Corbett: “Introduction”
Summary
Corbett begins with a broad definition of “rhetoric,” and, quoting George Campbell, says that there are three possible ends for rhetoric: “ ‘to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, or to influence the will’ ” (2). He then moves to a rhetorical analysis of an advertisement, demonstrating how rhetoric encompasses images as well as text and speech. His analysis includes an accounting of which leg of the communication triangle is most “prominent” in advertising, placing his analysis in the context of recent changes in advertising practice, and claiming in the end that “[p]ersuasion is what rhetoric is all about” (5).
Next, Corbett reproduces a prose version of a section of the ninth book of the Iliad and then rhetorically analyzes it according to the principles of ancient rhetoric. Using the (now-standard?) Latin terminology, he uses the passage from the Iliad to outline the three types of discourse and their parts, concerns, times, and special topics. For Corbett, what is common to all rhetorical discourse is that it involves or “implies” “the use or manipulation of words” (15).
The five canons of ancient rhetoric provide Corbett his next topic, and he explains each in its turn, beginning with inventio. In this section, Corbett moves easily between the Greek approach as exemplified by Aristotle, and the later Roman rhetoric codified by Cicero, weaving the two together while pointing out the ways in which they differ. He introduces and explains much of the terminology of ancient rhetoric, deferring the more complex explanations until later sections of the book. Corbett maintains and explains the ancient distinction between the three types of orations while also providing explanations of the sub-species of each in the next section of his essay.
In the final section, Corbett establishes the “relevance and importance of rhetoric for our times” (24), listing a number of occupations for which persuasive and communications skills are crucial. He also notes several “dangerous form[s] of rhetoric” (25), arguing that awareness and understanding of these kinds of rhetoric can help citizens guard themselves against the influence of these “vicious forms of persuasion” (25). Corbett holds that the study of ancient rhetorical principles and techniques can help teach synthetic skills, help produce effective writers, and help us to convey ideas and emotions effectively.
Musings
Pretty useful article in terms of coming to grips with the terminology of classical rhetoric. I did, however, find it surprising that he omits “teachers” from the list of those whose occupations demand that they engage aspects of rhetoric as they go about practicing their profession!
Berlin: “Current-Traditional Rhetoric”
Summary:
Berlin begins by placing the development of current-traditional rhetoric into a post-Civil War context of decreasing educational elitism and increasing educational secularism, and social valuing of free inquiry. He reiterates the importance of the German model on American post-secondary education, and the influence of the introduction of an elective-based system of education. According to Berlin, the changes in post-secondary education in the US served an individualistic ideology in the service of “upward social mobility,” especially for the middle class. Pedagogy, Berlin holds, was influenced by the needs of industry and the interests of the middle class. He shows how constructing educational institutions on the business model, with a focus on increasing profits by decreasing costs (especially labor costs), led to the absurd result “in which four teachers and two graduate assistants were responsible for [teaching] 1,198 students” composition (60). Attempts to fix this problem led to a focus on grammar and mechanics in writing instruction.
Berlin notes that the foundational texts of current-traditional rhetoric didn’t go so far as some programs in “restricting composing to correctness” (62), but he points out that their ideas about teaching composition were based in the mechanistic “faulty psychology” of the eighteenth century. He demonstrates that the resultant “scheme severely restricts the composing process” in its insistence on an illusory “objective” POV (63), its focus on isolating and addressing the proper “faculties,” and its exclusion of the reader/auditor from the meaning-making process.
The text next moves to an examination of the “scientific” rhetoric and the ways it “redefined” the composing process. Tracing the change of focus to expository writing, Berlin begins by noting that the way a text affects the audience is the central concern of the “scientistic” approach to composition espoused by Genung, Hill, Bain, Wendell et al. Berlin shows how the current-traditional approach establishes expository writing at the top of the writing hierarchy, and relegates all other types of writing—description, argument, and persuasion, for example—to its service. Addressing invention, arrangement, and style in turn, he shows how even those who, like Genung, consider “persuasion . . . the apotheosis of rhetoric” omit it from their composition textbooks (67).
Berlin also shows how the focus on arrangement and its principles of “unity, coherence, and emphasis” led to the rise of the understanding of the paragraph as a miniature essay. Hill, in fact, argued that the structure of the sentence should be the model for the structure of the paragraph, and Wendell extended this idea about form to the essay.
Berlin notes that current-traditional rhetoric’s reliance on a mechanistic epistemology and faulty psychology led to the focus on correctness as the most “significant measure of accomplished prose” (73). Texts that gave priority to practice encouraged the organization of composition classes “around actual writing” (74), especially models of well-written essays, and on what students would find useful in the business and professional worlds after college. Berlin says that although it might seem paradoxical to fault a system for encouraging student writing, the problem with current-traditional rhetoric is that it encourages mechanistic writing for an “abstract” audience (74). Because current-traditional rhetoric limits students’ compositional vocabularies to the empirically verifiable (75). It also limits writers’ conceptually to that which can “be contained within acceptable structures” such as the rational categories (75).
Musings
I love Berlin. I’ve like every single one of the few things I’ve read that he wrote, and I find especially useful the way he contextualizes his history. I might be a bit of an idealist, but for me, education is not just about getting a job, and education shouldn’t necessarily be in the service of the professions. Note that I said “necessarily.” ‘Cause I do recognize that many students whom I will teach do not share my beliefs, and their goals are quite different from mine. And, embracing a liberation pedagogy involves allowing students to decide what ends education will serve for them, even if I believe other goals are better.
That said, I think Berlin sums up some of the difficulties with the other approaches we read this week, even if only implicitly. He demonstrates that even the supposedly scientific approaches to teaching composition and rhetoric are not objective and serve the interests of particular classes. He raises the question of how one is to divest oneself of the “trappings of culture that distort . . . perceptions” (63). For if language is one of the trappings of culture, how are we to stand outside language to use language? A pretty paradox. He shows that what happens in classrooms in inextricably intertwined with what happens in the larger cultural context and that classroom practices embody values. Pretty important stuff from my perspective.
Connors: “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse”
Summary
Connors’ article begins by noting that although most histories trace the origins of the modes back to the late nineteenth century, they were in “general use” as early as the 1820s, and their prototypes are found in Newman’s 1827 text (444). However, Connors notes, Newman’s terms did not become common currency until Bain’s 1866 text. Because Bain used modal terminology to inform significant portions of his text, and because American post-secondary education became significantly more secular between 1830 and 1900, Bain’s text strongly influenced the development of the modes of discourse as both classificatory and pedagogical tools. The rise of the modes was accompanied by a decline in the popularity of belletristic composition education. According to Connors, Genung’s text marked the paradigm shift between belletristic and modal approaches to teaching composition.
Bain’s paragraph model remained popular alongside the modes, and Scott and Denney codified the Bainian trinitarian model for paragraph development in their 1891 text. The modal model of composition ruled until the mid-1930s. Until then, there were few innovations in the teaching of composition, partially, perhaps, because of a split between the study of literature and the study of rhetoric in English departments, with rhetoric disappearing completely from many English departments and literary study rising to the top of the English department hierarchy.
Two trends “fragmented” the discipline of English by the 1930s: the rise of single-mode texts, most of which focused on expository writing, and the rise of the thesis text. This fragmentation led to the decline of the modes, and Fulton’s text provided the prototypical methods for expository writing. However, although these trends contributed to the decline of modes, thesis-driven theories and exposition both derive their “controlling assumptions” from the modes (450).
In 1931, Foerster and Steadman’s text presented the notion that thinking and writing are “organically related” (451). By the late 1940s, the general education movement based on Dewey’s work and the general semantics movement, with its focus on the uses and abuses of language also contributed to the decline of the modes as the controlling idea in composition education. By the 1960s, the modes had been largely abandoned as not terribly useful.
Connors holds that the modes lasted as long as they did because they “fit into the abstract, mechanical nature of writing instruction at the time, and they diminished in importance as other, more vital, ideas about writing appeared” (453). Today, the modal approach to composition has largely been supplanted by process-oriented approaches that shift the focus of the process back to the writer’s purpose, and classifying discourse is no longer viewed as very important. Connors closes with a warning that “we need always be on guard against systems that seem convenient to teachers but that ignore the way writing is actually done” (455).
Musings:
It seems to me that the main difference between Genung’s and Newman’s systems is that Newman focuses on authorial intent, while Genung categorizes by content. A few things I’d have liked to have more about: First, Connors notes that little “progressive theoretical work was done in the field” between 1870-1930 (453). Well, I’m left wondering why that is. A little more context would be useful here. He also claims that the modes don’t really help students learn to write, and while that confirms my experience in the Writing Center, I’m left wondering about what he bases his claim on. Do data exist?
The modes are rather more than “an unofficial descriptive myth” (454). In fact, one of the more popular texts used by adjuncts at CSN until last year was Patterns for College Writing. It’s a terrible book, one whose method led students to say things to me like “I can’t describe the room. This is an argumentative essay, not a descriptive essay.” But students really did love that way of learning. They knew exactly what they were expected to do and what “should” be contained in each paragraph for the essay to be “correct.” This pedagogical method reduced the fear of writing for many students. Isn’t there something to be said for that?
Now, I don’t want you all to think that I like a modal method. I think it’s limiting, rigid, and mechanistic, and it usually produces really boring texts. But students’ reaction to it may mean that we need to take seriously the idea that values are embodied in pedagogy, that ways of teaching are never objective, for if our students are so afraid of “imperfection” that they want a mechanical model for writing “success,” they will be reluctant to work things out for themselves, to figure out what they want to say, and to find their own voices.
Kinneavy: “The Aims of Discourse”
Summary:
Kinneavy begins by defining “discourse” and what he means by the “aims of discourse” (129). By the former he means a complete oral or written text; by the latter he means the effect the author/speaker intends to achieve relative to a particular audience. Kinneavy cautions against allowing classification of discourse’s aims to prevent flexibility and “overlap” (130).
A distinction between external and internal aims of discourse is discussed, and Kinneavy uses Wimsatt and Beadsley’s enunciation of the intentional and affective fallacies to illustrate his claim that authorial intention and audience reaction are “markers” but not determinants of the aims of discourse (131).
Kinneavy outlines the similarities and differences between different conceptions of the aims of discourse, beginning with Aristotle’s “codification” of the Platonic approach (131). The chart on page 132 aims to illustrate similarities and differences among historically diverse methods of classifying the aims of discourse. Some of the divisions are based on logical positivism; others are based on psychological considerations. Kinneavy’s own classificatory system “distinguishes aims by the focus on the component of the communication process which is stressed in a given discourse” (134). Kinneavy concludes that although the classificatory systems seem to widely diverge, they are in fact “fairly symmetrical” (137). The lesson he says we need to learn from this symmetry is that composition programs cannot afford to ignore any of the basic aims of discourse.
Musings:
I think some of the shortcomings I see in Kinneavy’s schema have to do with his goal of establishing a scientific analysis of the aims of discourse. I’m never really comfortable with thoeires that claim to answer all of the questions in an objective way. And Kinneavy’s scheme leaves important kinds of discourse out, it seems to me. He only examines the overt aims of discourse; he completely neglects others. For example, what about interpellating discourses whose aims are to delimit identity construction, like those Althusser talks about? Self-referential discourse? Extra-legal regulatory discourse? I have trouble seeing where these would fit in Kinneavy’s classificatory system.
A couple of things Kinneavy says annoy me. For instance, he says that “during the Deweyite progressive period, the reduction of all language to self-expression destroyed alike any objective scientific or literary norms” (137). I would argue that such objective norms never existed in the first place and that we are well rid of the notion that they do. I agree that we have “norms”; I just think it’s important to understand the ways in which they’re culturally constructed as such (I also think it can be important to challenge them, but that is, perhaps, another issue). However, given that Kinneavy first published this essay in 1969, perhaps it is not too surprising that he maintains the objectivity of norms.
Second, as many of you know, my area of interest is American humor, and I’m not too sure that his understanding of the social functions of humor is adequate. Here’s the thing: While one of the aims of humor is to make us laugh, humor can do a lot of other stuff, too, and its authors often aim at those things. For instance, George Carlin aims at cultural critique via pointing out incongruities; much American humor aims at constructing community either by including or excluding people (or both). Not all humor involves joking. Yet that’s the only form of humor in his system.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Week of 2/11 Cont'd
Juzwik, et al: “Writing into the 21st Century: An Overview of the Research on Writing”
Summary: Exactly what the title says it is: an overview. The authors identify four foci:
1.) General problems researchers investigated between 1999 & 2004.
2.) The age groups of the populations being investigated
3.) The intersection of the kinds of research and the age groups
4.) The methodologies the researchers used
They hope their data will provide an idea of what kinds of research are being done and what kinds need to be done, and a direction for research funding reform in light of federal funding’s discontinuities with federal mandates.
They examine reviews of research and a meta-analysis to get an idea of “the range and coexistence of different epistemologies, problems, age levels, and methods considered important in contemporary research” (457). In keeping with APA research writing, they begin by stating who they are and naming the three databases from which they drew their data. They clearly state that their research is limited to “empirical research on writing” (460). Next, they describe the process by which they evaluated the content and relevance of the articles they reviewed, and the process by which they “inductively” developed their coding categories.
Moving to their findings, they identify 10 problem categories and 6 age categories. They explain why they grouped the ages as they did. They indicate clearly, with the aid of two visuals, the relationship between age and research problems being explored. The methodologies used in the research they examine are described, distinguishing between interpretive methods “such as discourse analysis,” “experimental or quasi-experimental group designs . . . correlational designs such as factor analysis . . . historical research . . . and single-subject design methodology” (467).
Next, the authors move to the discussion, where they explore what their findings indicate. In this section, they conclude that certain problems are researched more often using certain populations, and they attempt to draw some conclusions about what these correlations and lacks might indicate about the larger social context. Finally, they imply that federal research funding guidelines should be revisited since the methodologies that have proved most fruitful in writing research do not meet the USDOE’s guidelines for federal funding, and they indicate that a review into who is providing other sources of funding remains to be done.
Musings:
Like Juzwik et al, I am surprised that more research on assessment is not being done, especially since it’s such a hot topic in education these days. I’m interested in understanding how assessment tools and methods are themselves assessed. I’d also find a study that indicated the sex/gender, ethnicity, and class of subject populations and the writing contexts explored more helpful to my own research. One of the shortcomings I’ve noted in my research on reading practice is that the research always takes place in either a classroom context or in a context in which the subjects know that their practices are being studied. Since my primary research revolves around American domestic humor, and since this humor is rarely either read or written in an academic context, I’d like some information about how context affects process, too.
This article, by the way, drove me to a statistics text for definitions at least four times.
Yancey: “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key”
Summary:
In her four-part essay, Yancey begins by interrogating our definitions of writing and composing. She catalogues a number in ways people are reading and writing outside academic settings and posits that the revolution in public writing parallels the revolution in reading in the early modern period. She notes that some data indicate that English departments may already have become “anachronistic” (302), and suggests that the revolution in writing may be a preliminary “tremor” indicating a “change [in] the very topography of higher education” (303). Yancey calls attention to the role of the screen in our lives, the ways it has transformed our language and interactions, and the questions that its presence raises about what it means to write, in the process articulating some of the ways the screen complicates the notion of literacy. She says that we must investigate three changes: “Develop a new curriculum; revisit our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts; and develop a major in composition and rhetoric” (308).
According to Yancey, the process movement has been the most influential change in composition. However, attempts to define a post-process curriculum “remain . . . chiefly focused on the writer qua writer,” and the teacher-student relationship is still paramount (309), which she views as a contradiction “if we believe that writing is social” (310-311).
Yancey lists some things students might do to expand the range of compositional possibilities as a means of proposing a new paradigm for composition curricula, and she argues that circulation (including intertextuality, variety, and remediation), the canons of rhetoric, and deicity are all crucial. Next, she addresses the issue of how the relationship between technology and the writing process is and ought to be understood, concluding that technology is central to the process, not something “outside the parameters governing composing” (320). Finally, Yancey notes that composition programs help “create writing publics” and implies that the end of teaching composition is to produce global citizens “whose commitment to humanity is characterized by consistency and generosity as well as the ability to write for purposes that are unconstrained and audiences that are nearly unlimited” (321).
Musings:
Okay. I get what she’s doing, but I found the slides, sidebars, and text-wrapped quotes distracting. Paper is NOT hypertext. I guess my difficulty indicates that we establish different sorts of reading practices as appropriate to different media, and it throws us off when a text doesn’t conform to our reading practices. I wonder if it doesn’t also indicate that there is a kind of generational split in which younger people are returning to the kind of discontinuous reading practices that were common when even secular texts carried marginal glosses designed to guide the reader to relevant biblical passages. In other words, those of us who are adapting to the Internet and those of us who have grown up with it may in fact employ different reading practices. When I read text with hyperlinks, for instance, I read the whole text first and then go back and check out any hyperlinks I’m interested in. My nieces, on the other hand, interrupt their reading to check out the links as they go and then pick up where they left off—if they get back to the original text at all. Just a thought.
I’m wary of connecting composition to the production of “good” citizens for a variety of reasons. Most important is that my pedagogical goal is to produce critical thinkers, people who, as I said in an earlier post, are able to critically examine even their most fundamental beliefs and who understand the role language plays in the ways they interpret and participate in the construction of reality. While this pedagogy can have the effect of producing what I would call a “good” global citizens, it allows both the students and me to define what precisely “good” signifies ourselves, as individuals, thus respecting student autonomy. I fear that shifiting the focus from language and thought to citizenship could produce the effect of dictating what should be thought. In a world where political dissent (or even just religion or ethnicity) can land one in Guantanamo Bay or get one "rendered" to a torture-friendly country such as Syria, it doesn't seem a long leap from a pedagogy that focuses on citizenship to one that dictates what that citizenship should look like.
One other point: I’m also taking Gender and Interpretation, and we’ve just read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and several essays by Adrienne Rich. Both authors present housework and family obligations only as distractions that keep women from writing. While this has been my experience, it doesn’t describe my whole experience. Yancey’s description of the woman who uses the timer on the dryer as a kind of break from writing that allows her to think and sort things out also resonates with me. I need to occasionally walk away from what I’m writing for the same reasons. Especially academic writing.
Canagarajah: “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued”
Summary: Canagarajah presents what s/he calls “code meshing” as a way of merging multiple Englishes with Standard Written English (SWE) which s/he sees as necessary in a transnational cultural and intellectual world. Canagarajah proposes that we replace the terms “native speakers” and “non-native speakers” with Metropolitan English (ME) and World Englishes (WE) to better capture the multiplicity of Englishes currently spoken around the world. She describes the movement of a variety of Englishes across national boundaries via the Internet, television, film, and business. The author argues that even speakers of Anglo American English must become proficient in multiple Englishes. Like many of the authors we’ve read thus far, Canagarajah holds that people are developing the strategies they need outside the classroom, implying that composition instructors can learn from and need to adapt to the learning methods people actually employ as they negotiate multiple Englishes. S/he addresses issues of pedagogical practice, concluding that “rather than teaching grammatical rules in a normative and abstract way, we should teach communicative strategies” modeled on the ways multilingual interlocutors accommodate each other in conversation, while acknowledging the power relations embodied in different communication contexts (593-594).
For Canagarajah, a crucial issue is the fact that the expository texts we use are written in ME; while we use WE literary texts and other WE texts as supplements. S/he moves on to the manners in which we “segregate” codes (595), especially the many forms of stratification including macrosocial stratification. A modification of Elbow’s strategy is proposed, and the author draws on Pratt’s notions of hybridity and the contact zone to illustrate what actually happens when Englishes converge. Multimodality is also addressed, and, adding to the temporal requirement, Canagarajah introduces a spatial requirement for the emergence of successful code meshing. Finally, Geneva Smitherman’s writing is deconstructed as an example of a text that successfully meshes codes in the way that Canagarajah proposes.
Musings:
Of all of the articles we read this week, I found this the most thought-provoking. Here’s one thing for me: I love grammar. I love teaching grammar. I love the organizing power it helps me bring to language. I love the way punctuation groups words together and helps me to control the rhythm of what I write. I know that I am strange in this regard. I know that other people experience grammar as an onerous, limiting, intimidating exercise—especially first-year comp students. Still. I love grammar. My problem, then, is how to fit my love of grammar into the transnational social context Canagarajah describes so well. At least one of my problems is. Some people would say that loving grammar is a much more serious problem! No, seriously, one other problem I have with this article is the way it privileges academic discourse while seeming not to. What I mean is that in the world of business, transnational or not, people make judgments about other people’s social status and competence based on the way language is deployed. There is considerable stigma attached to the use of “non-standard” English. The way one speaks can signify one’s class, geographic origins, and educational level. Failing to expose students to the prescriptions and proscriptions of SAE could result in their inability to effectively cross class boundaries if that is their goal. Canagarajah seems to believe that s/he has overcome this objection with code meshing. I remain suspicious. I don’t believe, for example, that a student who included AAVE in, say, a scholarship application would get the scholarship. I think that the problem is that Canagarajah, for all his/her attention to the macro context, does not attend quite carefully enough to the micro. Smitherman, writing from a position of discursive privilege based on her academic standing, is able to do things in an academic context that would mark her as ignorant in other contexts. Canagarajah thus privileges academic discourse in this example.
I’m not saying that students will benefit most by a grammatically prescriptivist approach to composition. On the contrary. I don’t think they will. However, there has been, throughout US history, a resistance to and prejudice against people with accents—unless they’re British, or possibly French. Non-standard usage is a kind of accent that can reveal more than national origin. I don’t think that modeling WE in texts is enough to overcome the revelatory and performative power of language use. Modeling in textbooks hasn’t worked for SAE, has it?
All that said, I do appreciate a couple of things about this approach. I am fascinated by the possibilities of openly discussing what’s being conveyed by different Englishes. I loved the Tamil “which language am I a native of?” I think it captures our construction in and by language beautifully—in a way that SAE stumbles around but never quite gets. The open discussion of the reasons why students turn to the constructions they do is entirely in keeping with my desire for transparency in the classroom, so I’m going to look for ways to incorporate it when possible.
Sorry for going on and on so. I’ve decided to separate the required summary from the rest of the text so that those of you who have read the articles can skip that part and get to the meat without a huge time investment. This blog really is an example of what Knoblauch & Brannon call composing—working my ideas and thoughts out as I write—and sometimes it takes a while to get anywhere.
Peace to all.
Summary: Exactly what the title says it is: an overview. The authors identify four foci:
1.) General problems researchers investigated between 1999 & 2004.
2.) The age groups of the populations being investigated
3.) The intersection of the kinds of research and the age groups
4.) The methodologies the researchers used
They hope their data will provide an idea of what kinds of research are being done and what kinds need to be done, and a direction for research funding reform in light of federal funding’s discontinuities with federal mandates.
They examine reviews of research and a meta-analysis to get an idea of “the range and coexistence of different epistemologies, problems, age levels, and methods considered important in contemporary research” (457). In keeping with APA research writing, they begin by stating who they are and naming the three databases from which they drew their data. They clearly state that their research is limited to “empirical research on writing” (460). Next, they describe the process by which they evaluated the content and relevance of the articles they reviewed, and the process by which they “inductively” developed their coding categories.
Moving to their findings, they identify 10 problem categories and 6 age categories. They explain why they grouped the ages as they did. They indicate clearly, with the aid of two visuals, the relationship between age and research problems being explored. The methodologies used in the research they examine are described, distinguishing between interpretive methods “such as discourse analysis,” “experimental or quasi-experimental group designs . . . correlational designs such as factor analysis . . . historical research . . . and single-subject design methodology” (467).
Next, the authors move to the discussion, where they explore what their findings indicate. In this section, they conclude that certain problems are researched more often using certain populations, and they attempt to draw some conclusions about what these correlations and lacks might indicate about the larger social context. Finally, they imply that federal research funding guidelines should be revisited since the methodologies that have proved most fruitful in writing research do not meet the USDOE’s guidelines for federal funding, and they indicate that a review into who is providing other sources of funding remains to be done.
Musings:
Like Juzwik et al, I am surprised that more research on assessment is not being done, especially since it’s such a hot topic in education these days. I’m interested in understanding how assessment tools and methods are themselves assessed. I’d also find a study that indicated the sex/gender, ethnicity, and class of subject populations and the writing contexts explored more helpful to my own research. One of the shortcomings I’ve noted in my research on reading practice is that the research always takes place in either a classroom context or in a context in which the subjects know that their practices are being studied. Since my primary research revolves around American domestic humor, and since this humor is rarely either read or written in an academic context, I’d like some information about how context affects process, too.
This article, by the way, drove me to a statistics text for definitions at least four times.
Yancey: “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key”
Summary:
In her four-part essay, Yancey begins by interrogating our definitions of writing and composing. She catalogues a number in ways people are reading and writing outside academic settings and posits that the revolution in public writing parallels the revolution in reading in the early modern period. She notes that some data indicate that English departments may already have become “anachronistic” (302), and suggests that the revolution in writing may be a preliminary “tremor” indicating a “change [in] the very topography of higher education” (303). Yancey calls attention to the role of the screen in our lives, the ways it has transformed our language and interactions, and the questions that its presence raises about what it means to write, in the process articulating some of the ways the screen complicates the notion of literacy. She says that we must investigate three changes: “Develop a new curriculum; revisit our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts; and develop a major in composition and rhetoric” (308).
According to Yancey, the process movement has been the most influential change in composition. However, attempts to define a post-process curriculum “remain . . . chiefly focused on the writer qua writer,” and the teacher-student relationship is still paramount (309), which she views as a contradiction “if we believe that writing is social” (310-311).
Yancey lists some things students might do to expand the range of compositional possibilities as a means of proposing a new paradigm for composition curricula, and she argues that circulation (including intertextuality, variety, and remediation), the canons of rhetoric, and deicity are all crucial. Next, she addresses the issue of how the relationship between technology and the writing process is and ought to be understood, concluding that technology is central to the process, not something “outside the parameters governing composing” (320). Finally, Yancey notes that composition programs help “create writing publics” and implies that the end of teaching composition is to produce global citizens “whose commitment to humanity is characterized by consistency and generosity as well as the ability to write for purposes that are unconstrained and audiences that are nearly unlimited” (321).
Musings:
Okay. I get what she’s doing, but I found the slides, sidebars, and text-wrapped quotes distracting. Paper is NOT hypertext. I guess my difficulty indicates that we establish different sorts of reading practices as appropriate to different media, and it throws us off when a text doesn’t conform to our reading practices. I wonder if it doesn’t also indicate that there is a kind of generational split in which younger people are returning to the kind of discontinuous reading practices that were common when even secular texts carried marginal glosses designed to guide the reader to relevant biblical passages. In other words, those of us who are adapting to the Internet and those of us who have grown up with it may in fact employ different reading practices. When I read text with hyperlinks, for instance, I read the whole text first and then go back and check out any hyperlinks I’m interested in. My nieces, on the other hand, interrupt their reading to check out the links as they go and then pick up where they left off—if they get back to the original text at all. Just a thought.
I’m wary of connecting composition to the production of “good” citizens for a variety of reasons. Most important is that my pedagogical goal is to produce critical thinkers, people who, as I said in an earlier post, are able to critically examine even their most fundamental beliefs and who understand the role language plays in the ways they interpret and participate in the construction of reality. While this pedagogy can have the effect of producing what I would call a “good” global citizens, it allows both the students and me to define what precisely “good” signifies ourselves, as individuals, thus respecting student autonomy. I fear that shifiting the focus from language and thought to citizenship could produce the effect of dictating what should be thought. In a world where political dissent (or even just religion or ethnicity) can land one in Guantanamo Bay or get one "rendered" to a torture-friendly country such as Syria, it doesn't seem a long leap from a pedagogy that focuses on citizenship to one that dictates what that citizenship should look like.
One other point: I’m also taking Gender and Interpretation, and we’ve just read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and several essays by Adrienne Rich. Both authors present housework and family obligations only as distractions that keep women from writing. While this has been my experience, it doesn’t describe my whole experience. Yancey’s description of the woman who uses the timer on the dryer as a kind of break from writing that allows her to think and sort things out also resonates with me. I need to occasionally walk away from what I’m writing for the same reasons. Especially academic writing.
Canagarajah: “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued”
Summary: Canagarajah presents what s/he calls “code meshing” as a way of merging multiple Englishes with Standard Written English (SWE) which s/he sees as necessary in a transnational cultural and intellectual world. Canagarajah proposes that we replace the terms “native speakers” and “non-native speakers” with Metropolitan English (ME) and World Englishes (WE) to better capture the multiplicity of Englishes currently spoken around the world. She describes the movement of a variety of Englishes across national boundaries via the Internet, television, film, and business. The author argues that even speakers of Anglo American English must become proficient in multiple Englishes. Like many of the authors we’ve read thus far, Canagarajah holds that people are developing the strategies they need outside the classroom, implying that composition instructors can learn from and need to adapt to the learning methods people actually employ as they negotiate multiple Englishes. S/he addresses issues of pedagogical practice, concluding that “rather than teaching grammatical rules in a normative and abstract way, we should teach communicative strategies” modeled on the ways multilingual interlocutors accommodate each other in conversation, while acknowledging the power relations embodied in different communication contexts (593-594).
For Canagarajah, a crucial issue is the fact that the expository texts we use are written in ME; while we use WE literary texts and other WE texts as supplements. S/he moves on to the manners in which we “segregate” codes (595), especially the many forms of stratification including macrosocial stratification. A modification of Elbow’s strategy is proposed, and the author draws on Pratt’s notions of hybridity and the contact zone to illustrate what actually happens when Englishes converge. Multimodality is also addressed, and, adding to the temporal requirement, Canagarajah introduces a spatial requirement for the emergence of successful code meshing. Finally, Geneva Smitherman’s writing is deconstructed as an example of a text that successfully meshes codes in the way that Canagarajah proposes.
Musings:
Of all of the articles we read this week, I found this the most thought-provoking. Here’s one thing for me: I love grammar. I love teaching grammar. I love the organizing power it helps me bring to language. I love the way punctuation groups words together and helps me to control the rhythm of what I write. I know that I am strange in this regard. I know that other people experience grammar as an onerous, limiting, intimidating exercise—especially first-year comp students. Still. I love grammar. My problem, then, is how to fit my love of grammar into the transnational social context Canagarajah describes so well. At least one of my problems is. Some people would say that loving grammar is a much more serious problem! No, seriously, one other problem I have with this article is the way it privileges academic discourse while seeming not to. What I mean is that in the world of business, transnational or not, people make judgments about other people’s social status and competence based on the way language is deployed. There is considerable stigma attached to the use of “non-standard” English. The way one speaks can signify one’s class, geographic origins, and educational level. Failing to expose students to the prescriptions and proscriptions of SAE could result in their inability to effectively cross class boundaries if that is their goal. Canagarajah seems to believe that s/he has overcome this objection with code meshing. I remain suspicious. I don’t believe, for example, that a student who included AAVE in, say, a scholarship application would get the scholarship. I think that the problem is that Canagarajah, for all his/her attention to the macro context, does not attend quite carefully enough to the micro. Smitherman, writing from a position of discursive privilege based on her academic standing, is able to do things in an academic context that would mark her as ignorant in other contexts. Canagarajah thus privileges academic discourse in this example.
I’m not saying that students will benefit most by a grammatically prescriptivist approach to composition. On the contrary. I don’t think they will. However, there has been, throughout US history, a resistance to and prejudice against people with accents—unless they’re British, or possibly French. Non-standard usage is a kind of accent that can reveal more than national origin. I don’t think that modeling WE in texts is enough to overcome the revelatory and performative power of language use. Modeling in textbooks hasn’t worked for SAE, has it?
All that said, I do appreciate a couple of things about this approach. I am fascinated by the possibilities of openly discussing what’s being conveyed by different Englishes. I loved the Tamil “which language am I a native of?” I think it captures our construction in and by language beautifully—in a way that SAE stumbles around but never quite gets. The open discussion of the reasons why students turn to the constructions they do is entirely in keeping with my desire for transparency in the classroom, so I’m going to look for ways to incorporate it when possible.
Sorry for going on and on so. I’ve decided to separate the required summary from the rest of the text so that those of you who have read the articles can skip that part and get to the meat without a huge time investment. This blog really is an example of what Knoblauch & Brannon call composing—working my ideas and thoughts out as I write—and sometimes it takes a while to get anywhere.
Peace to all.
Week of 2/11
Lowe & Williams: "Into the Blogosphere"
Lowe and Williams argue that blogs can replace written journals as sites of exploratory writing and peer interaction. They claim that it's better to use public blogging rather than a private or restricted site because allows students to interact "potentially with any intersted reader on the Internet." First they offer examples of professionals using blogs "to share ideas." They move from there to discuss the ways students are required to blog publicly in their classes, and they offer rationales for the requirement. They consider blogging as a means of "public interaction," and go on to show how blogging meshes with process theory. They find public blogging superior to WebCT, Blackboard, and personal web pages, and they give some reasons for that. For them, blogging can be a site for drafting, revising, and commenting on others' papers as well as a place where students can write about personal experiences, and find and offer comfort.
I'm trying to be open-minded, but this article irked me. They deal pretty cavalierly with some serious issues, it seems to me. First, I'd be interested in knowing whether the students who speak so glowingly about blogging as a classroom tool are male or female. What class(es) do they come from? What are their ethnic/racial identifications? As Coley's blog last week made so clear, people from different cultures (and I would argue that sex/gender, race, ethnicity, and class can constitute different cultures in an important and relevant sense) are more or less comfortable with different things and approaches to writing. Women are, in general, less apt to disagree with an authority figure in a public way than are men. Public criticism can be especially difficult for working-class folks to deal with.
I think we need to attend carefully to how identity affects ability to be honest and to feel safe at the same time. People who have been sexually assaulted, for instance, might not feel particularly safe making their private self available for public consumption. I almost dropped this class because of the blogging requirement, as a matter of fact.
Now, let's consider our students' ages. How comfortable would you have been about being corrected by an instructor in front of the whole world when you were 18? How willing were you to contradict one of the "cool kids"? And, my experience as a student in online classes showed me that a significant subset of the students in online classes wait until the last minute to post to the discussion board, first reading what everyone else had to say, and then composing their post by writing about how they loved what so-and-so had to say, and how they agreed with so-and-so, and how they'd never thought of it that way until they'd read so-and-so's post. No real engagement. Real bull, as a matter of fact. Are we to think that won't happen with blogs?
It also seems to me that people develop online personae. That is, we all know that when we interact with people online they sometimes deliberately behave and speak quite differently than they would in the real world. I find myself editing thoughts and explorations and sentence constructions that I would just go with in a private journal--even one I knew would be read by an instructor or a peer.
I'm not sure it's not a good thing for student writers to be "safely sequestered from the discourse community of the Internet" at least some of the time. Young people are already blogging. They are not "sequestered." Perhaps it's more beneficial for them to come to understand the difference between public and private writing. Some of them will be employed in jobs with confidentiality requirements, after all.
The authors write that "students come to see weblogs as a fun communication medium." Are we entertainers now? Should everything be "fun"? How is this congruent with their claims that students learn, through public blogging, to take writing more seriously?
Nearly all of the advantages they find in blogging can be found in other approaches without requiring that students put themselves out into the wide, wide cyberworld. And, I'm spending considerable time trying to figure out their pedagogical philosophy. How would this work for a social-epistemic approach such as Freire's or Berlin's? Doesn't this approach depend, in part, on the sort of "deep, personal reflective writing that is not possible within the public eye"? As an educator, I want to provide students the opportunity to question and examine why they believe what they believe. How free will they feel to do that if they're aware that their parents, pastors, and friends might find and read their musings and "explorations"? The authors claim that we run the risk of forgetting that "comfort can also come from community." I respond that there are different sorts of communities, and one doesn't have to open oneself up to the whole world in order to feel connected to one.
One more thing (sorry): How are we to get students to understand that the conventions of online writing (acronyms, lack of punctuation, etc.) are unacceptable nearly everywhere else? How does blogging affect the notion of revision? From the emails I've received and the blogs I've explored, it seems that certain things do not get considered at all--fundamental things like reading what you've written before posting it.
Now, all of this said, I will probably use a restricted blog site for some of the student interaction and homework assignments in my 101 classes. I know this sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but I do think that it can be a useful technology. I just wouldn't use it quite the way Lowe and Williams do.
Did anyone else feel like it was kind of weird to be writing to each other while we were sitting in the same room on Monday? That's one of the things I dislike about this. Are all human interactions to be mediated by technology? I want to interact with real, live human beings. I think there's something of the richness of life that gets lost when I lose real-life contact with real human beings. Isn't it easier to objectify and hate and be disrespectful when you don't have to look the person with whom you're interacting in the eye? I like people. I like talking to them. In person. Human communication doesn't take place just in words. It involves bodies, too. But maybe that's just me.
More later. Peace.
Lowe and Williams argue that blogs can replace written journals as sites of exploratory writing and peer interaction. They claim that it's better to use public blogging rather than a private or restricted site because allows students to interact "potentially with any intersted reader on the Internet." First they offer examples of professionals using blogs "to share ideas." They move from there to discuss the ways students are required to blog publicly in their classes, and they offer rationales for the requirement. They consider blogging as a means of "public interaction," and go on to show how blogging meshes with process theory. They find public blogging superior to WebCT, Blackboard, and personal web pages, and they give some reasons for that. For them, blogging can be a site for drafting, revising, and commenting on others' papers as well as a place where students can write about personal experiences, and find and offer comfort.
I'm trying to be open-minded, but this article irked me. They deal pretty cavalierly with some serious issues, it seems to me. First, I'd be interested in knowing whether the students who speak so glowingly about blogging as a classroom tool are male or female. What class(es) do they come from? What are their ethnic/racial identifications? As Coley's blog last week made so clear, people from different cultures (and I would argue that sex/gender, race, ethnicity, and class can constitute different cultures in an important and relevant sense) are more or less comfortable with different things and approaches to writing. Women are, in general, less apt to disagree with an authority figure in a public way than are men. Public criticism can be especially difficult for working-class folks to deal with.
I think we need to attend carefully to how identity affects ability to be honest and to feel safe at the same time. People who have been sexually assaulted, for instance, might not feel particularly safe making their private self available for public consumption. I almost dropped this class because of the blogging requirement, as a matter of fact.
Now, let's consider our students' ages. How comfortable would you have been about being corrected by an instructor in front of the whole world when you were 18? How willing were you to contradict one of the "cool kids"? And, my experience as a student in online classes showed me that a significant subset of the students in online classes wait until the last minute to post to the discussion board, first reading what everyone else had to say, and then composing their post by writing about how they loved what so-and-so had to say, and how they agreed with so-and-so, and how they'd never thought of it that way until they'd read so-and-so's post. No real engagement. Real bull, as a matter of fact. Are we to think that won't happen with blogs?
It also seems to me that people develop online personae. That is, we all know that when we interact with people online they sometimes deliberately behave and speak quite differently than they would in the real world. I find myself editing thoughts and explorations and sentence constructions that I would just go with in a private journal--even one I knew would be read by an instructor or a peer.
I'm not sure it's not a good thing for student writers to be "safely sequestered from the discourse community of the Internet" at least some of the time. Young people are already blogging. They are not "sequestered." Perhaps it's more beneficial for them to come to understand the difference between public and private writing. Some of them will be employed in jobs with confidentiality requirements, after all.
The authors write that "students come to see weblogs as a fun communication medium." Are we entertainers now? Should everything be "fun"? How is this congruent with their claims that students learn, through public blogging, to take writing more seriously?
Nearly all of the advantages they find in blogging can be found in other approaches without requiring that students put themselves out into the wide, wide cyberworld. And, I'm spending considerable time trying to figure out their pedagogical philosophy. How would this work for a social-epistemic approach such as Freire's or Berlin's? Doesn't this approach depend, in part, on the sort of "deep, personal reflective writing that is not possible within the public eye"? As an educator, I want to provide students the opportunity to question and examine why they believe what they believe. How free will they feel to do that if they're aware that their parents, pastors, and friends might find and read their musings and "explorations"? The authors claim that we run the risk of forgetting that "comfort can also come from community." I respond that there are different sorts of communities, and one doesn't have to open oneself up to the whole world in order to feel connected to one.
One more thing (sorry): How are we to get students to understand that the conventions of online writing (acronyms, lack of punctuation, etc.) are unacceptable nearly everywhere else? How does blogging affect the notion of revision? From the emails I've received and the blogs I've explored, it seems that certain things do not get considered at all--fundamental things like reading what you've written before posting it.
Now, all of this said, I will probably use a restricted blog site for some of the student interaction and homework assignments in my 101 classes. I know this sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but I do think that it can be a useful technology. I just wouldn't use it quite the way Lowe and Williams do.
Did anyone else feel like it was kind of weird to be writing to each other while we were sitting in the same room on Monday? That's one of the things I dislike about this. Are all human interactions to be mediated by technology? I want to interact with real, live human beings. I think there's something of the richness of life that gets lost when I lose real-life contact with real human beings. Isn't it easier to objectify and hate and be disrespectful when you don't have to look the person with whom you're interacting in the eye? I like people. I like talking to them. In person. Human communication doesn't take place just in words. It involves bodies, too. But maybe that's just me.
More later. Peace.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Week of 2/4 cont'd
Excuse me. I had to go yell at Tim Russert, Pat Buchanan, George Will, Mary Matalin, and Ben Wattenberg. It’s part of my Sunday morning ritual. Often it involves Cokie Roberts, too, but George Stephanopoulos had the good sense to leave her out of things this morning. Thank heaven. I’ve quit smoking, and I’d probably have become apoplectic if I’d had to listen to that woman on top of the others.
Brereton: “Introduction”
The thing about Brereton that struck me deeply is what hit Jessica pretty hard, too. Why does he (and so many other theorists) conflate woman-centered content with feminist? Well, at least women aren’t completely invisible in this article. But the fact is that feminist rhetoric may be produced by males or females, so conflating it with women’s voices is just wrong. Brereton seems also to conflate and equivocate between “feminine” and “feminist.” Really irksome in something published in 1995, dontcha think? Feminist rhetoric is not the same as gendered (feminine) rhetoric. In fact, some of the most recent research published in the Journal of Pragmatics indicates that the search for a gender-specific dialect (genderlect) has been fruitless; the data indicate that different conversational and writing styles have more to do with one’s power position relative to the audience than to one’s sex, gender, or race.
Speaking of sex and gender, a really rare event occurred as I read page 25. I’d heard of most of the women on the list of those who “taught and published in rhetoric while young and migrated to literature when older,” but I’d heard of none of the men. How often does that happen?
Brereton’s distinction between male-targeted rhetoric and female-targeted rhetoric, makes some sense, but I’d sure like to hear more about how he determined which audience was targeted by which rhetoric. What characteristics signify male-targeted rhetoric and what characteristics count as “signs of a specifically female-targeted public rhetoric”? I suspect that it’s something as simple as use of apostrophe and vocative, but I’d like to have read more about this. He continues to say that it’s hard to find “a trace of a black writer or orator in composition’s professional literature” (21). What would such a “trace” look like? Is it about content? Style? Voice? Would all black writers or orators embody the same defining “trace”? My goodness. So much left unsaid. So much revealed about the writer in what’s left unsaid. But that’s getting ahead of myself and into Nystrand, et al, isn’t it?
Brereton’s historical overview seems to me vastly inferior to Nystrand et al’s (hereafter Nystrand for brevity’s sake), even though he tries to contextualize the mid-nineteenth century transformation of the university. He complicates the discussion in ways that Hill does not. Still, I am suspicious of the “great men” approach to historicizing and the Enlightenment epistemology that underlies Brereton’s history. Brereton doesn’t address why the student population in American colleges nearly quadrupled between 1890 & 1920, and that strikes me as an important question that ought to be answered. Nor does he address the social and economic factors that led Congress to establish land-grant colleges, surely another significant consideration. What was really striking to me was how little the college/university curriculum has changed since Eliot’s time. And the hierarchy within the English department’s pretty much the same, too. A quick anecdote: During a Writing Across the Curriculum committee meeting at CSN, one first-year professor asked why she had to teach comp. I mean, she’s at a community college! She seemed to find it insulting that she wasn’t allowed to get to what she called “the good stuff”—lit. Nothing’s really changed. And, after reading this article, one might think that we just keep going over the same ground in our attempts to make our classrooms more productive and conducive to writing.
I’m annoyed with the false dichotomy set up by those who claim that “[w]orking with first-year students is a job for a teacher, not a scholar” (18). In my experience, it’s not working with first-year students that prevents their instructors from doing scholarly work—it’s the hellacious course loads required of professors and instructors at all post-secondary institutions except research universities and elite colleges. Again, an example from CSN: English faculty there are required to teach 5 classes per semester. Many teach between 5 and 7. The classes are capped at 25 (or sometimes 30). That’s a lot of essays to read in addition to college service (committee work, advising student organizations, etc.). Then there are departmental and divisional meetings, budget constraints on sabbatical time—you get the point. This leads me to another point: If the business of colleges and universities is education, why is pedagogy less prestigious than research? I’m not sure it’s enough to say that it’s because “English departments organized themselves on the German model” (22). Nor am I certain that the three options Brereton articulates as available to those who are dissatisfied with the research model exhaust the possibilities. More thinking necessary.
Reynolds, Bizzell, and Herzberg: “A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition”
Okay. So I promise this’ll be shorter. I really can run on, can’t I? I suppose that by the end of the semester, when I have a ton of things to do and I’m also trying to prep for comps, I’ll be a lot less long-winded.
They’re getting warmer. Very useful extended timeline. Some stuff I think will be useful for my dissertation. Again, however, I’m appalled by the elitism. Is it that there is no evidnce or record of what was happening at schools other than the elite colleges and universities? Is it that we have no idea of what has happened in English department courses in women’s colleges during the course of American history? I, too, have recently read Woolf, and maybe I’m just being overly sensitive, but as best as I can recall, the only real mention of a woman’s college is a note that some prof taught the same way at Radcliff as at Harvard. Oh, well.
The social agenda of progressive educators—to produce moral and productive citizens—seems to me to differ little from Quintilian’s ideas about classical rhetoric. But this account of the development of the modern comp program still seems to me to depend on a kind of top-down theory of historical development, and while it might give an adequate and informative chronology, it’s overly simplified, I think, especially when compared to Nystrand’s earlier accounting. But perhaps my dissatisfaction stems from my prejudice in favor of New Historical approaches.
The most interesting point that these folks make is, to my mind, the claim that “New
Criticism . . . made it possible to see the relation between thought and language as fundamental rather than superficial” (Sorry, don’t have the page number. To cut down on paper, I copied and pasted this into a Word document and didn’t retain the pagination). This implies, of course, that New Criticism paved the way for post-Enlightenment epistemology, even though the New Critics seemed to completely embrace the empiricist bent of the Enlightenment. Cool. And, I’m wondering if anyone else is seeing Kant in these pages. That is, I think that it might be kind of misleading to claim that language use creates knowledge. But it kept occurring to me as I read this article (and Nystrand’s) that it might be accurate to say that language functions as the Kantian categories of understanding do. This has the advantage of eliminating the divine imposition of the categories on the mind and allowing for the human construction of knowledge mediated through and by language . . .
Two questions: What’s the “particle-wave-field heuristic” these folks talk about? What was the Wyoming Resolution? Does anyone know?
Nystrand, Greene, and Wielmet: “Where Did Composition Studies Come From?”
Okay. Operating on the prescriptivist model outlined by Hill and Reynolds et al, I have to ask if the title shouldn’t be “From Where Did Composition Studies Come?” But that’s just me. I. Whatever.
At last! An attempt to historicize the development of comp programs in a way to which I can relate (I’ll stop it, I promise). I found the way this article links trends across and within disciplines extremely useful and evocative. Most interesting to me is the way Nystrand et al link the evolution of the field of comp studies to the “problem of meaning in discourse” (272). I must say that although this isn’t the first place I’ve come across many of the critiques of different theoretical perspectives, the critiques are articulated clearly, concisely and without the oversimplification that can obfuscate the points. Yay!
Again, I’m reminded of Kant in the authors’ description of Chomsky’s epistemology. The description of the cognitive view of language leaves me with a question or two: If meanings are “generated and then stored as mental representations,” what, precisely, is doing the generating? Is it the mind? The brain? Are the mind and the brain the same thing on this view? ‘Cause they sure aren’t on mine.
Ahhh. Bakhtin. In one of my undergraduate theory classes, I had to write an essay articulating my definition of reading. I had not yet read Bakhtin, but I’ve always thought of reading as a conversation between ideologies articulated by a text. If you have a grasp of the language and grammar of an ideology, you can “get” the book. I thought this was a great metaphor. I thought this was an original metaphor. Then I read Bakhtin. Damn. It seems as though every idea I get that I think is worth pursuing has already been articulated by someone who has thought more deeply about the issue than I have . . . or than I can. I have been busy trying to understand American domestic humor through a Bakhtinian lens. It’s really one of the most useful ways I’ve found for entering the discussion. But this article has taken me places with Bakhtin I’ve never been before.
A few things I’m still thinking about: “[T]he context of writing is not somehow exterior to the writer but rather is created and justified while writing” (299). I’m not always sure about the precision of this way of talking. On one level, the context exists prior to the writing. It may be, it seems to me, more accurate to say that the context is re-created or altered while writing. In other words, writers do make a context (the rhetorical situation or whatever you want to call it) while they’re writing, but there are many contexts, all interacting and mutually constituting each other. I want to consider how these contexts vibrate into and alter each other. Just something to think about.
“[C]ognition itself is a thoroughly public, that is, publicly ‘accountable’ sense-making practice” (300). I really need to think about this and to revisit my initial reaction to it.
And you thought you might be writing too much, Jess . . . Sorry if I’ve bored you all, but I do tend to work things out by talking. Well, I’m still working.
Brereton: “Introduction”
The thing about Brereton that struck me deeply is what hit Jessica pretty hard, too. Why does he (and so many other theorists) conflate woman-centered content with feminist? Well, at least women aren’t completely invisible in this article. But the fact is that feminist rhetoric may be produced by males or females, so conflating it with women’s voices is just wrong. Brereton seems also to conflate and equivocate between “feminine” and “feminist.” Really irksome in something published in 1995, dontcha think? Feminist rhetoric is not the same as gendered (feminine) rhetoric. In fact, some of the most recent research published in the Journal of Pragmatics indicates that the search for a gender-specific dialect (genderlect) has been fruitless; the data indicate that different conversational and writing styles have more to do with one’s power position relative to the audience than to one’s sex, gender, or race.
Speaking of sex and gender, a really rare event occurred as I read page 25. I’d heard of most of the women on the list of those who “taught and published in rhetoric while young and migrated to literature when older,” but I’d heard of none of the men. How often does that happen?
Brereton’s distinction between male-targeted rhetoric and female-targeted rhetoric, makes some sense, but I’d sure like to hear more about how he determined which audience was targeted by which rhetoric. What characteristics signify male-targeted rhetoric and what characteristics count as “signs of a specifically female-targeted public rhetoric”? I suspect that it’s something as simple as use of apostrophe and vocative, but I’d like to have read more about this. He continues to say that it’s hard to find “a trace of a black writer or orator in composition’s professional literature” (21). What would such a “trace” look like? Is it about content? Style? Voice? Would all black writers or orators embody the same defining “trace”? My goodness. So much left unsaid. So much revealed about the writer in what’s left unsaid. But that’s getting ahead of myself and into Nystrand, et al, isn’t it?
Brereton’s historical overview seems to me vastly inferior to Nystrand et al’s (hereafter Nystrand for brevity’s sake), even though he tries to contextualize the mid-nineteenth century transformation of the university. He complicates the discussion in ways that Hill does not. Still, I am suspicious of the “great men” approach to historicizing and the Enlightenment epistemology that underlies Brereton’s history. Brereton doesn’t address why the student population in American colleges nearly quadrupled between 1890 & 1920, and that strikes me as an important question that ought to be answered. Nor does he address the social and economic factors that led Congress to establish land-grant colleges, surely another significant consideration. What was really striking to me was how little the college/university curriculum has changed since Eliot’s time. And the hierarchy within the English department’s pretty much the same, too. A quick anecdote: During a Writing Across the Curriculum committee meeting at CSN, one first-year professor asked why she had to teach comp. I mean, she’s at a community college! She seemed to find it insulting that she wasn’t allowed to get to what she called “the good stuff”—lit. Nothing’s really changed. And, after reading this article, one might think that we just keep going over the same ground in our attempts to make our classrooms more productive and conducive to writing.
I’m annoyed with the false dichotomy set up by those who claim that “[w]orking with first-year students is a job for a teacher, not a scholar” (18). In my experience, it’s not working with first-year students that prevents their instructors from doing scholarly work—it’s the hellacious course loads required of professors and instructors at all post-secondary institutions except research universities and elite colleges. Again, an example from CSN: English faculty there are required to teach 5 classes per semester. Many teach between 5 and 7. The classes are capped at 25 (or sometimes 30). That’s a lot of essays to read in addition to college service (committee work, advising student organizations, etc.). Then there are departmental and divisional meetings, budget constraints on sabbatical time—you get the point. This leads me to another point: If the business of colleges and universities is education, why is pedagogy less prestigious than research? I’m not sure it’s enough to say that it’s because “English departments organized themselves on the German model” (22). Nor am I certain that the three options Brereton articulates as available to those who are dissatisfied with the research model exhaust the possibilities. More thinking necessary.
Reynolds, Bizzell, and Herzberg: “A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition”
Okay. So I promise this’ll be shorter. I really can run on, can’t I? I suppose that by the end of the semester, when I have a ton of things to do and I’m also trying to prep for comps, I’ll be a lot less long-winded.
They’re getting warmer. Very useful extended timeline. Some stuff I think will be useful for my dissertation. Again, however, I’m appalled by the elitism. Is it that there is no evidnce or record of what was happening at schools other than the elite colleges and universities? Is it that we have no idea of what has happened in English department courses in women’s colleges during the course of American history? I, too, have recently read Woolf, and maybe I’m just being overly sensitive, but as best as I can recall, the only real mention of a woman’s college is a note that some prof taught the same way at Radcliff as at Harvard. Oh, well.
The social agenda of progressive educators—to produce moral and productive citizens—seems to me to differ little from Quintilian’s ideas about classical rhetoric. But this account of the development of the modern comp program still seems to me to depend on a kind of top-down theory of historical development, and while it might give an adequate and informative chronology, it’s overly simplified, I think, especially when compared to Nystrand’s earlier accounting. But perhaps my dissatisfaction stems from my prejudice in favor of New Historical approaches.
The most interesting point that these folks make is, to my mind, the claim that “New
Criticism . . . made it possible to see the relation between thought and language as fundamental rather than superficial” (Sorry, don’t have the page number. To cut down on paper, I copied and pasted this into a Word document and didn’t retain the pagination). This implies, of course, that New Criticism paved the way for post-Enlightenment epistemology, even though the New Critics seemed to completely embrace the empiricist bent of the Enlightenment. Cool. And, I’m wondering if anyone else is seeing Kant in these pages. That is, I think that it might be kind of misleading to claim that language use creates knowledge. But it kept occurring to me as I read this article (and Nystrand’s) that it might be accurate to say that language functions as the Kantian categories of understanding do. This has the advantage of eliminating the divine imposition of the categories on the mind and allowing for the human construction of knowledge mediated through and by language . . .
Two questions: What’s the “particle-wave-field heuristic” these folks talk about? What was the Wyoming Resolution? Does anyone know?
Nystrand, Greene, and Wielmet: “Where Did Composition Studies Come From?”
Okay. Operating on the prescriptivist model outlined by Hill and Reynolds et al, I have to ask if the title shouldn’t be “From Where Did Composition Studies Come?” But that’s just me. I. Whatever.
At last! An attempt to historicize the development of comp programs in a way to which I can relate (I’ll stop it, I promise). I found the way this article links trends across and within disciplines extremely useful and evocative. Most interesting to me is the way Nystrand et al link the evolution of the field of comp studies to the “problem of meaning in discourse” (272). I must say that although this isn’t the first place I’ve come across many of the critiques of different theoretical perspectives, the critiques are articulated clearly, concisely and without the oversimplification that can obfuscate the points. Yay!
Again, I’m reminded of Kant in the authors’ description of Chomsky’s epistemology. The description of the cognitive view of language leaves me with a question or two: If meanings are “generated and then stored as mental representations,” what, precisely, is doing the generating? Is it the mind? The brain? Are the mind and the brain the same thing on this view? ‘Cause they sure aren’t on mine.
Ahhh. Bakhtin. In one of my undergraduate theory classes, I had to write an essay articulating my definition of reading. I had not yet read Bakhtin, but I’ve always thought of reading as a conversation between ideologies articulated by a text. If you have a grasp of the language and grammar of an ideology, you can “get” the book. I thought this was a great metaphor. I thought this was an original metaphor. Then I read Bakhtin. Damn. It seems as though every idea I get that I think is worth pursuing has already been articulated by someone who has thought more deeply about the issue than I have . . . or than I can. I have been busy trying to understand American domestic humor through a Bakhtinian lens. It’s really one of the most useful ways I’ve found for entering the discussion. But this article has taken me places with Bakhtin I’ve never been before.
A few things I’m still thinking about: “[T]he context of writing is not somehow exterior to the writer but rather is created and justified while writing” (299). I’m not always sure about the precision of this way of talking. On one level, the context exists prior to the writing. It may be, it seems to me, more accurate to say that the context is re-created or altered while writing. In other words, writers do make a context (the rhetorical situation or whatever you want to call it) while they’re writing, but there are many contexts, all interacting and mutually constituting each other. I want to consider how these contexts vibrate into and alter each other. Just something to think about.
“[C]ognition itself is a thoroughly public, that is, publicly ‘accountable’ sense-making practice” (300). I really need to think about this and to revisit my initial reaction to it.
And you thought you might be writing too much, Jess . . . Sorry if I’ve bored you all, but I do tend to work things out by talking. Well, I’m still working.
Week of 2/4
Hill: “An Answer to the Cry for More English”
So, I’m trying to keep in mind when Hill was writing. Because the elitism implicit in his article annoys me. Immensely. His assumption that meaningful change must be made by those at the top of the hierarchical pyramid (46) shows a shocking lack of historical understanding.
Hill’s approach to teaching comp is product-focused. Nonetheless, I find myself in agreement with some of the things he says. It’s still the case that many students can’t spell. It’s still the case that students arrive at post-secondary institutions ill-prepared to write academic essays. It’s still the case that few students arrive in our classrooms with a “taste for good reading” (48). It’s still the case that many students “show . . . such utter ignorance of punctuation as to put commas at the end of complete sentences” (49). It’s still the case that elementary and secondary schools don’t function as we’d like (51). But Hill regards revision as merely correcting mechanical and grammatical errors. He doesn’t seem to understand that if children never hear Standard American English (SAE) spoken, they have no way of knowing that what they’re saying and writing is incorrect by its standards. I’ve worked more than one student who told me that they’d never heard the word whom used before, for instance. For many students, SAE is like a foreign language that they cannot use without translation. Hill seems completely blind to the realities of socioeconomic class. Worse, Hill’s approach to composition education seems designed to reinforce class divisions.
Hill’s epistemology is archaic, too. He believes knowledge to be cumulative. He thinks that language is merely a tool one wields in order to make some pre-ordained meaning clear. His ideas about language and its relationship to knowledge are outmoded as well. He says that thought is “aimless amusement” and learning “mere pedantry” without “the use of that great instrument of communication” (52). To this I would respond that the use of SAE is neither necessary nor sufficient to either profound thought or significant learning. It’s language that’s necessary (but not sufficient), not standard usage. Idiolect is enough as long as one doesn’t feel compelled to share thought or to teach, so language doesn’t even have to be a shared language to enable thought and learning! Implicit in this characterization of learning is, I think, what Freire calls the banking concept of education and what Elbow has pointed to as an error: the idea that learning requires teachers.
Hill also draws his “data” from a male-only school. Well, given women’s well-documented facility with language, I wonder what his data would have looked like had he considered the entrance exams to any of the women’s colleges extant in 1879. Perhaps he’d not have been so disappointed.
Isn’t it ironic that in an article that contains a list of egregiously misspelled words there are two misspellings (exercise 53; Shakespeare 56)? While I realize that this is probably due to editorial carelessness, it’s amusing anyway. More later . . .
So, I’m trying to keep in mind when Hill was writing. Because the elitism implicit in his article annoys me. Immensely. His assumption that meaningful change must be made by those at the top of the hierarchical pyramid (46) shows a shocking lack of historical understanding.
Hill’s approach to teaching comp is product-focused. Nonetheless, I find myself in agreement with some of the things he says. It’s still the case that many students can’t spell. It’s still the case that students arrive at post-secondary institutions ill-prepared to write academic essays. It’s still the case that few students arrive in our classrooms with a “taste for good reading” (48). It’s still the case that many students “show . . . such utter ignorance of punctuation as to put commas at the end of complete sentences” (49). It’s still the case that elementary and secondary schools don’t function as we’d like (51). But Hill regards revision as merely correcting mechanical and grammatical errors. He doesn’t seem to understand that if children never hear Standard American English (SAE) spoken, they have no way of knowing that what they’re saying and writing is incorrect by its standards. I’ve worked more than one student who told me that they’d never heard the word whom used before, for instance. For many students, SAE is like a foreign language that they cannot use without translation. Hill seems completely blind to the realities of socioeconomic class. Worse, Hill’s approach to composition education seems designed to reinforce class divisions.
Hill’s epistemology is archaic, too. He believes knowledge to be cumulative. He thinks that language is merely a tool one wields in order to make some pre-ordained meaning clear. His ideas about language and its relationship to knowledge are outmoded as well. He says that thought is “aimless amusement” and learning “mere pedantry” without “the use of that great instrument of communication” (52). To this I would respond that the use of SAE is neither necessary nor sufficient to either profound thought or significant learning. It’s language that’s necessary (but not sufficient), not standard usage. Idiolect is enough as long as one doesn’t feel compelled to share thought or to teach, so language doesn’t even have to be a shared language to enable thought and learning! Implicit in this characterization of learning is, I think, what Freire calls the banking concept of education and what Elbow has pointed to as an error: the idea that learning requires teachers.
Hill also draws his “data” from a male-only school. Well, given women’s well-documented facility with language, I wonder what his data would have looked like had he considered the entrance exams to any of the women’s colleges extant in 1879. Perhaps he’d not have been so disappointed.
Isn’t it ironic that in an article that contains a list of egregiously misspelled words there are two misspellings (exercise 53; Shakespeare 56)? While I realize that this is probably due to editorial carelessness, it’s amusing anyway. More later . . .
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