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February 09, 2005
Project Proposal
What I would like to do is attempt to discover the history of Spanglish composition. While we often hear about this language phenomenon, we rarely see it in print. My goal then will be to document as much evidence as possible to perhaps instigate a discussion pertaining to the progression of Spanglish in its written form. One of the problems I can already foresee is that most of the scholarship dealing with Spanglish is limited in that the focus is on Spanish itself. While I intend to document the origin (since it would impossible to do my project unless I provide some type of background), I am aware that innovative ideas may just end up being a composition history of Spanish. One of the questions I would like to investigate is why Spanglish is candidly seen in literature by Latino authors, yet the criticism said literature generates seldom addresses the linguistic melding that created Spanglish.( Perhaps those in a position to report this history in the making deemed it as yet another uneventful moment in our society.) Another question that I would like to attempt to research is when and where Spanglish became the language of assimilation. I can imagine that most of my efforts will entail archival work (and if you and I decide that novels are indeed an appropriate form of composition to be included in this project), lots of reading.
The books that will help me accomplish this are as follows:
Hakuta, Kenji. Mirror of Language, The Debate Bilingualism. Basic
Books,1986.
Morales, Ed. Living In Spanglish: New York, 2002.
Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence.
Wayne State University Press. 1991
Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language.
Harper Collins, 2003.
Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and
Society. Penguin Books, 2000.
Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color.
NCTE, 1993.
Posted by dvaldesd at February 9, 2005 09:41 PM
Comments
Consider including selections from the Kells, Villanueva, & Balester essay collection, as well as from the Gonzales volumes.
Posted by: senioritis at February 10, 2005 08:54 AM
What you'll be doing in this project is what I would characterize as a "lit review," in that it's a synthesis of secondary sources. And yes, you can draw on sources from outside comp/rhet. Yet your project should be one in comp history. Here's one way you might do that: overview some of the major works on Latino/a discourse in comp/rhet, asking research questions about how these works address the specific issue of Spanglish. And then overview some of the scholarship on Spanglish, and suggest ways in which an attention to that specific issue would improve the work on Latino/a discourses in comp/rhet. Your primary objective would be the overview of comp/rhet Latino/a discourse studies; your secondary objective would be to enrich it with Spanglish scholarship. If you decide to go in this direction, you could select from these (and other?) comp/rhet texts:
Baca, Damian Patrick. "Contesting U.S. Cultures of Authorship." An Introduction to Authorship. Ed. Tracy Hamler Carrick and Rebecca Moore Howard. New York: Wadsworth. Forthcoming.
Cintron, Ralph. Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon, 1997.
Enoch, Jessica. "Para la Mujer: Defining a Chicana Feminist Rhetoric at the Turn of the Century." College English 67.1 (Sept. 2004): 20-37.
Gonzalez, Roseann Duenas. "Teaching Mexican-American Students to Write: Capitalizing on the Culture." English Journal 71 (November 1982): 20-4.
Kells, Michelle Hall, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva, eds. Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004.
Kirschner, Samual A., and G. Howard Poteet. "Non-Standard English Usage in the Writing of Black, White, and Hispanic Remedial English Students in an Urban Community College." Research in the Teaching of English 7 (1973): 351-5.
Mejía, Jaime Armin. "Tejano Arts of the U.S.-Mexico Contact Zone." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 18.1 (1998): 123-136.
Mejía, Jaime Armin. "They Could Be Giants: Gregorio Cortez, Carmen Lomas Garza's Familias, and Spy Kids." Rhetoric and Ethnicity. Ed. Keith Gilyard and Vorris Nunley. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004. 70-76.
Thatcher, Barr;y. "Contrastive U.S. and South American Rhetorics." Rhetoric and Ethnicity. Ed. Keith Gilyard and Vorris Nunley. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004. 56-69.
Villanueva, Victor, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.
Villanueva, Victor. "Cuentos de mi Historia: An Art of Memory." Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing. Ed. Deborah H. Holdstein and David Bleich. Logan: Utah State UP, 2001. 267-276.
Villanueva, Victor, Jr. "Solamente Inglés and Hispanics." Not Only English: Affirming America's Multilingual Heritage. Ed. Harvey A. Daniels. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1990. 77-6.
And then supplement that with Spanglish research from other disciplines.
How does this sound to you? It's only a suggestion. But however you do this project, it's important to keep the comp/rhet focus, even while you're working interdisciplinarily.
Posted by: senioritis at February 12, 2005 07:27 AM