Sunday, September 16, 2012

Porter



Summary:  Porters article is about intertextuality. Intertextuality is the idea that all written texts contain traces of other texts. He also talks about how intertextuality, plagiarism has been happening all through out history. A few examples he gives are 1. a pepsi commercial, uses ideas from movies or iconic american ideas to make their commercial come across to viewers. and 2. the Declaration of Independence is nothing but a mix of authors ideas and structures put together. His audience in this article is students. 

Synthesis:  This article compares to a little piece of Allen where she talked about using a little bit of the organization of a piece of writing with her own information. I think this article really stands alone from others we have read so far. But I think that it had some good points and exposed somethings I wouldn't have thought of other wise.




Response
Quotation
I picked this quote because I thought that it was a summary of what the article was about, and I agree with this quote, It seems that no matter what text you look at there is always a part of another text incorporated.
 "Not infrequently, and perhaps ever and always, texts refer to other texts and in fact rely on them for their meaning."
I liked the metaphor in this quote, comparing writing to a Cultural Salvation Army Outlet. It gave a visual to what porter is trying to explain about writing.  
 "Its system of languages, its grammar, its lexicon, drag along numerous bits and pieces -traces-of history so that the text resembles a Cultural Salvation Army Outlet with unaccountable collections of incompatible ideas, beliefs, and sources."
I thought this was an interesting idea. It seems so simple yet i had never thought of how our mind assumes what we dont know based on what a text says.
 "refers to assumptions a text makes about its referent, its readers, and its context- to portions of the text which are read, but which are not explicitly "there"."

I picked this quote because this is a classic line that is in all kinds of writing. I thought it was a good example of how texts are used in other texts
 ""Once upon a time" is a trace rich in rhetorical presupposition, signaling to even the youngest reader the opening of fictional narrative. Text not only refer to but in fact contain other texts."

The Declaration of Independence is one of the most valued documents in our country so I thought it was interesting that even our most valued document isn't considered to be original. and the parts that were original were changed.
 "To produce his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson seems to have borrowed, either consciously or unconsciously, from his culture's Text."
When you read that two of them were women as the article says it becomes more of a tragedy, when phrased two of them men it doesn't have the same effect. Again it seems like such a simple thing but isn't something we think about when writing.
 "two of them women" ............ but can we imagine the phrase "two of them men?"

I thought it was interesting how in this part of the article, it looked at how things were worded. When you read the clip of the kent state article, the wording is what adds tone or voice.
" Notice that the students were not shot by National Guardsmen, but were shot "by a volley of gunfire"."

Thoughts:  I liked porter's essay because Porter talks about how when writing you are always using other writings in your own writing in some way because there is no way you could make up your own new unique writing every time. I have always had this same thought, there are only so many ways you can say the same thing, eventually you are going to end up saying something or writing something that has already been said. 

1 comment:

  1. Very good, I like the examples. But I think the audience could also be teachers/professors.

    ReplyDelete