Remembering, Shelving, and Reincorporating: Trester

As with Tannen and Tovares, probably the most interesting thing about reading Anna Trester’s work is getting to work through the texts with her. The presence of the researcher in the discussion of the text makes the text even more polyvocal—the researcher’s voice becomes laminated on the voices of those whom she researches and thus provides an additional layer of insight into the ways these texts function.

What strikes me the most about Trester’s evaluation of Bauman and Briggs’ discussion of entextualization is this issue that often we cannot recognize the entextualization until the text has been decontextualized and recontextualized. For example, it is not until the “student athlete” says “U is offering me a freshman start,” and the homophony causes a break in the frame of the expected rules of grammar, that the text is able to be recognized and reincorporated to be used later. Similarly, when the actors enter into a game frame while doing their work backstage as actors, it often takes a line or two for the text to emerge, and it often is not recognized as the text until someone takes it up as such. For example in the game “Change the quote,” the lines “that’s not in there,” “show me,” and “play the game” are all originally responses to a single speech event. It is not until they are repeated that they become recognized as the Text. In this sense, it is really almost the reincorporating that causes the shelving of discourse.

Anna suggests that perhaps this framework is a useful one for my own research, and I agree that she is correct. However, I need to look more carefully at the ways WK is instantiated by this process of reincorporation—if it is the same backward look. Certainly there is not the same level of taking up as there is in the creation of the game frame within the improve artists’ work, but at the same time, there does seem to be some sort of shared understanding that the frame of WK has been invoked, and this causes a number of participants to respond in similar, if not identical ways.