Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay

Abstract

Until a very few years ago, I had never heard the term construction. Much less had I become acquainted with its implications for scholars and instructors of literature and composition, or its implications for those of us interested in broader educational issues such as the future of humanistic studies and liberal education in general. During the past three or four years, pursuing some of these implications, I discovered that social constructionist thought can positively affect the way we address professional issues that increasingly interest many of us today. But I also discovered that attempts to address these issues in this way are limited because many of us-myself included-have not yet read deeply enough the relevant scholarly literature. In this respect we are not alone. Although social construction has a venerable history in twentieth-century thought and although writers in a number of fields are engaged in an effort to develop the disciplinary implications of a nonfoundational social constructionist understanding of knowledge, that history remains largely unacknowledged and the effort fragmented. Terminology proliferates. The result is that in some cases positions not only similar but mutually supportive seem alien to one another. Writers find it difficult to draw upon each other's work to pursue their own more effectively. Many of the most sophisticated and knowledgeable texts that I discuss in this essay-not only work in literary criticism and composition studies but in philosophy and the social sciences-evidence a lack of awareness of fertile, suggestive, parallel work in other fields. One cause of this situation is that there seems to exist no bibliographical guide that brings social constructionist texts together in one place, presents them as a coherent school of thought, and offers guidance to readers wending their way through unfamiliar territory. This is the need I hope this essay will fill.