Yes, "authoritative discourse" seems to characterize a lot of social
studies texts. There's a great description of a geography textbook's section
on "regions" that Gunther Kress gives in _Linguistic processes in
sociocultural practice_ (1989, Oxford UP), which he writes "provides a space
which the student/reader is forced to occupy" (p. 38). I searched for it,
since it seems to be an excellent example of this kind of monologic text:
Regions
The area around a town in which its urban functions exert a strong influence
can be described as a _functional region_. In highly urbanised countries
this is probably the most useful way of dividing large areas into smaller
units for study. We need to remember, however, that the boundary of a region
can be defined precisely only in terms of one factor, and then only if that
factor can be expressed as a quantity. We can talk of part of northern New
South Wales as within the rgion of 50 per cent or more commercial orientation
to Brisbane: we can also talk of that part where 50 per cent or more of the
people take in Brisbane daily newspapers; the boundaries are different, but
they both mean something precise. To speak of the 'Brisbane region' without
any indication of the way it is defined is vague indeed. In Chapter 2 the
boundary of a population density region was defined from statistics in a
precise way.... (D.D. Harris & I.R. Stehbens, _Settlement patterns and
processes_, 1981, p. 157, in Kress, 1989, p. 37).
The above example, Kress argues, is coercive to the extent that it hides the
reader-subject behind a "we" that is presumed to be both inside the text (as
geographer) and allied with the writers of the text (as other geographers).
In addition, Kress argues that phrases like "To speak of the 'Brisbane
region'...is vague indeed" encourage the reader to identify with the
attitudes of disapproval but without inviting the possibility that one could
speak of the region in any intelligent way other than the ones suggested by
the authors.
I suspect there are equally good examples from American texts; I know history
text books tend to be written this way, and the level at which critique is
suppressed or made difficult by the fact that it is invisible is often at the
level of plot and thematic organization, making serious challenges
difficult....
Bill Penuel
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