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C++: A Powerful and Object-Oriented Programming Language

C++ is a high-performance, compiled programming language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs in 1983. It is an extension of the C language, with object-oriented and generic programming features, making it a powerful language for system programming, game development, and many other applications.

Background of C++

C++ was initiated as an extension to the C language, aiming to provide object-oriented and generic programming features. Its development started in 1983, and the first official release, named "C with Classes," was published in 1985. In 1998, the final standard, ISO C++, was adopted.

Object-Oriented Limitations

While C++ is an object-oriented language, it still maintains some limitations. For instance, it does not support multiple inheritance polymorphism by default. To work around these limitations, C++ offers various design patterns and language features.

Functions in C++

Functions are first-class citizens in C++. To declare a function, you use the following syntax:

return_type function_name(parameters);

Functions in C++ can:

  1. Accept parameters
  2. Perform complex operations
  3. Return values

Calling functions in C++ and returning values is straightforward, following the standard syntax of other C-family languages.

Control Flow Statements

C++ offers a full range of control flow statements ensuring robustness, flexibility, and performance in its programs:

  • if
  • else
  • while
  • do-while
  • for
  • switch

These statements help C++ programmers manage the program's flow, iterate over data collections or elements, and facilitate efficient decision-making inside the program.

In Conclusion

C++ remains a universal, powerful programming language for many domains, combining low-level and high-level programming paradigms. Capable of handling high-performance applications, it has evolved into a mature language over the years, addressing weaknesses and expanding its feature set. The language's nuances and control flow statements empower C++ developers to create optimized and maintainable software solutions.

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Java theory encompasses a wide range of concepts related to the Java programming language. Here are some key theoretical areas:

 

1. **Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)**: Java is a strongly object-oriented language. Understanding OOP principles such as encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction is essential for Java developers.

 

2. **Syntax and Language Features**: Knowing the syntax and language features of Java, including data types, variables, operators, control flow statements (if-else, loops), methods, classes, interfaces, and packages, is fundamental.

 

3. **Memory Management**: Understanding how memory is managed in Java, including concepts like garbage collection, heap, stack, and the use of the `new` keyword for object instantiation.

 

4. **Exception Handling**: Java provides robust mechanisms for handling exceptions. Understanding how to use try-catch blocks, throw and throws keywords, and creating custom exceptions is important.

 

5. **Concurrency**: Java supports multithreading and concurrency. Developers need to understand concepts like threads, synchronization, locks, and concurrent collections to write safe and efficient concurrent programs.

 

6. **Java Virtual Machine (JVM)**: Understanding the role of the JVM in executing Java programs, including its architecture, bytecode, class loading, and JIT compilation.

 

7. **Collections Framework**: Java provides a rich set of collection classes and interfaces for storing and manipulating groups of objects. Understanding collections such as lists, sets, maps, and their implementations is crucial.

 

8. **Generics**: Java's generics allow for creating parameterized types, providing compile-time type safety and reducing the need for explicit type casting. Understanding how to use generics effectively is important.

 

9. **I/O Streams**: Java provides classes for working with input and output streams, enabling reading from and writing to files, network sockets, and other sources. Understanding the different stream types and how to use them is essential.

 

10. **Design Patterns**: Familiarity with common design patterns such as Singleton, Factory, Observer, and MVC (Model-View-Controller) can help in writing modular, maintainable, and scalable Java code.

 

These are just some of the theoretical aspects of Java programming. Mastering these concepts is essential for becoming proficient in Java development.

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Here is the reading JAMES E. PORTER 
Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne 
Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 
At the conclusion of Eco's The Name of the Rose, the monk Adso of Melk 
returns to the burned abbey, where he finds in the ruins scraps of parchment, the 
only remnants from one of the great libraries in all Christendom. He spends a 
day collecting the charred fragments, hoping to discover some meaning in the 
scattered pieces of books. He assembles his own "lesser library .. . of 
fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books" 
(500). To Adso, these random shards are "an immense acrostic that says and 
repeats nothing" (501). Yet they are significant to him as an attempt to order 
experience. 
We might well derive our own order from this scene. We might see Adso as 
representing the writer, and his desperate activity at the burned abbey as a mod- 
el for the writing process. The writer in this image is a collector of fragments, an
archaeologist creating an order, building a framework, from remnants of the 
past. Insofar as the collected fragments help Adso recall other, lost texts, his 
experience affirms a principle he learned from his master, William of Basker- 
ville: "Not infrequently books speak of books" (286). Not infrequently, and 
perhaps ever and always, texts refer to other texts and in fact rely on them for 
their meaning. All texts are interdependent: We understand a text only insofar 
as we understand its precursors. 
This is the principle we know as intertextuality, the principle that all writing 
and speech-indeed, all signs-arise from a single network: what Vygotsky 
called "the web of meaning"; what poststructuralists label Text or Writing 
(Barthes, ecriture); and what a more distant age perhaps knew as logos. Exam- 
ining texts "intertextually" means looking for "traces," the bits and pieces of 
Text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new dis- 
course. ' The most mundane manifestationf intertextuality is explicit citation, 
but intertextuality animates all discourse and goes beyond mere citation. For the 
intertextual critics, Intertext is Text-a great seamless textual fabric. And, as 
they like to intone solemnly, no text escapes intertext. 
Intertextuality provides rhetoric with an important perspective, one currently 
neglected, I believe. The prevailing composition pedagogies by and large culti- 
vate the romantic image of writer as free, uninhibited spirit, as independent, 
creative genius. By identifying and stressing the intertextual nature of dis- 
course, however, we shift our attention away from the writer as individual and Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 35 
focus more on the sources and social contexts from which the writer's discourse 
arises. According to this view, authorial intention isless significant than social 
context; the writer is simply apart of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, 
and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective 
meaning. Thus the intertext constrains writing. 
My aim here is to demonstratehe significance of this theory to rhetoric, by 
explaining intertextuality, its connection to the notion of "discourse communi- 
ty," and its pedagogical implications for composition. 
The Presence of Intertext 
Intertextuality has been associated with both structuralism and poststruc- 
turalism, with theorists like Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, 
Hayden White, Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault, and Michael Riffaterre. (Of 
course, the theory is most often applied in literary analysis.) The central as- 
sumption of these critics has been described by Vincent Leitch: "The text is not 
an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts. Its 
system of language, 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" (59). It is these "unaccountable collections" that intertextual critics 
focus on, not the text as autonomous entity. In fact, these critics have redefined 
the notion of "text": Text is intertext, or simply Text. The traditional notion of 
the text as the single work of a given author, and even the very notions of author 
and reader, are regarded as simply convenient fictions for domesticating dis- 
course. The old borders that we used to rope off discourse, proclaim these 
critics, are no longer useful. 
We can distinguish between two types of intertextuality: iterability and 
presupposition. Iterability refers to the "repeatability" of certain textual 
fragments, tocitation in its broadest sense to include not only explicit allusions, 
references, and quotations within adiscourse, but also unannounced sources 
and influences, cliches, phrases in the air, and traditions. That is to say, every 
discourse is composed of "traces," pieces of other texts that help constitute its 
meaning. (I will discuss this aspect of intertextuality in my analysis of the Dec- 
laration of Independence.) Presupposition 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." For example, as Jonathan Culler 
discusses, the phrase "John married Fred's sister" is an assertion that logically 
presupposes that John exists, that Fred exists, and that Fred has a sister. "Open 
the door" contains apractical presupposition, assuming the presence of a de- 
coder who is capable of being addressed and who is better able to open the door than the encoder. "Once upon a time" is a trace rich in rhetorical presupposition, 
signaling to even the youngest reader the opening of a fictional narrative. Texts 
not only refer to but in fact contain other texts.2 
An examination of three sample texts will illustrate the various facets of 
intertextuality. The first, the Declaration of Independence, ispopularly viewed 
as the work of Thomas Jefferson. Yet if we examine the text closely in its rhetori- 
cal milieu, we see that Jefferson was author only in the very loosest of senses. A 
number of historians and at least two composition researchers (Kinneavy, Theo- 
ry 393-49; Maimon, Readings 6-32) have analyzed the Declaration, with inter- 
esting results. Their work suggests that Jefferson was by no means an origi- 
nal framer or a creative genius, as some like to suppose. Jefferson was a skilled 
writer, to be sure, but chiefly because he was an effective borrower of traces. 
To produce his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson seems to have 
borrowed, either consciously or unconsciously, from his culture's Text. Much 
has been made of Jefferson's reliance on Locke's social contract theory 
(Becker). Locke's theory influenced colonial political philosophy, emerging in 
various pamphlets and newspaper articles of the times, and served as the foun- 
dation for the opening section of the Declaration. The Declaration contains 
many traces that can be found in other, earlier documents. There are traces from 
a First Continental Congress resolution, a Massachusetts Council declaration, 
George Mason's "Declaration of Rights for Virginia," apolitical pamphlet of 
James Otis, and a variety of other sources, including a colonial play. The over- 
all form of the Declaration (theoretical argument followed by list of grievances) 
strongly resembles, ironically, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, in which 
Parliament lists the abuses of James II and declares new powers for itself. Sev- 
eral of the abuses in the Declaration seem to have been taken, more or less 
verbatim, from aPennsylvania Evening Post article. And the most memorable 
phrases in the Declaration seem to be least Jefferson's: "That all men are created 
equal" is a sentiment from Euripides which Jefferson copied in his literary com- 
monplace book as a boy; "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" was a 
cliche of the times, appearing in numerous political documents (Dumbauld). 
Though Jefferson's draft of the Declaration can hardly be considered his in 
any exclusive sense of authorship, the document underwent sill more expropri- 
ation at the hands of Congress, who made eighty-six changes (Kinneavy, Theo- 
ry 438). They cut the draft from 21 1 lines to 147. They did considerable editing 
to temper what they saw as Jefferson's emotional style: For example, 
Jefferson's phrase "sacred & undeniable" was changed to the more restrained 
"self-evident." Congress excised controversial passages, such as Jefferson's 
condemnation of slavery. Thus, we should find it instructive to note, Jefferson's 
few attempts at original expression were those least acceptable to Congress. Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 37 
If Jefferson submitted the Declaration for a college writing class as his own 
writing, he might well be charged with plagiarism.3 The idea of Jefferson as 
author is but convenient shorthand. Actually, the Declaration arose out of a 
cultural and rhetorical milieu, was composed of traces and was, in effect, 
team written. Jefferson deserves credit for bringing disparate traces together, 
for helping to mold and articulate the milieu, for creating the all-important 
draft. Jefferson's skill as a writer was his ability to borrow traces effectively and 
to find appropriate contexts for them. As Michael Halliday says, 
"[C]reativeness does not consist in producing new sentences. The newness of a 
sentence is a quite unimportant and unascertainable property and 'creativi- 
ty' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the 
potentiality oflanguage for the indefinite extension of its resources to new con- 
texts of situation. . . . Our most 'creative' acts may be precisely among those 
that are realized throughighly repetitive forms of behaviour" (Explorations 
42). The creative writer is the creative borrower, in other words. 
Intertextuality can be seen working similarly in contemporary forums. Re- 
call this scene from a recent Pepsi commercial: A young boy in jeans jacket, 
accompanied by dog, stands in some desolate plains crossroads next to a gas 
station, next to which is a soft drink machine. An alien spacecraft, resembling 
the one in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, appears overhead. 
To the boy's joyful amazement, the spaceship hovers over the vending machine 
and begins sucking Pepsi cans into the ship. It takes only Pepsi's, then eventual- 
ly takes the entire machine. The ad closes with a graphic: "Pepsi. The Choice of 
a New Generation." 
Clearly, the commercial presupposes familiarity with Spielberg's movie or, 
at least, with his pacific vision of alien spacecraft. We see several American 
cliches, well-worn signs from the Depression era: the desolate plains, the gen- 
eral store, the pop machine, the country boy with dog. These distinctively 
American traces are juxtaposed against images from science fiction and the 
sixties catchphrase "new generation" in the coda. In this array of signs, we have 
tradition and counter-tradition harmonized. Pepsi squeezes itself in the middle, 
and thus becomes the great American conciliator. The ad's use of irony may 
serve to distract viewers momentarily from noticing how Pepsi achieves its 
purpose by assigning itself an exalted role through use of the intertext. 
We find an interesting example of practical presupposition iJohn Kifner's 
New York Times headline article reporting on the Kent State incident of 1970: 
Four students at Kent State University, two of them women, 
were shot to death this afternoon by a volley of National Guard 
gunfire. At least 8 other students were wounded. The burst of gunfire came about 20 minutes after the guardsmen 
broke up a noon rally on the Commons, agrassy campus gathering 
spot, by lobbing tear gas at a crowd of about 1,000 young people. 
From one perspective, the phrase "two of them women" is a simple statement 
of fact; however, it presupposes acertain attitude-thathe event, horrible 
enough as it was, is more significant because two of the persons killed were 
women. It might be going too far to say that the phrase presupposes a sexist 
attitude ("women aren't supposed to be killed in battles"), but can we imagine 
the phrase "two of them men" in this context? Though equally factual, this 
wording would have been considered odd in 1970 (and probably today as well) 
because it presupposes a cultural mindset alien from the one dominant at the 
time. "Two of them women" is shocking (and hence it was reported) because it 
upsets the sense of order of the readers, in this case the American public. 
Additionally (and more than a little ironically), the text contains anumber of 
traces which have the effect of blunting the shock of the event. Notice that the 
students were not shot by National Guardsmen, but were shot "by a volley of 
. . . gunfire"; the tear gas was "lobbed"; and the event occurred at a "grassy 
campus gathering spot." "Volley" and "lobbed" are military terms, but with 
connections to sport as well; "grassy campus gathering spot" suggests apicnic; 
"burst" can recall the gloriousight of bombs "bursting" in "The Star-Spangled 
Banner." This pastiche of signs casts the text into a certain context, making it 
distinctively American. We might say that the turbulent milieu of the sixties 
provided a distinctive array of signs from which John Kifner borrowed to 
produce his article. 
Each of the three texts examined contains phrases or images familiar to its 
audience or presupposes certain audience attitudes. Thus the intertext exerts its 
influence partly in the form of audience expectation. We mighthen say that the 
audience of each of these texts is as responsible for its production as the writer. 
That, in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse. 
The Power of Discourse Community 
And, indeed, this is what some poststructuralist critics suggest, those who 
prefer a broader conception of intertext or who look beyond the intertext tothe 
social framework regulating textual production: to what Michel Foucault calls 
"the discursive formation," what Stanley Fish calls "the interpretive communi- 
ty," and what Patricia Bizzell calls "the discourse community." 
A "discourse community" isa group of individuals bound by a common 
interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 39 
regulated. An individual may belong to several professional, public, or person- 
al discourse communities. Examples would include the community of 
engineers whose research area is fluid mechanics; alumni of the University of 
Michigan; Magnavox employees; the members of the Porter family; and 
members of the Indiana Teachers of Writing. The approved channels we can 
call "forums." Each forum has a distinct history and rules governing appropri- 
ateness to which members are obliged to adhere. These rules may be more or 
less apparent, more or less institutionalized, more or less specific to each com- 
munity. Examples of forums include professional publications like Rhetoric 
Review, English Journal, and Creative Computing; public media like 
Newsweek and Runner's World; professional conferences (the annual meeting 
of fluid power engineers, the 4C's); company board meetings; family dinner 
tables; and the monthly meeting of the Indiana chapter of the Izaak Walton 
League. 
A discourse community shares assumptions about what objects are appropri- 
ate for examination and discussion, what operating functions are performed on 
those objects, what constitutes "evidence" and "validity," and what formal con- 
ventions are followed. A discourse community may have a well-established 
ethos; or it may have competing factions and indefinite boundaries. It may be in 
a "pre-paradigm" state (Kuhn), that is, having an ill-defined regulating system 
and no clear leadership. Some discourse communities are firmly established, 
such as the scientific community, the medical profession, and the justice sys- 
tem, to cite a few from Foucault's list. In these discourse communities, as 
Leitch says, "a speaker must be 'qualified' to talk; he has to belong to a commu- 
nity of scholarship; and he is required to possess a prescribed body of knowl- 
edge (doctrine). . . . [This system] operates to constrain discourse; it 
establishes limits and regularities. . . . who may speak, what may be spoken, 
and how it is to be said; in addition [rules] prescribe what is true and false, what 
is reasonable and what foolish, and what is meant and what not. Finally, they 
work to deny the material existence of discourse itself' (145). 
A text is "acceptable" within a forum only insofar as it reflects the communi- 
ty episteme (to use Foucault's term). On a simple level, this means that for a 
manuscript to be accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Psychology, 
it must follow certain formatting conventions: Itmust have the expected social 
science sections (i.e., review of literature, methods, results, discussion), and it 
must use the journal's version of APA documentation. However, these are only 
superficial features of the forum. On a more essentialevel, the manuscript 
must reveal certain characteristics, have an ethos (in the broadest possible 
sense) conforming tothe standards of the discourse community: It must demon- 
strate (or at least claim) that it contributes knowledge to the field, it must demonstrate familiarity with the work of previous researchers in the field, it must 
use a scientific method in analyzing its results (showing acceptance of the truth- 
value of statistical demonstration), it must meet standards for test design and 
analysis of results, it must adhere to standards determining degree of accuracy. 
The expectations, conventions, and attitudes of this discourse community-the 
readers, writers, and publishers of Journal of Applied Psychology-will influ- 
ence aspiring psychology researchers, shaping not only how they write but also 
their character within that discourse community. 
The poststructuralist view challenges the classical assumption that writing is
a simple linear, one-way movement: The writer creates a text which produces 
some change in an audience. A poststructuralist rhetoric examines how audi- 
ence (in the form of community expectations and standards) influences textual 
production and, in so doing, guides the development of the writer. 
This view is of course open to criticism for its apparent determinism, for 
devaluing the contributionf individual writers and making them appear mere- 
ly tools of the discourse community (charges which Foucault answers in "Dis- 
course on Language"). If these regulating systems are so constraining, how can 
an individual merge? What happens to the idea of the lone inspired writer and 
the sacred autonomous text? 
Both notions take a pretty hard knock. Genuine originality is difficult within 
the confines of a well-regulated system. Genius is possible, but it may be con- 
strained. Foucault cites the example of Gregor Mendel, whose work in the 
nineteenth century was excluded from the prevailing community of biologists 
because he "spoke of objects, employed methods and placed himself within a
theoretical perspective totally alien to the biology of his time. . . . Mendel 
spoke the truth, but he was not dans le vrai (within the true)" (224). Frank 
Lentricchia cites a similar example from the literary community: Robert Frost 
"achieved magazine publication only five times between 1895 and 1912, a peri- 
od during which he wrote a number of poems later acclaimed .. . [because] in 
order to write within the dominant sense of the poetic in the United States in the 
last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, one 
had to employ a diction, syntax, and prosody heavily favoring Shelley and 
Tennyson. One also had to assume a certain stance, a certain world-weary 
idealism which took care not to refer too concretely to the world of which one 
was weary" (197, 199). 
Both examples point to the exclusionary power of discourse communities 
and raise serious questions about the freedom of the writer: chiefly, does the 
writer have any? Is any writer doomed to plagiarism? Can any text be said to be 
new? Are creativity and genius actually possible? Was Jefferson a creative gen- 
ius or a blatant plagiaris Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 41 
Certainly we want to avoid both extremes. Even if the writer is locked into a 
cultural matrix and is constrained by the intertext of the discourse community, 
the writer has freedom within the immediate rhetorical context.4 Furthermore, 
successful writing helps to redefine the matrix-and in that way becomes crea- 
tive. (Jefferson's Declaration contributed todefining the notion of America for 
its discourse community.) Every new text has the potential to alter the Text in 
some way; in fact, every text admitted into a discourse community changes the 
constitution of the community-and discourse communities can revise their 
discursive practices, as the Mendel and Frost examples suggest. 
Writing is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the con- 
straints of some discourse community. We are constrained insofar as we must 
inevitably borrow the traces, codes, and signs which we inherit and which our 
discourse community imposes. We are free insofar as we do what we can to 
encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand 
our semiotic potential-with our goal being to effect change and establish our 
identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter. 
The Pedagogy of Intertextuality 
Intertextualitys not new. It may remind some of Eliot's notion of tradition, 
though the parameters are certainly broader. It is an important concept, though. 
It counters what I see as one prevailing composition pedagogy, one favoring a 
romantic image of the writer, offering asrole models the creativessayists, the 
Sunday Supplement freelancers, the Joan Didions, E. B. Whites, Calvin 
Trillins, and Russell Bakers. This dashing image appeals to our need for intel- 
lectual heroes; but underlying it may be an anti-rhetorical view: that writers are 
born, not made; that writing is individual, isolated, and internal; not social but 
eccentric. 
This view is firmly set in the intertext of our discipline. Our anthologies 
glorify the individual essayists, whose work is valued for its timelessness and 
creativity. Freshman rhetorics announce as the writer's proper goals personal 
insight, originality, and personal voice, or tell students that motivations for 
writing come from "within." Generally, this pedagogy assumes that such a 
thing as the writer actually exists-an autonomous writer exercising afree, 
creative will through the writing act-and that the writing process proceeds 
linearly from writer to text to reader. This partial picture of the process can all 
too readily become the picture, and our students can all too readily learn to 
overlook vital facets of discourse production. 
When we romanticize composition by overemphasizing the autonomy of the 
writer, important questions are overlooked, the same questions an intertext view of writing would provoke: To what extent is the writer's product itself a 
part of a larger community writing process? How does the discourse communi- 
ty influence writers and readers within it? These are essential questions, but are 
perhaps outside the prevailing episteme of composition pedagogy, which 
presupposes the autonomous status of the writer as independent cogito. Talking 
about writing in terms of "social forces influencing the writer" raises the specter 
of determinism, and so is anathema. 
David Bartholomae summarizes this issue very nicely: "The struggle of the 
student writer is not the struggle to bring out that which is within; it is the 
struggle to carry out those ritual activities that grant our entrance into a closed 
society" (300). When we teach writing only as the act of "bringing out what is 
within," we risk undermining our own efforts. Intertextuality reminds us that 
"carrying out ritual activities" is also part of the writing process. Barthes 
reminds us that "the 'I' which approaches the text is already itself aplurality of 
other texts, of codes which are infinite" (10). 
Intertextuality suggests that our goal should be to help students learn to write 
for the discourse communities they choose to join. Students need help develop- 
ing out of what Joseph Williams calls their "pre-socialized cognitive states." 
According to Williams, pre-socialized writers are not sufficiently immersed in 
their discourse community to produce competent discourse: They do not know 
what can be presupposed, are not conscious of the distinctive intertextuality of 
the community, may be only superficially acquainted with explicit conventions. 
(Williams cites the example of the freshman whose paper for the English teach- 
er begins "Shakespeare is a famous Elizabethan dramatist.") Our immediate 
goal is to produce "socialized writers," who are full-fledged members of their 
discourse community, producing competent, useful discourse within that com- 
munity. Our long-range goal might be "post-socialized writers," those who 
have achieved such a degree of confidence, authority, power, or achievement in 
the discourse community so as to become part of the regulating body. They are 
able to vary conventions and question assumptions-i.e., effect change in 
communities-without fear of exclusion. 
Intertextuality has the potential to affect all facets of our composition peda- 
gogy. Certainly it supports writing across the curriculum as a mechanism for 
introducing students to the regulating systems of discourse communities. It 
raises questions about heuristics: Do different discourse communities apply 
different heuristics? It asserts the value of critical reading in the composition 
classroom. It requires that we rethink our ideas about plagiarism: Certainly 
imitatio is an important stage in the linguistic development of the writer. 
The most significant application might be in the area of audience analysis. 
Current pedagogies assume that when writers analyze audiences they should Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 43 
focus on the expected flesh-and-blood readers. Intertextuality suggests that the 
proper focus of audience analysis is not the audience as receivers per se, but the 
intertext of the discourse community. Instead of collecting demographic data 
about age, educationalevel, and social status, the writer might instead ask 
questions about the intertext: What are the conventional presuppositions ofthis 
community? In what forums do they assemble? What are the methodological 
assumptions? What is considered "evidence,"valid argument," and "proof'? 
A sample heuristic for such an analysis-what I term "forum analysis"-is 
included as an appendix. 
A critical reading of the discourse of a community may be the best way to 
understand it. (We see a version of this message in the advice to examine a 
journal before submitting articles for publication.) Traditionally, anthologies 
have provided students with reading material. However, the typical anthologies 
have two serious problems: (1) limited range-generally they overemphasize 
literary or expressive discourse; (2) unclear context-they frequently remove 
readings from their original contexts, thus disguising their intertextual nature. 
Several recently published readers have attempted to provide a broader selec- 
tion of readings in various forums, and actually discuss intertextuality. 
Maimon's Readings in the Arts and Sciences, Kinneavy's Writing in the Liberal 
Arts Tradition, and Bazerman's The Informed Writer are especially noteworthy. 
Writing assignments should be explicitly intertextual. If we regard each writ- 
ten product as a stage in a larger process-the dialectic process within adis- 
course community-then the individual writer's work is part of a web, part of a 
community search for truth and meaning. Writing assignments mightake the 
form of dialogue with other writers: Writing letters in response to articles is one 
kind of dialectic (e.g., letters responding to Atlantic Monthly or Science 
articles). Research assignments might be more community oriented rather than 
topic oriented; students might be asked to become involved in communities of 
researchers (e.g., the sociologists examining changing religious attitudes in 
American college students). The assignments in Maimon's Writing in the Arts 
and Sciences are excellent in this regard. 
Intertextual theory suggests that the key criteria for evaluating writing should 
be "acceptability" within some discourse community. "Acceptability" in- 
cludes, but goes well beyond, adherence to formal conventions. It includes 
choosing the "right" topic, applying the appropriate critical methodology, ad- 
hering to standards for evidence and validity, and in general adopting the 
community's discourse values-and of course borrowing the appropriate 
traces. Success is measured by the writer's ability to know what can be presup- 
posed and to borrow that community's traces effectively to create a text that 
contributes to the maintenance or, possibly, the definition of the community The writer is constrained by the community, and by its intertextual preferences 
and prejudices, but the effective writer works to assert the will against those 
community constraintso effect change. 
The Pepsi commercial and the Kent State news article show effective uses of 
the intertext. In the Kent State piece, John Kifner mixes picnic imagery 
("grassy campus gathering spot," "young people") with violent imagery ("burst 
of gunfire") to dramatize the event. The Pepsi ad writers combine two unlikely 
sets of traces, linking folksy depression-era American imagery with sci-fim- 
agery "stolen" from Spielberg. For this creative intertwining of traces, both 
discourses can probably be measured successful in their respective forums. 
Coda 
Clearly much of what intertextuality supports is already institutionalized 
(e.g., writing-across-the-curriculum programs). And yet, in freshman comp 
texts and anthologies especially, there is this tendency to see writing as individ- 
ual, as isolated, as heroic. Even after demonstrating quite convincingly that the 
Declaration was written by a team freely borrowing from acultural intertext, 
Elaine Maimon insists, against all the evidence she herself has collected, that 
"Despite the additions, deletions, and changes in wording that it went through, 
the Declaration is still Jefferson's writing" (Readings 26). Her saying this 
presupposes that the reader has just concluded the opposite. 
When we give our students romantic role models like E. B. White, Joan 
Didion, and Lewis Thomas, we create unrealistic expectations. This type of 
writer has often achieved post-socialized status within some discourse commu- 
nity (Thomas in the scientific community, for instance). Can we realistically 
expect our students to achieve this state without first becoming socialized, with- 
out learning first what it means to write within asocial context? Their role 
models ought not be only romantic heroes but also community writers like 
Jefferson, the anonymous writers of the Pepsi commercial-the Adsos of the 
world, not just the Aristotles. They need to see writers whose products are more 
evidently part of a larger process and whose work more clearly produces mean- 
ing in social contexts. 


now the questions! Guidelines: Respond to the following questions concerning James Porter's "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community"; the purpose of these questions is to get you thinking about the text's worth and how to understand it:

What does intertextuality mean to you?

What distinguishes assumption from iterability?

Why does Porter contend that most content is plagiarised and that originality is nearly impossible?

Writing is a "simple linear, one-way movement"; how is it not?

Why do you think it's necessary for you to read this in order to comprehend writing, and how may you use this essay to the composition of your formal essay?


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