| Since Aristotle, audience has been seen as a key component of the rhetorical situation: "Of the three elements in speech-making-speaker, subject, and person addressed -it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech's end and object" (Rhetoric 1.3). And more than thirty years ago, Moffett, a famous rhetorician, directly and forcefully announced the need for greater attention to audience in composition studies: "If anybody is going to do anything about the teaching of writing, the first priority is going to have to be the rekindling of the sense of audience. Until that's done, nothing else is going to happen" (Squire et al.,1977, p.298). This announcement caused renewed attention to audience in written communication. Since the early 1980s, there has been a flood of critical commentary and research on audience. For example, an on-line search of ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center, USA) abstracts from 1980 to July 2002 yields 6,234 entries focusing on the keyword "audience" and MLA (Modern Language Association USA) bibliography records 5,215 audience-related entries. Researchers and theorists in various disciplines- not only in composition and rhetoric, but also in speech communication, technical communication, literary studies, education, cognitive psychology, philosophy and linguistics - have acknowledged the importance of audience to the communicative process, a concept seen as crucial to the writer's invention process, formulation of purpose, arrangement, and stylistic and linguistic choices. It is clear that theconcept of audience has become a central theme in many scholarly discussions.Current approaches to audience include historical studies of classical rhetoric, of writers' audience awareness during composing, of the relation between audience awareness and syntactic and lexical features, and of audience as discourse communities. Such journals as Research in the Teaching of English, College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Revie\v and Whiten Communication have published articles on audience in increasing numbers. And studies of audience are scattered across numerous journals, anthologies and book chapters.Recently, part of this renewed attention has accompanied an interest in the social-constructionist view of composition. Old notions of audience have been re-scrutinized because traditional discussions of audience, such as those that could be found in textbooks of a few decades ago, limit themselves to an analysis of the demographic factors of hypothetical readers: their educational background, income, location, and class. What has been missing in such discussions is a sense of the social context in which text production and dispersion take place, a sense of the forums (publications, talks, conferences) that shape audiences, and a sense of the shifting dynamics of discourse communities. As scholars have begun to explore the rich contexts for writing, notions of "audience" have become increasingly complex and acquired a host of different meanings. Kroll (1984), for example, has identified three different perspectives on audience: "the rhetorical," "the informational," and "the social." Furthermore, there is an ongoing debate about the "invoked" and "addressed" audience (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). Some scholars argue that writers have to analyze and accommodate actual readers while others propose that writers create roles for audiences by providing textual cues with which readers identify. Park (1982) suggests: "The meanings of'audience' -tend to diverge intwo general directions: one toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied therein, a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers or listeners." (p. 249)In this thesis, the writer will provide a concise historical background of the term "audience" and examine how it is historically and theoretic... |
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