Ong: The Audience is a Fiction or is it the Author's Voice?

In Walter Ong's “The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction”, Ong discusses the roles readers are given by the author and states that, “if the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know” (Ong, 11), meaning that the audience for a writer is always the same because the author cannot write for an individual audience because he/she does not know who they are writing for; thus the author may copy the classics such as Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or Chaucer and write for the imagined audience these individuals wrote for. This is a key statement for Ong in his theory, but I however, find loopholes in the theory; which is: what if the author writes for an individual person, let’s say his son? Would that still cause the author to imagine an audience that is not particularly known to him? And then if so, is his son fictionalized as he writes?  

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Foucault paraphrases the author-text relationship in a, for his time, very unprecedented way.  He describes modern writing as having left its own rules behind and evolved into a space where self-expression is not a priority, nor a necessity, but the author is somewhat “consumed” in the point they are making and the words/genre/medium in which they compose. Other important points that Foucault addresses are the relationship between a work and “death” (also taking note that he addresses death as a general rather than the death of the author), and the evolution of literary criticism and its contribution to writing.

From a historical stand point, the validity of Foucault’s argument is on-point, taking into consideration the purpose of writing 500 years ago versus today.  

Questions about Discursive Texts

After reviewing Foucault’s What is an Author, I find that one concept that I think was meant to perplex me as his reader was the fourth, unorthodox author mentioned--the one who takes part in “discursive practices.” 

Foucault defines discursive authors as ones who are “not just the authors of their own works,” but who open up a direction for future texts. They create a new rhetorical situations through their texts and allow other writers to fall into the categories they created. Foucault used the example of Karl Marx as a discursive author because he established an “endless possibility of discourse.” Still, the concept of discursive practice and discursive authors is a little confusing to me. I have four questions regarding discursive practices:

The writer's audience is not much of a fiction

In picking apart the ambiguity of the reader's role in The Writers's Audience Is Always a Fiction, Walter Ong is exultant of the merits of spoken-word communication. He is emphatic to the point that he almost sounds like Plato and other classic rhetors and his condemnation of written rhetoric, as though Ong would prefer arguments be committed to memory and performed. As Ong examines the role of the reader, he finds a great deal of complexities in the writer's relationship to their reading audience.

Ong finds the expectations of the reader to be too vague. He describes a student writing an essay: "Where does he find his "audience"? He has to make his readers up, fictionalize them." Ong goes on that the writer, ". . . might ask, "Who wants to know?" . . . The teacher? There is no conceivable setting in which he could imagine telling his teacher how he spent his summer vacation other than in writing this paper, so that writing for the teacher does not solve his problems but only restates them." (p.11) Ong is seeing a subtlety here in the reader's role that is much less of an issue in rhetoric than it seems. One does not need to fictionalize a teacher-as-reader; the teacher has a very clear role as the future reader of this essay. The student can very easily write in the voice of a student who is turning in this essay to a teacher, as other writers use the voice of an advertiser presenting a product or service, or a reporter writes in the voice of an informed individual writing to the populace of a community. The writer's audience is not that much of a fiction.

"The Author is"

There are text on the screen. The Author is the person who put them there. An author writes on their own behalf even when it is on the behalf of others. All Authors are agents and rhetoric or the spoken word are how they use exercise their agency. The author always acts with an audience in mind, whether it be themselves or imagined. Is the act of self expression the power in itself or is it powerless without the reader?

Hemingway believed the Author is affected by time and space. What an author writes today will be totally different is they wrote it in ten years. In ten years one moves around so much that even if they were to have the same exact experience ten years apart it could hardly be from the same point of view. When an author writes its up to themselves to acknowledge this and address it in their writing or move past it. An author writes with an audience in mind and knows the audience is affected by time and space as well. So the author must do their best in translating the scene into written form to document as best as he can.

Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric

Since class started, I found Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics the most interesting and intriguing.  In preparation for this blog, I did more reading and analyzing and actually made a connection that I had embarrassingly not before: Aristotle’s concept of virtue in Nicomachean Ethics is directly related to his concept of ethos in rhetoric.  

The English word ethics directly comes from the Greek word ethos.  Ethos simply means character.  In order to be a successful rhetorician, it is important to possess concrete ethos, or good character.  Honorable ethos is constituted by virtues, so a virtuous person has good character – a good person exhibits all virtues.

According to Aristotle, a good person either possesses all virtues or none, though some may be more predominant in someone’s character than others.  Aristotle’s definition of a good person is someone who is happy, and the end goal is Supreme Good.  A person achieves Supreme Good when he or she lives his or her life in accordance with virtue.  “A good person will always behave in a virtuous manner.”  A good person won’t ever engage in “mean-spiritedness” even if provoked.  

Jordan Gregory: What is an Author?

I believe that the importance of the author relies on the individual that is reading the text. Doing research on an author prior to reading his or her work can and will determine how you view the piece. If you are the type of individual like me, then you don't care to know any thing about the author. You're much more interested in what the story itself has to offer. Doing your background research does indeed prevent a lot of confusion when reading someone's work. You might be confused as to why an author is making references to war throughout their work but if you research and find out that the author had parents who served in the war then you might understand that portion of the work more. Gender also can play a vital role in how you view an author's work. If an author is a male speaking as a feminist, you might not view this as an authentic piece just because you would expect it more from a female author.

Who is the author, and why does it matter?

Authors are artists of words. They bring their own style of writing to the world in hopes of becoming a well known written story teller. But that doesn't necessarily mean all authors are good word artists. Some have strengths that others lack, and some seem so near perfection all you can do is build off their work. But like every other kind artist on this planet, word artists have their own individual tone and style. A picture painted by one painter is never exactly the same painting as when created by another painter. This statement holds true for authors as well. Every author is a little different and who the author of a text is, greatly effects what the audience will grasp from reading.

The Relationship Between Agency/Power and The Author

            Think of a scene from a movie. In this scene you have two people arguing about a missing dress. In this scene, the person speaking is the one that has the agency. When the other person decides to begin speaking, then the agency shifts. It shifts because the person that is currently acting changed and that person is the one who has agency in the situation. When someone is composing a book, that person has the agency, and therefore controls the agency of the characters in the book since they’re in control of the rhetorical situations occurring. Granted, this idea of agency is not the same for all the different schools of thought, but it’s how I think about it .

            Agency can be taken away from the agent depending on the situation. In the scene with the two people arguing, the person who speaks has the agency in the moment. Granted, that can easily change depending on who is speaking and in control of the moment. Agency can be improved when someone takes more control of the situation, but like I said earlier, it can be lost. It’s a natural thing to some people but some people need to work on improving and enhancing their agency especially when they’re in a situation with someone who has a more dominant sense of agency.

           

Ong's Fictional Audience

     In "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction" by Walter Ong,  He deals with concepts concerning: audience, authorial intent, reader reception, and the transmission of meaning. When talking about the audience he discusses the creation of audience and what an author must consider when creating his work. The audience is an imaginary concept that the writers must come up with while creating a text. This concept of "not simply what to say but also whom it say it to: (Ong 11), bring up the question of who is the structure of writing created in the first place. 

     What I found the most interesting is his comparison of written and oral communication. He begins by saying that "rhetoric originally concerned oral communication…gradually extended to include writing more and more" (Ong 9). Ong discusses the  constraints that are placed on written and oral communication. Oral communication is constructed around the receptiveness of the audience; written communication can only anticipate potential receptiveness and act accordingly. 

Writing has freed itself ...

Writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression... it is a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Before: Narrative = immortality.
Now: authors must assume the role of dead men to make accomplished writing, he can't be present in his own text.

We can't take full measure of the author's disappearance because we are obsessed with analyzing works but cannot define what constitutes a work of literature without understanding the writer as an author. Writing is another way that maintains the existence of the author because, since we hold it to such high standards, the style of the writing itself gives away the author who wrote it. An author's name functions as a way to classify a work. It receives a certain status because author's names are not interchangable. If they were, we would have entirely different ways of thinking about the work. It contains status. It didn't always have to be the author that gave a text status; writing down a well-known epic could be done anonymously in the past because the history of the text was all the status the writing needed.

Authors, We Need You! (Sometimes...)

The articles, “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes and “What is an Author” by Michel Foucault each give insight on the importance of the author and how the relevance of the author has changed. Reading each of these has led me to question the relationship between the author, the text, and the reader.

 Obviously the author is important in terms of who is writing and creating the text. In reading a text, whether or not the author is important depends on what one wants to accomplish in reading that text. Being an English major I find that there are different ways that I have been asked to interpret a text. What does the author mean by that? and How do you (the reader) interpret the text? are two ways of asking what a text means. In the first one, however, knowledge of the author is important. The second is not as important because it is asking for the reader’s thoughts of what the text is saying. 

Nicomachean Ethics, Uncovered

Over the course of this week I was intrigued by Aristotle's ideas in Nicomachean Ethics. This work, though at first frustratingly in-depth, delivers such a broad scope of ideas, it seems to try to explain every aspect of life and the meaning our lives themselves. Aristotle's intense obsession with finding the greater good and ultimate happiness caused me to step back and examine our current culture in comparison to the mindset of Aristotle and many of the great thinkers of his time. Individuals in our society today seem to be so overly concerned with instant gratification, that thinking in a broader scope is practically unheard of in the common, first-world civilian. 

So the question is how do Aristotle's years of thinking and analyzing affect us?

The Magnificent Walter Ong: His take on writer/reader fictionalization

Walter Ong's essay, "The Writers's Audience Is Always a Fiction," focuses on the relationship between the writer and his/her audience. Most would agree that the study of rhetoric would be the go-to subject when approaching this unique association, however, not one particular scholar has fully examined "the question of the readers' roles called for by a written text" (Ong, 9). Who would think that the role of the reader surpassed the actual event of reading? Is the reader that important that such an examination is needed? To be sure, Ong believed so.

He begins by stating that verbal communication can be simplified into the "printed word" (Ong, 10),  and because of this, it is important to understand the placement of the audience in relation to the writer. It is a given that the writer is most likely by himself when creating/writing a work, and his audience is absent at that current time. Under these circumstances, the audience receives no context, or "actuality," (Ong, 10) of the situation (unlike the audience with a present speaker), and is practically thrown into the black ink depths of typed word onto paper.

The Importance of Reading Subjectively

The author is important because they are involved in the creation of a text. The author doesn't necessarily change the way that something is read but rather invokes his/her own style and tone to manipulate the way something is read by an audience. A work of writing should be interpreted with all the knowledge that the audience has available to them regarding background, author, and origin. The interpretation of a work based upon the gender of the author is dependent upon the audience and their view of whichever specific gender they are reading in the work. Certain knowledge is strict to a certain genre but that has become more obsolete in most of the works I've read.

The information in a work of non-fiction writing is most important because it backs up the work with facts that are trying to be relayed to the world by the author. The author's name should be connected to the work so that, if necessary, the work can be referred to with a sense of credibility as well as origin. The cause of connection of an author's name to a work is subjective because of the many different reasons one would connect their name to a work, just as there is a plethora of reasons why someone would choose to write a work anonymously. The writer is writing for a reader in a sense, but then again she is also writing for a reaction in the reader. If that reader chooses to skip over the work, then the reader's reaction is one of not reacting. If the reader finds something important and uses on of the many ways to note its importance, then that reader's reaction is one of opening up a new area of ideas and thoughts about the work.

"Readership" = Author

To be honest, most of the texts that we have encountered thus far have been hard to fully digest.  After reading Walter Ong's "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction", some important questions came to my mind that I previously had never thought of.  What makes a novel popular?  Does the author's reputation overshadow their work?  Can a writer compose a piece without having an audience in mind?  Why do readers connect more to certain texts?  These are the questions that came to mind after reading Ong.  Going forward, I will try my best to tackle these difficult questions while analyzing quotes from Ong's text. 

Walter Ong writes, "More properly, a writer address readers-only, he does not quite "address" them either:  he writes to or for them." (Ong 10-11).  He says this in regard to his comparison of public speakers to writers/authors.  This is true because a writer is not directly addressing a crowd in front of him.  Rather, he is speaking imaginatively to a perceived group of readers that will read the written text in different settings.  While a writer can compose a letter intended for one specific reader, the recipient is not in direct contact with the writer.  I may be stating the obvious but this it is crucial that we understand that there is a distinct difference between addressing an audience in public and writing privately to readers.  Ong's text was written in a time where rhetoric's definition and place of use were transforming to the page.  So what does this mean?  It means composers of a text, whether public or private, will be influenced on what they write depending on who is receiving the message.  For example, there is a higher chance of someone writing a radically, strongly opinionated message on paper rather than a person giving a speech in the same manner.  A speaker feeds off audience reactions.  This is why a lot of successful speeches have a charismatic tone.    

The Importance of an Author

What is an author's importance? Does an author change the way something is read? How should a work of writing be interpreted? How does the gender of an author affect its interpretation? These are only a few questions that can be raised about the author. But they are important as far as rhetorical theory is concerned.

First of all, without the author (or writer), there would be no written work. That's a simple reason why the author is important. But we're more interested in complicating things for rhetorical theory's sake—to obtain a deeper understanding of things. So, maybe a re-thinking of what it means to be important is in store. 

The information in a work of non-fiction writing is most important; is it not? With fiction writing, the piece is about stories and ideas (both which relay information). The writer, if modest, is trying to relay information to the world, not trying to be recognized as a "great author". So, why even put a name to the piece? Maybe the writer is not so modest as to want some sort of ownership to her ideas. But maybe another alternative: the writer wants to document her thoughts to gain some sort of credibility that would not come from an anonymous signing of a work (in order to further a career in writing). That alternative suggests that the reader is more important to a work of writing. The reader determines importance in a writer. Let's focus on one reader. If that reader does not find something important, she will be inclined to skip over it. If she finds something particularly interesting or "important", she might underline it, circle it, or do a number of other things to it—maybe tear it out (if she's feeling rebellious). The point is: the writer is writing for a reader.