In this essay, Harris works to pose some critical challenges to the idea of discourse community (see also Cooper, 1989 and Kent, 1991). Drawing heavily on the work of Raymond Williams, Harris points out the fact that the term “community” almost never has a negative connotation. Like the pronoun “we,” it almost instantly sets up an us/them relationship that separates academics and students. Harris rightly identifies the danger of thinking of our work as “assimilation,” and notes that it is all too appealing to think of academic discourse as the discourse.
In its place, he proposes the idea of a city as a metaphor for the university. He considers this a more accurate picture of the university, as a place with competing voices and demands. Any community, he asserts, is really a fiction. Conventional thinking says that a community, like a person, is a bundle of contradictions. Yet, since he offers such an effective reading of Bartholomae and Bizzell, it may surprise some readers that he categorically rejects the concept of “community” in favor of other terms (“discourse, language, voice, ideology, hegemony“). His rejection isn’t altogether easy to account for because he does not position himself as in complete opposition to those who have pushed for a theory of discourse community; rather, I think it is best to consider this article as an attempt to reshape the theory of discourse community by explicitly rejecting the idea of a holistic and unified community. In any serious composition theory that uses the term “discourse community” today, I think Harris’s position will have to be accounted for.
Discourse Communities 