Are you really out there, audience?

I take a sort of joy in the fact that I am writing in my blog, where I know who my intended audience is, about the concepts of addressed versus invoked audience. It's all very post-modern and 'meta'.

I agree, to an extent, with Chris' confusion in class yesterday about the idea of a fictionalized audience. I think though, that I have more of a problem with Ong's belief that an audience is more real for an orator than it is for a writer. There is always a real, actual audience for any piece of writing, even if the audience is simply the writer-as-a-reader of their own work. It is, instead, a matter of 'determining' who the audience is, not a matter of creating a previously non-existing audience.

I also do not understand how a reader can take on a role that requires them to ficitionalize themselves. I understand the part about taking on a role; I have two reader roles -- with pen in hand and for pleasure.

Maybe I am too caught up in semantics here, but fiction to me means 'not real'. Therefore, the audience is never fictional or constructed because the reader all ready exists (regardless if the reader is the writer or someone else).

The Lunsford/Ede piece was interesting to read as a direct follow up to Ong's writing. I've never before read a (partial) critique of an author that I had just read. I enjoyed that this essay mostly dealt with the strengths and weaknesses of several theoretical models, instead of taking the usual very distinct bias that some of the other essays in the book take. I understand that the purpose of writing a paper on a specialized topic (or almost any writing at all) is to make an argument, but at the level that I am at in the world of composition theory, it is occasionally good to just become more informed on something.