INTERTEXTUALITY IN ACTION: THE ROLE OF EXPERT ADVICE IN EVERYDAY PARENTING
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29038/2617-6696.2020.3.68.89Keywords:
intertextuality, action, public discourse, expert advice, parenting, parental socialization, family interactionAbstract
This article explores the relationship between discourse and action by examining the role of expert advice in everyday parenting practices. Drawing upon the notions of dialogicality (Bakhtin, 1981), intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986), and repetition (Tannen, 2007) and incorporating insights from Mediated Discourse Analysis (e. g., Scollon, 1998; Scollon and Scollon, 2007; Norris and Jones, 2005), this work analyzes instances in which the actions of parents in three American families can be traced back to various public texts on parenting. Such relationship between text and action is identified as intertextuality in action (Author, 2005, 2020), or when public texts serve as resources for the verbal and non-verbal everyday actions of parents. It is further suggested that by adopting a positive, childcentered approach to parenting from literature and trained childcare professionals, parents themselves are socialized into the contemporary Discourse (Gee, 1999, 2015) of parenting. The analysis of the “repetition” of the words of experts in family (inter)actions also illuminates the dialogic relationship between the public and private spheres.
References
Ambert, Nina-Marie. 1994. “An international perspective on parenting: Social change and social constructs.” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 56(3): 529–543.
Arendell, Terry. 1997. “A social constructionist approach to parenting.” Contemporary parenting: Challenges and issues, edited by Terry Arendell, 1–44. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Atkinson, Maxwell and John Heritage, eds. 1984. Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, John. 1961. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bachmair, Ben. 2000. “Creator spiritus: Virtual texts in everyday life.” In Intertextuality and the Media, edited by Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith, 115–131. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Baumslag, Naomi and Dia Michels. 1995. Milk, Money, and Madness: The culture and Politics of Breastfeeding. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Berger, Peter and Hansfried Kellner. 1964. “Marriage and the construction of reality: An exercise in the microsociology of knowledge.” Patterns of Communicative Behavior, edited by Hans Peter Dreitzel, 49–72. New York: Macmillan.
Bettelheim, Bruno. 1988. A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-rearing. New York: Vintage Books.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1997. Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierrre.1996. “On the family as a realized category.” Theory, Culture and Society 13(3): 19–26.
Calhoun, Craig. 1999. “Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere.” Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 1–50. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fasulo, Alessandra, Heather Loyd and Vincenzo Padiglione. 2007. “Children’s socialization into cleaning practices: A cross-cultural perspective.” Discourse & Society 18(1): 11–33.
Fraiberg, Selma. 1996. The Magic Years. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Gee, James Paul. 1999. An Introduction to Discourse analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge.87
Gee, James Paul. 2015. Discourse, Small d, Big D. The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, edited by Karen Tracy, Todd Sandel and Cornelia Ilie. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi016
Gerhardt, Cornelia and Ruth Ayaß, eds. 2012. The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life: What People Do with Media. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Live. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Gordon, Cynthia. 2004. “‘Al Gore’s our guy’: Linguistically constructing a family political identity.” Discourse & Society, 15(5): 607–631.
Gordon, Cynthia. 2009. Making Meanings, Creating Family: Intertextuality and Framing in Family Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, Cynthia. 2011. “Impression management on reality TV: Emotion in parental accounts.” Journal of Pragmatics, 43: 3551–3564.
Grant, Julia. 1998. Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge,
Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Katz, Elihu and Tamar Liebes. 1990. The Export of Meaning: Cross-cultural Readings of Dallas. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kremer-Sadlik, Tamar and Jeemin Lydia Kim. 2007. “Lessons from sports: Children’s socialization to values through family interaction during sports activities.” Discourse & Society, 18: 35–52.
Kress, Gunther. 2000. “Text as the punctuation of semiosis: Pulling at some of the threads.” In Intertextuality and the Media, edited by Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith, 132–154. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1986. “Word, dialog and novel.” The Kristeva Reader, edited by Tori Moi, 34–61. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kurcinka, Mary Sheedy. 1998. Raising your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents whose Child is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, and Energetic. New York: Harper Perennial.
Lee, David. 1997. “Frame conflicts and competing construals in family argument.” Journal of Pragmatics, 27: 339–360.
Matthews, P. H. 1997. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Meinhof, Ulrike H. and Jonathan Smith. 2000. “Spitting image: TV genre and intertextuality.” Intertextuality and the Media, edited by Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith, 43–60. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Norris, Sigrid and Rodney Jones, eds. 2005. Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. New York: Routledge. Ochs, Elinor and Carolyn Taylor. 1992. “Family narrative as political activity.” Discourse & Society, 3(3): 303–340.
Paugh, Amy L. 2005. “Learning about work at dinnertime: Language socialization in dual-earner American families.” Discourse & Society, 16(1): 55–78.88
Pitt, Kathy. 2002. “Being a new capitalist mother.” Discourse & Society 13(2): 251–267.
Raffaetà, Roberta. 2015. “My parents never spent time with me! Migrants’ parents in Italy and hegemonic ideals of competent parenting.” Journal of Family Issues, 36(9): 1192–1211.
Sacks, Harvey. 1984. “On doing being ordinary,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 413–429. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.” Language, 50: 696–735.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1994. Approaches to Discourse. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.
Scollon, Ron. 1998. Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction. A Study of News Discourse. London and New York: Longman.
Scollon, Ron. 2001a. Mediated Discourse. The Nexus of Practice. London and New York: Routledge.
Scollon, Ron. 2001b. “Action and text: Toward an integrated understanding of the place of text in social (inter)action.” Method in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyers, 41–19. London: Sage.
Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 1995. Intercultural Communication. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2005. “Lighting the stove: Why habitus isn't enough for Critical Discourse Analysis.” A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton, 101–117. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2007. “Nexus analysis: Refocusing ethnography on action.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5): 608–625.
Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, B. F. (Burrhus Frederic). 1938. The Behavior of Organisms. New York and London: Appleton-century Company, INC.
Sliepushova, Anhelina. 2020. “Dyskurs batko-dytyna v animatsiinomu seriali ‘Family Guy’: Korpusnyi analiz.” Synopsys: Tekst, kontekst, media, 26(2): 61–65.
Solter, Aletha. 1998. Tears and Tantrums. Goleta, CA.: Shining Star Press.
Spitulnik, Debra. 1997. “The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 6(2): 161–187.
Strel’nik, Elena. 2015. “Zhyzn po doktoru Komarovskomu”: Konstruirovanie roditelstva v sovetah po ukhodu za detmi”. Laboratorium, 7(2): 83–105.
Tannen, Deborah. 1984. Conversational Style: Analyzing talk among friends. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tovares, Alla. 2005. “Intertextuality in family interaction: Repetition of public texts in private settings.” PhD diss., Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Tovares, Alla. 2006. “Public medium, private talk: Gossip about a TV show as "quotidian hermeneutics.” Text & Talk, (4): 463–491.
Tovares, Alla. 2007. “Family members interacting while watching television." Family talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families, edited by Deborah Tannen, Shari Kendall, and Cynthia Gordon, 283–310. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tovares, Alla. 2010. “All in the family: Small stories and narrative construction of a shared family identity that includes pets.” Narrative Inquiry, 20 (1): 1–19.
Tovares, Alla. 2012. “Watching out loud: A television quiz show as a resource in family interaction.” The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life: What People Do with Media edited by Cornelia Gerhardt and Ruth Ayaß, 107–130. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Tovares, Alla. 2020. “The art of the insult: (Re)creating Zaporizhian Cossacks’ letter-writing on YouTube as collective creative insurgency.” Language of Conflict: Discourses of the Ukrainian Crisis, edited by Natalia Knoblock, 213–232. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Voloshinov, Valentin. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York and London: Seminar Press.
Vygotsky, Lev. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wertsch, James. 1991. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wertsch, James. 1998. Mind as Action. New York: Oxford University Press.
