On the Very Idea of a Discourse Community

Abstract

In the study of discourse production, quite different elaborations of community-elaborations such as discourse community, interpretive community, speech community, and community, for example-occur regularly in our scholarship, and, generally speaking, these elaborations incorporate either a thick formulation of community or a thin one.' The thick formulation understands a community to be a system of social conventions that may be isolated and then codified. For Anne Herrington, for instance, a disciplinary community will be constituted by distinct intellectual and social conventions. . . . Some scholars claim that these conventions differentiate not only from another, but also typical forums, or locations, for reasoning and writing within a given discipline (405). On the other hand, the thin formulation understands community to be a chorus of polyphonous voices where, according to Joseph Harris, one is always simultaneously a part of several discourses, several communities, is always already committed to a number of conflicting beliefs and practices (19). So-again, generally speaking-we uncover a spectrum of different uses of the term community; on end of the spectrum are thick formulations that depict a community as a determinate and codifiable social entity, and on the other end are thin formulations that depict a community as a relatively indeterminate and uncodifiable sedimentation of beliefs and desires.

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