Inventing the University

INVENTING THE UNIVERSITY

by David Bartholomae, anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp, Victor Villanueva Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion---invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the particular ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. -623 

... he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of the discipline, on the other hand. -624 This is, however, one of the most important characteristic slips of basic writers. (I use the term "basic writers" to refer to university students traditionally placed in remedial composition courses.) It is very have for them to take on the role--the voice, the persona-- of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. -625 

 Linda Flower has argued that the difficulty inexperienced writers have with writing can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the transition between "writer based" and "reader-based" prose. -627 [Bartholamae thinks this advice is unhelpful, considering how little they really know about the reader and his/her discourse conventions]. Our students, I've said, have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily or comfortably one with their audience. -628 

 What these assignments fail to address is the central problem of academic writing, where a student must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows more about baseball or "To His Coy Mistriss" than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplaces and the readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate. -629 

 [B argues for the importance of "academic writing" as writing for a discourse community, not an expressivist interpretation.] [Here he is reacting to a Cognitive Process theory , an expressivist type that places meaning in the writer, expressed by language.] The act of writing, here, has a personal, cognitive history but not a history as a text, as a text that is made possible by prior texts. When located in the perspective afforded by prior texts, writing is seen to exist separate from the writer and his intentions, it is seen i nth e context of other articles in Seventeen, of all articles written for or about women, of all articles written about English teaching, and so on. Reading research has made it possible to say that these prior texts, or a reader's experience with these prior texts, have bearing on how the text is read. -630 And since students assume privilege by locating themselves within the discourse of