Gees Ideas About Discourse

During the course of this year we have many different literary critics ideas and purposes. One that has stuck out in particular to me is Gees ideas about Discourse. A Discourse is “ a socially accepted association among ways of using language of thinking and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or social network” (Gee 274). Literacy can be seen differently though everyone's eyes because we all have different interpretations of it. Gee believes that literacy is all about Discourses. This connects to all of the literary critics works in how they are all writing about similar ideas but portray them differently because of their different discourses. There are also two different discourses that
Brandt had two good examples of this in her reading between Raymond and Dora. Each of these individuals grew up in the same college town but had vastly different discourses. Raymond's family was more affluent than Doras and therefore gave Raymond more chances and earlier opportunities for education. Not to mention the fact that when Raymond was going to school at a young age he was introduced to computers which quickly caught his attention and interest. Raymond recalls “that his first grade classroom in 1975 was hooked up to a mainframe computer at stanford, and he enjoyed fooling around with computer programming”(77) This early childhood experience along with receiving his own personal computer at the age of twelve(77) enabled him to have a head start on his classmates and dive into his profession. Compared to Dora who was “first exposed to a computer at thirteen when she worked as a teacher's aide in a federally funded summer school program”(78). These earlier advances gave Raymond an advantage later in life seen through the career paths of Raymond becoming a computer programer and Dora becoming a maid. These events occurred because Raymond had better sponsors and was able to capitalize on it compared to Doras family who was able to try there best to help their daughter but couldn't provide her with everything she needed. This can be connected to Brandt's theories with "Going back to Brandt's idea of sponsorship, one can see how important it is when looking at these two cases. Raymond had sponsorship from the minute he was old enough to go to school. Being from a wealthy family meant his parents could get him any sponsors he wanted. The computer he was introduced to helped fuel his sponsorship, and Raymond was able to gain an advantage in life