These week's 601 readings present quite a grab-bag of possibilities for discussion: Hartwell on grammar, Kinneavy on theories of discourse, Braddock on the topic sentence, D'Angelo on a psychological theory of the composing process, and Berlin on theories of contemporary composition. This is all in the segment that Villaneuva refers to as "discourse." We didn't read all the essays in this segment, rather we sampled some of them. The class members are blogging individual notes for select figures, so I'll jump in and comments on the set up of this conversation in _Cross-Talk_.

As Villaneuva argues, all of the essays are "concerened with matters of mind: ontology, epistemology, psychology" (127). He reminds us that these questions go back to the second book of Aristotle, "which provides a psychology of audiences" (127). He also reminds us that we need to remember that 18th c. rhetorician George Campbell and 19th c. rhetorician Alexander Bain turned to psychology to "explain the processes involved in rhetorical acts" (127). The picture would not be complete without Kenneth Burke, either, who considered symbolic action in relation to the "new sciences" of which psychology is one (127).

What I think is interesting about this section in _Cross-Talk_ is that it is very grab-bag. I'm not sure it is a coherent section in the book, and I don't yet have a fully worked through explanation of why I feel this is so. I'll work on it. I agree that pyschology is major cross-theme across the essays, but moreso in some pieces that in others. What does hold the chapter together across the essays is Villaneuva's argument that the a number of the essays tend to "look to the parts of discourse in order to understand the whole more readily" (128). What I'm interested in, too, is the methodological differences across the essays: how the object of study is framed, what the controls and constraints are within each essay. More on that later.

On Laura's blog, I commented on my sense that Braddock left out questions of genre and the major differences between a journalistic essay for a major publication vs. student essays. It seems reasonable that genre and audience are the major factors here in determining whether or not such pieces have topic sentences, yet that issue is largely omitted. This goes back to the way the study was defined to isolate and discuss a particular feature of prose: the topic sentence. It seems to me one of the challenges this segment of readings poses is how to study language as a whole vs. how to study constituent parts of language such as sentences. What do we find from looking at the part vs. the whole? This is a productive tension throughout all the pieces in this section, and it is one I'd like to talk more about in class.