History Bump

Video

Posted by senioritis at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

Revised Groups

After our discussion after class today, the revised groups emerged as follows:

Synthesis I
Elisa, Denise, Kelly, and Ruby

Synthesis II
Tyra, Jeremiah, and Aleshia

New Methods
Jen and Derek

Methodology
Carolyn, Vanessa, Ty, and Chris

Revisionists
Dianna, Gale, and Ina

much fun was had by all. Anticipations are high for successful sharings and projects.

Posted by cageyer at 12:18 PM | Comments (3)

project(ile) over(board)

the grand scheme, refocused: color me returning to the land of the lit review for this project, whose broadest goal is to better acquaint me with the theoretical frames & practical applications that have characterized collaborative writing in composition during the 1980s and 1990s. i am keenly interested in the archival work i initially proposed to undertake, but realized i was going about this out of order: before making cogent sense of the artifacts i hope to study, i need a better sense of what's happened, and what kinds of sense have been made of it already.

concrete objects: there are two piles of books concerned with issues of collaboration, writing as a social activity, and intellectual property on my desk, 3 from 1987-90 (Ede & Lunsford, Gere, and LeFevre), 3 from 1994-2000 (Buranen & Roy, Leonard, et al, and Spigelman). there is a 1978 reading theory book (Rosenblatt) on my recliner-chair. College English is accessibly archived online & available through the SU library website & JSTOR from as early as 1939; my version of Adobe is current & working just fine.

not exactly distillation:
Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" College English 46.7 (November 1984): 635-52.

Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: SU of New York P, 1999.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Leonard, James S., Laura Brady, and Robert Murray. "Collaborative Writing: A Browser's Bibliography." Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing. Ed. James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray Davis, and Jeanette Harris. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1994. 229-250.

Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.

Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.

Spigelman, Candace. Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

what i want to know: what does "collaborative writing" variously mean to different experts? (i.e. co-writing, peer editing, collaborative drafting with one person having final editorial "say" over the product, writing that takes place in a conversational milieu, some or all of the above?) where are the sites of collaboration in these writers' conceptions? (i.e. between people sitting side-by-side with a text in front of them, between writers and readers, between writers and other people not present in the space/time of the writing event?) what is the relationship, for these authors, between the traditionally individualistic conceptualization of the solitary writer and the definitions & purposes of collaboration as they define it? how do the writers who deal with the development of collaborative work in the field describe its history? how do their accounts differ? how do their accounts and projections correspond with my experiences in writing classes during the decades in question?

the clock is ticking: tasks = 1) download .pdf & read it, because it's the oldest thing on my list, & 2) skim these books, or the sections thereof that seem most relevant, in something approximating chronological order, & 3) take better notes than i've taken for white & connors. 4) post abbreviated versions of those notes as an annotated bibliography by march 10th (i.e. before spring break, because becky is crazy). 5) take books to CCCCs, & do the reading on the plane & while i'm there that i've faked in order to rush out annotations. 6) create a relatively chronologically-organized draft of what i've found by april 7th, & solicit feedback specifically geared towards arrangement & presentation: chronology's easy, but what's the bigger picture here (if there is one), & how can/should i arrange these bits to say something? 7) offer brilliant & insightful feedback to my compatriots by april 14th. 8) revise the stuff into a more coherent, focus-driven account in time to post on april 28th. 9) take everybody to chuck's for hot cookies (we'll call ahead to remind them to make some!) to celebrate finishing projects. 10) provide more brilliant & insightful feedback, with chocolate-chip fingerprints, by may 6th.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:23 AM | Comments (1)

Aleshia's Overview

Goal
I will review selected works of Geneva Smitherman and Jacqueline Jones Royster in an effort to explore their contributions to composition studies.

In reviewing the selected works, I shall establish a timeline that backgrounds movements in composition and rhetoric, and foregrounds the attitudes and ideologies held during the time these works were published. I will situate African American Rhetoric’s stance within that timeline. As I consider Smitherman and Royster’s contributions to composition studies, I will reveal how these women have gained national recognition and audience within this field. I have begun to read through the essays and book chapters to gain an understanding of what these women have written. From what I have read, I am assuming that they are contending that underrepresented peoples, especially African Americans have not been acknowledged and/or recognized in composition studies. That this is both unethical and diminishes the richness of writing courses, since underrepresented peoples are sitting in the classroom. This is not only evident at the college level, but also in K-12 classrooms as well.

Research Questions
Questions that I will use as a guide for comprehending and regurgitating this history are,
— What movements in comp and rhetoric chronicle the events leading up to their acceptance as scholars, specifically in comp/rhet.?
— Why does Smitherman and Royster’s work seem unimportant to composition scholars like Sharon Crowley and Robert J. Connors?
— Why isn’t Smitherman and Royster acknowledged in the works of historians like Crowley and Connors, since they lay claim on identifying and specifying the history of composition and rhetoric?
— What ideological criticisms have they overcome, paralleled, intersected?
— How does their stance toward language and pedagogy differ from that of their white counterparts?
— What are critics or other comp. scholars saying about the subject matter of their texts?
— How has Smitherman and Royster’s work has changed over time; what was their focus when they began to write, and do they hold the same focus as they continue to write and teach?
— What has been overlooked or what has not been said about underrepresented people, especially African Americans in composition and rhetorical studies?
— What does the future hold for other African American comp/rhet. scholars?

Feasibility
By searching the SUMMIT Catalog, reviewing the ERIC database, using the Interlibrary loan, and going through my home collection of books and journals, I was able to locate several books and essays that were written by both Smitherman and Royster. However, I continue to hold the same reservations as when I began to take a serious look at this project. I am not sure of how to begin research for locating the movements existing in composition studies at the time the selected texts were published. I am also weary about locating what critics/scholars have said concerning the works I have selected.

Refined Timeline
— March 10: Post annotated bibliography and/or research notes
— March 24: Begin drafting work
— March 31: Reread sources for specific analysis, redraft
— April 7: Post preliminary draft of research project
— April 14: Prepare Certeau, Ch. 7 for discussion; respond to one classmates' draft
— April 21: Redraft based on classmates' response
— April 28: Post final draft of research project
— May 6: Respond to one classmates' draft

Refined Bibliography
The sources listed here are my initial resources; I expect to add sources based on additional research on critics and movements in composition studies.

Potter, J. and M. Mulkay. "Scientists' Interview Talk: Interviews as a Technique for Revealing Participants' Interpretative Practices." The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. Ed. M. Brenner, J. Brown, and D. Canter. New York: Academic P, 1985. 247-271.

Reinharz, Shulamit. Feminist Methods in Social Research. New York: Oxford University P, 1992. 175-196.

Jackson, Austin, and Geneva Smitherman. “ ‘Black People Tend to Talk Eubonics': Race and Curricular Diversity in Higher Education.” Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition. Ed. Duane Roen, Veronica Pantoja, Lauren Yena, Susan K. Miller, and Eric Waggoner. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002. 46-50.

Smitherman, Geneva. “CCCC's Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.” College Composition and Communication. 50.3 (February 1999): 349-376.

Smitherman, Geneva. “The Historical Struggle for Language Rights in CCCC.” Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice. Ed. Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. 7-39.

Smitherman, Geneva. “Language and Democracy in the USA and the RSA.” Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement. Vol. 2. Ed. Roseann Dueñas González. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001. 316-345.

Smitherman, Geneva. “Language Policy and Classroom Practices.” Making the Connection: Language and Academic Achievement among African American Students. Ed. Carolyn Temple Adger, Donna Christian, and Orland Taylor. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999.

Smitherman, Geneva. “Meditations on Language, Pedagogy, and a Life of Struggle.” Rhetoric and Ethnicity. Ed. Keith Gilyard and Vorris Nunley. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004. 3-14.

Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977, 1986.

Smitherman-Donaldson, Geneva. “Toward a National Public Policy on Language.” College English 49 (1987): 29-36.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Interview. (Before this project is complete [2005]).

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” College Composition and Communication 47.1 (February 1996): 29-40.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Jean C. Williams. “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication. 50.4 (June 1999): 563-585.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, Anne Bradford Warner. “Saga of the Dragon Slayers or Perspectives on Teaching Writing at Spellman College.” Teaching Writing at Historically Black colleges and Universities. eds. David G. Lanoue and Vivian A. Wilson. New Orleans: Southern Education Foundation, 1988. 25-30.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “In Search of Ways in: Reflection and Response.” Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. eds. Louise W. Phelps and Janet Emig. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. 385-392.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Rebecca Greenberg Taylor. “Construction Teacher Identity in the Basic Writing Classroom.” Journal of Basic Writing. 16.1. 1997: 27-50.

Posted by aljeffer at 12:14 AM | Comments (1)

February 23, 2005

vanessa's overview

Proposal Summary
My intention is to read a few of the top hits in composition history (from a list provided by RP) and to analyze these works through the lenses of Hayden White and, maybe, Michel de Certeau and Kenneth Burke. The worthwhile factor will be in hopefully gaining a handle on the tropes each writer used to grasp and record history. Linguistic modes, modes of explanation, emplotment and ideology will be taken into consideration. My approach will be to read, summarize, analyze and evaluate. In addition, I will utilize my small group members for ideas and feedback. The historical element is not only in looking at the superstars of composition history, but to understand the biases/interests which informed their works and influenced the field of composition and rhetoric. Concerns regarding this project include: fear that I will not understand White, DeCerteau and Burke well enough to read accurately through the lenses they provide; fear that I will not get a strong enough grasp on each work to provide a fair analysis; and fear that my own bias/interests will seriously impact how I read, interpret and write about my findings.

Research Questions
1. What linguistic, explanatory and emplotment modes are being utilized by the writer? Do these modes switch often in the text?
2. Does a clear ideology or political orientation come through the
text?
3. What are the tropic commonalities among the comp. superstars? Do these vary by time period?

Feasibility Statement
This project will require that I acquire and read up to 11 texts (5 to 8 as subjects of analysis and 1 to 3 as tools for analysis). Once I obtain the books, I will do a quick review and decide which I will read in depth and which may get left by the sidelines. Reducing how many lenses and subjects are utilized may be in order given the timeline. A consultation with RP and my small group will be held to assist with this process. Hayden and DeCerteau are already in my possession for class, the other 9 are on order from Amazon. The Russell and Harris were already shipped. The Crowley, Berlin, North, LeFevre, Miller and Burke are to arrive within the week. The Parks will not be received until mid-March.

Refined Bibliography
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900- 1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press, 1969.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. U Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

DeCerteau, Michel. The Writing of History. Columbia University Press: New York, 1988.

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH, 1987.

Parks, Stephen. Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000.

Russell, David R. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 2nd ed. 2002.

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. John Hopkins: Baltimore, MD, 1978.

Timetable
2/24—Project Overview due.
2/25-Meet with RP to discuss narrowing lenses and books.
3/03-Develop a coding system for White and make copies for class.
Refine personal timetable and hand-in to RP.
3/10—Post annotated bibliography and research notes. (More time
needed for some books to arrive?)
3/24—Read, summarize and analyze________________
3/31-Read, summarize and analyze________________
4/07-Post preliminary draft of research project!!
4/14—Read and respond to two classmates preliminary drafts**
4/28-Post final draft
5/06-Respond in depth to two peer projects**

**Though I recognize the value of peer response, I fear that this will take away from my own work on an already tight schedule. Can the peer review number or dates be changed?

Posted by vwatts at 02:00 PM | Comments (3)

February 22, 2005

Connors Chapter 3 Discussion Questions

Connors claims that comp is different from other college courses in two way: "More than any other college subject, composition has been shaped by perceived social and cultural needs; less than any other college subject it has been informed by a general body of knowledge crying out to be disseminated" (112-3).
1.Have other disciplines really been shaped less by cultural needs?
2.Thinking of composition as part of rhetorical tradition as he does, has there actually been no general body of knowledge or just a body of knowledge that was unacknowledged?

Throughout his recounting of the "classing" of American culture through language, Connors implicitly claims that until the mid-nineteenth century, a distiction between "refined and "vulgar" language didn't particularly exist.
3. Looking at p120-121, on what does he base this claim?
4. How does this pronouncement (and the one about college courses above) affect his reliability as a historian?

Posted by dwinslow at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

Connors Chapter 3 Summary

Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

Chapter 3, “Composition-Rhetoric, Grammar, and Mechanical Correctness”
“In a sense, the history of composition-rhetoric in America is a history of how this heretofore ‘elementary’ instruction took over a commanding place in most teachers’ ideas of rhetoric.”
(127-8)
Connors, apparently through an examination of a series of textbooks, student work and instructor assignments from the late-seventeenth century through the early-twentieth century, traces the gradual assimilation of language grammar and mechanics into the teaching of rhetoric in American colleges. His premise is that composition-rhetoric has been, and currently is, tabbed as having a strong focus on the mechanics of written language, teaching the conventions of grammar, syntax and punctuation as a staple in the curriculum of college courses in writing.

In Connors view, three things led to this:
1.New ways to teach grammar needed to be implemented because traditional methods that taught grammar out of context left students unprepared to speak and write to social standards of correctness.
2.Rhetoric in the late 17th and early to mid-18th centuries became less oratorical and more written, and with that “correct” writing became an issue.
3.American cultural became obsessed with “correct” language use and used it to define class membership and professional status.
Additionally, Harvard started testing students for admission using a written exam and was appalled by the lack of knowledge of conventions. College grammar instruction was insinuated into writing and rhetoric classes as a “fix” for the problem. What started as a concern about student preparedness eventually turned into a way to expedite assessment of huge numbers of student papers: it was easier to grade for concrete, quickly identifiable errors than to read for creative development of abstract ideas.
Old guard rhetoricians resisted the move (around 1890s) to blend composition and rhetoric into a consolidated area of study. Traditional rhetoric teachers thought it should be the job of the secondary schools to do the grammar work before the students got to the college level. This desire to have the secondary schools teach grammar as mechanical lessons was complicated by the fact that right about the same time, secondary educators were beginning to recognize that explicit knowledge of grammar rules did little to help students learn to communicate effectively.
As early as 1913, some educators objected to the “reign of red ink” (152) that characterized the preoccupation of writing instructors to focus on mechanical error. But Connors notes that no significant challenge to this method of grading until the 1930s. The NCTE (started in 1911) started gaining influence over pedagogical matters in the 1930s. Basing their educational theories on Dewey’s philosophies that education should shape responsible citizens for society, the gradual reassimilation of rhetoric, which went beyond grammar errors, into composition began and continued into the 1940s and 1950s.

Posted by dwinslow at 06:57 PM | Comments (1)

February 21, 2005

White, Ch. 8 questions

1. What are we to make of White’s leaps on page 188 from “consumption and destruction” to “possession” and “desirability”? Why is it assumed that we need to destroy what we can not consume? How are “consumption and destruction” the “twin aspects of the idyll of unrestricted “possession”?

2. How is White’s description of human nature in this chapter “The Noble Savage as Fetish” emplotted? What linguistic and explanatory modes are utilized? What is White’s ideological position in relation to this chapter?

Posted by vwatts at 08:45 PM | Comments (2)

White, Ch. 8

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish”. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978. 183-196.

Both the terms “Wild Man” and “Noble Savage” (derived from the former) are metaphors for understanding what defies convention. White argues that these dual concepts are fetishized. The magical and irrational elements of fetish were used to inspire an almost faith-based devotion. Libidinal displacement in the Wild Man/Noble Savage fetish is more insidious in that it is used to justify racism by creating the idea of a wild “other”. The “Wild Man” only became viewed as “Noble Savage” after the natives were no longer a threat to European domination. After the native threat was removed, the attention was turned internally as the European middle class became more frustrated with the notion and reality of aristocratic privilege. The transition from “Wild Man” to “Noble Savage” was not to imply that natives were noble, but that nobility was savage.

White uses “logic of metaphor” which he derives from Marx’s “dialectical logic” to explain how humans alienate what is closest to them and idolize what is most removed. The alienation possible through the concept of the “Wild Man” allowed natives to be used as objects of nature, while idolization of the “Noble Savage” permitted the return of a repressed humanity. White explains that “human nature is only negatively definable” (186). Incest, cannibalism, and matrilineal patterns among the natives stirred fear and fantasy among Europeans who equated natives with animals, and themselves between the animal and the divine. The debate over whether natives possess human souls demonstrated the confusion of Europeans over their own humanity. White describes the difference between “human soul” and “animal soul” as vertical which, in turn, implies a hierarchy. The unintended result was that Europeans, natives and animals shared common qualities (189). Unable to scientifically prove the existence of soul and the threat of the “chain of being” may, White surmises, account for the popularity of Buffon’s “degeneracy” theory that believes natives are “an inferior species type” (190).

“Continuity” is associated with the chain-of-being theories and “contiguity” is associated with Buffon. The latter is believed to be more focused on similarities and, therefore, more tolerant and likely to result in “missionary activity and conversion”, while the former is focused on differences, and is more likely to result in “war and extermination” (190). “Pacification” was the term used to justify the slaughter of natives. Out of this moment, between the Renaissance and late eighteenth century, the idea of the “Noble Savage” gained great popularity. Though it may have been out of guilt, White suggests instead that the concept was one “with which to belabor nobility, not to redeem the savage” (192). The bourgeoisie wanted the privileges that the aristocracy took as their inherent right. By extending the concept of nobility to everyone, it also suggested that everyone had a right to a piece of the proverbial pie. The bourgeoisie, however, did not extend such benefits to the workers below them.

The fetishization of natives as objects of repulsion and desire, also fetishized European humanity into the ideal form. Race fetishism eventually gave way to class fetishism “which has provided the bases of most of the social conflicts of Europe since the French Revolution” (195).

Posted by vwatts at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)

white chp. 7 questions

Discussion Questions:

1. White carefully frames this essay before he starts, making sure we understand what he's not doing; what he insists that he's created is "more like an archaeologist's cabinet of artifacts than the flowing narrative of the historian" (150). To what extent do you agree with his characterization? Does he successfully avoid "flowing narrative"? Is what he creates a "proper" history? A piece of historiography?

2. In this chapter, we see White applying his approach to doing historical work. He doesn't once remind us that the writing of history is subjective and time & speaker-dependent. As an example of his tropic system, in his own terms, how might he (or we) characterize this piece? In what ways does this essay successfully fulfill his criteria for historical work? In what ways might it be less successful?

3. On page 179 he writes that, in modern discourse, "value-neutral terms like primitive, which designate a particular technological stage or social structure" have replaced "wildness" and "barbarism" as ways to characterize groups of people. Is "primitive" a value-neutral term? (I wrote "is he serious?!" in my margin.) Is there such thing as a value-neutral term? Does this seem consistent with his treatment of language in other parts of the book?

Posted by ttobryan at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

white chp. 7 summary

White, Hayden. "Forms of Wildness: The Archaeology of an Idea." Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 1978. 150-82.

Introducing his "genealogy of the Wild Man myth" as "chunks" of Western Civilization's cultural history clustered by "possible significance" into a non-narrative collection of artifacts (150), White describes the purpose of cultural fictions (153) and identifies the Wild Man as a crucial site of the "remythification" of one such fiction¹ (154), identifiable early in ancient Hebrew tradition as a necessary "theonomic" division of godly ("whole") from ungodly ("partial" or "cursed") peoples (155). The different priorities of classical civilizations—for whom true "barbarians" were not "corrupt" creations but simply weren't human²—allowed for the development of a less morally threatening, more desirable, even erotic conception of wildness that readily aligned with evil & monstrosity by Christian interpretation³ (170).

By the late Middle Ages, these traditions coexist in an "animal" Wild Man representative of "nature as a horrible world of struggle" and as a bucolic "antitype of social existence" (173), an ambiguity apparent in the imperfect fates of both Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest (174). At the same time, travelers' reports of distant civilizations were contributing to the "spatialization" of the Wild Man as an inhabitant of "places sufficiently obscure" that thinkers could make of him "whatever [they] wanted" (174); Vico made "the poetic powers of the savage" a "cure" for declined civilizations (174).

If a myth is "an example of thought working at the extremities of human possibility," the mythic Wild Man allowed medieval thinkers both extremes; owing his evolution to a conflated overlap of both Greek and Hebrew conceptions, he represented both the "pleasure" and the "pain" the "liberation" of "libidinal impulses" promised (175). Around the 15th century, "writers and thinkers" began to differentiate between these characterizations, seeing in the "benign" version potential uses for a "demythologized," "fictionalized" Wild Man "as an instrument of intracultural criticism" (176). Montaigne, for example, uses this "fictive" wildness to critique the "myth of civilization" by creating a binary between "natural" and "artificial"; White characterizes his work alongside that of Tacitus and Lévi-Strauss as "ironical" and allowing an "approximat[ion of] a truth about [the] world" (177) that would not have been possible when "wildness" was an inextricable part of the "root metaphor" of Judeo-Christian thought (178).

In more modern times, White identifies the early-nineteenth century tendency to see primitive people as "failed" or "arrested" humanity giving way to the late-nineteenth century development of an anthropological perspective from which "primitive cultures are seen as different [rather than strictly inferior] manifestations of man's power to respond differently to environmental challenges" (178), an acknowledgement that leaves the Wild Man mythos nowhere to reside but the "psychological category" of human experience—wildness now characterizes those "unable to participate in the life of any society" who are in some way "sick" and in need of curing (179). Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, the 19th century's "most revolutionary thinkers," all argue for the necessity of humanity's "transcend[ence]" of an inherent wildness, variously characterized as idyllic or nightmarish, into a society that wildness can then be used to critique (180).

Posted by ttobryan at 05:21 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2005

Project groups

One of the things we decided in class on 2/17 was that scheduled work on projects would be circulated in the following manner:
1) Send your assigned work to Becky in an email attachment.
2) Circulate your work to members of your project group (see below) by whatever means the group agrees on. Please talk with your group now to settle on what those means will be! And if you have time, when you get work from fellow members, please read it over and offer whatever suggestions you might have.
3) If you wish, post assigned project work to the course blog. No word limit—but please use the extended entry function.

PROJECT GROUPS:

1. Secondary-source syntheses: Denise, Elisa, Jeremiah, Ruby, Aleshia
   
2. Archival research: Gale, Kelly, Tyra, Chris
   
3. Developing new methods & methodologies: Derek, Jen
   
4. Methodological analyses: Carolyn, Dianna, Ty, Vanessa
   

Posted by senioritis at 05:55 AM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2005

Ruby’s Newly Revised Course project proposal (CCR611-3-02172005)

Topic: ESL instruction in composition history

I intend to conduct a comprehensive and critical survey of major scholarships in ESL instruction of composition history. My key research questions are “What are the major trends in different stages of ESL instruction of composition history?”, and “What are the things got dropped out or added throughout the history, and the interrelationships among these trends?”. I will explore the enchanting and unique area through a historical perspective and will contextualize the overwhelming scholastic works historically and thematically. I will also attempt to incorporate White and Connor‘s discussion into my research. As for my biggest concern today, it might be challenging to read, synthesize and reflect on as many works as I think would produce a fairly holistic picture of the filed within this semester.

My anthology will mainly include:
Adams, Corinne. English Speech Rhythm and the Foreign Learner. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1983.

Adams, Katherine; and John Adams. "Write, Read and Edit: ESL Theory in the Basic Writing Curriculum." The Writing Instructor 4.3 (1985): 116-122.

Al-Kahtany, A.H. "Dialectal Ethnographic 'Cleansing': ESL Students' Attitudes Towards Three Varieties of English." Language and Communication 15.2 (April 1995): 165-80.

Atkinson, Dwight. "L2 Writing in the Post-Process Era: Introduction." Journal of Second Language Writing 12.1 (February 2003): 3-15.

Atkinson, Dwight. "Writing and Culture in the Post-Process Era." Journal of Second Language Writing 12.1 (February 2003): 49-63.

Baker, Stephen. "English as Second Language, English as First Love." Writer's Digest June 1990: 80, 78-9.

Benson, Beverly, et al. "A Combined Basic Writing/English as a Second Language Class: Melting Pot or Mishmash? Journal of Basic Writing 11.1 (1992): 58-74.

Bloch, Joel, and Lan Chi. "A Comparison of the Use of Citations in Chinese and English Academic Discourse." Academic Writing in a Second Language. Ed. D. Belcher and G. Braine. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995. 231-274.

Bloch, Joel. "Plagiarism and the ESL Student: From Printed to Electronic Texts." Linking Literacies: Perspectives on L2 Reading-Writing Connections. Ed. D. Belcher and A. Hirvela. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2000. 209-228

Boyd, Zohara, and Harriette Cuttino Buchanan. "English as a Second Language Techniques in Developmental Writing." CEA Critic 42.3 (1980): 37-40.

Braun, Friederike. Terms of Address: Problems of Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988.

Brookes, Arthur, and Peter Grundy. Writing for Study Purposes: A Teacher's Guide to Developing Individual Writing Skills. Cambridge UP. Draws on the authors' work teaching writing to native and non-native speakers of English at the University of Durham.

Bruce, Shanti, and Ben Rafoth, eds. ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004.

Buley-Meissner, M.L.C. Understanding how native and non-native students learn to write. (1985) DAI 46, 07A

Campbell, Cherry. Writing with Others' Words: Native and Non-Native University Students' Use of Information from a Background Reading Text in Academic Compositions. Washington DC: Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), 1987. ERIC ED 287 315.

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2002.

Carter, Ronald. "Study Strategies in the Teaching of Literature to Foreign Students." Literature and Language Teaching. Ed. C.J. Brumfit and R.A. Carter. Oxford UP, 1986. Rpt. The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jacobson to the Present. Ed. Jean Jacques Weber. New York: St. Martin's, 1996. 149-57.

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Leki, Ilona. "Cross-Talk: ESL Issues and Contrastive Rhetoric." Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. NewYork: MLA, 1997. 234-47.

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Lewis, E. Glyn. Linguistics and Second Language Pedagogy: A Theoretical Study. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1974.

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Matsuda, Paul Kei. "Composition Studies and ESL Writing: a Disciplinary Division of Labor." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 699-721.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. "Process and Post-Process: A Discursive History." Journal of Second Language Writing 12.1 (February 2003): 65-83.

McLeod, Susan H. "Responding to Plagiarism: The Role of the WPA." WPA: Writing Program Administration 15.3 (Spring 1992): 7-16.

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Myers, Sharon. "Questioning Author(ity): ESL/EFL, Science, and Teaching aboutPlagiarism." TESL-EJ 3.2 (March 1998).

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Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003): 317-345.

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Peyton, Joy Kreeft, and Jana Staton. Dialogue Journals in the Multilingual Classroom. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990.

Peyton, Joy Kreeft, Jana Staton, Gina Richardson, and Walt Wolfram. "The Influence of Writing Task on ESL Students' Written Production." Research in the Teaching of English 24 (May 1990): 142-72.

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Posted by yqin at 02:49 PM | Comments (1)

Octalog Decanted

To apply a modified qualitative analysis to portions of text which address questions of epistemology, methodology, and method in historiographic work.

Project Working Title:
Octalog Decanted

Rationale:

The 1988 CCCC included a panel whose proceedings were published as an Octalog, a conversation between eight writers of composition history. Papers by the members of that panel were published in Rhetoric Review> (Fall 1988, 5-49) as
"Octalog: The Politics of Historiography". Roughly a decade later, a second Octalog was presented to consider and debate "The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography". These two panels represent a variety of approaches to historiography, and include many influential authors in the field of composition history.
It seems appropriate to survey the range of epistemology and methodology represented by these authors.

Methodology:

To apply a modified qualitative analysis to portions of text which address questions of epistemology, methodology, and method in historiographic work.

Method:
Planned method, pilot project:

1) Identify appropriate portions of text and propose coding system to be used on texts

2) Scan text to identify portions which reference method, methodology, epistemology.

3) Research background of author to identify disciplinary antecedents, timeline of publications, and theoretical assumptions


4) Apply proposed coding system, using a database to capture codes and text excerpts on which coding is based


5) Determine length and scope of project (how many authors)


6) After data collection, analyze for clues about sources of and shifts in methodology.


7) Project the number of texts to be analyzed, lather, rinse, and repeat.

Initial Goal (for this course): To complete the pilot project and to chart coding of the Octalog papers

Research Questions:

What similarities and differences in approach are displayed in historiographers' talk about their work?
How do philosophical, disciplinary, and theoretical background alter the choice and application of methodology and method?

Working Bibliography

Phase I (pilot):
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Phase II:
"Octalog: The Politics of Historiography". in Rhetoric Review> Vol 7, No1, Autumn 1988, 5-49

"Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography". in Rhetoric Review Vol 16, No. 1, Autumn 1997 pp 22-44

Phase III:

Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Berlin, James A. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Crowley, Sharon The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric

Kitzhaber, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900 (Smu Studies in Composition and Rhetoric), SMU 1990

Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America. 2nd ed. 2001.

North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field:

Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession, with a New Introduction. 1996.

Russell, David R. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History. 2nd ed.

My plan is to do a pilot assessment, as you suggest, of Crowley's Composition in the University, to estimate time and feasability, and test coding strategies.

Posted by clostran at 11:42 AM | Comments (2)

vw's revised project proposal

Intention My goal for this project is to improve my own knowledge of composition history by reading the superstars recommended by RP and picking out a few of personal interest. While doing so, I plan to look at each work through the lenses that White provides to get a handle on each writer's tropes for recording history.

Worthwhile-ness In addition to increasing my own reservoir of important information, I hope to contribute to class goals by using White to analyze those comp. histories/historians that have heavily impacted the field.

Approach Read, summarize and evaluate through White.

How historical? This project is focused on the "superstars" of composition as the field has developed. Looking through White's lenses should assist with understanding the bias each star brought to the table and how this related to the times and influenced the future.

Concerns I fear that I may find the same tropes, emplotments, etc. in the works. How I read the text will undoubtedly be impacted by my own bias/choice of lenses. Also, since these texts represent the "stars", is it possible they will all use the same linguistic, explanation, and emplotment modes? Will the modes change over the course of each text making close reading necessary and therefore the project becomes more a close analysis of a couple texts rather than a broad overview? Will I understand White's project will enough to recognize the modes? How will and should I account for the ideologies which the authors bring to the text?

Research Questions Some of the concerns above, may actually turn into research questions. Generally, I will ask each text what it is saying (summary), how it is saying it (White's modes), and perhaps why it is saying it (ideology)? On the next level, I am interested in if the author's ideology had to match the ideology of the times in order to reach "star" status (I'm thinking here of Connor's post-homous textbook superstars). Or, did the writer help create the sea-change? Or, did starmanship depend primarily on practical concerns, such as what sold?

Preliminary Bibligraphy
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. U Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987.
Russell, David R. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 2nd edition. 2002.

Posted by vwatts at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2005

Feminist Projec(tions) 3.0

For this project, I will review a range of several "feminist" theoretical works in the field to determine the methods they employ. I am particularly interested in how the terms feminism and feminine are used to define the field and to resist the field's definition all at once. These terms will become critical tropes which I hope will allow me to begin to understand the movements and methods which have defined composition throughout its history.

Once the tropes and methods are established, I hope to show how these writers have begun to disrupt and challenge the traditional paradigm of historical representation of the field, but they have not yet fully made the shift for which White is calling. Instead, these theoretical texts become bound to disciplinary language and form, so that seem to fill in gaps of an already on-going project of defining the field. Once I have established how these feminist texts are at work, I hope to show how Transnational Feminism can give feminists in composition (and all compositionists really) practices to not only challenge the story of the history of the field, but also begin to shift the paradigm of historical research to include the interplay between past and present, as well as multiple perspectives, which White discusses.

Generative Bibliography of Feminist Theory texts in the field (thanks Teach!):

Boardman, Kathleen A., and Joy Ritchie. "Rereading Feminism's Absence and Presence in Composition." History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition 1963-1983. Eds. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1998. 143-162.
Eichhorn, Jill, et alia. "A Symposium on Feminist Experiences in the Composition Classroom." College Composition and Communication 43.3 (October 1992): 297-322.
Flynn, Elizabeth A. "Composition Studies from a Feminist Perspective." The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, and Charles Schuster. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. 137-154.
Flynn, Elizabeth A. "Feminist Theories/Feminist Composition." College English 57.2 (February 1995): 201-212.
Haynes, Cynthia. "Virtual Diffusion: Ethics, Techné and Feminism at the End of the Cold Millennium." Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. 337-348.
Hoffmann, Leonore, and Margo Culley, eds. Women's Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy. New York: MLA, 1985.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. "Women's Work: The Feminizing of Composition Studies." Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201-229.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism." College English 62.4 (March 2000): 473-491.
Jarratt, Susan C. "Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict." Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: MLA, 1991. 105-23.
Jarratt, Susan C. "Feminist Pedagogy." A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Ed. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 113-131.
Lauer, Janice M. "The Feminization of Rhetoric and Composition Studies?" Rhetoric Review 13.2 (Spring 1995): 276-86.
Logan, Shirley Wilson. "'When and Where I Enter': Race, Gender, and Composition Studies." Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: Modern Language Assocation, 1998. 45-57.
Meisenhelder, Susan. "Redefining 'Powerful' Writing: Toward a Feminist Theory of Composition." Journal of Thought 20.3 (Fall 1985): 184-95.
Miller, Hildy. "Postmasculinist Directions in Writing Program Administration." WPA: Writing Program Administration 20.1-2 (Fall/Winter 1996): 49-65.
Miller, Susan. "The Feminization of Composition." The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, and Charles Schuster. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. 39-54.
Peterson, Linda H. "Gender and the Autobiographical Essay: Research Perspectives, Pedagogical Practices." College Composition and Communication 42.2 (May 1991): 170-183.
Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. "Becoming a Warrior: Lessons of the Feminist Workplace." Feminine Principles and Women's Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Ed. Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1995. 289-339.
Reichert, Pegeen. "A Contributing Listener and Other Composition Wives: Reading and Writing the Feminine Metaphors in Composition Studies." JAC 16.1 (1996): 141-57.
Reynolds, Nedra. "Interrupting Our Way to Agency: Feminist Cultural Studies and Composition." Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: Modern Language Assocation, 1998. 58-73.
Richardson, Elaine. "'To Protect and Serve': African American Female Literacies." College Composition and Communication 53.4 (June 2002): 675-704.
Ritchie, Joy, and Kathleen Boardman. "Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 585-607.
Rosenthal, Anne. "Knowing the Ropes, Women Professing." Pre/Text 9 (Fall/Winter 1988): 214-17.
Schell, Eileen E. "The Costs of Caring: 'Femininism' and Contingent Women Workers in Composition Studies." Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: Modern Language Assocation, 1998. 74-93.
Schell, Eileen E. "The Feminization of Composition: Questioning the Metaphors that Bind Women Teachers." Composition Studies/Freshman English News 25 (1997). Rpt. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P, Sheridan-Rabideau. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. 552-557.
Stuckey, J. Elspeth. "The Feminization of Literacy." Composition and Resistance. Ed. C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 105-114.
Swearingen, C. Jan. "Women's Ways of Writing, or, Images, Self-Images, and Graven Images." College Composition and Communication 45.2 (May 1994): 251-7.
Worsham, Lynn. "Writing against Writing: The Predicament of Ecriture Feminine in Composition Studies."Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Harkin, Patricia, and John Schilb, eds. New York: MLA, 1991.

As for the Transnational Feminist portion of the project, I feel that I have a solid foundation of that knowledge, and in the latter part of the semester, I will be taking Mohanty’s Transnational Feminism Course. In that course, I will work on a paper about transnational feminism as method, so I will be able to use the work I do there to help inform this project. I believe that this project will also help me begin to articulate exactly what I mean when I say that feminism is a method, so I see this as a large project that spans two courses. For that reason, I believe the work will be manageable.

Posted by jlwingar at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)

Discussion Questions for Connors ch. 2

1. In the last chapter, Connors attributes the shift from oral rhetoric to written composition to the entry of women into a male arena. But, in this chapter, he points out that “College education after the Civil War no longer only led to the bar or the pulpit,” and that, “The new professionals needed to communicate in writing, and from being essentially based in orality, rhetoric…was becoming a writing-based discipline” (80). This seems to be an acknowledgement of other, rather significant factors aside from the presence of women led to the development of comp as we know it. If this is the case, what does this do to the story he has worked to create? Of course, we know he cannot tell the story from every perspective, but this apparent contradiction would seem to cast doubt on other assertions such as, “…composition-rhetoric was overwhelmingly shaped by one great force: textbooks” (69). Essentially, in literary terms, is Connors a reliable narrator in this history that he has created?

2. Throughout the chapter, Connors describes the tensions in composition-rhetoric as a struggle, a battle, and a war. Do you find this binary a useful or limiting tool for understanding the history of the field? What sorts of competing interests do you have to address in your project and how do you plan to handle them?
3. At various points in his narrative, Connors casually makes “we” statements as he discusses some element of the field. Is he right in assuming this bond? Rhetorically speaking, are you the audience for whom he is writing? Is he conscious of his audience’s identity or is he imagining some disembodied, universal audience?
4. If the last chapter was a story of loss, this one seems to be a tale of (eventual) restoration, dipping into some rather purple prose from time to time. Do/should we fault him for the obvious tone he establishes throughout? Would it be more forgivable if he were more up-front about it?

Posted by jwthom01 at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

Connors, Chapter 2 Summary

For Connors, the composition-rhetoric textbook is the “one great force” (69) that shaped college writing courses from the 18th to the mid 20th century. Studying the history of textbooks in composition-rhetoric gives us a window into the glacial, “evolutionary change” (111) in teaching practices, and into the endless “war between good and evil” (102) – otherwise known as the struggle between competing epistemological perspectives in the writing classroom. Seeking to address what was seen as the need of composition teachers in various eras throughout this history, these textbooks tend to reflect the social, cultural, and academic values of the times in which they were created.

The earliest texts to be used in composition-rhetoric classrooms tended to be treatises that students were expected to memorize and regurgitate on command (72). However, since composition required a written product, writing textbooks began to add “…questions, exercises, drills, questions [sic], and assignments to the rhetorical lessons at the heart of each treatise chapter” (73). These questions, however, usually required more than a written recapitulation of the reading (74-75). The development of such a text came in handy when, during the period from 1800-1860, the number of colleges – and, naturally, students – grew at an unprecedented rate, resulting in a shortage of qualified instructors (77). The textbook itself became the authority in the composition-rhetoric classroom.
Around the 1890s, these textbooks evolved into more specialized volumes focusing on different aspects of writing. Among the most significant developments was the emergence of handbooks emphasizing rules and the “correctness” of writing (88). Once again responding to the perceived need of the market (i.e. the unwashed masses entering the schools), these handbooks focused on the “…elimination of sentence- and word-level errors…” in student writing (97). Over time, these handbooks morphed from collections of rules into workbooks that contained exercises intended to measure and develop students’ skills (98-99).
With the advent of serious scholarly journals dedicated to the study of composition after WWII, the primacy of textbooks began to be challenged (101-102). And, as scholars trained in rhetoric began entering the college classroom, traditional (and up to this point, unchallenged) methods started facing serious scrutiny (104). In time, this scrutiny developed into full-blown rebellion as “age of Aquarius” instructors developed a “fascination” with pedagogies and textbooks that stressed invention and other “touchy-feely” approaches (104-107). This “radical” era was short-lived, however, and Connors traces a turn back towards traditional methods around 1972 (107). With a renewed focus on the “basics” of writing, textbooks were apparently dumbed-down and fancied-up for “…an audience that had to be wooed and won as well as instructed” (107).
As we reach the end of Connors’ guided tour, he assures us that the future of the field is in good hands because “…more textbook adoption decisions are being made by rhetorically trained persons than by rhetorically ignorant persons” (110). As present day instructors of composition-rhetoric, we use textbooks wisely – “…as our tools, not as crutches we depend upon for all support” (111). Teachers, not textbooks, have the authority now.

Posted by jwthom01 at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)

Questions for White, Chapter 6

The word "truth" appears to have been a very important criteria for
the thinkers of The Enlightenment. How do we ascribe meaning to the
word truth? Is it possible to do? If we agree with White’s critique of interpretation, is a truthful account of history even possible?

What responsibility does the historiographer have with regard to
modes of thought (146).

On page 148, White claims that our views on the past shape our futures and the history that we create. If this is so, what are the
implications for the way we construct our modern histories? Does this oblige the historiographer to record past events differently?

Posted by dvaldesd at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)

Discussion Questions for White's Chapter Five

1) White's argument in chapter five depends heavily on the figure of the "historian" who is 'captive' and the 'victim of an illusion.' How persuasive is his use of this trope? Would it be possible to identify a similar figure in the history of Rhetoric and Composition?

2) White identifies the French Revolution as a decisive moment in the development of historiography. What do you think are the parallel decisive moments in Rhetoric and Composition? Closer to home, what could be the discursive implications of the current split in CCR between a 'composition track' and a 'rhetoric track?' Any connections?

3) White’s analysis of Darwin’s Origin of Species demonstrates the way that Darwin set out to create ‘science’ and succeeded in constructing “fable.” So, from within White’s framework, what would be the value of reading Darwin today?

Posted by gpcoskan at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2005

White, Chapter 6

White, Hayden. “The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins UP, 1978. 135-149.

Chapter 6 addresses the way in which history was not only
recorded, but regarded by the thinkers of the enlightenment with
respect to irrational thought. The chapter discusses these terms
briefly, as White is more concerned with the expansion of these ideas and how they were classified during the Enlightenment. White
initiates the discussion by commenting on historical sensibility
during the Enlightenment (or the lack thereof), and the epistemologies that were in conversation with each other at the time.
The Enlightenment epistemology insists on exclusively rational
arguments, which of course must be determined by the historiographer; the nineteenth-century epistemology that respected both rational and irrational thought (an epistemology for which Herder was the bridge); and the "fictive" epistemology that Vico offers, which is concerned with divine knowledge (mathematics) and the human desire to create knowledge. Once again we are asked to consider the ingredients that comprise a historiography and the amount of subjectivity that one must employ in order to record historical events. As the discussion progresses, White asserts that
history is necessary, and that the critical view upon history was an
unavoidable mechanism for enlightened thinkers of the time (Nietzsche,
Leibnizian, Bayle, Montesquie, and Voltaire and those previously mentioned). White includes Herder’s opinion in the conversation which suggests the possible
limitation of subjectivity in the writing of history by abandoning
synecdoche. White also postulates that the problem with the thinkers
of the time (specifically Voltaire and Bayle) was the qualification of
what was true, however deciding how to "translate it in a plausible
account (141)" was not a problem. White continues his discussion by addressing the notion of "common sense" when employing a critical view and offering a fair accounting of the past, while invoking the need for validation within any historiography. Included in these discussions is the notion of using of comedy and tragedy as appropriate literary devices available to historiographers, and the limits of figurative language as methods of emplotment, and offers Manly's postulation of a more viable solution by way of "classical rhetoric", which (in his view) demonstrates the promise of eliminating the binary within historical narratives by combining all of the tropes in order to compose a less subjective history. White closes the chapter by discussing the responsibilities of (what to include and exclude when recording history) along with the burdens of the historian operating under any of the literary strategies, tropes, and epistemologies of that time.

Posted by dvaldesd at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

Summary of White's Chapter Five

White, Hayden. “The Fictions of Factual Representation.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins UP, 1978. 121-134.

In chapter five of The Tropics of Discourse, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” Hayden White elaborates on his assertion that what is most interesting about the discourses of history and poetics is the extent to which they “overlap, resemble, or correspond” (121).

White identifies the early nineteenth century as the moment at which truth became connected to fact in opposition to fancy, fiction or imagination. Specifically, he argues that the French revolution inspired “profound hostility to all forms of myth” (124). He is critical of the way that historians of the early nineteenth century conflated “demythification” with “defictionalization.” They viewed history as studying “the real” while fiction treated only the “imaginable.” (124). According to White, they were “captives of an illusion.” White’s captive historian does not realize that he brings his own “notions” to his work, and that the “facts do not speak for themselves” (124).

For White, both prose and poetry constitute “linguistic behavior,” and as such they must be seen as constituting their objects (125). White depicts a historian who is absurdly captivated by the archives (126). This depiction leads to a short, and suddenly serious statement: “Yet the price paid is a considerable one” (126). The price is, he continues, “the repression of the conceptual apparatus and the remission of the poetic moment in historical writing” (126). In other words, the proper historian masks his fictions beneath a myth of plain talking.

White asserts that writers have a tendency to want to “decode” the world in the same mode in which they “encode” it—what he calls the “peculiar dialectic of historical discourse.” This discourse is created through the writer’s efforts at mediation between the modes of emplotment and explanation. White distinguishes between two sets of historians: those who are sensitive to language and those who are not (129). White identifies Tocqueville as a member of the former group and he insists that Tocqueville’s value is not simply in his knowledge of the French Revolution, but rather in his acknowledged inability to reach an objective understanding of the Revolution, which produces the discursive uncertainty that White terms apori (129).

White ends by presenting an extended analysis of Darwin’s Origin of Species (130). Darwin, according to White was seeking “real order in nature” but he did not want this order to spring from a “spiritual or teleological power” (130). White’s Darwin encodes the world metonymically in order to refute previous metaphorical descriptions based on semblance or difference and contrast. He then restructures “the facts” when he shifts the “tropological mode” and “begins to concentrate on differences.” This transformation from metonym to “sublimated synecdoche” results in an “allegory” as Darwin seeks to create an image of coherence and unity. White implies that this quest for unity has ideological implications for Darwin. White ends by reasserting that Darwin and other historians remain under the “illusion” of the “value neutral description of the facts,” and that this illusion represents their failure to recognize the crucial role of language in their work. (134).

Posted by gpcoskan at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

Geyer Project Proposal (rev. 2-13)

Project Working Title: Editing Porter Perrin's Dissertation

Rational: Porter Perrin directed Albert Kitzhaber's dissertation, but is underrepresented in this history of composition scholarship. By following John Gage's example in his editing of Kitzhaber's dissertation, I will provide an overview of Perrin's writing, his academic work, the influences on him and those he influenced.

Methodology: Historicism. I will contextualize Perrin's work and influences for the twenty-first century composition scholar/practitioner.

Method: Primarily archival research, including primary texts authored or edited by Perrin, introductory material by co-authors in later editions of Perrin's texts, and Perrin's papers at Colgate University and the University of Washington.

Initial Goal (for this course): Read the dissertation, review other materials, begin compiling footnotes for the dissertation text, draft a preliminary introduction, an outline of the overall project and a plan for its completion.

Research Questions:
- What would a twenty-first century student or practitioner in the field of composition need to know to understand Perrin's dissertation and its relevance?
- Porter Perrin is a white male academic working in the middle of the twentieth century. At a time when recovery work focuses on underrepresented groups, what can be gained by a better understanding of Perrin's work?

Some supporting questions:
- What does the reader need to know about the author's life? (This is the biographical part.)
- What allusions, literary, social, or otherwise, shape the meaning of the text?
- With whom was Perrin working/studying at the University of Chicago? How, if at all, do the values or theories of those people influence the text?
- How much of Perrin's dissertation work is revealed, followed, or departed from in his later work?
- How widely used were Porter's Writer's Guide, Reference Handbook, Index, and Guide used?
- Besides Kitzhaber, what other dissertations did Perrin direct, if any, and what other working relationships did he have the influenced the field of composition and rhetoric?
- What other information about Perrin's work in the field is important and relevant?

Working Bibliography:
Sources readily available:
Brown, Leonard Stanley, and Porter G. Perrin. A Quarto of Modern Literature. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935.*

Gage, John T., intro. Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900. By Albert R. Kitzhaber. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1990. vii-xxii.

Perrin, Porter G. "Freshman Composition and the Tradition of Rhetoric." Perspectives on English: Essays to Honor W. Wilbur Hatfield. Ed. Robert C. Pooley. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts; National Council of Teachers of English, 1960. 119-132.

Perrin, Porter G. An Index to English. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1939.*

Perrin, Porter G. "Maximum Essentials in Composition." College English 8.7 (1947): 352-360.

Perrin, Porter G. "For a Responsible Rhetoric." College English 10.4 (1949): 222-223.

Perrin, Porter G., with Karl W. Dykema. Writer's Guide and Index to English. 3rd ed. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1959.*

*These are the editions available at Bird Library. I would like to try to obtain different editions of these works from ILLIAD, or through campus visits.

Other potential works (final ones to be included will be based on availability as well as content):

Perrin, Porter G., George H. Smith, and Jim W. Corder. Handbook of Current English. 3rd ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1968.

Perrin, Porter G., and William Kelley Wright. The History of Modern Philosophy. Hanover, NH, 1917.

Perrin, Porter G. "Notes on Lectures by Porter G. Perrin." Transcribed by Emily Ann Beatty. Publication of the Fifth Workshop in Basic Communication, University of Denver, 1947. Ed. Thelma R. Sherman. U Denver P, 1947. 6-30.

Perrin, Porter G., and George H. Smith. The Perrin-Smith Handbook of Current English. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1955.

Perrin, Porter G. "A Realistic Philosophy for Teachers of English." College English 9.5 (1948): 256-264.

Perrin, Porter G. Reference Handbook of Grammar and Usage. New York: Morrow, 1972.

Perrin, Porter G. "Text and Reference Books in Rhetoric before 1750." Chicago, 1940.

Platt, Harrison Gray, and Porter G. Perrin. Current Expressions of Fact and Opinion. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1941.

Warnock, Robert, Porter G. Perrin, Frank Earl Ward, and Harrison Gray Platt. Using Good English: A Textbook and Workbook in Writing, Reading, and Speaking. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1944.

Posted by cageyer at 02:16 PM | Comments (1)

February 12, 2005

Assignment for February 17

To prepare for class,

1. Read Connors Ch. 2: Jeremiah will summarize and lead class discussion
   
2. Read White Ch. 5: Gale will summarize and lead class discussion
   
3. Read White Ch. 6: Denise will summarize and lead class discussion
   
4. Sign up for an individual conference for the week of 2/21.
   

1. We'll begin with small-group meetings about projects; these will take place in 009. Please note which groups you are in, and arrive on time for your group's meeting:
   

   
   9:30 Secondary-source syntheses: Denise, Elisa?, Kelly, Jeremiah, Ruby
   9:45 Archival research: Chris, Elisa?, Gale, Tyra
   10:00 Historicizing compositionists: Aleshia, Chris
   10:15 Developing new methods & methodologies: Derek, Jen
   10:30 Methodological analyses: Carolyn, Dianna, Ty, Vanessa
   

   
   We'll then convene as a group at 10:45:

2. We'll discuss blog navigation
   
3. We'll discuss assigned texts
   
4. We'll collaboratively analyze Connors' methods and methodology, using White's categories of analysis. Please bring both books with you to class.
   
5. We'll take a close look at what White says about representations of context (64-67; 89-90)—a god-term in composition studies, and one that deserves closer inspection.
   

Posted by senioritis at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)

Assignment for February 24

To prepare for class,

1. Think about what you know about information literacy as it pertains to scholarship in comp/rhet. In class on 2/24 (or, if necessary, 3/3), we'll share tips on finding sources in databases, the web, etc. Ty, for instance, has some experience with AHSearch that he can share with the rest of us. So gather together any URLs or documents that you might want for an information literacy show-and-tell, and bring them to class with you.
   
2. Read Connors Ch. 3: Dianna will summarize and lead class discussion
   
3. Read White Ch. 7: Tyra will summarize and lead class discussion
   
4. Read White Ch. 8: Vanessa will summarize and lead class discussion
   
5. Post project overview
   
6. Sign up for an individual conference—there's a replacement schedule posted.
   

In class,

1. Our #1 task will be to discuss assigned texts. We'll focus on the chapters assigned for 2/24, but we'll also loop back (time permitting) to talk in more depth about the 2/17 assigned chapters.
   
2. Project groups will meet briefly to determine preferred method of sharing text-in-progress.
   
3. I'll open a discussion of methods for coding research data.
   
4. Instruction in keeping a commonplace book
   
5. Information literacy workshop: using online library databases. How, for example, can you find what's been published about Hayden White's, Michel de Certeau's, and Robert Connors' work?
   
6. Information literacy workshop: using online reference guides. Where, for example, can you find information on the rhetorical terms diegesis and diataxis?
   

Posted by senioritis at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)

Project overviews

Between February 11 and February 24, you should begin work on your project by ascertaining what resources are available to you. For example:

Posted by senioritis at 08:55 AM | Comments (1)

February 11, 2005

Individual conference signups

Beginning February 21, I'll be meeting with each of you individually to discuss your course projects. (This is in addition to the small-group meetings in class on February 17.) These appointments will be on IM or telephone. Signups are first come, first served: use the Comments function to choose a time. Feel free to trade with class members, if you wish; but please negotiate these between the two of you, and use the Comments function to alert me to any switches you've made.

Posted by senioritis at 01:06 PM | Comments (12)

I Want to Populate the Wiki

I was initially concerned that developing a Wiki would take too much knowledge of coding, but apparently it's as easy as blogging. Would it be possible for me to begin populating the Comp Rhet Wiki that Collin set up as my project for this class? I would research and write entries on notable figures (A.S. Hill, I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, etc), key conceptual frameworks (process, product, etc), and other areas of interest. It would be a way cool online guide that has potential for growing well beyond the scope of the course and this program to help others who are studying rhet/comp to get an idea of the field and many of its interconnected ways.

Posted by trobryan at 11:08 AM | Comments (3)

Dianna's Project Proposal

After reading White, I more interested than ever in looking at the "stories" compositionist construct under the name of qualitative research. In that vein, I want to...

1)Read two or three ehtnographies (chronological, from different decades?) particularly favored in comp
2)Analyze them using White's tropes and forms, as well as for their methods and methodologies

Using what I find, I'd like to think about a few things:
How do the stories we tell in ethonographic work get represented as truth?
How do these qualitative methods promote, or not, the sense that comp is a research field as well as a teaching field, and the higher education politics associated with those distinctions
What do these authors claim about their ethnographies and how do compositionists take them up and make (other?) claims about them?
What do the tropes and forms I identify ala White say about the texts, and by extension, about composition in the uptake of those texts?

Preliminary bibliography:
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge UP, 2001.
Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and the Tools . Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press, 1998.
Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Varnum, Robin. Fencing with Words: A History of Writing Instruction at Amherst College during the Era of Theodore Baird, 1938-1966. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1996.
White, Hayden. The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Posted by dwinslow at 10:37 AM | Comments (1)

Course project proposal (02112005)

Key Words: ESL, L1 basic writers, L2 basic writers, placement testing, assessment, contrastive rhetoric
I intend to conduct a comprehensive and critical survey of major scholarships in ESL composition history, with an emphasis on contrastive rhetoric.

Topic and Exigence:
I intend to conduct a comprehensive and critical survey of major scholarships in ESL composition history, with an emphasis on contrastive rhetoric. I am interested in and feel passionate about ESL, but I haven't had a big chunk of time to study it systematically. I took a course "Second Language Acquisition" from the Linguistics Department last year. Although it laid a good foundation for me, it covered only the ABCs in the field, and now I want to read the field on a higher level.

Research Questions and Rationale:
My tentative key research questions are “How much should L2 pedagogy adopt L1 values, assessment standards and research methodology while retaining its own unique legacy?”, “Where to draw the line between L1 basic writers and L2 basic writers?”. After having an idea about these two questions, I will move onto a more practical question “Is the current ESL placement testing at Syracuse University effective?” The three questions are pertinent to my teaching at SU where most L1 and L2 writers are having the same writing courses, and I want to investigate how L1 and L2 construe and construct writing differently. If time permits, I will conduct an empirical research combining qualitative and quantitative methods on SU’s ESL placement testing system. Hopefully, this will turn out to be something presentable and publishable.

Concerns:
My biggest concern today is how much I can read and synthesize before the end of semester, although I’ll always try my best. The second concern is that how much people in the ESL field actually think about methods and methodology since my impression is that certain empirical research methods have been conventionalized and people never think about it anymore.

Workload:
I used Kaplan’s works (particularly the one on different thought patterns among people in different regions) in my master’s thesis, and I’m still familiar with it. I met and talked with Paul Matsuda, Tony Silva, Helen Fox and Ilona Leki last October when I was in Purdue for the L2 conference. I know some of their works but I definitely need to read more.
My anthology will include but not limit to:
-"CCCC Statement on Second-Language Writing and Writers." College Composition and Communication 52.4 (June 2001): 669-674.
-Kaplan, Robert B. "Cultural Thought Patterns in Inter-Cultural Education." Language Learning 16 (1966): 1-20.
- Leki, Ilona. "A New Approach to Advanced ESL Placement Testing." WPA: Writing Program Administration 14.3 (Spring 1991): 53-68.
-Leki, Ilona. "Cross-Talk: ESL Issues and Contrastive Rhetoric." Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. NewYork: MLA, 1997. 234-47.
- Lu, Min-zhan. "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle." College English 49 (April 1987): 437-48.
-Matsuda, Paul Kei. "Process and Post-Process: A Discursive History." Journal of Second Language
-Raimes, Ann. "A Basic Bibliography in Teaching English as a Second Language." Teaching ESL at CUNY, a special issue of Resource. CUNY, 1981: 46-8.
-Raimes, Ann. "Errors: Windows Into the Mind." College ESL 1.2 (1991). Rpt. Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing, and First-Year Composition. Ed. Geraldine DeLuca, Len Fox, Mark-Ameen Johnson, and Myra Kogen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. 279-288.
-Ramanathan, Vai, and Robert B. Kaplan. "Audience and Voice in Current L1 Composition Texts: Some Implications for ESL Student Writers." Journal of Second Language Writing 5.1 (1996): 21-34.
-Roy, Alice M. "Alliance for Literacy: Teaching Non-native Speakers and Speakers of Nonstandard English Together." College Composition and Communication 35 (1984): 439-47.
-Roy, Alice M. "Developing Second Language Literacy: A Vygotskyan Perspective." Journal of Teaching Writing 8 (Spring/Summer 1989): 91-98.
-Silva, Tony, Ilona Leki, and Carson. "Broadening the Perspective of Mainstream Composition Studies." Written Communication 14.3 (July 1997).
-Silva, Tony. "An Examination of Writing Program Administrators' Options for the Placement of ESL Students in First Year Writing Classes." WPA: Writing Program Administration 18.1-2 (Fall/Winter 1994): 37-43.
-Silva, Tony. "Differences in ESL and Native-English-Speaker Writing: The Research and Its Implications." Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. New York: MLA, 1997. 209-19.
-Adams, Katherine; and John Adams. "Write, Read and Edit: ESL Theory in the Basic Writing Curriculum." The Writing Instructor 4.3 (1985): 116-122.
-Bloch, Joel, and Lan Chi. "A Comparison of the Use of Citations in Chinese and English Academic Discourse." Academic Writing in a Second Language. Ed. D. Belcher and G. Braine. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995. 231-274.
-Bloch, Joel. "Plagiarism and the ESL Student: From Printed to Electronic Texts." Linking Literacies: Perspectives on L2 Reading-Writing Connections. Ed. D. Belcher and A. Hirvela. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2000. 209-228
-Boyd, Zohara, and Harriette Cuttino Buchanan. "English as a Second Language Techniques in Developmental Writing." CEA Critic 42.3 (1980): 37-40.
-Buley-Meissner, M.L.C. Understanding how native and non-native students learn towrite. (1985) DAI 46, 07A
-Eichler, Marie Hutchison. Developing Basic Writing Skills in English as a Second Language. U Pittsburgh P, 1981.
-Ferris, Dana R. "Rhetorical Strategies in Student Persuasive Writing: Differences Between Native and Non-Native English Speakers." Research in the Teaching of English 28.1 (February 1994): 45-65.
-Grabe, William, and Robert Kaplan. "Writing in a Second Language: Contrastive Rhetoric." Richness in Writing: Empowering ESL Students. Ed. Donald M. Johnson and Duane H. Roen. New York: Longman, 1989. 263-83.
-"University of Illinois International Students Learn about Plagiarism in Class." The Council Chronicle (February 1994): 6.

Posted by yqin at 10:27 AM | Comments (1)

Geyer Project Proposal

My final project will be to begin the process of editing Porter Perrin's dissertation, with a view to finishing that project after the course has concluded.

I see this project as one of historicism, where my attempt will be to situate Perrin and his work in historical and disciplinary context. The dissertation, titled "The Teaching of Rhetoric in American Colleges Before 1750," is the primary text for the project. It will reflect both what Perrin saw as important in the early history of rhetoric instruction, as well as what was important in his time (the 1930s specifically).

The primary research question will be, "what would a twenty-first century student or practitioner in the field of composition need to know to understand Perrin's dissertation and its relevance?" Some supporting questions are:

- What does the reader need to know about the author? (This is the biographical part.)
- What allusions, literary, social, or otherwise, shape the meaning of the text?
- With whom was Perrin working/studying at the University of Chicago? How, if at all, do the values or theories of those people influence the text?
- How much of Perrin's dissertation work is revealed, followed, or departed from in his later work?
- How widely used were Porter's Writer's Guide, Reference Handbook, Index, and Guide used?
- What other information about Perrin's work in the field is important and relevant?

My goal will be to write an introduction to the dissertation, along with such footnotes as seem appropriate for the text itself. If the project were to advance to publication, i would anticipate a bibliography being included.

Preliminary Bibliography:
Brown, Leonard Stanley, and Porter G. Perrin. A Quarto of Modern Literature. New York:  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935.

Perrin, Porter G. An Index to English. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1939.

Perrin, Porter G., with Karl W. Dykema. Writer's Guide and Index to English. 3rd ed.  Chicago:  Scott, Foresman, 1959. 

These are the editions available at Bird Library. I would like to try to obtain different editions of these works from ILLIAD. I'm interested in learning more about Karl Dykema and his involvement with Perrin, since he appears more than once in newer editions of Perrin's older texts. Also, John Breretson placed Perrin at the University of Washington in an administrative capacity. It's possible they have some of his papers or other documents that reveal aspects of his work. I will contact both the English department and the library to find out.

Other potential works (final ones to be included will be based on availability as well as content):

Perrin, Porter G. "For a Responsible Rhetoric." College English 10.4 (1949):  222-223. 

Perrin, Porter G.  "Freshman Composition and the Tradition of Rhetoric."  Perspectives on English:  Essays to Honor W. Wilbur Hatfield.  Ed. Robert C. Pooley.  New York:  Appleton-Century-Crofts;  National Council of Teachers of English, 1960.  119-132. 

Perrin, Porter G., George H. Smith, and Jim W. Corder.  Handbook of Current English.  3rd ed.  Glenview, IL:  Scott, Foresman, 1968. 

Perrin, Porter G., and William Kelley Wright.  The History of Modern Philosophy.  Hanover, NH, 1917. 

Perrin, Porter G.  "Maximum Essentials in Composition."  College English 8.7 (1947):  352-360. 

Perrin, Porter G.  "Notes on Lectures by Porter G. Perrin."  Transcribed by Emily Ann Beatty.  Publication of the Fifth Workshop in Basic Communication, University of Denver, 1947.  Ed. Thelma R. Sherman.  U Denver P, 1947.  6-30. 

Perrin, Porter G., and George H. Smith.  The Perrin-Smith Handbook of Current English.  Chicago:  Scott, Foresman, 1955. 

Perrin, Porter G.  "A Realistic Philosophy for Teachers of English."  College English 9.5 (1948):  256-264. 

Perrin, Porter G.  Reference Handbook of Grammar and Usage.  New York:  Morrow, 1972.

Perrin, Porter G.  "Text and Reference Books in Rhetoric before 1750."  Chicago, 1940. 

Platt, Harrison Gray, and Porter G. Perrin.  Current Expressions of Fact and Opinion.  Chicago:  Scott, Foresman, 1941. 

Warnock, Robert, Porter G. Perrin, Frank Earl Ward, and Harrison Gray Platt.  Using Good English:  A Textbook and Workbook in Writing, Reading, and Speaking.  Chicago:  Scott, Foresman, 1944. 

Posted by cageyer at 07:59 AM | Comments (1)

February 10, 2005

Can't find my own stuff!

Somewhere someone (was it Denise?) asked how many sources you should be working with. (Anybody remember where my answer is?) My generic answer is that it depends on what your work is. If you're doing a lit survey, you should consider having 5-10 books; or 20-25 articles & essays; or some combination of the two. If you're doing textual analysis (of methodologies, etc.), your number may be larger. Or smaller. It depends! Pitch your list, and I'll respond to you individually, letting you know if I think you should be doing less or more.

Posted by senioritis at 09:25 PM | Comments (2)

Course project proposal (02102005)

Key Words: ESL, L1 basic writers, L2 basic writers, placement testing, assessment, contrastive rhetoric

Topic and Exigence:
I intend to conduct a comprehensive and critical survey of major scholarships in ESL composition history, with an emphasis on contrastive rhetoric. I am interested in and feel passionate about ESL, but I haven't had a big chunk of time to study it systematically. I took a course "Second Language Acquisition" from the Linguistics Department last year. Although it laid a good foundation for me, it covered only the ABCs in the field, and now I want to read the field on a higher level.

Research Questions and Rationale:

My tentative key research questions are “How much should L2 pedagogy adopt L1 values, assessment standards and research methodology while retaining its own unique legacy?”, “Where to draw the line between L1 basic writers and L2 basic writers?”. After having an idea about these two questions, I will move onto a more practical question “Is the current ESL placement testing at Syracuse University effective?” The three questions are pertinent to my teaching at SU where most L1 and L2 writers are having the same writing courses, and I want to investigate how L1 and L2 construe and construct writing differently. If time permits, I will conduct an empirical research combining qualitative and quantitative methods on SU’s ESL placement testing system. Hopefully, this will turn out to be something presentable and publishable.

Concerns:
My biggest concern today is how much I can read and synthesize before the end of semester, although I’ll always try my best. The second concern is that how much people in the ESL field actually think about methods and methodology since my impression is that certain empirical research methods have been conventionalized and people never think about it anymore.

Workload:
I used Kaplan’s works (particularly the one on different thought patterns among people in different regions) in my master’s thesis, and I’m still familiar with it. I met and talked with Paul Matsuda, Tony Silva, Helen Fox and Ilona Leki last October when I was in Purdue for the L2 conference. I know some of their works but I definitely need to read more.
My anthology will include but not limit to:
-"CCCC Statement on Second-Language Writing and Writers." College Composition and Communication 52.4 (June 2001): 669-674.
-Kaplan, Robert B. "Cultural Thought Patterns in Inter-Cultural Education." Language Learning 16 (1966): 1-20.
- Leki, Ilona. "A New Approach to Advanced ESL Placement Testing." WPA: Writing Program Administration 14.3 (Spring 1991): 53-68.
-Leki, Ilona. "Cross-Talk: ESL Issues and Contrastive Rhetoric." Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. NewYork: MLA, 1997. 234-47.
- Lu, Min-zhan. "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle." College English 49 (April 1987): 437-48.
-Matsuda, Paul Kei. "Process and Post-Process: A Discursive History." Journal of Second Language
-Raimes, Ann. "A Basic Bibliography in Teaching English as a Second Language." Teaching ESL at CUNY, a special issue of Resource. CUNY, 1981: 46-8.
-Raimes, Ann. "Errors: Windows Into the Mind." College ESL 1.2 (1991). Rpt. Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing, and First-Year Composition. Ed. Geraldine DeLuca, Len Fox, Mark-Ameen Johnson, and Myra Kogen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. 279-288.
-Ramanathan, Vai, and Robert B. Kaplan. "Audience and Voice in Current L1 Composition Texts: Some Implications for ESL Student Writers." Journal of Second Language Writing 5.1 (1996): 21-34.
-Roy, Alice M. "Alliance for Literacy: Teaching Non-native Speakers and Speakers of Nonstandard English Together." College Composition and Communication 35 (1984): 439-47.
-Roy, Alice M. "Developing Second Language Literacy: A Vygotskyan Perspective." Journal of Teaching Writing 8 (Spring/Summer 1989): 91-98.
-Silva, Tony, Ilona Leki, and Carson. "Broadening the Perspective of Mainstream Composition Studies." Written Communication 14.3 (July 1997).
-Silva, Tony. "An Examination of Writing Program Administrators' Options for the Placement of ESL Students in First Year Writing Classes." WPA: Writing Program Administration 18.1-2 (Fall/Winter 1994): 37-43.
-Silva, Tony. "Differences in ESL and Native-English-Speaker Writing: The Research and Its Implications." Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. New York: MLA, 1997. 209-19.
-Adams, Katherine; and John Adams. "Write, Read and Edit: ESL Theory in the Basic Writing Curriculum." The Writing Instructor 4.3 (1985): 116-122.
-Bloch, Joel, and Lan Chi. "A Comparison of the Use of Citations in Chinese and English Academic Discourse." Academic Writing in a Second Language. Ed. D. Belcher and G. Braine. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995. 231-274.
-Bloch, Joel. "Plagiarism and the ESL Student: From Printed to Electronic Texts." Linking Literacies: Perspectives on L2 Reading-Writing Connections. Ed. D. Belcher and A. Hirvela. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2000. 209-228
-Boyd, Zohara, and Harriette Cuttino Buchanan. "English as a Second Language Techniques in Developmental Writing." CEA Critic 42.3 (1980): 37-40.
-Buley-Meissner, M.L.C. Understanding how native and non-native students learn towrite. (1985) DAI 46, 07A
-Eichler, Marie Hutchison. Developing Basic Writing Skills in English as a Second Language. U Pittsburgh P, 1981.
-Ferris, Dana R. "Rhetorical Strategies in Student Persuasive Writing: Differences Between Native and Non-Native English Speakers." Research in the Teaching of English 28.1 (February 1994): 45-65.
-Grabe, William, and Robert Kaplan. "Writing in a Second Language: Contrastive Rhetoric." Richness in Writing: Empowering ESL Students. Ed. Donald M. Johnson and Duane H. Roen. New York: Longman, 1989. 263-83.
-"University of Illinois International Students Learn about Plagiarism in Class." The Council Chronicle (February 1994): 6.

Posted by yqin at 03:36 PM | Comments (1)

Assignment for March 3

To prepare for class,

1. Think about any experiences you've had with coding research data, and prepare to share those experiences with the class. Prepare any handouts and copy any URLs that might be useful.
   
2. Come up with a preliminary coding system for your research project for this course. Make copies for the class, and bring them to class.
   
3. Prepare a one-page chronological timetable for your project, listing tasks and target completion dates. Hand this in to me in class.
   
4. Review notes, etc., from any previous encounters you've had with the work of Giambattista Vico, and we'll have a chat about him in class, pooling our information. I'm also trying to lure an actual rhetorician who has some Vico expertise into joining us.
   
5. Read Connors Ch. 4: Aleshia will summarize and lead class discussion
   
6. Read White Ch. 9: Elisa will summarize and lead class discussion. (Recommended background reading: Verene, Donald Phillip. "Giambattista Vico." Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996. 743-745. Sent to you in PDF.) As you read, pay particular attention to White's analysis of Croce's expectations for what invalidates a claim.
   
7. Read White Ch. 10: Ty will summarize and lead class discussion
   

In class,

1. Discuss assigned texts
   
2. Continued discussion of methods for coding research data
   
3. Hand in your one-page chronological project timetable
   
4. With luck, we'll have time to mull over the work of Giambattista Vico, with Denise as volunteered/drafted discussion leader.
   

Posted by senioritis at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)

Hayden White (02092005)

A historian's efforts to either favor one trope over another, or meditate between them are ubiquious. In Chapter 4, White says,"the form of the putatievly straight hisorical narrative is as much dependent up on the governing tropological mode of figuratoin as the form of any historicist account is dependent upon the theory which it seeks to justify." The various modes in which theory is expressed represent theoretical fomalizations of the tropes of natural language. (116)

Posted by yqin at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

Myth; fiction

In lay discourse, myth is generally a synonym for untrue. In most humanistic discourse, on the other hand, it means something more like a shared framework for making meaning, one that isn't itself subjected to critical scrutiny. In such discourse, use of the word myth isn't itself a value judgment but is a reasonably value-free descriptor.

Mythical thinking, White says, takes "signs and symbols for the things they represent" and takes metaphors literally. "When a fiction, such as a novel or a poem, is taken literally, as a report of reality rather than as a verbal structure with more or less direct reference to the world of experience, it becomes mythologized" (177).

Posted by senioritis at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)

Pitching a Propsal

My work in education has largely centered around an examination of critical pedagogy and its relation to whiteness studies. I am interested in white identity formation, privilege, and the disruption of the invisibility that surrounds it all.

With this project, I would like to look at how issues of race and identity (with a particular focus on whiteness) have been or could be addressed in the composition classroom. This is particularly relevant to our situation at Syracuse considering the work being done with the diversity grant. I am also drawn to this topic because of the controversy surrounding it. The issue of doing “diversity work” in FYC (as a mandatory class) is hotly contested. Thus, I’ll have a number of questions to consider.

How and when did race first enter the composition classroom as a topic?
How has the comp classroom incorporated race as a topic of inquiry?
How, if at all, does the discussion of race take up questions of whiteness and privilege?
What debates surround the effectiveness of FYC as the place to do “race work”?

Ideally, I would like this project to accomplish two things:
-Trace a trajectory for the development of this topic in the field.
-Offer some insight for potential pedagogical directions in the future.

My concerns are many. The immensity of the project (even after having focused in on a more specific area) is daunting. It would seem to entail some sort of archival work and/or rhetorical analysis of mission statements and syllabi. I guess what challenges me most is finding a starting point. After looking at the source list for readings on activism and critical pedagogy, I’ve identified the following texts as potentially helpful.

Aronowitz, Stanley. "Towards Radicalism: The Death and Rebirth of the American Left." Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship, and the State. Ed. David Trend. New York: Routledge, 1996. 81-101.

Bell, Sandra, M. Morrow, and Evangelis Tastsoglou. "Teaching in Environments of Resistance: Toward a Critical, Feminist, and Antiracist Pedagogy." Meeting the Challenge: Innovative Feminist Pedagogies in Action. Ed. Maralee Mayberry and Ellen Cronan Rose. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Cushman, Ellen. "The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research." College English 61.3 (1999).

Cushman, Ellen. "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change." College Composition and Communication 47.1 (February 1996): 7-28.

Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. NewYork: Teachers College P, 1997.

Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the
Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy." Harvard Educational Review 59 (1989): 297-324.

Gallagher, Chris. "'Just Give Them What They Need': Transforming the Transformative Intellectual." Composition Studies 28.2 (Fall 2000): 61-83.

Harris, C.I. "Whiteness as Property." Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. Ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, and K. Thomas. New York: The New Press, 1995. 276-291.

Jay, Gregory, and Gerald Graff. "A Critique of Critical Pedagogy." Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities. Ed. Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson. new York: Routledge, 1995.

Pough, Gwendolyn D. "Empowering Rhetoric: Black Students Writing Black
Panthers." College Composition and Communication 53:3 (February 2002): 466-486.

Seitz, David. "Hard Lessons Learned since the First Generation of Critical Pedagogy." College English 64.4 (March 2002): 503-512.

Trainor, Jennifer Seibel. "Critical Pedagogy's 'Other': Constructions of Whiteness in Education for SocialChange." College Composition and Communication 53.4 (June 2002): 631-650.

Posted by jwthom01 at 01:23 AM | Comments (2)

February 09, 2005

Project Proposal draft--revised 2/16/05

Basically, I would like to historicize the contemporary appearance of composition (Internationally) from within a larger historical context of international English language teaching .

Project proposals should describe what you intend to do: What I intend to do in this project is to look at how the history of International English language teaching has been written at different historical moments and geographical places and to compare those stories to the ones told today by composition instructors teaching at several English medium Universities in Turkey. I would use a sort of 'Whitian' rhetorical/ analysis informed by a transnational feminist perspective in oder to explore the ways that these stories are emploted and how/whether their figurative or latent content reveals anything interesting about gender, motivation and/or power.

Why you feel it's worth your while to do it: I want to do this project because I am hoping that it will give me a better sense of my own position as a International English language writing teacher. I am interested in the ways that agency shifts as the desire to spread the language as a disciplining function of Imperialism is transformed into a demand by the 'postcolonial subject' (this term doesn't quite work here, but I'm using for now anyway) for foreign workers (intellectual labor?) to teach English-for-International-Business (this is simplifying things too much). I am confused by Composition and. Rhetoric’s seeming invisibility in the international context from within the field’s histories of itself. If people are engaged in teaching and learning writing, in English, outside of what someone like Connors designates the geographical and temporal ‘territory’ of rhet comp, are they not teaching composition?

How you will do it:

Methodology: I want to ground my project in White’s sense of history both in terms of the way I read my archival sources and the ways that I represent them in my own narrative. I would like to take up his call to open history up to alternative ways of seeing and representing. White is clearly writing from within a more general, postmodern/poststructural ‘crisis’ of knowledge, which has had a major influence on the ways that scholarship is done. Transnational feminist scholarship (Mohanty, Sudbury, Alexander) has explored ways of reading historical and contemporary events and making them relevant to the present by contesting the ‘back then’ and ‘over there’ of a great deal of Western scholarship—contesting White’s dusty historian lost in the archive, maybe. Specifically, Jacque Alexander, has developed a methodology based on a ‘palimpsestic’ analysis that I think White would very much approve of—she takes textual moments separated by time and space, lays them on top each other, and identifies textual instances of continuity and change. In this way she is able to isolate heteronormative discourse that shows up in a colonial text from 1517 and then reemerges intact in the US Congressional meetings of 1997, juridical proceedings in Trinidad and Tobago, and discussions of the Abu Graib prison scandal. The richness and sophistication of her method allows her to make/identify connections that a more superficial analysis would not expose. I would like to explore ways of adapting her work to my own context.

Research design: My project would have three parts 1) Rhetorical analysis of a limited set of ‘classic’ story-of-English texts—I would like these to represent different historical moments and geographies, 2) rhetorical analysis of a limited set of contemporary testimonials from teachers teaching English—these will all be contemporary and located in Turkey, 3) to lay these moments on top of each other and see what emerges that can provide insight into the global context of rhetoric and composition.

I will begin by surveying English language teaching histories in order to identify a limited group that I will argue are representative of general trends. I will need to make some decisions such as, will I consider only full length texts dedicated to teaching or will I also use excerpts from other historical texts in which passages appear that discuss teaching (such as missionary logs, travel books, etc.). This process will help me to further focus my project.

How it constitutes historical work in composition studies: This project constitutes work in composition studies in that it attempts to historicize composition and rhetoric’s increasing presence and visibility in international contexts in countries (job boards and the appearance of English language rhetoric positions in at least Germany, Turkey, and the Gulf) where English is not the language of wider communication. I worked in a department in Turkey that taught composition classes very similar to SU’s WRT 105 and 205. Composition does not have a strong presence overseas, but it is growing. I would like to intervene at this early moment given the lack of scholarship in this area.

Concerns you have about the project: My concerns are mainly that I am physically far away from the areas I am interested in looking at. Hopefully electronic communication and interlibrary loan will assist my in this. I am also wondering how far back in time I want to go—or what time period I should concentrate on. I am assuming that I will be able to address these concerns as I learn more about what is ‘out there.’ Finally, I am concerned that my project won’t be easily identifiable as a history of composition—but I also think that it is a sympom of the problem to begin with—Comp rhet doesn’t seem to be keenly aware of its global context., and globally, the history of English is part of the history of comp.

List of possible research questions:
1) What can be revealed through a rhetorical reading of a specific and limited collection of 'classic' English Language Histories (I do not mean language teaching textbooks)?
2) What can be revealed through a rhetorical reading of a collection of contemporary International English language teacher testimonials?
3) What evidence of continuity and change emerges from a comparison of historical and contemporary texts? So what?
4) The underlying/overlying question: In what ways can Haydin White's theory of discourse, combined with transnational feminist insights (on at least the nation, mobility, and theories of the border), create a useful framework/ methodolgy with which to assess the questions above?

I would rely on textual analysis of historical texts. I would conduct interviews with both Turkish and non-Turkish instructors (in Turkey) in order to look at the 'stories' they tell as to why they teach and compare them to historical accounts. I could also probably get friends to ask student to write to me--maybe they could have them do in-class writing or something like that.

Tentative Inital Bibliography:

Alexander, Jaquie. “Transnationalism, Sexuality, and the State” (forthcoming).

Crystal, David The stories of English. Woodstock : Overlook Press, 2004.

Darian, Steven G. English as a foreign language: history, development, and methods of teaching, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press [1971, c1972].

Manfred, Gorlach. Text types and the history of English. Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, c2004.

McCrum, Robert. The story of English / New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Penguin Books, 1993.

Pennycook, Alastair. The cultural politics of English as an international language London ; New York : Longman, 1994.

Pennycook, Alastair. English and the discourses of colonialism. London ; New York : Routledge, 1998.

The Story of English. 1 - 9, An English speaking world [videorecording] / MacNeil-Lehrer-Gannett Productions/BBC Chicago, IL : Films Inc., c1986,

Posted by gpcoskan at 11:15 PM | Comments (8)

The Emplotment of Parks

In reviewing Parks, I feel that he is writing in the romantic, as he attempts not only to explain but to engage the phenomenon of Ebonics and the students write to express themselves in a discourse that is under constant evaluation by teachers as well as the “keepers of English” if you will. Another emplotment device used in this book are the tropes of language: metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche and as Whit outs it “it articulates the theory of the discourse”. It seems logical to me that these devices are employed, as it would be difficult to discuss language itself with including the theories surrounding them.

Posted by dvaldesd at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)

Proposing, Pondering, Preposterous

Okay Senioritis. I’ve decided. The bib is pretty long, and I know it needs more focus, but here goes.

I've decided to research: 20th Century African American Women Rhetoricians and their Contributions to Composition Studies. My reasons for wanting to take on such a task are simple. First, I don’t know enough about the contributions that African American women have made in the field of composition studies. Since being introduced to the polemical underpinnings of composition and rhetoric, I’m not surprised that this arena is dominated by people, who are not of color. I know that there is information that I need to know, realize, and hold true, but, I’m not really interested in taking up a cause I’m not feeling. Thus, I’d like to know what it is that I am being birth into by situating Royster and Smitherman in the field of composition. I want to know whether other scholars have embraced their arguments, in particular, what Royster and Smitherman espouse about language, and how that is represented in pedagogy. I want to know how they execute their research, and what methods they use. Since these women are writing in present day, it would also be interesting to survey their writings, collectively, to identify areas of composition to which they ascribe. I want to present a picture and mood of the attitude of composition when they wrote specific works. This constitutes historical work because the focus would not be a posthumous account of the contributions that African American women have made to composition studies, but a contemporary account. This would permit me to access primary sources by way of interview, and it would allow me to survey a specific period, locating what may have helped to influence how they couched language and pedagogy. I am concerned that this proposal is too broad and needs more focus. I am also concerned that I will not have enough time to complete this project. I am also concerned that "language" is not the word I'm looking for to describe what I want to review.

So, as a very preliminary bibliography, I'm thinking:

Potter, J. and M. Mulkay. "Scientists' Interview Talk: Interviews as a Technique for Revealing Participants' Interpretative Practices." The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. Ed. M. Brenner, J. Brown, and D. Canter. New York: Academic P, 1985. 247-271.

Fink, Arlene, and Jacqueline Kosecoff. How to Conduct Surveys: A Step-by-Step Guide. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.

Smitherman, Geneva. Interview. (Before this project is complete [2005]).

Jackson, Austin, and Geneva Smitherman. “ ‘Black People Tend to Talk Eubonics': Race and Curricular Diversity in Higher Education.” Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition. Ed. Duane Roen, Veronica Pantoja, Lauren Yena, Susan K. Miller, and Eric Waggoner. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002. 46-50.

Makoni, Sinfree, Geneva Smitherman, Arthur K. Spears, and Arnetha F. Ball. Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Rose, Shirley K. “Two Disciplinary Narratives for Non-Standard English in the Classroom: Citation Histories of Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations and Smitherman's Talkin' and Testifyin'.” History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition 1963-1983. Eds. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1998. 187-204.

Smitherman, Geneva. “ ‘The Blacker the Berry, the Sweeter the Juice’: African American Student Writers.” The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community. Ed. Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. 80-101.

Smitherman, Geneva. “CCCC's Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.” College Composition and Communication. 50.3 (February 1999): 349-376.

Smitherman, Geneva. “The Historical Struggle for Language Rights in CCCC.” Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice. Ed. Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. 7-39.

Smitherman, Geneva. “Language and Democracy in the USA and the RSA.” Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement. Vol. 2. Ed. Roseann Dueñas González. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001. 316-345.

Smitherman, Geneva. “Language Policy and Classroom Practices.” Making the Connection: Language and Academic Achievement among African American Students. Ed. Carolyn Temple Adger, Donna Christian, and Orland Taylor. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999.

Smitherman, Geneva. “Meditations on Language, Pedagogy, and a Life of Struggle.” Rhetoric and Ethnicity. Ed. Keith Gilyard and Vorris Nunley. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004. 3-14.

Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977, 1986.

Smitherman-Donaldson, Geneva. “Toward a National Public Policy on Language.” College English 49 (1987): 29-36.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Interview. (Before this project is complete [2005]).

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” College Composition and Communication 47.1 (February 1996): 29-40.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Jean C. Williams. “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication. 50.4 (June 1999): 563-585.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, Anne Bradford Warner. “Saga of the Dragon Slayers or Perspectives on Teaching Writing at Spellman College.” Teaching Writing at Historically Black colleges and Universities. eds. David G. Lanoue and Vivian A. Wilson. New Orleans: Southern Education Foundation, 1988. 25-30.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “In Search of Ways in: Reflection and Response.” Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. eds. Louise W. Phelps and Janet Emig. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. 385-392.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Rebecca Greenberg Taylor. “Construction Teacher Identity in the Basic Writing Classroom.” Journal of Basic Writing. 16.1. 1997: 27-50.

Posted by aljeffer at 10:09 PM | Comments (7)

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 09:41 PM | Comments (2)

Emploting Ohman

Ohman’s English in America seems to be a romance that contains a combination of synecdochic and ironic modes.

Ohman emplots the story of the English department in a descending narrative that mirrors his version of the Marxist story of late capitalism. The story of the English department appears to have a synecdoche relationship to the larger capitalist system—if I’m getting this right. Rampant corporatization is ruining the English department just as it is ruining the world in general. However, the descent can still be turned upwards if English teachers would teach according to humanist principles: “We in the universities, and especially humanists, must mobilize what we know and believe to encourage the humane application of knowledge in the solution of problems created as by-products of previous advances in knowledge” (308). Those “by-products” include war, nuclear weapons, the degraded environment, etc. In this romance, the English teacher is cast in a potentially heroic role in which her/his choices have cataclysmic implications. S/he can choose to remain complicit in the descending narrative of the larger capitalist system by, for example, choosing to support the MLA’s decision in 1968 to distance itself from anti-war activities in the lobby of the convention hotel (28). On the other hand, s/he can choose a transformative role and “encourage the humane application of knowledge.”

It seems to me that the ironic mode comes strongly into play in Ohman’s “Introduction to the 1995 edition.” He refers to his former self ironically as “I or somebody else by the same name” (xiii). He reaffirms, but plays with the solution he proposed in 1976 for a “socialist revolution” (276) as the only remedy for the ills of the English department. He discloses the superficiality of his knowledge of Marx at the time, reveals his political position, gender and professional position, and in this way, he acknowledges the contingent nature of knowledge in a way that I think White would approve of (In White's terms, he "sanctions the ambiguous" 73).

Posted by gpcoskan at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

Tracing Narratives (Take 2)

My project will focus on identifying the metaphors used to describe Composition as people write histories about the field. To paraphrase Hayden White, how we write about the history of Composition is as important as what we write about it. Central to this project are the following questions:
• What are the metaphors used in describing the history of Composition?
• Do writers adopt certain narrative styles that coincide with the metaphors they choose?
• Have we reached a self-reflexive (ironic) phase in Composition?
• How do these compare to the metaphors being used to describe the similar discipline of Speech Communication?

At the foundation of this project I will assume two basic narrative structures: lament and revel, that can be seen in the larger structures of Romance, Tragedy, Epic, and Satire identified by White. If possible, I would like to select representative texts that either lament or revel in the history of the field. I hope to identify the larger structures written onto these histories through an analysis of the metaphors used, very similar to Hayden White’s method for demonstrating the larger narrative emplotment of histories, and thereby lay open the writer’s attitudes and interests in telling history from a certain vantage.

The main problem I will encounter in this project is text selection. I foresee the project working one of two ways.
A) Identifying whether or not Composition has entered a self-reflexive phase and, if so, selecting a canonical history from before and a canonical history from after the movement. The goal here would be to examine the shift and try to ascertain what effect an ironic trope has on how the history of Composition is told.
B) Instead of working from book length texts, visit past issues of CCC and see if it is possible to codify distinctions in the way histories were written in certain eras. The goal here would be to identify major shifts in how the history of Composition was perceived and try to identify the cultural environments informing those perceptions.

(note: for the purposes of this proposal, metonymy and synecdoche are considered included when I write metaphor).

Please help me pick texts. I’m rather lost when it comes to that.

Posted by trobryan at 08:56 PM | Comments (3)

Varnum read with White's/Burke's Tropes

Varnum is particularly self-conscious of the fact that he is writing from a synechdochal stance. He is quite clear that he is moving between a micro-look at a particular series of events in the history of a particular time and place and set of characters in composition history, and a macro-look at the ways in which the enactment of the particular speaks to and informs the general, larger issues facing composition both then and now.

The other way I see Varnum as favoring the synechdochal trope is his movement back and forth among the various parts of the complex system he is trying to describe: the classroom, the program, the college, and the professional, cultural, and political climates involved in and around Theodore Baird’s professional life and Amherst College.

Of course, according to White’s analysis, all histories are inevitably metaphors, even as they privilege one Master Trope or negotiate between two or more, in the very fact that the history with its story form is standing in and pointing towards a way of seeing and feeling the thing it represents, but ultimately is not.

Posted by dwinslow at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

Emplotting Manly Writing

As I look back over the methods and methodology employed by Brody in her text, I have difficulty finding examples of historical emplotment, but I can easily see her history attempting to do the kind of historical work of which White is an advocate.

Her text focuses on the figurative rhetorical language present in archival texts to attempt to reveal how the metaphorical construction of gender reveals the social and epistemic assumptions of the time. She then attempts to show how these assumptions drive the construction of the student in composition through the rhetoric and metaphors used in textbooks. These embedded rhetorical moves, according to Brody, are at the heart of the development of composition and come through in the writing of the texts which both define and teach.

Brody's analysis of sections of both composition textbooks and rhetorical treatises is much like White's analysis of Taylor's passage from The Course of German History . She takes discreet parts of texts and closely analyzes them for the moves they make from "the manifest level to the figurative level and back again" (White 114). Brody's shifts display how gendered writing and rhetorical practice has been, so that she may reveal the inherent power-relations between teacher and student through composition discourse.

Because Brody is so focused on gender, she may seem as if she is not fully reaching the ideas set forth by White in allowing the study of the rhetorical tropes to reveal the ideological assumptions made in both the past and the present. However, I would argue that this is the type of history that White would advocate because it is looking at particular tropes to construct meaning not about what has been lost in the chronicle of history, but what has been ideologically embedded in that history through language. Brody, like White, is interested in how we come to know the world and make meaning of it through language; therefore, like White she is focused on the tropes which drive how composition defines itself.

I suppose one could say that the emplotment Brody follows is gender, and the history of how the masculine has always been privileged over the feminine. And this is the point where her text may part company from the "ideal" of Whitian history. Because she is steeped in the confines of gender ideology, she assumes a baseline meaning for gender and how the metaphors surrounding it function, and therefore, she is limiting her study to what she already knows. But I don't think that White would object to this all that much, really. Because White sees the possibility of infinite numbers of histories because of the historian's personal commitments. And Brody's ability to construct her analysis on the basis of rhetorical tropes would prove that she is aware of the power of language and her own position in it.

Posted by jlwingar at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)

preliminary proposal from vw

At this point, I am leaning towards a historical look at the divide between faculty and students (sometimes thought of as "the dirty student body"). Such a project would have the potential to reveal the source(s) of underlying prejudices that can sometimes create a barrier to learning, either because faculty prefer research to teaching or because faculty do not truly engage in a "learning community" with students. My research will primarily entail an exploration of composition histories that may unveil some other sources for further research. Also, connections with other forces and movements should be considered, i.e. did the separation occur with Morrill Land Grant? Was it influenced by capitalism, i.e. money awarded to research by our govt. and corporations, but not to teaching? Was it influenced by the changes in the university system, becoming as Bill Reading wrote "a university of excellence" instead of the traditional city-state sponsored university? My concern is that my research will take me far-flung from composition, i.e. my question may be one that addresses the whole university system, not just composition studies. I have the impression, however, that composition is positioned in such a way that it can reverse the trend. One of my research questions would be to examine if this is happening.

Preliminary bibliography:
Atherton, Catherine. "Children, Animals, Slaves and Grammar." Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning. Ed. Yun Le Too and Niall Livingstone. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 214-244.

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition . Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

More research to do!

Posted by vwatts at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)

Project Proposal

Project Proposal: {Keyword String}: A Data-based Condensation of Disciplinary Ritual

As the Conference on College Composition and Communication convenes each spring, the chair's keynote address reflects the currents of the field.  The conference commences after the brief address, which is performed by a prominent scholar identified by/with the field.  Through my project, I am seeking to revisit the addresses as arrangements of verbal/lexical data, which, sorted for word and (perhaps) phrase frequencies, provide us with a meta-perspective on the field.  Of course this is experimental through and through; other than a few keyword analyses of speeches from political figures and increasing attention in social network theory to folksonomies and tagging, very little work like this has been taken up.  I will begin with text versions of the six most recent CCC addresses, from Villanueva's talk in Atlanta in 1999 to Kathleen Yancey's address last year in San Antonio.  Provided that I can access copies of the text versions of these talks, I will process them through a word frequency indexer, as individual texts and as a collective.  I am currently working to access malleable copy; it is, I think, the only inhibitive factor in my plan.  From there, I intend to read the data for patterns and exceptions.  I would like to render the results into graphic form and develop an account of the process I applied as well as what it means to read the field in this way.  I will work toward my own understanding of what we might ascertain from data-sets stemming from large samplings of discourse, and, as well, infer connections between the annual ritual of the keynote address and the circulation of thema/topoi/noesis in the discipline.  

Provisional Bibliography

Barton, Ellen L. "Evocative Gestures in CCCC Chairs' Addresses." History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition 1963-1983. Eds. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1998. 235-252. (on request from Bird)

Bishop, Wendy. "Against the Odds in Composition and Rhetoric." CCC. 53.2 (2001): 322-335. 

Gilyard, Keith. "Literacy, Identity, Imagination, Flight." CCC. 52.2 (2000): 260-272. 

Hiatt, Mary P. "The Feminine Style: Theory and Fact." On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 77-83.

Logan, Shirley. "Changing Missions, Shifting Positions, and Breaking Silences."  CCC. 55.2 (2003): 330-342. 

Lovas, John C. "All Good Writing Develops at the Edge of Risk." CCC. 54.2 (2002): 264-288. 

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geogg Bennington and Brian Massumi. 1979. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.

---. "Database as a Genre of New Media." AI & Society. 2 Feb. 2005. < http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html>.  17 Nov. 2001.

Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly Quiet. Dir. Lenka Clayton. Lenka Clayton, 2003.

"The Words Speakers Use." Chart. New York Times. 28 Sep. 2004.  <http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/09/02/politics/campaign/nat_02WORDS.gif> 3 Sep. 2004.

Villanueva, Victor. "On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism." CCC. 50.4 (1999): 645-661. 

Yancey, Kathleen. "Make Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." CCC. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. 

Posted by dmueller at 01:54 PM | Comments (3)

Emplotment of Roen, Brown and Enos collection

Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline
is a collection of stories by people who "fell in love" (xi) with the field. The editors collected "the professional histories of 19 rhetoricians and compositionists who explain how they came to fall in love with the written word and teaching" (xv). It may be a simplistic move on my part, but if emplotment as described by White is either romance, tragedy, comedy, satire, epic, etc. Then I would have to say this collection is emplotted like a romance. The goal was to tell a love story, actually 19 love stories, about people who met and, in a sense, married their profession. Though there are at times moments of sadness and elements of humor, the overarching theme of romance was set by the editors and created by the contributors.

In terms of the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synechoche, and irony, I would classify this work as synecdoche as it understands "the particular as a microcosm of a macroscopic totality" (73). In other words, the differing narratives are expected to reveal truths that can "provide an orientation to the profession" (xvii).

Posted by vwatts at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

feminist project proposal

For my project I am interested in taking up issues of historical representation—in terms of the historical representation of the field, as feminized in relation to English its masculine counterpart. The second part of this project will analyze how students represent their experiences, specifically at SU (through evaluations/online forums) in a discipline comprised on predominantly women with little institutional power.

This project contributes significantly to my work on contra-power sexual harassment insofar as I can make connections in terms of how Composition may be particularly vulnerable to contra-power sexual harassment, given the historical nature of the field and the assumptions which are prevalent on a university campus about writing instruction.

I will divide my research into two parts: 1) historical work on how the field is constructed as feminized, and 2) historical work involving The Writing Program at Syracuse University. The archival work I will conduct includes student evaluations. Further, I will conduct interviews with faculty who may have experienced issues of harassment/student resistance.

Historical Representation of the field:

• How is the field viewed as feminized? By whom? And, on what grounds?
• Does this representation of the field as feminized reflect second wave feminism in terms of the actual bodies that taught composition?
• How can this representation be revised to account for additional markings on the body which may indicate lesser power (race, ethnicity, age, ability, etc)?

Questions concerning reading evaluations:

• Is the feminization of composition reflected in the ways that students evaluate their teachers? How does the race, gender, sexuality of the teacher effect the student’s assessment?
• Does assessment of writing instruction change with technology? Is/how is the assumedly feminized field of composition assessed by students within this space?
• Can a comparative analysis be made between the ways writing classes are assessed and other introductory courses at SU?

Generative Bibliography
Apple, M.W. Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
Batsleer, Janet, Tony Davies, Rebecca O'Rourke, and Chris Weedon. Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Batson, Lorie Goodman. "Defining Ourselves as Woman (in the Profession)." Pre/Text 10 (Spring/Summer 1989): 117-120.
Bechtel, Judith. "Why Teaching Writing Always Brings up Questions of Equity." Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity. Ed. Cynthia L. Caywood and Gillian R. Overing. Albany: SUNY UP, 1987. 179-84.
Bell, Sandra, M. Morrow, and Evangelis Tastsoglou. "Teaching in Environments of Resistance: Toward a Critical, Feminist, and Antiracist Pedagogy." Meeting the Challenge: Innovative Feminist Pedagogies in Action. Ed. Maralee Mayberry and Ellen Cronan Rose. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Boardman, Kathleen A., and Joy Ritchie. "Rereading Feminism's Absence and Presence in Composition." History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition 1963-1983. Eds. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1998. 143-162.
Caywood, Cynthia L., and Gillian R. Overing, eds. Teaching Writing: Pedagogy, Gender, and Equity. Albany: SUNY P, 1987.
Desmet, Christy. "Equivalent Students, Equitable Classrooms." Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: Modern Language Assocation, 1998. 153-171.
Donnelly, Michael. "Male Instructor, Feminist Pedagogy: Interrogating Presence and Authority in the Classroom." Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 16.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1995): 228-244.
Edwards, Lynnell Major. "What Should We Call You? Women, Composition Studies, and the Question of Eminent Authority." Composition Studies 28.2 (Fall 2000): 43-59.
Eichhorn, Jill, et alia. "A Symposium on Feminist Experiences in the Composition Classroom." College Composition and Communication 43.3 (October 1992): 297-322.

Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996.

Flynn, Elizabeth. "Strategic, Counter-Strategic, and Reactive Resistance in the Feminist Classroom." Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies. Ed. Andrea Greenbaum. Albany: SUNY UP, 2001.

Fontaine, Sheryl I., and Susan Hunter eds. Writing Ourselves into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

[selected chapters]

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. [selected chapters]
Payne, Michelle. “Rend(er)ing Women’s Authority in the Writing Classroom.” Feminism and Composition. Ed. Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 398-410.

Phelps, Louise, and Janet Emig. Feminine Principles and Women’s Experiences in American Composition and Rhetoric. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. 289-341.

Reichert, Pegeen. "A Contributing Listener and Other Composition Wives: Reading and Writing the Feminine Metaphors in Composition Studies." JAC 16.1 (1996): 141-57.

Sánchez-Casal, Susan, and Amie A. MacDonald, eds. Twenty-First Century Feminist Classrooms: Pedagogies of Identity and Difference. Palgrave, 2002.

Schell, Eileen E. "The Feminization of Composition: Questioning the Metaphors that Bind Women Teachers." Composition Studies/Freshman English News 25 (1997). Rpt. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P, Sheridan-Rabideau. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. 552-557.
- - -. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook, 1998.
- - -. “The Cost of Caring: ‘Feminism’ and Contingent Women Workers in Composition Studies.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA, 1998. 74-93.

Posted by kaconcan at 01:04 AM | Comments (4)

February 08, 2005

White discussion questions: "Historicism, History, and the Imagination"

Rhetoric introduces the problems of the nature of analysis and description. White explains that “to raise the question of the rhetoric of historical discourse is to raise the problem of the nature of description and analysis in fields of study which, like historiography, have not yet attained to the status of sciences in the way that physics, chemistry, and biology have done”(102).

How do you see rhetoric generally intersecting with a field like Composition, which continually functions to validate itself (particularly through historical methodology/methods) as legitimate to the university? How do you see Composition (an incredibly interdisciplinary field) as parallel to History, following Levi-Strauss’s claims (in terms of methods)? How do the suggestions White makes about resolving conventional problems of historical theory apply to your research in the field?

White draws upon Levi-Strauss who claims that there exists a paradoxical relationship between “the amount of information that may be covered in any given account of the field and the kind of comprehension that we can have of it” (102). In other words, as he later explains, the more we include, the less comprehension we are of a field, whereas the more comprehension we claim to be, the less we are. Given this claim, how do we make sense of/judge Connors who claims to cover rhetoric of written composition after 1780 in American colleges to the present? Where do you see yourself fitting within this paradox? What kinds of justifications do you establish for delineating particular borders around your work?

White claims that the conflation of prosaic and poetic within a general theory of discourse has important implications for work in history (104). Further, he suggests that a rhetorical analysis illustrates the ways that not only explanation (information), but additionally prescription as to what kinds of attitudes readers should assume before reading which are contained in the figurative elements of the text (105). What kind of attitudes do you think Connors expects you to assume while reading a chapter on gender influences?

Locate a paragraph in Connors “Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric” to discuss in class. Attempt to delineate between the superficial and deep-structural meaning Connors constructs as White does.

Posted by kaconcan at 10:53 PM | Comments (2)

White Summary: "Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination"

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination.” 101-120.

White draws upon underlying assumptions that distinguish a properly historical approach (historiography) and a historicist (philosophy of history) to history, and suggest these distinctions are “virtually worthless” (101). Every historical representation is subject to distortions/biases of language and interpretive frameworks, and thus can be categorized as “historicism” (102). Rhetorical questions applied to historical discourses render methods/methodologies of historical representation suspect (102). White distinguishes two kinds of meanings located in these discourses, the superficial (literal) and figurative (deep-structural) (105; 106-109). His analysis resolves various conventional problems of historical theory (114-117).

White relies heavily on the work of Levi-Strauss, who suggests that the relationship between historical thought and the imagination is found in the nature of language itself (104). Levi-Strauss argues that the coherency of history is actually myth—narrative strategies to construct effective stories (103). In other words, stories, mythic stories, are the basis of history, which is nothing more than a human construction. For Strauss, the delineation of all fields is arbitrary, and he locates history within a mythic Western epistemological frame (103). Further, history is never of but is rather always for particular ideological purposes and directed to particular audiences through language (104). A conflation of the concepts of prose and poetry within a theory of language/discourse carries with it several implications for historiography, particularly in “proper history” (104).

Historical writing must be subject to rhetorical analysis in an effort to test its objective claims because historicists cannot escape the power of figurative language use. What “figurative” historians say is always bound up in how they present their versions of reality (105). Clues to meaning of history are located in both the rhetoric of the description as well as the logical argument, although traditionally historical discourse is viewed in terms of a fact/analysis dichotomy (106). Rhetorical analyses, what White deems as most pertinent, could: classify different discourses based on their use of figurative language; transcend assumptions of objectivity/current mutually exclusive; and finally, reveal the attitude reader’s should assume before both levels of interpretation (105).

Historical discourse consists of two levels: the surface level (literal) and the figurative (deep-structural) (110). Latent meaning consists of the generic story-type of which the facts themselves are the manifest form (110). This latent meaning of an historical discourse consists of the story-types in which the facts fit (110). Story, an essential element of a historical discourse, functions as an image of the events. The historian, as literary artist, chooses particular techniques to construct truth of the historical event; thus, there are positive (arrageing) and negative (omitting) consequences (112).

Because every figurative discourse has a figurative level of meaning, White believes that various conventional problems of historical theory can be resolved. For example, distinctions between philosophy of history and historiography become more a matter of presentation and explicitness. In addition, his analysis permits a conceptualization of the possible types of historical representations through tropes; and finally, new perspectives of historical relativism are revealed (115-116).

Posted by kaconcan at 09:19 PM | Comments (1)

Discussion Questions for Connors, Chapter 1

1) In the second half of Connor's chapter, in which he addresses four major effects of coeducation on rhetoric, he says several times that he doesn't have the space to give detailed support to a claim. Is this a valid way to address the limitations of writing a chapter? What should he have left out, or added in, to make a stronger case?

2) Connors acknowledges some work done on the history of women rhetoricians, but claims that the "few thin stories" (28) that have been uncovered prove how entirely absent women have been from the rhetorical field before the rise of coeducation. Does the absence of documentation prove the absence of the phenomenon?

3) How does the work done in this chapter stack up against the author's declared approach, as defined in the Introduction? In other words, did the introduction represent his epistemology fairly, and does his methodology (analysis) appear to be consistent with his stated approach?

Posted by clostran at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)

Connors, Chapter 1 Summary

Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. U Pittsburgh P, 1997. Chapter 1, 23-69

Rhetoric remained relatively stable from the 5th century BC until the 19th century. With the rise of coeducation in the United States (42), rhetorical instruction shifted from public, oral (23), and male-dominated (27) to a more private, written rhetoric open to women (24).

Early education (26, 27) taught rhetoric’s agonistic purpose (to win cases through argumentation, 25), fueled by male status contests (25). Traditional rhetorical success depended on a masculine “ethos” (28-9). Early women rhetoricians are rare (28). Women, could not participate even as audience to oral debates, were not exposed to rhetorical forms in daily life, and were excluded from schools. The Christian church as a rhetorical arena also excluded women (31). The privatization of women in medieval life did not prevent them from participating to some extent in reading and writing, which were considered private activities (32).

Medieval rhetoric developed two strands. Preaching became the 13th century “New Rhetoric’s” oral, public, male form (35). The 12th century emergence of ars dictaminis (the art of letter-writing) shifted from preparation of orations to written end products (33). Model letters demonstrated the proper presentation of an argument in written form (33-34). During the English Reformation a few “preacherless” sects permitted female preaching (37), though many 17th century women preachers (particularly Quakers) were imprisoned or killed for heresy (38-39).

The late 18th century saw the first schools for Young Ladies with classes in rhetoric (40), and the first colleges for women were founded in the early 19th century (42-43). Apart from the abolition movement (41), no public forum was generally available for women. Only a handful of colleges were coeducational until the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862 (43), but by 1900 ¾ of the colleges in the US admitted women (43).

In 19th century all-male colleges, rhetoric had pedagogical and civic value. The university system was built on ritual contests between faculty and students as well as on competition between students. (47-49). Women’s presence altered campus life and classroom practices (49). Discussion, seminar, and laboratory formats replaced lecture/recitation methods (49). Women resisted reading aloud in mixed company, and men were reluctant to debate women (49-50). Literary analysis and private writing assignments, voluntary participation in discussion, and professors’ written comments emerged. (50-51), and oral rhetoric gave way to written composition (51-52). Women were taught analytical rhetoric, rather than being offered public fora (53). The belles letters approach espoused by Blair emphasized composition (53-54) and fit this approach. Women were expected not to participate in oratory and debate (56-57), and rhetorical oratory gave way to a more aesthetic style of public speaking (59-60). Whately’s 1828 text on argumentative composition was replaced by Bain’s 1866 text which focused on modes of discourse: narration, description, exposition, and argument (61). Argumentation as a special mode focused on logic in Baker’s proposal to “train students to think” (63). Prompts for composition shifted to more personal topics (64-65). The Process Movement sprang up as women students began to outnumber men (66-67).

Posted by clostran at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

Emplotment - Campbell on Gertrude Buck

Campbell, Joann, ed. Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Univ. Press, 1996.

In light of White's framework for emplotments, I can think of ways to case Campbell's edited collection with each of the four master tropes.  The project is metaphorically emplotted, for example, in the sense that it (as a thing) stands for some other thing--the lost/faded/misunderstood contributions of women to composition's emergence, much like concerns Connors in his chapter on "Gender Influence."  The project, then, is framed as a metaphoric precedent; Campbell explicitly wants others to properly historicize a "feminist rhetoric."   

Read another way, the project could be called metonymically emplotted because Buck stands in place for others like her who, though they have yet to be properly historicized (as if that's even ever possible), stand as a large-scale manifestation of the field's emergence, larger-scale than Buck-as-individual, anyhow. In this sense, Buck is often cited as a "meta-name" for others like her.  Likewise, we might say that it is synechdochically emplotted because Buck's work as assembled represents a part of the whole of composition studies.  The collection, if we take it to be synechdochically emplotted, is a representative part of the field--an element of the whole (although whole-ness has issues, White would say), right? 

Finally, although I'm reluctant to suggest that the entire project could be understood as ironically emplotted, Campbell makes it very clear that Buck's forgotten-ness reflects particular disciplinary ironies related to both gender and labor.  Does this make it ironically emplotted?  I'm not sure, but some of the issues selected to reflect on composition's early professional practices might be understood as ironic. In the chapter on "Correspondence and Department Reports," for example, Campbell includes letters concerning class sizes, establishing, with the historical documents, Buck's claim that "Under such conditions [classes capped at 60] good teaching was so manifestly impossible that soon after taking charge of the department I was able to reduce the size of the freshman sections to a maximum of twenty-five" (264). The collection is filled with carefully selected ironic turns, many of which are embodied in Buck's original writing, making it difficult to determine whether Campbell sought to invoke them as part of her work.

As I worked through these ways of inferring emplotments, I questioned whether it was possible for a history to invoke all four of the master tropes.  After looking at the particular language analysis of Taylor undertaken by White in chapter four, I still have questions about whether we should conceive of large projects as emplotted in an over-arching or general way or whether, instead, we should find the master tropes prefiguring specific, sentential/phrasal (perhaps) encasements of history.

Posted by dmueller at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)

White, Chapter 3, Discussion Questions

These are the questions I would like to discuss in class on Thursday regarding Chapter 3. I'm posting them early i hopes that we will be able to keep the discussion somewhat focused. These seem to me to be big questions, probably worth more time than we can give them during class. So maybe after class, comments and thoughts can be posted here.

Questions:
1. Can we say that composition has "a formal terminological system for describing its objects?" If so, what are these terms? What are the objects they describe?

2. If we accept that histories are about the "possible sets of relationships" between events, how does this shape our approach to our historical constructions (i.e., the projects we'll be doing)? This is an extension of the discussion we began at the end of class last week, in specifically identifying ways White's ideas will shape our work.

3. Composition, like history as described by White, is often classified as not having a subject. Given that, how might the introduction and acceptance of literary forms change the nature of our historical work? It seems much of the history of composition is a push-pull between empirical and anecdotal evidence. In the context of this class, is a history that includes this identifiable and declared fictive element acceptable? Why or why not?

4. On page 89, White discusses the "contexts of the texts that literary scholars study" and compares historical documents to literary texts, claiming both are "opaque" and neither more "given" than the other. As composition practitioners, how do we view the notion of context? Is it a given? Or a constructed fiction? What implications does this distinction have for us as scholars and for our students when we function as teachers?

Posted by cageyer at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)

White, Chapter 3, Summary

White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact." Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 81-100.

Metahistory asks questions intended to disrupt the types of inquiry employed by practitioners in a field to discover underlying assumptions and possible alternatives ways of knowing or questioning. Although the field of history has been questioning its disciplinary success, the problem of the fictive quality of "historical narratives" has not been taken up seriously (82). These narratives have more structural similarities to literature than to documents in science. Though Northrop Frye found history and myth to be binary opposites, he also allowed that historian's narratives reflected the four categories of myth: Romantic, Comic, Tragic, and Ironic (82). The historian gathers data and assembles it toward a form, and part of the success of histories in explaining events of the past to readers in the present is due to the story-making ability of the historian, or "emplotment" (83). The success of historical narrative requires both elements of Frye's binary, the "facts" of the events, and the explanatory and associative effects of the myth.

R. G. Collingwood also viewed historians as story-tellers, but did not make the distinction between the elements of a story and the story itself. The story takes shape by "the suppression or subordination" of some events and the "highlighting" of others (84). But the form is not implicit in the events, as Collingwood suggests. Rather the form comes from the combination of the historian's choices in telling the events and the reader's familiarity with the forms of tragedy, comedy, romance, or irony. History telling is in this way a literary form. By encoding the events so as to reflect a familiar form, the historian "refamiliarizes" readers with events, in a process similar to psychotherapy (88). Historical narratives serve not only as a "reproduction" of the events but also as a "complex of symbols" assisting reader's to find an "icon" of those events. Symbols, icons, and signs are based on C.S. Peirce's philosophy of language. As sign systems, historical narratives point both to the events and the story type or mythos that serves as the "icon," thus "mediating" between the events and the "pregeneric plot structures" of the culture (88). In this system the "plot" serves the iconic function.

The coherence of a series of events is the coherence of the story, which is limited by the form. The facts must be tailored to the form, while preserving the chronology or sequence. This happens both by emphasis within the sequence and by the omission of some events. The choices of emphasis and omission come from the historian's sense of possible sets of relationships among the events. The historian begins with "ordinary educated speech" as his communication method, leaving figurative language to construct meaning. The "dominant figurative mode" available can determine the type of emplotment to be used (94).

It is necessary to recognize the fictive element of historical narratives and to reconnect history with its "literary basis" in order to allow for the incorporation of theories of language and narrative and thus a "more subtle presentation" of historical events. Such recognition and reconnection would guard against "ideological distortions" and come to a theory that would revitalize the discipline of history (99).

See also Becky Howard's comment on double conformity.

Posted by cageyer at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2005

Assignment for February 10

To prepare for class,

1. Read Connors Ch. 1: Carolyn will summarize and lead class discussion
   
2. Read White Ch. 3: See preliminary notes here and here. Chris will summarize and lead class discussion.
   
3. Read White Ch. 4: Kelly will summarize and lead class discussion. (I've posted a note on some of White's terminology in this chapter.)
   
4. In Ch. 4, White formalizes a principle for which the previous chapters have been laying the groundwork: "[A] given historian's style of representation can be characterized in terms either of his favoring one or another of [Burke's master] tropes, or of his efforts to mediate between them. . ." (116). Return to the text in composition history whose methods and methodology you surveyed for January 27: how would you now describe this text in terms of its emplotment? As you consider your answer, take into account not just the above quotation from White, but the entire conclusion to the chapter, especially on 116. Before class on 2/10, write your response (however tentative it may be) to this question as a separate blog entry. In the title to your entry, please include either the author's name or title of the book that you are analyzing. Please categorize your entry under your own name; under "methods and methodologies"; and under "texts."
   
5. Post a proposal for your course project.
   

In class,
Discussion of assigned readings

Posted by senioritis at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)

oh, piffle.

stephen north's the making of knowledge in composition in white's schemata...

i've been stalling about doing this for days, b/c i don't understand them. really. still.

what north is doing: trying to identify many separate pieces so he can (& we can) see & work with how they might work together to form the whole of the field. BUT he's not trying to say his division-system is the only way of doing it. so he's making a whole out of parts, but not out of necessary parts, because he recognizes that many different ways of dividing the mess up into parts would be equally valid--what's important is finding commonalities within each created category so that communication & participation within the whole is possible. it's not simple metaphor, it's probably in some ways ironic, but its primary purpose isn't ironic reflection... and i really still don't understand the other two. derek? jen? what's what north's doing called in hayden-white-land?

Posted by ttobryan at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)

Feminist Projec(tions) 2.0

For this project, I will review several “Feminist” works in the field to determine the methods they employ when doing history. Once this is established, I hope to show how these writers have begun to disrupt and challenge the traditional paradigm of historical representation, but they have not yet fully made the shift for which White is calling. Instead, these histories become bound to disciplinary language and form, so that seem to fill in gaps of an already on-going historical project of the field. Once I have established how these feminist texts are at work, I hope to show how Transnational Feminism can give feminists in composition (and all compositionists really) practices to not only challenge the story of the history of the field, but also begin to shift the paradigm of historical research to include the interplay between past and present, as well as multiple perspectives, which White discusses.

The bibliography below is a generative one, but I do plan to skim most of the works on it, so that I may establish the parameters for the texts I address. I know that not all feminist works will use the same methodology, nor will they have the same purpose, but I am hoping that through this research, I will be able to establish some patterns at work from which I can choose representative texts for final analysis. (Ooh, that last statement was a bit of synecdoche and not irony. Perhaps I should rethink this or my history will fall under my own critique, too. But I suppose that is my point in all of this – how hard it is to challenge disciplinary commitments and methods.)

As for the Transnational Feminist portion of the project, I feel that I have a solid foundation of that knowledge, and in the latter part of the semester, I will be taking Mohanty’s Transnational Feminism Course. In that course, I will work on a paper about transnational feminism as method, so I will be able to use the work I do there to help inform this project. I believe that this project will also help me begin to articulate exactly what I mean when I say that feminism is a method, so I see this as a large project that spans two courses. For that reason, I believe the work will be manageable.

Preliminary Bibliography

Adams, Katherine H. A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women
Writers, 1880-1940. Albany: SUNY UP, 2001.
Ballif, Michelle. "Re/Dressing Histories; Or, On Re/Covering Figures Who Have Been Laid
Bare By Our Gaze." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1 (Winter 1992): 91-8.
Bloom, Lynn Z., Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White, eds. Composition Studies in the New
Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2003.
Boardman, Kathleen A., and Joy Ritchie. "Rereading Feminism's Absence and Presence in
Composition." History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of
Composition 1963-1983. Eds. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet.
Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1998. 143-162.
Brody, Miriam. Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois UP, 1993.
Campbell, JoAnn, ed. Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck. Pittsburgh: U
Pittsburgh P, 1996.
Flynn, Elizabeth A. "Composition Studies from a Feminist Perspective." The Politics of Writing
Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, and Charles Schuster.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. 137-154.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Tradition and the Female Talent." The Poetics of Gender.
Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 183-207.
Jarratt, Susan C. "Performing Feminisms, Histories, Rhetorics." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1
(Winter 1992): 1-6
Jarratt, Susan C. "Speaking to the Past: Feminist Historiography in Rhetoric." Pre/Text 11.3-4
(Fall/Winter 1990): 189-210.
Jarratt, Susan C. and Lynn Worsham. Ed. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words.
New York: Modern Language Assocation, 1998. 132-152.
Kirsch, Gesa E., Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P,
Sheridan-Rabideau, eds. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003.
Lunsford, Andrea A. Ed. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh:
U Pittsburgh P, 1995. 203-26.
Rosenfelt, Deborah S. "Crossing Boundaries: Thinking Globally and Teaching Locally about
Women's Lives." Women's Studies Quarterly 3-4 (1998): 4-16.
Schell, Eileen E. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and
Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook, 1998.

Posted by jlwingar at 07:49 PM | Comments (1)

Project proposals

Project proposals should describe what you intend to do; why you feel it's worth your while to do it; how you will do it; and (if needed) how it constitutes historical work in composition studies. Please keep your proposal as succinct as possible, but do describe your project concretely. Describe, too, any concerns you have about the project. You'll probably benefit from generating a list of possible research questions, if you can. Once you get into the research, you'll be able to revise this list, using the process of revising as a way of clarifying for yourself what you're doing and why. Everything in this proposal is tentative, intended to get you started and get you focused. The proposal is not the product of having figured everything out; rather, writing the proposal is a way of forcing yourself to begin the figuring.

The proposal should candidly assess how much work you will need to do for each portion of the project. By next week, I'm wanting these projects to have become realistic. In the proposal stage, projects are pretty ambitious. I want that ambition to be tempered by realism in February, not May. Your proposal should outline your ambition; calculate the amount of elbow grease needed to accomplish it; and tell me what parts of the project you've already done (see, for example, my exchange with Jen) and what you would still have to do. Then we'll figure out how to make it a realistic ambition; see, for example, my exchange with Chris.

Please be specific about the methods you will use to accomplish your ambition, and also include a preliminary bibliography of sources that you intend to consult. Remember to code the italics for titles!

Call me (between 9 and 9) if you want to discuss possibilities & problems; god knows I'm here! (Except for Wed. afternoon, when I'll be getting a m-a-s-s-a-g-e. . . .) I'm well enough to do phone calls, and I'd be delighted to talk with you. On second thought, the phoning idea isn't going to work as well as I'd hoped. My resident cop is just too efficient. Last night he interrupted a conversation with Jen to tell me I looked too tired to continue, and afterwards he wouldn't let me talk to Carolyn! The up side of this update, though, is that I get to see my doctor this week (2/9) instead of next week (2/16), and I'm confident he's going to clear me for returning to campus next week. And maybe he'll tell the cop to ease off a bit.

Due 2/10. Post to the blog. Categorize under your name and "Projects." If you have a good draft on 2/10, you'll have an opportunity to revise it before I grade it on 2/13.

Projects timetable

Posted by senioritis at 07:27 PM | Comments (2)

project proposal, take 2

i propose as my broad topic the history of collaborative writing as a part of the 1st-year-sequence (which here is 2 years but at most places isn't) of composition curricula.

questions that inspire this project are as follows: when and why did collaboration become a standard part of the curriculum at SU? does that development correlate with a field-wide interest in collaborative writing? does the field have a wide interest in collaborative writing, or are there just pockets of interest in the topic? what are the major justifications for assigning collaborative writing projects, and what are the major arguments against the practice?

more specifically, i propose to dig in the SU archives (as per this discussion's hints) to see what evidence of the assignment and completion of collaborative writing products appears, in addition to scouring both the suggested bibliographies in becky's amazing hard drive and the wonderful hint-list that is comp-pile for contextualization.

my method will thus be primarily archival in nature, using both primary (examples of student work, syllabi, course/program goals?) and secondary (scholarly publications) sources.

my methodological assumptions will be that what appears repeatedly in field scholarship is indicative of major concerns among field-members, and that although i might not find a single answer to "why" questions about the popularity & value of collaborative writing, i will get a better picture by hearing from different speakers than i have right now, when i'm working primarily from my own experience.

my scope might narrow to a specific time period as i begin to work with sources, but i don't want to specify before i learn more about what's out there to work with.

my tentative bibliography includes:

Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" College English 46.7 (November 1984): 635-52.

Day, Kami, and Michele Eodice. (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2001.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Leonard, James S., Laura Brady, and Robert Murray. "Collaborative Writing: A Browser's Bibliography." Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing. Ed. James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray Davis, and Jeanette Harris. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1994. 229-250.
*& other articles in this collection*

Lunsford, Andrea A., and Lisa Ede. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.

Posted by ttobryan at 04:55 PM | Comments (1)

Master Tropes for Authoring a Discipline

In Maureen Goggin's Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition there is a distinct effort by Goggin to mediate between Metaphor and Metonymy. On the one hand, she investigates how a particular editorial decision in a journal functions as a metaphor that "tells us what images to look for in our culturally encoded experience in order to determine how we should feelabout the thing represented" (White 91). She also works to "stress the similarities among the elements" of the various journals as she tries to demonstrate a "formal terminological system for describing [Rhetoric and Composition's] objects" (White 96, 95). Her project is to demonstrate that the editorial choices made show consistent and cohesive trends toward disciplinarity.

However, Goggin is also struggling to account for what White calls the figurative discourse of fields that have not yet defined themselves as disciplines (White 95). Since she is writing a progress narrative and sees disciplinarity of Rhetoric and Composition as a recent development (dating to about 1980 when self-reflexive scholarly articles start appearing), Goggin is necessarily bound to a Romantic emplotment. However, she works to complicate the scholarly work represented in these journals as she stresses the differences or disparities in her findings. It is here (in her studies of geographical regions, gender, rank, etc, that mark the contributions to the journals) that Goggin adopts a metonymic trope.

I would further posit that the Mode of Ideological Implication (if we are to follow White's graphic) is not the expected Anarchist as derived from Romantic emplotment and Ideographic explanation. Rather, it is a Conservative ideology that informs Goggin's work as she is trying to pin down the structures that turn Rhetoric and Composition into an institutional discipline. As White put it, "[A]ll original characterizations of anything must utilize both metaphor and metonym in order to 'fix' it as something about which we can meaningfully discourse" (96).

Posted by trobryan at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2005

clo Project interests revisited

My primary interest in this class is the issue of how we understand the methodologies of other disciplines from which comp research methods are borrowed, and if/how those understandings do or don't lead to an organized way of doing and evaluating the research that results.

Our earliest reading and discussion addresses the question of how research is done in comp, and two things are clear from that opening:
1) The framework within which research is conducted can be organically developed within the discipline or adapted from the accepted approaches to problems in other disciplines, and
2) logically, the strongest approach to research includes a thorough understanding of the field in which data resides combined with a rich research programme: a fully articulated theory, coherent and usable methodology, and a range of appropriate methods.

Among the project topics suggested for this course, the one that corresponds most closely to my interest is:

"Analyzing and synthesizing the methods and methodologies of selected composition historians. In addition to textual analysis, this might (in the case of living historians) involve conducting interviews."

In answer to Becky's question about how this would be historical, rather than merely (!) methodological, here's one possibility:

I was thinking that a combination of timeline and textual analysis might yield some interesting information. Iow, some number of composition studies would be coded for descriptions of method, methodology, and underlying assumptions, as well as for citations of methodological antecedents,

then sorted by authorial disciplinary training, writing/publication dates, and perhaps theoretical stances. The goal would be to look for trends in methodological choices (including methods):
Would the disciplinary antecedents of those methods and methodologies, if any, shift over time?
Would the theoretical/narrative explanations that might constitute epistemological justifications of the methodologies be altered as critiques of certain disciplines, theories, and methodologies make them less attractive as "proof"?.

I'm thinking of coding only certain portions of the texts - say, prefatory/introductory kinds of remarks, and sections that specifically discuss methods, rather than whole texts, because of the time constraints in a 1 semester course.

As for the list of works to be analyzed, I could look at only a few authors who are considered seminal or prototypical in the field (or some other subset - say, first and last books by a few authors who wrote about composition over a long span of time), or at those published in a specific discipline related journal, as a test of the project's viability and value.

clo

Posted by clostran at 06:34 PM | Comments (6)

Possible Project

I'm particularly interested in why comp seizes on literacy ethnographies as a favorite form of qualitative research. I think I'd like to look at the ethnographic studies getting the most play in comp and :
1) Analyze the methods being used
2) Weigh in on why these particular methods appeal to compositionists
3) Measure the methods against the criteria for rigorous qualitative research (Sociology) and ethical qualitative research (Feminism)
4) Opine on what these method choices do for promoting professionalism in the field, which would seem to include investigating profitable uses of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods.

I think it could also be insightful to do all of the above, but as a survey of articles from our major journals (CCC, CE, JAC, Rhet Rev, Research and the Teaching of Eng...) to get a sense of what the discipline does (or doesn't do) with qualitative research, what forms of qualitative methods get used most often, and again, importantly, how the use of these methods shape disciplinary reputation within the academy and in political forums on language and literacy.

Posted by dwinslow at 05:24 PM | Comments (5)

Tracing Historical Narratives

I'm currently interested in analyzing how the stories of the creation of modern composition programs are narrated and comparing it with the rise of Communication Studies programs (focusing particularly on Speech Comm because that is where rhetoric is generally taught). I would likely use Connors, Berlin, and Crowley as representative examples of how the history of Comp is told, and am open to other suggentions regarding seminal historical work in the field. However, I will need to do some investigating to find comparable examples in Speech Comm.

My methods will be textual and rhetorical analyses of secondary sources. I'm interested in the events that have been plotted, how they are framed, and what that suggests about our approach to the current status of Composition/Rhetoric. I plan to use White's tropes, particularly metaphor and metonymy at this point, to explore the various ways the histories are told, which will hopefully lead toward a greater understanding of how these two offshoots of English Departments work through similar issues as they seek to define themselves within the university.

(I feel like I've just defined a dissertation, so a little help at narrowing would be greatly appreciated) :o)

Posted by trobryan at 05:18 PM | Comments (2)

Initial project thoughts...

I found my post, Beck! I'm under "possible projects." I e-mailed you this and now I'm going back around to try and figure out how to post and catagorized....I guess I've been mainly "commenting" and not "posting."

I'm catching on, albeit slowly. Sorry about the ineptness.

Posted by dwinslow at 04:59 PM | Comments (2)

Project

Hi Becky,
I was wondering what kind proposal you are looking for. Should I state how I am going to conduct my research? Originally I wanted to create a bibliography concerning the composition history in Spanglish. I am certain that although there are many titles that refer to composition and Spanish, those on Spanglish number few. Is there a model for what you what like to see on the 10th? Thanks, and feel better!

Posted by dvaldesd at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)

The Resistant Writer

Payne, Charles. The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.

author's purpose/goal: to construct a history of comp as a discipline that is more microscopic in its approach; critical of previous comp histories, particularly Berlin's, and their attempts to chronicle comp's history by making broad generalizations about social factors and their influences on the direction of writing instruction; this work is in response to "historians who were surveying the field of composition more broadly" (23).

methodology: archival work

methods: focuses on the works and writings of Edward Tyrrel Channing and Adams Sherman Hill, 3rh and 5th Boylston Professors at Harvard (1819-51 and 1876-1904 respectively); both have been portrayed as villians who worked toward policing public discourse; in other words, Channing and Hill sought to maintain the exclusionary practices that ensure that would "enable students to resist the enfeebling and overwhelming onsluaghts of a culture" (xii)

Posted by emnorris at 09:54 AM | Comments (1)

Bewildered by blogs?

If the design quirks and coding problems of this website haven't already tipped you off, I should tell you that I'm a total blog newbie. I've been reading them for less than a year and blogging for all of two months. So I can answer a few questions but by no means all of them. If you're wanting a better understanding of blogs, these sources may be useful:

1. Blood, Rebecca. "Weblogs: A History and Perspective." Weblog entry. Rebecca's Pocket. 7 Sept. 2000.
   
2. Brooke, Collin G. "Plain Ketchup." Weblog entry. Collin vs. Blog. 30 Sept. 2004.
   
3. Hourihan, Meg. "What We're Doing When We Blog." Weblog entry. Megnut. O'Reilly Network 2002.
   
4. Jerz, Dennis. "The Blogosphere: What's in It for Me? (An Introduction)." 2 Apr. 2004.
   
5. McClellan, Jim. "Inside the Ivory Tower." Guardian [UK] 23 Sept. 2004.
   
6. Richardson, Will. "Blogging and RSS—The 'What's It?' and 'How To' of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators." Information Today 11.1 (Jan./Feb. 2004).
   
7. "Weblog." Wikipedia.
   
8. Winer, Dave. "The History of Weblogs." Weblogs.com News. 2002.
   
9. Young, Julie. "Getting the Most Out of Your Weblog." Weblog entry, 13 Jan. 2004.
   

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

Reading the blog

Some blogs (such as Drudge, which is actually a kind of proto-blog) don't provide an option for readers' comments. Others (such as Atrios) do (though he took his Comments function down for awhile when his readers got too abusively rowdy), but many people read only the entries and not all the comments. For a class blog (such as Honorable Mention), however, reading the comments is often just as important as reading the entries, because answers, information, and perspectives appear in those comments. So as you browse entries, browse the comments, too.

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

Posting to the blog

Here are some very fine blog directions provided by the Inestimable Madeline to my 109 students last semester; I shamelessly patchwrite from them here:

There are two sites involved in this blogging business. The first is the actual blog itself, where you go to read posts. (You've already been there; otherwise, you wouldn't be reading this!) The second site is the one where you go to create your own posts.

1. Click "create entry."
   
2. Enter text in "entry body." Enter a title for the post. Ignore the "extended entry" and "excerpt" fields.
   
3. Choose an appropriate category for your post.
   
4. Enter the text for your post.
   
5. Go to the bottom of the page and under "post status" select "publish."
   
6. Click the dialog box for "accept trackback pings."
   
7. Click "Save." Now your entry exists. You have now posted to the blog!!
   

A few notes: it is always safe to type your entry in Word (and save it!!) and then copy/paste it into the "entry body" field. This way, if you misnavigate or accidentally close the browser window before you've published/saved the post, you can recover your work.

Also, if you "view blog" and you don't see your post, you can log back in and "rebuild files," which simply refreshes all new posts and changes, etc. You shouldn't have to do this, but we're finding that once in a while a post fails to show up immediately unless you tell it to rebuild.

This is the bare bones of entry posting. If you want to create links or embellish the text in your post, you can use HTML tags in the entry body.

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

Posting to the blog, w/ HTML primer

Collin has some good directions on the 711 blog for making entries on a Moveable Type weblog.

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (1)

HTML coding

Our blog client does not, alas, have WYSIWYG options. That means you have to hand-code links (to other websites, for example) and text formatting (such as italics and boldfacing). Lester Faigley has a fairly accessible coding guide on the Longman website, and you may well find that useful.

The main principle you need to remember for HTML coding is that directions must precede the word or words to be linked or formatted; and that you must signal where the coding ends.

Personally, I find it easiest to locate a website that presents text in the way I want mine, and then on the browser menu I choose "view source" and study the way the coding was done. That means I have a profoundly erratic, partial understanding of coding, but it suits my profoundly erratic, partial personality.

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

Using the "extended entry" function

Whenever you create a long post, put the first paragraph in "entry body" and the rest in "extended entry." That way, people can browse the site easily, scrolling down from one post to the next without too much paging down; but they'll also be able to read your entire post. When you put all but the introduction of your post in "extended entry," the site will display only the first part but then offer a link saying "continue reading." As a demonstration, I've done this with the post "Epistemology, Methodology, and Method in Ethnography." (Scroll down to see it; it's a January 21 entry.) Originally it was one long entry that took up two screens. So I clipped the larger portion of it and put it in "extended entry." Now the first paragraph only appears, and then there's a link that says "Continue reading "Epistemology, Methodology, and Method in Ethnography."

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (1)

Choosing categories

Whenever you create a post, be sure to categorize it under your own name, so that later, when somebody thinks, "Where's that wonderful/bewildering post of X's," they can click on X's name and readily find the post.

But also categorize your post under whatever other categories are relevant.

Carolyn appropriately categorized "Epistemology, Methodology, and Method in Ethnography" in the "methods and methodology" category but forgot to categorize it under her own name, as well. (Don't worry, C; I've gone into the site & already made that change.) Now anyone looking for methods & methodology posts will find hers; and anyone looking for Carolyn's posts will also see it.

Remember that to create multiple categories, you must first save a draft of your post, and then under "primary category" you'll see a link to "multiple categories." There you'll be able to choose additional categories; click on the arrow to move them into the right-hand box; save your category choices; and then save your entry again.

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (1)

Multiple categories

Set multiple categories by first creating an entry, giving it a primary category, and saving it. Then under the "Primary Category" dialogue box you'll see a link, "Assign Multiple Categories." Click on that. Two columns will appear: one (on the left) for the possible secondary categories to choose, and one (on the right) for the secondary categories chosen.

To create secondary categories, click on a category in the left-hand window; then click the arrow button that will move it to the right-hand window. Once you've created all the secondary categories you want, click the "save" button at the bottom of the dialogue window. AND THEN, at the bottom of your entry window, click that "save" button.

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (2)

Archives

If you scroll down the page, you'll see "Archives" in the menu in the right-hand margin. If you're looking for an entry that you can't locate through categories, you may be able to locate it chronologically.

Posted by senioritis at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2005

Tentative plans

Very tentative, indeed; but I'm beginning to recover enough that I can project what might turn out to be feasible. Keep your eye on the blog for updates; here's what I have so far:

It's easy to stay home, rest, and recover, secure in the knowledge that Collin's doing an outstanding job of leading class discussion. He and I have talked, and he is expecting to conduct class again this Thursday 2/10.

Meanwhile, you and I will use the blog to develop your projects; it is here that we will work together on them at least until I can return to campus. It is my hope that on Sunday, 2/6, I will be able to work in several short sessions to respond to your project proposals. I will be posting those responses here on the blog, not over email, so you need to check here daily for what's happening. I will categorize my responses under your name so that you can find them easily. And when you respond to my response, please do it on the blog, and please remember to categorize your entry under your name; otherwise, I may miss it. If you feel a need to communicate with me in a confidential way, use email, but expect a slower response; I'm doing very little emailing just now.

Note that your 2/10 assignment includes a statement of methods and a preliminary bibliography for your project. I'm assuming that you're already at work on this, and I'm hoping that my 2/6 response to your initial statement of interests will help move you along. As an experienced academic, I'm at the same time aware that many of you will be working at the last minute to complete this 2/10 assignment. (At the weekly meeting of Academic Procrastinators Anonymous, I begin with "Hi. I'm Becky, and I take on too much work and then put off beginning it.") If you haven't begun the project portion of the 2/10 assignment yet, though, get on it immediately. Completing it at the last minute is fine; starting it at the last minute puts you at a conceptual disadvantage that won't help your development of the project.

The statement of methods + bibliography is 5% of your course grade. You're required to have a good first draft up by 2/10, and as soon as it's up, I'll be responding to it. You'll then have till 2/13 to post a revised version that I will then grade.

I'm now sincerely hoping that I'll be back in class on 2/17. I won't know for sure till I see the doctor on 2/16, though.

Posted by senioritis at 10:18 AM | Comments (2)

February 03, 2005

Initial Thought on my Course Project

I am interested in compiling an annotated bibliography on the ESL Composition History, preferably with an emphasis on methodology and methods. This project might be very revelant to my dissertation topics. As for the methodologies in ESL, my sense is that scholars are employing quantitative and qualitative research methods on a daily basis. Last October, I went to Purdue to attend the Conference on Second Language Composition, and I found out about 80% presenters used empirical research methods. I'll be working on a tentative booklist first to see what's available and then decide the final topic.

Posted by yqin at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)

not today

Sorry, everybody, but I can't be in class today, either. I'm not allowed to work at all, not even from home; just rest. So I'll respond to your project proposals when I can. In the meantime, think about this: 611 is a *history* class, and some of the project proposals didn't sound like historical work. So with some of you I may be raising that issue, and you should be thinking in the meantime about whether/how to reframe them.

Posted by senioritis at 09:34 AM | Comments (4)

Derek's discussion question #2 (for in-class work only)

Please do not respond to this question prior to our 2/3 class meeting. It is posted here for you to read and think about. In class on 2/3, one group will be assigned to respond to this. After that class meeting, you'll be able to comment here as much as you wish.

White delivers us--as historical thinkers--into a pressure cooker: the
dualism between the arts and the sciences. Develop your own way of commenting
on this binary. Do you conceive of similar critical tensions as you have
preliminarily framed your own historical project for CCR611? How so?

Posted by senioritis at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

Jen's discussion question #2 (for in-class work only)

Please do not respond to this question prior to our 2/3 class meeting. It is posted here for you to read and think about. In class on 2/3, one group will be assigned to respond to this. After that class meeting, you'll be able to comment here as much as you wish.

White claims that the aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical forms all intertwine so that there is no clear hierarchy as to which one influences the other, but then he goes on to compare these three sets of four to language tropics (which seemed to represent developmental stages in the introduction). What in White's analysis supports his claim of intertwining influences instead of hierarchical ones? How does this reframe his discussion of language in the introduction?

Posted by senioritis at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

Becky's discussion question #2 (for in-class work only)

Please do not respond to this question prior to our 2/3 class meeting. It is posted here for you to read and think about. In class on 2/3, one group will be assigned to respond to this. After that class meeting, you'll be able to comment here as much as you wish.

How do the textbooks you have used or are using in your composition
teaching resemble (or not) the books that Connors describes in the
middle of 12? How comfortable are you with that resemblance (or lack
thereof)? Why?

Posted by senioritis at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

Jen's discussion question #3 (for in-class work only)

Please do not respond to this question prior to our 2/3 class meeting. It is posted here for you to read and think about. In class on 2/3, one group will be assigned to respond to this. After that class meeting, you'll be able to comment here as much as you wish.

As rhetoricians, it seems as if White is not only giving us a big shot of legitimacy, but also a way to construct our own disciplinary work to account for a "lack of a subject." How might we apply White's analysis of history to work in composition/rhetoric as a field?

Posted by senioritis at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

Assignment and class plans for February 3

PLEASE BE IN THE 009 CLASSROOM FOR OUR CLASS MEETING ON 2/3.

I see my doctor on Wednesday 2/2. It's possible he'll tell me that I can teach on Thursday 2/3. It's also possible he'll tell me to stay home (or not drive, which amounts to the same thing) for awhile longer. With a little help from my friends, I'm hatching a plan for Thursday 2/3 that can have us meeting synchronously, with a somewhat reduced level of frustration—a plan that will be flexible for whether I'm there or not. Check this entry regularly for the gradual unfolding of the Gorgeous Plan.

To prepare for class,

1. Create a blog entry in which you indicate your current thoughts/inclinations about your course project. I've posted a list of a few possibilities. Please post this entry by Tuesday, 2/1, and categorize it under your name and also under "Projects." Aleshia, Ty, and Jen have already posted ideas in the Comments section of the projects overview. You three don't have to do anything beyond that, but you might find it useful to turn those comments, updated, into fresh entries.
   
2. Read Connors, Composition-Rhetoric, introduction (1-22): Becky will summarize & lead class discussion.
   
3. Read White Ch. 1: See preliminary notes. I've also set up some entries on White's vocabulary. Derek will summarize & lead class discussion.
   
4. Read White Ch. 2: See preliminary notes. Jen will summarize & lead class discussion.
   
5. Respond to at least two of the following discussion posts: Derek's Discussion Question #1; Jen's Discussion Question #1; and Becky's Discussion Question #1. Each class member may respond to a discussion post only twice, and each response is limited to 200 words. It is therefore important that you think through your response to a discussion question, since you will be allowed to comment only twice, with a limit of 200 words each time. Please do not introduce tangential topics to the comments section of one of these posts. Use the Comments function to respond to the posts themselves and the problems/issues that they directly address.
   
6. Before and during our 2/3 class, please do not create new posts for tangents, arguments, and speeches. Create these after class is adjourned. Feel free, however, to ask questions and to explain any difficulties you may be having with the discussion questions.
   

1. We'll begin with a discussion of projects.
   
2. Derek will do a brief overview of White Ch. 1; Jen of White Ch. 2; and Becky of Connors' intro, responding to blog comments and raising whatever additional issues and questions they think are worthwhile. These overviews will be of 15 minutes' duration, max.
   
3. I'll do small-group meetings with class members about possible projects.
   
4. While I am conducting proiject meetings, the other groups will be working collaboratively to respond to assigned discussion questions posted by Jen, Derek, and Becky. By the end of class, a representative of each group will enter the group's response to that discussion question, and other group members may then make individual responses, as well.
   

Everybody should feel free to create their own entries regarding the White and Connors texts, and should respond as often and as long as they wish to any blog entry.

Posted by senioritis at 09:29 AM | Comments (2)

February 02, 2005

contextualizing hayden white for compositionists

if anybody else is struggling to connect hayden white to composition (& not just history), here's a JAC article by frank d'angelo that i found helpful. i'm not sure i totally agree with d'angelo, and i don't follow every move he makes either, but having someone else take a stab at explaining what white's up to & then connecting it to things i know & care about makes this easier to take on--gives me a place to put him, as it were. (and, helpfully, d'angelo connects some of the "white...to...burke" (or vice versa) dots i was hoping earlier for help arranging!)

Posted by ttobryan at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

possible project

thinking about...
exploring how to integrate african-american rhetorical traditions in a comp classroom in a way that goes beyond our field's attempt to diversify its pedagogical approaches by merely assigning works authored by folks from marginalized groups

means that...
if we were serious about culture and its role in the teaching of writing, we would have to revisit standards and assessment practices

so...
this project will require a foray into the history of standards and should include a discussion of standards as gate-keepers

Posted by emnorris at 09:47 PM | Comments (1)

Possible Project

Becky,
My knowledge and language of composition is limited so the projects listed above feel out of my reach. However, I have always had a passion for people's stories and love the idea of interviewing. What about a project that puts together (through a series of interviews) the stories of the current faculty in the S.U. CCR program? I think it would also be interesting to include interviews with students and perhaps those who have graduated from the Ph.D. program.
This may or may not contribute to the method/methodology goal.

Two other projects of interest that I have carried over from last semester:
1) the separation between faculty and the "dirty" student body...
2) and a continuation of your work noting the roots of composition history programs closely tied to the history of racism, discrimination and attempted assilimulation.

Which project do you think would be most useful to the goals of this course?
Thanks,
Vanessa

Posted by vwatts at 08:53 AM | Comments (4)