English Composition Assignment Discourse Community

Question :

Write a brief description of discourse communities and rhetorical situations shared by at least three of the readings in the A World of Ideas for this unit. Analyze their arguments; include reference to the main claims, evidence, warrants, and qualifications. Evaluation criteria: Must include specific cultural, historical, and demographic information

about the discourse communities and rhetorical situations. Must include quotations and descriptions of the main claims, evidence, warrants, and qualifications.

Answer :

 It plays a Janus-like role, looking backwards at the historic milestones of critical theories and facing toward the vistas of future; the concatenation of such avant-garde philosophical ruminations and praxis. However, in terms of experiencing these syllogisms as a part of discourse communities, the plethora of purposes become staggering, owing to  their vast dialectical coverage. However, to achieve the set of goals, the expanse of rhetorical situations align themselves at a point of incidence, as it appears, by three seminal works stored in the aforementioned trove of a book- Jung’s theory of collective unconscious, Freud’s concepts of Oedipus complex and Woolf’s Shakespeare’s Sister.

 Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory Oedipus Complex is one of the most variegated theories of the Modern age. In the Interpretation of Dreams, he used the moniker to allude to a stage in a boy’s life, as early as the age of five, where, unconsciously, he develops a sense of jealousy against his father and desires irreversible love and unwavering attention from his mother. In 1899, his psychoanalytic renderings pointed to a groundbreaking discourse of a theory based on the Greek mythological legend of King Oedipus who, unwittingly, killed his father and married his mother, as written in the form of a tragedy in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He states that:

“Falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent shock of the psychic impulses which arise in early childhood , and are of such importance as the material of the subsequent neurosis (Freud).

This formed the basis of an argument that has found subsequent roots in literature and collaterals in cultural mores. The discursive elements are reflected exponentially across artistic renditions, like Salvador Dali’s Oedipe et le sphinx and later, one of the most popular songs of the American rock group, The Doors. However propagative the discourse community might have been in the Freudian context, his peer and compadre Carl Jung himself caused a fairly lucid fission in terms of the observations on Oedipus complex. In 1912, “while ona lecture tour of America, Jung publicly criticized Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on infantile sexuality. The following year this led to an irrevocable split between them and Jung went on to develop his own version of psychoanalytic theory” (simplypsychology.org). Hence, the retractable theorizing met a cul-de-sac in terms of the rhetorical situation because of the ensuing differences between them. The syntactical caveat gave rise to a new set of incontrovertible but invariable alteration in the unambiguity of discourse communities. In The concept of discourse community, it is representatively marked that a discourse community is steeped in utilizing the genres to imbibe its course of actions to a final realization of its goals. The ensuing snowballing of ‘discoursal expectations’ has worked on the leitmotif  of “appropriacy of topics, the form, function and positioning of discoursal elements, and the roles texts play in the operation n of the discourse community” (Swales 26). In retrospect, the inadvertent solicitude of Freud’s thespian leanings, didn’t bode well with Jung. His theory of the personal and collective unconscious was in direct antithesis to that of the Freudian mothership ,  in terms of libido , where the latter incorporates the idea of psychic energy which motivates one positively and thus, a departure from the Freudian principles instigates the formation of a veritable and non-exhaustive body of philosophical contention on the nature of the repressed and the unconscious psyche of mankind that in turn, isolates the rhetorical proclivities of the superseding age of the 20th century. Although Jung had encroached on the Freudian tripartite state of the implicit, unconscious mind, according to him, collective unconscious is an objective form of the psyche of the entire humankind , conceived as “a whole and originating in the inherited structure of the brain” (Encyclopedia Britannica). It is different from the afferent excesses of the Freudian superstructure of id, ego and superego and his own notations of the personal unconscious, which states the chthonic presence of complexes that focus on a linear thought process in Modern man in search of his soul. His foray into the idea of a ecumenical presence of  similar patterns of thoughts, irrespective of divisions, formed the theory of the collective unconscious that puts different aspects of the human personality in parenthesis. Thus formed the Jungian model of archetypes based on ancestral memories  which furthered his esoteric journey into the human psyche. 

Jung’s model of thought is connected in concomitance to a ‘constitutive nature of analogy or metaphor” (Gardiner). These metaphors arise without any synchronous attachment to the Freudian metanarrative but nevertheless, fuses into the states of the society and is inexorably embedded in its cultural forms. Gardiner elucidates:

Works cited:

Gardner, Leslie. Rhetorical Investigations: G.B. Vico and C.G. Jung. Routledge, 2013.

Jacobus, Lee A. A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. Bedford/St. Martins, 2020.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press, 1980.

LUNGU-CIRSTEA, Arina. “Feminism and Faith: Exploring Christian Spaces in the Writing of Sa...” E, Laboratoire D'études Et De Recherche Sur Le Monde Anglophone, 28 Mar. 2011, journals.openedition.org/erea/1563.

Mcleod, Saul. “Carl Jung.” Carl Jung | Simply Psychology, 1 Jan. 1970, www.simplypsychology.org/carl-jung.html.

Swales, John. Approaching the Concept of Discourse Community.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Collective Unconscious.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 28 Feb. 2020, www.britannica.com/science/collective-unconscious.

Woolf, Virginia. Room of One's Own. Penguin Books Ltd., 2019.