You just stepped in it!
Hmpfff!
Oh dear, she's been reading again:
one of the charms of edited volumes is they tempt me to read a lot of stuff
besides what I got the book for. So visiting the original Schegloff (1972)
on conversational openings (in Gumpertz & Hymes, Directions in
sociolinguistics) I also found, for example, "The Strategy of Turkish Boys'
verbal Dueling Rhymes", Dundes, Leach & =D6zk=F6k. Almost wrote a snippet on=
it
a few days ago, as a temporally coincidental example of how rape organizes
the social semiotics of domination -- the verbal dueling in case has the
structure of my intro, but is all about who gets the last word in
presenting himself as the active part in "ritual phallic penetration",
positioning the other boy as the passive. Actually the rules are that "one
has to place his penis in his opponent's anus, but he has to make this
threat in rhyme form". The authors end the chapter by doing it to the
reader...
About autobiographies, I know I was being oblique, but THAT part of what I
tried to say was really very simple: it's OK to be autobiographical here,
and to draw on our own experience. Just as it is, of course, OK to draw on
the literature or one's own research. As what we all are working with is so
heterogeneous it's the way we can meet, I think. The culture we are
sustaining here on this list is quite informal, even if it is also
scholarly (community of learners?) -- and by no means all that easy to
figure out for the newcomer. It is certainly no "panel of invited
speakers"... and I hope it isn't a panel at all. It has been compared to a
cocktail party or a Burkean parlour (more coffee than coctails?),
conversants coming and going into a conversation with no beginning or end.
Or is it a neverending class? with recess merging in seamlessly...
Eva