By Way of Review: Discourse Community Lesson

This blog reviews the larger concept of discourse communities and shows how a single issue (religion) is treated within two different discursive contexts. Seeing how different communities treat the same subject rhetorically will allow you to see the importance of discursive versatility.

Discourse Communities

Discourse is defined as “ways of speaking that are bound by ideological, professional, political, cultural, or sociological communities. Discourse is used to refer not just to the special vocabulary of a particular science or social practice (‘the discourse of medicine,’ ‘the discourse of imperialism’) but also to the way in which the language in a particular domain helps to constitute the objects it refers to (as medicine defines various conditions and constitutes them as social realities)” (A Handbook to Literature 155).

In current academic theory, all discourses are viewed as value-laden “ways of speaking” about their subjects and are seen as ways of making up the world in which we live. The idea that there is a “metalanguage,” or a language from which we can speak from a God’s-eye-view, is now academically discredited; instead, all discourses are viewed as equal. However, for the purposes of a given discourse community, it artificially and temporarily exalts its own discourse as a metalanguage; this, however, is viewed as a “useful fiction” and is entirely pragmatic. When discoursing from any point of view, we must be aware of this distinction.

Discourse community as defined by John Swales in Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. 24-27. The following is taken directly from Swales.

A discourse community

· has a broadly agreed set of common public goals

· has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members

· uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback

· utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims

· has acquired some specific lexis [specialized vocabulary, jargon]

· has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise

Academic Discourse versus Religious Discourse

At the risk of creating an artificial distinction—some academic institutions are also religious institutions—we would do well to examine the essential difference between academic and religious discourse communities. When speaking about the subject of religion in an academic setting, it necessarily follows that, because of the expectations of the academic discourse community, one would do well to use academic discourse when speaking about that subject. In any given discourse community, all other subjects—whatever their nature—are spoken of in terms of that discourse community. To cite one example, an academic (say, a sociologist) would not write about teens going to the mall in the language used by teens to speak of their mall-shopping experiences. Instead, the way the sociologist discusses it would be appropriate to sociological discourse.

When it comes to discussing the topic of religion, negotiating the expectations of the academic discourse community can prove a little tricky because students are being asked to discuss something they may feel deeply about and to speak about it from a distance and through the lens of a different worldview. But, this discursive versatility must be learned.

Ways of Speaking

Academic discourse and religious discourse are predicated on two different ways of speaking.

· Logos—the language of rational thought and inquiry; logic

· Mythos—the language of myth; myth is here defined as stories and symbol-systems by which a people understands its place in the universe and from which it derives meaning. Myth is the cultural wellspring of human values.

Academic Discourse

In academic discourse, logos or logical discourse is the language of choice. It is, to use the academic term, privileged over all other ways of speaking. There are a couple characteristics that go along with logos:

· It deals with the empirical, the observable

· It deals with probable, not absolute, knowledge

Religious Discourse

By contrast, in religious discourse, mythos or mythical discourse is the language of choice; all other discourses are subservient to it. While a religious discourse community will make use of logos (as it does in, say, apologetic discourse), it is embedded wholly within mythos. Mythos is privileged over all other discourses. To subvert this hierarchy in a religious discourse community would likely upset community expectations.

Ernesto Grassi lists a few characteristics of the “sacred language” that comes with a rhetoric embedded in mythos.

· it has a purely revealing or evangelical character, not a demonstrative or proving function; it does not arise out of a process of inference, but authoritatively proclaims the truth

· its statements are immediate, formulated without mediation or contemplation

· they are imagistic and metaphorical, lending the reality of sensory appearances a new meaning

· its assertions are absolute and urgent; whatever does not fit with them is treated as outrageous

· its pronouncements are outside of time

—taken from George Kennedy’s New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism, p. 6

Some examples

It is helpful to see how an academic discourse community and how a religious discourse community would talk about the same thing. The following are two examples:

· getting saved

· undergoing a conversion experience

The first one is purely religious. As it uses the metaphorical “saved,” it posits a realm of spiritual dimension and great intrinsic value to human existence. As such, it makes use of mythical language.

The second one is in a more academic register. Conversion experiences can be spoken of in empirical terms, and socio-psychological discourse can describe socially and cognitively what constitutes the social and psychological experience known as conversion. However, the discourse of social psychology posits no transcendent, mythical character to these experiences. It simply describes what happens on a more or less observable level; it cannot describe what it means transcendently.

Another example:

· In the Bible, God says we are to love one another.

· In the Johannine Gospel, Jesus instructs his disciples that they are to “love one another.”

The first example, again, is religious. The Bible is assumed mythically to be the Word of God; as such, all commands within it are viewed as divine revelation. As such, all commands are absolute and not subject to question or debate. Note to the use of “we,” which places the characters addressed in the Gospel itself and present-day people in the same group—both are addressed and commanded by God. It is understood that the command is issued to all people, for all time.

The second example, on the other hand, is a little more in keeping with the expectations of the academic. Instead of citing a biblical text as “the Bible,” it directs attention to the specific work in which the statement is found (the Gospel of John) and attributes the statement to the human speaker (Jesus), addressed to a specific audience (the disciples). In academic discourse, it is understood that all of the biblical texts are the work of different authors and editors. As such, these texts are viewed as artistic, literary, and rhetorical human creations. That God may have been responsible for their writing cannot be known empirically, and so to posit this would fall outside the realm of academic discourse (logos). All that academics assume is that there is a text before them which can be analyzed, scrutinized, and questioned.

Again, some religious academics may use, say, rhetorical criticism to help bring out the intent of a biblical author and so invent an argument that would serve the purposes of a homily. Here, the religious academic uses logical discourse, but he or she does so to serve the purposes of the homily, which is anchored in mythical discourse.

Sources Consulted

Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New
York: Knopf, 2000.

A Handbook to Literature. 9^th ed. Eds. William Harmon and Hugh
Holman. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003.

Kennedy, George A. New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical
Criticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research
Settings. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.