Phillips: English 540 Week Eight Response

 The Whos and Whats: Gee’s Figured Worlds and Five Systems of Discourse

Favorite Ideas from Gee’s Chapter Six & A Pet Peeve

“Different social languages…make visible and recognizable two different social identities, two different versions of who one is” (89).

“All utterances make assumptions about people’s previous experiences and knowledge “ (97).

“A figured world is an assumed part of the context on the part of the writer…” and it implies a set of cultural “…values and ideologies” (101; 106).

“There is no knowing a language without knowing the cultural models or figured worlds that organize the meanings of that language for some cultural group. But all cultural models tend ultimately to limit our perception of differences and of new possibilities” (110).

James Paul Gee poses the concept of “figured worlds.” I find this idea compelling, for, on the one hand, the idea suggests embodiment in the word ‘figure,’ and, on the other hand, the idea suggests a view of the world that a ‘figure’ sees, experiences, and holds. All of this is contingent with her/his own social situation.

Gee references Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (L&J) but doesn’t delve into their ideas about conceptual metaphors to my satisfaction. Gee’s text would benefit from the addition of L&J’s Philosophy in the Flesh, which was published in 1999 almost a decade prior to Gee’s own work, and three decades after Metaphors We Live By, which was first published in 1980. Even though I know no one can ‘read-it-all,’ his omission seriously impacted my ability to read him as generously.

For example, Gee names “idioms” like Time is Money, but I am not on board with his interpretation. L&J frame this as conceptual metaphor and place it into a schema representing Time as a Resource (L&J 161). Maybe I don’t understand why Gee doesn’t take the next step and deconstruct the idioms he poses, or at least reference extant scholarship that does a more thorough job deconstructing the concepts.

Favorite Concept from Gee’s Chapter Seven

Nevertheless, Gee’s description of Five Systems of Discourse provides some good points for consideration. Gee writes: “[D]iscourse [are] stretches of language” that “hang together” …to make sense to some community of people.” (112). He indicates that there are ways in which discourse “hangs together” that we may analyze.

Quoted and Paraphrased from 116-117

1. Prosody = the way things are said…pitch, loudness, stress, syllable length

2. Cohesion = ways sentences are linked, or the text’s glue

3. Over all Discourse Organization = the ways in which sentences are structured/positioned into higher ordered units

4. Contextualization Signals = cues for listeners and readers to situate a text or utterance

5. Thematic Organization = the ways in which themes are signaled and developed (through visuals, focalizers, etc…)

“These five systems are interrelated. … Devices in the first three are used to accomplish the functions of the last two…’ (116-17).

In response to Meg’s query, Gee doesn’t address the body in motion per se, but one might place the ‘figure’ under the heading of contextual signals, or theme (?!), or prosody under “stress.” I’m stretching it here, though.

While I am harsh on the details in Gee’s text, this doesn’t mean I find no merit in his project, I do. I wished to play devil’s advocate in this post to help forward my own thinking with regard to conceptual metaphors--something I intend look at in my intercultural analysis paper.