Kinneavy, James L. “The Basic Aims of Discourse

Kinneavy, James L. “The Basic Aims of Discourse”—129-140
“’Discourse’ here means the full text, oral or written, delivered at a specific time and place or delivered at several instances. A discourse may be a single sentence, ‘Fire,’ screamed from a hotel window, or a joke, or a sonnet, or a three-hour talk, or a tragedy, or Toynbee’s twelve volumes of A Study of History” (129).
“By aim of discourse is meant the effect that the discourse is oriented to achieve in the average listener or reader for whom it is intended” (129).
I find this all very confusing.
“The determination of the basic aims of discourse and some working agreement in this area among rhetoricians would be a landmark in the field of composition. For it is to the achievement of these aims that all our efforts as teachers of composition are directed” (130).
“It is dangerous in literature (and even more in persuasion) to assume that what the author says he is trying to do is actually what the work really accomplishes” (130).
“Discourses exist in a continuum with decreasing referential and increasing emotive affirmations. Pure reference discourse is scientific, pure emotive discourse is poetic. Any appreciable mixture of the two is rhetoric” (134).
This makes lots of sense, but I’m not sure I totally agree. There seems to be something lacking.
“Discourse dominated by subject matter (reality talked about) is called referential discourse. There are three kinds of referential discourse: exploratory, informative and scientific” (134).
“And it is equally important to distinguish a kind of discourse which asks a question (exploratory, dialectic, interrogative in some formulations) from discourse which answers it (informative) and proves the answer (scientific). Yet all three of these kinds of discourse are subject-matter or reference dominated” (134).
“as Buhler, Jakobson and Aristotle point out, discourse which focuses on eliciting a specific reation from the decoder and is dominated by this request for reaction emerges as persuasion or rhetoric” (136).
“when the language product is dominated by the clear design of the writer or speaker to discharge his emotions or achieve his own individuality or embody his personal or group aspirations in a discourse, then the discourse tends to be expressive” (136).
“the product or text or work itself may be the focus of the process as an object worthy of be appreciated in its own right. Such appreciation gives pleasure to the beholder” (136).
“At the college level, in English departments during the period immediately preceeding the present, the restriction of composition to expository writing and the reading of literary texts has had two equally dangerous consequences. First, the neglect of expressionism, as a reaction to progressive education, has stifled self-expression in the student and partially, at least, is a cause of the unorthodox and extreme forms of deviant self-expression now indulged in by college students on many campuses today” (137).