Whose Text? Whose Context?

Abstract

After a brief account of an old study on sociopolitical vs formalist styles of literary criticism and the lessons it taught about relating cultural objects to context, I turn to more recent work on talk-in-interaction and engage three themes: (1) That the events of conversation have a sense and import to participants which are at least partially displayed in each successive contribution, and which are thereby put to some degree under interactional control. Accordingly, academic accounts of the import of conversational `texts' can be endogenously grounded, and this is a worthy analytic aspiration; (2) The pursuit of this goal mandates relevant senses of context to be consulted for analysis, and these are senses and aspects of context which are demonstrably relevant to the participants in the event being examined, not necessarily ones relevant to the inquirer doing the analysis; and (3) Its technical grounds and mandate aside, this is a useful contraint on analysis in disciplining work to the indigenous preoccupations of the everyday world being grasped, and serving as a buffer against the potential for academic and theoretical imperialism which imposes intellectuals' preoccupations on a world without respect to their indigenous resonance.