Pat's Workshop

Pat’s topic is quite interesting to me from the standpoint of using a really very subtle intertext. I didn’t expect to be using such a subtle intertext myself; my original thought was simply to examine message board speech precisely because the intertext is usually so overt. Yet I’ve found that what I’ve ended up looking at is very subtle.

Were I to watch Pat’s Ford commercials, I would likely not recognize the “Dirty Jobs” intertext at all, as I’ve never seen the show and certainly don’t recognize its host. Yet at the same time, I would undoubtedly recognize the ideologies of masculinity and strength and the personification of those ideologies onto a machine. I thought this was perhaps one of the more useful connections of Pat’s workshop for me; thinking about how to pick apart an intertext and to see different intertexts based on what one has experience with. In my own work, much comes from people understanding a situation in the same way, or understanding that a certain set of behaviors constitutes a white-knighting frame in the same way that Anna Trester’s improv artists could recognize a set of behaviors as a game frame. Pat’s focus texts helped me think about how an intertext could be recognized with very little, and also how people with different experiences might cue in to different intertexts.

The readings Pat chose I thought were complementary. Irvine and Gal emphasized a great deal about group formation, and very importantly, intragroup diversity. Thinking about how we might hegemonically assign characteristics to single groups is an interesting thought, especially when it comes to understanding their linguistic practice. I find these concepts to speak back to Ana’s work on linguistic metadiscourse, and wonder if that might not be a good area of exploration for her as well. I was intrigued by Actor Network Theory, and it seems that Latour and Irvine and Gal are saying a great deal of the same things about the ways networks and groups are created intrinsically and must be understood as such to understand how different pieces of their worlds can carry meaning. One spot I thought about particularly was the concept of certain features being mapped on to social qualities, a la the nylon vs. silk example that Latour gives. This could be brought to bear on some of Pat’s work—we already have many of the ideologies of what it is to be masculine, and the way they do or don’t get

The one thing I was surprised was missing from Pat’s workshop was more information about Dirty Jobs itself. There was a LOT to work with simply exploring the intertextual ties between the commercials themselves, but I found I wanted to know more about the Dirty Jobs intertext and the way in which it played into or didn’t play into the focus texts. However, I found the process of identifying the actors and intermediaries in each was a very good method of analysis for Pat’s work.