The April discussion paper is is up and ready.
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April Discussion Paper
Peter Smagorinsky smago@peachnet.campuscwix.net
If Meaning is Constructed, What's It Made of?
http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Smagorinsky/meaning.html
In this essay I explore the notion of meaning, particularly as applied to
acts of producing and reading texts. I ground my analysis in principles of
activity theory and cultural semiotics, focusing on the ways in which
reading takes place among readers and texts in a culturally mediated,
codified experience that I characterize as the transactional zone. I build
on Rosenblatt's construct of the evocation-the associations generated
through engagement with a text-to argue that meaning comes through a
reader's generation of new texts in response to the text being read. To
account for this phenomenon, I give examples from studies illustrating the
complementary designative and expressive functions of language in meaning
construction; the dialogic role of composing during a reading transaction;
the necessity of culturally constructed subjectivity in meaning
construction; the role of intertextuality and intercontextuality in the
construction of meaning; and the depths and dynamics of context in readers'
engagement with texts. I conclude by locating meaning in the transactional
zone in which signs become tools for extending or developing concepts and
the richness of meaning coming from the potential of a reading transaction
to generate new texts.
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It will be up throughout the month at the MCA entry site.
http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/index.html
Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/nate_schmolze/
schmolze@students.wisc.edu
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"Overcoming the naturalistic concept of mental development calls for a
radically new approach
to the interrelation between child and society. We have been led to this
conclusion by a
special investigation of the historical emergence of role-playing. In
contrast to the view
that role playing is an eternal extra-historical phenomenon, we hypothesized
that role playing emerged at a specific stage of social development, as the
child's position in society changed
in the course of history. role-playing is an activity that is social in
origin and,
consequently, social in content."
D. B. El'konin
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