Tracking the transmission of culture: a cultural discourse analysis of narratives of circulation in the US undergraduate public speaking course

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ethnography of communication studies conducted by communication scholars, including those informed by cultural discourse theory, typically approach the cultural transmission of discursive resources using a narrow conception of language socialization. In this conception, expert speakers instruct or otherwise compel novice speakers to speak in locally recognized, normative ways and thereby achieve or affirm membership in the collective. I perform the cultural discourse analysis of narratives of circulation to extend this approach. In particular, I study narratives representing the movements of the Anglo-American speech genre known as public speaking in a US undergraduate course and a series of focus groups. Speakers narrated movement along four paths: from beyond the classroom into the classroom; inside the classroom (with the class acting as primary agent of dissemination); inside the classroom (with student speakers acting as secondary agents of dissemination); and from the classroom beyond the classroom. The analysis suggests three extensions of the existing approach to cultural transmission and, thereby, of cultural discourse theory: accounting for cultural ideologies (or metacultures) of transmission; producing more comprehensive accounts of transmission’s participation structure; and accounting for the local meanings of mobile resources both in context and in motion.