What is the point of Stein’s Essay, “In Defense of Domination.”?
- In Class Discussion Notes: In his essay, Stein is not truly talking about baseball in his essay. He is actually talking about the U.S’s military power, and how our military gets involved in foreign affairs when we shouldn’t really be getting involved. This essay is originally found in a TIME magazine. He uses baseball as a medium, to connect an American pastime to an issue that he believes to exist. He utilizes irony and sarcasm (irony), making him an unreliable narrator. By doing this, he is trying to invoke a response/reaction from his readers in regards to the issues that he believes to exist. He outlines himself as a rude, bullying type of person to make you dis-like him, however he makes points that you can’t help but see from his perspective and possibly agree with. He doesn’t truly write for just one type of audience, but prods at his readers to make them critically think about current events at the time.
- My Answer: To sum things up, Stein’s point in his essay is to prod and poke at readers by using sarcasm and irony to make them thinking critically about current events that were happening at the time of him writing this essay. Specifically to this essay, he wants his readers to view his points about the abuse of military power that the U.S. military has been using, by connecting a common ground with his readers using the ‘American’ pastime known as baseball (Making it less serious even though it’s a serious topic).
- Swales Questions:
- 1. Speech Communities: Centripetal- Absorb people into a central fabric/group (Us & We). Discourse communities: Centrifugal- Separate groups into specialized interests or skills (They &Them).
- 2. Six Distinct Characteristics of a Discourse Community: A common set of goals, Mechanisms for intercommunication among members, Provide information and feedback, Genres (Very Complex), Specific Lexis (level of language), Discourse communities have a threshold of members that have relevant content and expertise.
- 3. Problems with Discourse Communities: It seems somewhat removed away from actual reality, and has it’s own features that kind of contradict itself. It is very free going, and doesn’t relate to what actually occurs in everyday life.
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