Language and Vocabulary

In order to be able to talk about our writing, we need a common vocabulary to describe it. Luckily, most of these are standardized. So now, I am going to list a few words I frequently use that you may or may not know and attempt to define them.


What do I mean by text?


--A text is really anything that has the possibility of being interpreted, used, or looked at. We can look at the body as a text, a house as a text, a book, an article, a desk, a video, an image (painting, photgraph, whatever). "Text" stems from the latin, texere, which means "to weave" I like to think about "weaving together texts" in order to make meaning.

What do I mean by discourse?

Discourse is a common word that we use in the humanities that may sound fancy or intimidating, but it really just means "a way of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts"

Example: I might talk about the "discourse" of a particular thinker. This refers, to simplify, to his particular way of using and engaging with language. So we might say "In Geertz's discourse, culture is a text"

What do I mean by meta-discourse?


Meta-discourse is simply one remove from discourse; or, discourse about discourse. For our purposes, I mostly mean language that describes language or writing. Examples of meta-discourse can be seen below. We will return to this term.

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Just as Bartholomae and Petrosky might talk about appropriating (taking, making-one's own) the 'discourse' (the language and mode of organizing ideas) from some of these texts, I want you to either

a) Adopt some of the language I use in the class. If I say something you do not understand please stop me and I will attempt to define it. Some of the language I use is such a part of the way I speak that I may have to actually look up a definition online and then if that doesn't make sense to you, give you examples and "interpret" that definition.

b) Suggest your own language/terms/concepts for the stuff we are talking about; Define them for the class and myself and I will adopt your language and try to speak that. Although I do want to teach you different ways to talk about stuff, we also have to meet each other half way. If we cannot speak with similar vocabularies or at least touch vocabularies, this will be a very hard semester for all of us.

Language changes the way we think. Its that simple. We learn new words or use old ones to describe new things--it opens us up to new ways of seeing. I believe all language is figural--there is no such thing as "literal" meaning, although for convenience's sake we may speak of a "literal meaning" (or "denotative" rather than "connotative" language in jargon terms). There may be a "literal meaning" within a given context or use of language, but there is no intrinsic literal meanings. 

"What then is truth? A mobile army of mteaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long us seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people"   

                        --Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense"