The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing

The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing
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写作研究中的共同体理念

DOI:
10.2307/358177
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发表时间:
1989
期刊:
College Composition & Communication
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Joseph Harris
Joseph Harris
中科院分区:
--
文献类型:
--
作者:
Joseph Harris

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在《乡村与城市》(The Country and The City)一书中,雷蒙德·威廉姆斯(Raymond Williams)写道,在威尔士的一个村庄度过了童年后,他来到了这座城市,来到了剑桥,直到那时,他才“从镇上的人、学者那里听到了乡村生活、乡村文学真正含义的一个有影响力的版本:一部准备好的、有说服力的文化史”(6)。这种奇怪的双重运动,这种讽刺——一个人只有在离开时才开始理解自己来自的地方——被证明是塑造威廉姆斯职业生涯的力量之一——因此,在他第一次来到剑桥大约35年后,他仍然问自己:“我站在哪里……”在另一个国家还是在这个价值不菲的城市?”我想,类似的讽刺也描述了我自己与大学的关系。我在费城的一个工人阶级家庭长大,但直到上大学后,我才听到人们使用“工人阶级”这个词,或者开始认为自己是其中的一员。当然,到那时,我已经不再是它的一部分,或者至少不再完全或仅仅是它的一部分,但我在大学的时间也足够长了,我意识到我与它的关系同样含糊不清——这里也是一个我可以部分分享其价值观和兴趣的社区,但在某种程度上,我总是感到与之分离。这种差异感、重叠感、紧张的多元感,同时属于几个群体而又不完全属于一个群体的感觉,几乎伴随着我在大学期间的所有工作和学习。因此,在过去的几年里,当一些教师和写作理论家开始谈论社区的概念在某种程度上是我们工作的核心时,我被他们所说的所吸引。因为我在这里的目的是主张以更批判的眼光看待
In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams writes of how, after a boyhood in a Welsh village, he came to the city, to Cambridge, only then to hear "from townsmen, academics, an influential version of what country life, country literature, really meant: a prepared and persuasive cultural history" (6). This odd double movement, this irony, in which one only begins to understand the place one has come from through the act of leaving it, proved to be one of the shaping forces of Williams's career-so that, some 35 years after having first gone down to Cambridge, he was still to ask himself: "Where do I stand . . . in another country or in this valuing city?" (6) A similar irony, I think, describes my own relations to the university. I was raised in a working-class home in Philadelphia, but it was only when I went away to college that I heard the term working class used or began to think of myself as part of it. Of course by then I no longer was quite part of it, or at least no longer wholly or simply part of it, but I had also been at college long enough to realize that my relations to it were similarly ambiguous-that here too was a community whose values and interests I could in part share but to some degree would always feel separate from. This sense of difference, of overlap, of tense plurality, of being at once part of several communities and yet never wholly a member of one, has accompanied nearly all the work and study I have done at the university. So when, in the past few years, a number of teachers and theorists of writing began to talk about the idea of community as somehow central to our work, I was drawn to what was said. Since my aim here is to argue for a more critical look at a