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Conversational performance and the poetic construction of an ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2004

GAIL SHUCK
GAIL SHUCK
Affiliation:
Department of English, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725, gshuck@boisestate.edu
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Abstract

This study places conversational performance, or speakers' attempts during everyday talk to draw attention to the aesthetic form of their utterances, at the center of an analysis of linguistic ideology. It examines, in particular, the ways in which two white, middle-class, U.S. university students use performance strategies to construct as Other an English-speaking man whom one student encounters on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a socially and ideologically situated theory of verbal art, this article proposes five interconnected relations between performance and ideology. Together, these relations constitute a step toward an integrated theory of an inextricable link between the ideological structure of performance and the potential for performance in ideological discourse.I wish to thank Jane Hill, Kimberly Jones, Douglas Adamson, and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and on the dissertation from which it comes. I also greatly appreciate Jane McGary's careful editing.

Keywords

Oral performancelinguistic ideologynonnative speakerideological discourseverbal interactionyoung adult discourseverbal art in conversation
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 195 - 222
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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