the harness gall

[*I have no idea when I wrote this draft - this is the old, academic style of blogging that I do not want to pursue here anymore.  In the spirit of my previous post, I leave this stub to linger “like graveyard marble sculptures in the weather”*] In the first phase of my summer reading plan I have been reading a few general comp theory texts, including several essays that appear in Cross Talk in Comp.  Among these essays includes Maxine Hairston’s “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing” - here, Hairston argues that “Writing courses, especially required freshman courses, should not be for anything or about anything other than writing itself, and how one uses it to learn and think and communicate” (697).  This is a fair claim, although contestable.  But the real problem Hairston locates is in the move to liberalize the teaching of writing which, according to Hairston, is a “model that puts dogma before diversity, politics before craft, ideology before critical thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before the educational needs of the student … It’s a model that doesn’t take freshman English seriously in its own right but conceives of it as a tool, something to be used” (698). According to Hairston’s view, writing classes should place student writing at the center, and writing teachers should not stray from writing by introducing other texts, topics, themes, etc.  Students’ own experiences should suffice as material for the composition class, Hairston argues.  Thus, she writes,

we can create a culturally inclusive curriculum in our writing classes by focusing on the experiences of our students.  They are our greates multicultural resource, one that is authentic, rich, and truly diverse.  Every student brings to class a picture of the world in his or her mind that is constructed out of his or her cultural background and unique and cmoplex experience.  As writing teachers, we can help students articulate and understand that experience, but we also have the important job of helping everywritier to understand that each of us sees the world through our own particular lens, one shaped by unique experience … In an interactive classroom where students collaborate with other writes, this process of decentering so one can understand the ‘other’ can foster genuine multicultural growth (710).  

How can such “multicultural growth” be anything other than liberal.  Or rather, how can conservative attitudes and perspectives sufficiently admit and legitimize other cultural perspectives, experiences, ambitions while remaining conservative - that is, without the student transforming her own ideology. And furthermore,

 Real diversity emerges from the students themselves and flourishes in the collaborative classroom in which they work together to develop their ideas and test them out on each other.  They can discuss and exmaine their experiences, their assumptions, their values, and their questions.  They can tell their stories to each other in a nurturant writing community.  As they are increasingly exposed to the unique views and experiences of others, they will begin to appreaciate differences and understand the rich tapestry of cultures that their individual stories make up.  But they will also see unified motifs and common human concerns in that tapestry (711). 

Obviously, I have not put many posts up on the blog this summer.  In part, I attribute this slowness to the intensity of adjusting to life with a 3 year old and a (now) 3 month old.  But also, I am once again wondering why I maintain this blog - what is its purpose for me.  Not sure there is too much audience to consider in this equation, however I like to imagine people might be interested in reading the crap I serve up.  The art of blogging is a type of writing that I have not yet mastered - I do not yet feel like the content offered here really represents me - or I have not yet found a style that reflects the identity I imagine myself presenting through this forum.  Maybe this is because I am still working on constructing my academic identity and I want this space to reflect those interests in some way.  I do not know.Another writing genre that intrigues me while frightening me is fiction.  I have written poetry before, not very seriously, semi-regularly though - in spurts anyway.  Otherwise I have had little exposure to/practice in creative writing.  If I could/would write a novel, it would be a novel inspired by Robert Frost’s “Directive” - part of the interest is strictly intellectual in that I wonder what it would be like to write a story that tries to expand a poem while somehow reflecting, borrowing from, or adopting its structure.  Maybe someone has already done this, I don’t know.  From time to time my imagination returns to this project - maybe one day I will find the courage to learn how to write creative fiction.  Probably not this summer, though. 

While I am not quite ready to put up the play-by-play version, here are some key terms that will be guiding my ship of fools  inquiry this summer:

•  ideology
• resistance
• contact zones
• affects
• critical pedagogy
• ethnography
• literacy 

In my recently finalized and submitted MA Essay, “The Ethics of Affects: Theorizing Student Literacy Practices as Shield and Weapon,” I argue, partly, that resistance should be re-conceptualized through the metaphors of shield and weapon.  This realignment opens space for conceptualizing literacy as a mediator between individuals and forces of power in the classroom.  Here is an example that, I think may help illustrate this notion, it comes from bell hooks’ monograph, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

 Sometimes students who want professors to grapple with class differences often simply desire that individuals from less materially privileged backgrounds e given center stage so that an inversion of hierarchical structures takes place, not a disruption.  One semester, a number of lack female students from working-class backgrounds attended a course I taught on African American women writers.  They arrived hoping I would use my professorial power to decenter the voices of privileged white students in nonconstructive ways so that those students would experience what it is like to e an outsider.  Some of these lack students rigidly resisted attempts to involve the others in an engaged pedagogy where space is created for everyone.  Many of the black students feared that learning new terminology or new perspectives would alienate them from familiar social relations.  Since these fears are rarely addressed as part of progressive pedagogical process, students caught in the grip of such anxiety often sit in classes feeling hostile, estranged, refusing to participate.  I often face students who think that in my classes they will “naturally” not feel estranged and that part of this feeling of comfort, or being “at home,” is that they will not have to work as hard as they do in other students.  These students are not expecting to find alternative pedagogy in my classes but merely “rest” from the negative tensions they may feel in the majority of other courses.  It is my job to address these tensions.  (188-9)

Allow me to point out a few key landmarks in this passage: the context of this resistance lies in the tensions between the practice of normalizing bourgeois attitudes, discourses, habits of being and thinking on the one hand, and the attitudes, discourses, habits of being and thinking of working-class students on the other.  Many of the “black female students from working-class backgrounds” who resisted hooks pedagogical methods “feared that learning new terminology or new perspectives would alienate them from familiar social relations” (e.g. working-class Discourses).  And finally, “It is my [hooks’ and y extension our] job to address these tensions” through an attention to literacy practices in conjunction with a pedagogy that works to liberate students.  The ethics of affects is two fold: opening the hidden ways of being and thinking that are bourgeois yet normalized and thus invisible in the classroom; recognizing the important role of affects in ethics and actions in both classroom behavior, and in communicative, linguistic, and other transactions between students and teachers.  Theorizing literacy practices and resistance as shield and weapon allows us to see how resistance situates itself in relation to Discourse practices that mediate language use in the classroom as both a weapon that seeks to transform and a shield that works to protect subjectivities. 

I recently handed my MA essay over to my first reader.  Yesterday I had the post-paper anxiety - this paper makes no sense; I don’t even have a good argument; other people have made these claims better than I can.  Hopefully these are feelings more common to graduate students who are still working their way into the field than to those with more experience in the field…but I suspect, to some degree anyway, that one always has doubts about one’s own writing.  Anyway, I thought I was going to put my work down for a few days, especially since Finnegan is due to arrive Wednesday.  But I was looking over some notes, in particular my annotation on Stephen Yarbrough’s essay “On the Very Idea of Composition: Modes of Persuasion or Phases of Discourse?”  Besides, it has been too long since I have written anything new for the blog.   First off, Yarbrough draws a connection between the classical modes of persuasion and the three phases of discourse, which he draws from the philosophy of Donald Davidson.  From this perspective, Yarbrough writes, “discourse is a unitary process that can be analyzed into (at least) three phases - cognition, ethical apperception, and emotion - that roughly correspond to the classical “proofs” of logos, ethos, and pathos” (491).  This makes a lot of sense to me; the implication of this argument is that one cannot change, for example, the ethical appeal of an argument without, at the same time, changing the rational or emotional appeal.  The three are intimately connected.  Further, language, meaning, emotion, ethics, it would seem, are not social or individual but both at the same time; that is, only in the context of human interaction does the word have meaning, or express emotion, or refer to ethical apperceptions.I am not sure yet if I agree with everything Yarbrough argues here - much more careful thought, and study of other material will have to happen before I can make such a judgment.  Nonetheless, one final passage that I would like to point to closes out the essay, and will close out this post.  Hopefully, I will remember to return to this essay in the near future after I have contextualized myself a bit …

 [There is no such thing as “composition.”]  Discourse is not some thing that can be broken into parts and put together again like a car.  Discourse is an intervention in an ongoing, complex, but normally habitual process.  Writing is more like driving a car than building one, and just as when we enter the freeway from the on-ramp our car’s signals, direction, and speed all simultaneously affect the flow of the traffic, so, too, the cognitive, ethical, and emotional phases of our discourse affect the interactions of those with whom we intercourse - sometimes catastrophically, sometimes not noticeably, sometimes in ways most unexpected.  (509)