Comm theories and my future

Holy Theoretical Frameworks, Batman!

      I'm reading this thing in one of the Comm Studies journals from like 1985, before it got completely all cultural studies-y and way out there with Butler's performatives, and I run across (read: Was Assigned) this article that is so happily up my sadistic little theoretical alley. This dude, Ehrenhaus (Didn't Gerald mention him?) is talking about Silence as Object of Study and Silence as Experience . This is lots of fun! Silence is only silence when the person/thing communicating fails to elicit a response, that is, when the symbolic fails to symbolize something for the reader! In this way, Silence-as-absence-of-speech is golden, because it speaks in different ways, so that "the story ceases to be told by the speaker and becomes a story to be created by each who would listen."
      One sucky thing about this critic dude is that he is totally dissing Brummett! You know, Brummett, the Burkean scholar who "translates" Burke into critical approaches. Brummett! The dude who took Kenny's very abstract, very theoretically based idea of discourses creating representations of events (the representative anecdote) which we then use as Master Narratives to Live Life By, and turned it into a method of reading texts such as movies and novels! This dude Ehrenhaus has a beef with Brummett's idea of silence having "predictable" interpretations. Lay OFF MY BARRY!
      What does this have to do with anything? Well, I got the email today from Minnesota saying that they now have all my stuff and will start processing promptly. And I'm reading this cultural rhetoric and reading this Rhet/comp stuff, and I wonder if I really can be in an English Department much longer, or be in a lit-based program. I could handle Texas, looking at their philosophy of English Studies as multi-departmental, multi-faceted. And most of the other programs I applied to are either concentrated in "theory" or "cultural studies" (to cause Mom even more problems when she is asked what I "do"--no one really knows what it means to "do" theory or cultural studies). But Minnesota is fairly lit centered. And I don't think I can do it, when I love this other stuff so much. Art and Jazz have especially impacted me of late as "texts" which can be read in similar ways that I'm reading movies and lit--this isn't really new to me, but they have been more interesting and present to the upper level of my consciousness lately. Maybe because it's just something different. This is the sixth straight year I've been thinking about literature and narrative and post modernism and the ability to actually say something. In comp class Monday I found myself writing that phrase that made Pam Nath laugh so hard when we were in Chicago: It's all just words.
      That's not to say that words are insignificant, that they are so disconnected from the signified that there is no meaningful communication. No--sorry, Derrida. It's more that the word-ness has become so cliched (?) in my head. The linguistics of it breaks from the reason I like to read in the first place: That moment when the outside world is completely gone, and the words stop being things you are reading, and there's that internal hum as you become one step removed from the physical plane. Letting loose the subconscious to play--that's why I like the series by Jasper Fforde. He removes the idea of the pleasure of the text being in the interpretation. Like Prof Rotella said, literature is in danger because we are too busy privileging how it is read to actually read.
      Maybe I am thinking about switching programs because I want to change objects of study. Or methods of studying the same object. Or ways objects of study can be changed by changing departments. Or something like that. I just know that there is little joy in lit crit for me, unless it's the heavy, dense, Derridian stuff. The joy is now in cultural criticism and rhetoric. And, maybe it always has been.