Crosswhite: Chapters 5 & 6

Crosswhite, James. The Rhetoric of Reason: Writing and the Attractions of Argument. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Crosswhite is undermining philosophy and putting rhetoric – that ever-evolving, shifting, human hullabaloo – at the foundation of all human interaction and knowledge.

Chapter 5: “Audiences and Arguments”

Crosswhite’s claim is that the audience shapes the argument in every way: it affects the actual claim the claimant makes, the types of proofs the claimant offers, what constitutes as reason or not, etc. An argument cannot exist without an audience. The audience defines the argument: “It is not as if one can construt an argument, and then present it to an audience for evaluation. It is the audience-claimant pair, in conflict, which first creates the need for and the possibility of reason and argument” (137). The claimant is the one who knows who the audience is for his piece. This implied audience is the audience that will be persuaded by the argument.

Crosswhite has two principles in his rhetorical theory of argument evaluation: “audiences are the measures of an argument” (they judge the effectiveness of the argument) and “audiences themselves must be judged” (139). Why? Because audiences always change: “The evaluation of arguments rests on the same shifting, complicated, inconsistent, everyday sense of what is good, what is worthwhile, what is desirable, that human beings have tried to systematize in theories in all the disciplines and professions and spheres of life that lay claim to a rational justification” (139).

For the rest of the chapter, Crosswhite builds on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of the universal audience. He sees the problem inherent in describing what constitutes a universal audience: it is either empty and vague or not really universal at all (141). He skirts around this by making the universal audience a rhetorical idea, something that changes, a feature of an audience that shifts in different circumstances.

Again with Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Crosswhite review the way a universal audience may be constructed: 1. by taking a particular audience and subtracting the elements that make it particular 2. by adding several particular audiences together and discovering their base common elements 3. by imagining an audience over time – past, present, and future (this is considered the most authentically universal audience.) The neat thing is that each of these methods is valid and can lead to completely different universal audiences (145). Crosswhite points out that “what is taken as universal and what is taken as particular often follow lines of power that divide male from female, conquerors from conquered, rich from poor, jailers from prisoners, sane from insane, adults from children, and on and on” (146). This leads us to consider a theory of justice – we must realize that when we create universality, we empower some people and not others. The choices we make we must defend.

Universal audiences are useful because they distinguish between fact (which is universal) and values (which are particular.) There are some values that can be argued as universal, such as human rights, but Crosswhite argues that these values have really transcended into universal facts or truths. He also points out that when seen externally, “almost all facts show themselves to be values,” and therefore universal audiences are really not all that universal – they embody what is generally good than what is generally thought to be as true (151). Universal audiences also prove the relevance of an argument – in order to be convincing to a universal audience, the argument must give every side its say (148).

The universal audience that we create or imagine is not ahistorical or acultural. It’s impossible for us to divorce our own limitations of locality out of the audiences we create. However, we can remove some of that locality when we critique other writers’ arguments, because then we can take the external viewpoint and carry the argument further than the author originally could or intended to.

Since we cannot rely on our own minds and senses to create the perfect universal audience, we must defer to the undefined universal audience – the audience that appears when it critiques our vision of a universal audience: “an audience evaluates our reasoning in ways we could not have forseen – but which we nevertheless recognize as legitimate” (152). This “undefined universal audience is both unforseeable and unanticipated – something we both know and don’t know” (153).

I found this fascinating: Crosswhite is talking about the lists we see everywhere, that go along the lines of “everyone, regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, place of origin, etc.” He points out that “the ‘etc.’ is universality’s way of asserting itself in theorizing which has for the most part denied it a place. There is no final list of identity predicates, yet the moral imperative of recognition (its universality) demands that we add the ‘etc.’, taht we not exclude any identity that might deserve ‘recognition’” (158).

Crosswhite undermines logic as the foundation of sound reasoning. Logic is either right or wrong – possible or impossible. Something cannot be true and false at the same time in logic. But does the world work in such binaries? “Pefectly logical minds are not limited by memory, attention, or time” (161). Do real people engaged in conflect have that limitless luxury? No. Crosswhite suggests that rhetoric – its ever-shifting humanness – is the foundation of sound reasoning. Rhetoric recognizes that a truth at one time may not be a truth another time – or that one truth works for one construction of an audience but not for another. Rhetoric can handle inconsistencies (humanness) in ways in which logic cannot. Rhetoric understands that the outside forces of time and distractions sometimes interfere with the clear, cold sanity of logic. Rhetoric also recognizes that language cannot be easily translated into abstract, logical symbols – that there is implicit meaning in the language that forms our arguments that is lost when it is reduced to its commonest denominator.

His summary of this logic/rhetoric point: “My point is that the universal audience of logic is one audience among others. Its judgments will sometimes conflict with the judgments of other paragon audiences. One of the purposes of a rhetoric of reason is to describe these ideal audiences and to show how they articulate certain ideasl of rationality and what it means to be human” (164).

Chapter 6: Being Unreasonable: A Rhetoric of Fallacies

Crosswhite continues his critique of logic as the foundation of sound argumentation by showing how sometimes “fallacies” may be valid ways to construct arguments. By putting rhetoric – not logic – at the foundation, students may learn that using such “fallacies” is a rhetorical choice that works in some circumstances with some audiences. Also, they can learn, if they choose to use a fallacy, why others might be able to claim that their argument is unreasonable.

On the difference between logic and argument: “Written reasoning is not typically an attempt to construct a proof” – arguments are pursued not for the sake of finding what is logically true, but for suading an audience towards what is good and necessary (166). Also, arguments are not either/or pursuits: “arguments can be better or worse, stronger or weaker, even more or less valid. It’s all a matter of degree” (169 emphasis added.) The proof of a valid argument is not its logical soundness but rather how it has affected the audience it was addressed to.

Look at this move he makes – “Whether or not one speaks logically will be decided by how effective one’s speech is with this audience. This means that the distinction between philosophy and rhetoric is itself a rhetorical one, and that philosophy is a special branch of rhetoric” (170). Rhetoric can enliven and make philosophy grounded in human reality again.

Crosswhite develops a rhetoric of fallacies with three well-known falllacies: ad baculum (use of threat influencing the outcome of an argument), equivocation (ambiguity in making one thing equal something else that is not quite it), and composition and division (the parts equal the sum or the sum equals the parts.) He shows how each of these fallacies can be used to make an essential and valid argument.

Crosswhite points out that argument “is dependent on ambiguity” – if there was no ambiguity – no contested, different values – there would be just facts, and how can you argue with universal facts? (183)

I think he ends and sums up these two chapters powerfully in his last two paragraphs of Chapter 6 on pages 186 and 187. I suggest reading and thinking about those in full. Here’s part of it – his purpose in creating this rhetoric of reason – how can a theory of argumentation influence the world? Why do we want to teach our students to argue?: “To practice argumentation is not to assume that there is in some already established sense a common human nature to which one is appealing. It is rather a practice of hope, an agreement to go on reasoning with people who are different from oneself. This is tantamount to acting on a desire to create something in common, in order to live together in a mutually beneficial way” (186).

College English Special Issue

Happy Thanksgiving! As I was reading Trimbur’s article in this special July 2006 issue of College English (“Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English”), I compared his description of the “systematic forgetting of the multiple languages spoken and written in North America” to the similar systematic forgetting of the multiple origins of people in North America on Thanksgiving Day (577). As I sat down for Thanksgiving dinner in Westborough, Massachusetts – just a stone’s throw away from Plymouth Rock, really, compared to people who live in L.A. – I thought, why am I celebrating this handful of English Pilgrim settlers? What is their connection to me? I know I’ve appropriated a meaning of Thanksgiving of my own on top of that – a day to give thanks for the blessings of family, friends, and life – but why these chosen Mayflower few? Isn’t our collective American history larger than that?

Anyway – here were some of my thoughts about the special College English issue. I’m leading discussion on Tuesday, so check out what I’m thinking and add your thoughts so we can have a good conversation for the first 1/3 of class (check out Eileen’s schedule – the day’s jam packed!)

1. Real neat connections in a lot of the articles, but especially Trimbur, with how the development of the modern American university created the English-only character in higher education that exists today. Languages other than English were removed from instruction to their own departments to be objects of study. Can that be reversed? I suppose that’s my question throughout these articles – can the university become a place where multiple languages are spoken? Can the institution handle that? What would have to change? And how could it happen?

2. Composition, at least as I’ve seen it in the histories we’ve read, is an uniquely American discipline and field, one that was founded in “proper English” instruction at Harvard and elsewhere in the late 1800s. English has been composition’s gig for almost 120 years. If you look back at the kinds of articles that were written in the past few decades, they’ve often taken up decidedly English topics, such as the implications of teaching English grammar and questions of integrating Black English into the curriculum. How would our field change if we saw the international and the L1, L2, and so on student as an intergal part of our pedagogy and theory? Would it be a more accurate reflection of the world we and our students must live in – an increasingly gloablized world, where we must know how to negotiate across boundaries of language and history in order to communicate? What will be the focus, then, of composition? Horner mentions this train of thought too – will composition cross borders – will other scholars in other nations take it up as a focus of study? (572)

3. What do you think of Smitherman’s 1987 proposal (cited in Trimbur), calling for “a national public policy on langauge that would (1) teach standard edited English as the language of wider communication, (2) recognize the legitimacy of nonmainstream languages and dialects and promote mother tongues, along with English, as the medium of instruction, and (3) promote the learning of one or more additional languages, such as Spanish or other relevant languages” (586).

4. Language isn’t just a bunch of words strung together. It is a living history of a person’s culture. How, then, can non-bilingual students go about adopting the history that comes with a language? Where can they adopt these languages?

5. Horner: “Language, literacy, and citizenship are viewed as interdependent: to be literate is to know the language, and to know the langauge is requisite to citizenship” (570). What are the citizens we are forming in composition? What is the language of this citizenry? How can we teach it to our students?

6. Matsuda discusses how the containment of international and L2 students in ESL classrooms has led to “the myth of lingusitic homogeneity”  in our composition classrooms. He argues that that containment is preferred by some international students, who feel they get more one-on-one attention in a more supportive environment. Is that the best way to have both international/L2 students and native English speakers learn how to communicate in this increasingly complex world? Should we move to an inclusive model, like the one being used in public schools to integrate special education students into regular education classrooms? Can the learning needs of international students and native speakers be met in a “regular” comp classroom? What kind of teacher could handle that? I’m reminded in this article about how much time it takes to acquire the discourse practices of a second language – and I think back to TA orientation at Syracuse. Remember how the new international TAs came five days early to practice their English – how they were taped and evaluated? What do you think?

7. Canagarajahwrites argues that the researcher of second language writers should, ideally, be a speaker in both (or all) the langauges of his or her subjects. As burgeoning compositionists, we might be those researchers some day. How do we go about acquiring these languages? Why, if we (as Matsuda suggests) are going to encounter more and more L2 writers in our classrooms, are we not required to take a language as part of our coursework? Does that put us at a disadvantage? Shouldn’t we – a field that centers itself on the importance of effective communication in the globalized world – of all people know languages other than English?

 Tell me what interests you -

Dumpster Duty

We’ve had a dumpster at the house for ten days now – and it’s finally filled. I’ve spent every waking moment cleaning and sorting and reducing and donating: it is incredible how much stuff is accumulated over twenty-five years in a house where six kids grow up. Incredibly amazing.

And it’s equally how amazing it feels to finally start feeling like you’re living in a lighter house – a joyful, happy house, one that’s full of the life of two little boys instead of sickness. I think that feeling is spreading in the house, and it’s giving everyone a bit of hope in starting over. We’re tearing down the old treehouse – with plans to build a new, better one in the summer. We’re clearing out dusty trinkets for room for new pictures of the new additions to the family. What a great feeling.

My sister-in-law Sarah started a “Throw away 100 things” campaign, which has infected the rest of the siblings. The one catch is that no one can bring themselves to throw away something with a face on it. It’s too much like betraying the Velveteen Rabbit: a face implies an identity, an identity implies feelings and a history and an investment that you can’t deny, no matter how ratty or faded the fabric. It even saved a paper maiche rooster from the dumpster (I deemed it trash – I was overruled.) But that’s OK – I value the principle that saves things with a face.

Blogging Bolter

I’m sure he would be pleased.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. 2nd ed. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.

Chapter 6: “Refashioned Dialogues: The Reading Path”

In this chapter, Bolter examines the evolution of the written text from the first transcribed oral stories to hypertexted Web pages by focusing on three dialogues: the dialogue between the reader and the writer, the dialogue between vebal and audiovisual modes of representation, and the dialogue among various new and old media forms” (117). He explains how the shift to digital writing is just another change in a history of progressively clarifying the meaning of texts through visual cues (like paragraphing and indexing.) Bolter also argues that educators can use the flexibility of hypertext to introduce their students to different ways of presenting and acquiring knowledge.

Quotable Quotes & Notable Notes:

“Both the home page and the gift site depend for their rhetorical effect on teh cultural belief in the democratization of the Web: that the Web allows individuals not only to represent themselves in words and images, but also to publish these representations to an audience of millions at no expense” (119). I usually don’t think of my “web presence” as an exercise of my freedom in a democracy, but it is. Before the advent of the Web, I couldn’t have made my ideas known to such a large audience without some capital – cultural, monetary, and otherwise.

Bolter mentions how the transformation of more academic/nonfiction texts on the Web as hypertexts has also led to a revolution of advertising – seen a pop-up lately? (118) Now, advertising comes to us – corporations can solicit our attention when we’re doing work, not just when we are sitting on the couch watching the Sunday football game.

“MOOs and chat rooms seem well-suited to exploring the issue of postmodern identity; perhaps because the student must construct her identity solely through her words” (116). Because I am translating my thoughts to a “permanent” text, hypertext that it is, I feel a hesitancy in expressing my ideas that I do not feel in casual conversation. There is expectancy here. I must say something.

Here comes Ong!: “If hypertext could remediate the voice of the text, it might suggest a return to oral forms, such as the dialogue” (112). Is speaking closer to what we really think than writing? I guess that’s the question…

“Hyperlinking could alter the form of the argument” (112).  I think this is a crucial thing to consider – to teach our students to consider. How does the actual form – the structure of an argument change how it is perceived? And how does how an argument is perceived change how the audience receives/believes it?

“But we should also remember that the original text was without book or scene divisions, paragraphing, indices, punctuation, or even word division. All these conventions of modern printing are significant organizational intrusions into the original work. They make it easier to read Sophocles, but they change the Sophocles that we read. We would find it difficult to read an English manuscript of the 14th century, or even an early printed book, beacuse of the visual conventions. Transferring earlier texts to digital form will be just another in teh series of such transitions” (111) I read this out loud to my brother-in-law as I read it because it struck me so much – he added that the Bible is the same way: the verses, the chapters were put there long after it was written, and those “invisible” separations have transformed into very visual ones that change the way the Bible is read, learned, and interpreted.

“The electronic writer still has available the techniques of hierarchalical organization from the technology of print, but she may choose to embed hierarchical structures within larger networks, or networks within hierarchies. The line, the tree, and the network all become visible structures at her and her reader’s disposal” (106).

“All scholarly research is expected to culminate in writing. The historian or scholar does research not for its own sake, but in order to have something to write, and the same can be said of many of the social and even the hard sciences. In order to be taken seriously, both scholarly and scientific writing must be nonfiction in a hierarchical-linear form (105).

601 Project Notes

I’m doing my 601 project on the writing major. I’m interested in how composition can move from a field centered around the first-year course to one that encompasses a much broader scope of knowledge, theory, and practice. I also want to know how majors get proposed and conceptualized. In addition, I want to see how writing is conceived as a discipline – what do writing majors need to know? What common ties are there between various writing major programs? What are the differences?
And so we begin -
Bloom, Lynn Z., Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White, eds. Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP: 2003.
This is a collection of 24 articles that were originally presentations at the Conference on Composition Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future taht was held at Miami University of Ohio from October 5-7, 2001. Some of them deal specifically with the writing major, an emerging field of study for undergraduates across the country.

Miller, Susan. “Why Composition Studies Disappeared.” pg48-56
Miller imagines a new sort of writing studies/compostition that is focused on the students, not on the ethos of the instructors and that no long privileges the “writing life” as it is traditionally conceived:
“Writing studies would still contain required and elective writing instruction so long as graduate programs need support and a larger community thinks that the content of this instruction is expertise about how to write. However, insofar as it directs attention to practices rather than an interiorized writing life, it will also respond to an otherwise obvious, happily fragmented, social emphasis on production. We have many examples of that emphasis, even if we rarely generalize from them to reinforce our own practices. Instances include the eager, widespread composition of Web pages and restriction of that form of writing in prisons; the music taples, home videos, and CDs that students regularly turn out for each other and their own sense of craft; the emerging young artists who focus on novel ways of making images and texts as least as energetically as they attend to the representations these experiments create; and the myriad public writing groups across the country turning out fiction, autobiography, memoirs, family history, and children’s stories.
These and many other elected alternatives to santified composition multiply across both publicized and self-contained sites of production. They suggest that in a client-based New University, we have increasing difficulty in maintaining the ethos that knows better than students the appropriate uses of writing and that defines them as ancillary to personal, not social, development. That University, finally noticing the community – often the slums – around it, places cooperation at stake as much as it does canons. The liberal arts certainly thrive but now as “the liberal arts,” in quotation marks, as reference to but one cultural heritage among others that it is increasingly crucial to study. Teachers turning to writing studies mediate among such mixtures of academic, professional, and institutional desires. They and their students emphasize craft, not personal relationships. They devise family literacy centers and open community writing centers – not for remediation but to offer sites that acknowledge the mutual enrichment that results from ordinary literate habits: storytelling, senior reading groups, and Cicero for executives. Writing studies, that is, praises a satisfying completion of texts and sharing them, not just vision as revision” (54-55).
I like how Miller is turning writing outward – students in a writing major, who take multiple classes, will be able to study the actual, real writing that people do on a day to day basis, uplifting it as worthy of study. What can we learn about our neighbors and our communities and our world if we look at the writing practice that happens everyday as good in itself instead of problemitizing it?

Ferris, Christine. “No Discipline?” 57-61
Composition does not have “an exclusive claim on students’ literacy instruction. Just as we would now question any one theoretical model for organizing our knowledge of writing, so should it be difficult to comfort ourselves with any seamless narrative of theoretical coming-of-age, disciplinary success, or inalienable rights” (58). What does composition offer students when it comes to their writing that they cannot get in other disciplines? Perhaps this is the major point – what is unique about composition that students just can’t pick up elsewhere?

Spellmeyer, Kurt. “Education for Irrelevance?” 78-87.
“I have long believed that writing courses offer the one place in entire curriculum where issues like this [technology, globalization, environment] might be addressed in the synthetic way they require. To reimagine our undergraduate courses along these lines – as we have already done for some time now at my institution – is to place composition, of all things, at the center of the undergraduate experience. In economics, students learn about markets; in biology class, they learn about natural systems; in political science, they learn about world politics. In their writing classes, they might have the chance to connnect market forces with ecology, and both of these with global politics, and this is likely to make the lowly writing course the most-coherent educational experience the students will ever get” (86). Would this interdisciplinary frame work for a writing major? Or is composition a discipline itself?
“Such changes [an interdisciplinary connection in composition] imply a reversal of the logic now prevailing in the university, a logic that dictates that graduate study ought to shape the undergraduate major while assuming that courses for the major are the only courses that matter” (87). Seems like he’s saying that comp is a way of looking at the world, not a field – that undergraduate majors that model themselves after the graduate programs will be focusing on the wrong thing – they should be focusing on forging connections. Spellmeyer is focusing on the first-year course, though – not the undergraduate writing major.

Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. “The Juggler.” 88-94.
Brueggemann comments on the talks that Bishop and Spellmeyer gave: “Both addressed the question: What can composition offer the humanities as a field? Spellmeyer gave us cautionary tales about being in the humanities; Bishop offered hope for teaching at the heart of the humanities” (93). This analysis gives me a better sense of how Bishop and Spellmeyer are talking to each other, and the main question: What does composition as a field offer students?

Cushman, Ellen. “Vertical Writing Programs in Departments of Rhetoric and Writing.” 121-125
An interesting distinction – I wonder what others think of it: “The difference between composition and writing is that writing courses have a vertical curriculum attached to them. If composition is relegated to the remedial, the first-year, the disenfranchised, underemployed, and the exploitive, then writing opens up the possibilities of teaching courses about the literacies that various professional, community, and organizational members practice” (121). I guess that’s why it’s being called a writing major.
Cushman cites Crowley as first coming up with this idea in Composition in the University (pg 262) and something written by James Porter, Particia A. Sullivan, Jeffrey Grabill, Stuart Blythe, and Libby Miles in 2000, when they ask: “What would happen if we reconceived ourselves as ‘writing experts’ working in a public realm instead of ‘composition teachers’ working within the university?” (Cushman 122).
Why aren’t there more vertical writing programs now? Not enough rhet/comp PhDs to fill the job slots (139 PhDs granted in 1997 but 161 jobs available). So, vertical writing programs aren’t staffed enough to do it (122).
Also, “another problem might be that professors already in departments aren’t doing their share, as Young points out, to teach first-year writing, let alone any vertical writing courses” (122). Lots of faculty don’t want to teach writing, so the lower-division courses load up on the compositionists.
“Still another problem that hinders the development of vertical writing programs is that composition is seen by most literature faculty as a contentless curriculum…Professors in traditional English departments often do not value, appreciate, or undertand composition studies; they see the field as empty…Writing courses have no content, the argument goes, and without a content, an area of specialization, we haven’t a professional identity” (123). Cushman also cites a quote from Young, who says that composition will gain credibility in the academy if “the scholarship of teaching and learning is recognized and rewarded as an important contribution to knowledge” (123).
“Writing will be taught in the vertical curriculum by fully enfranchised teachers only if our colleagues in literature understand and appreciate that writing, a practice, is also a knowledge base. A social capital. A profession” (123). The good thing? The number of jobs in comp/rhet is growing, citing the value adminstration places on the teaching of writing.
How could we show that writing is a content area? “If writing professors and instructors teach, write, and publish with community and business partners…many [people and professions] appreciate the knowledge base of skilled writers. Many see writing influencing their chances for success, persuading decision makers, and making a stand. Community literacy projects, service-learning initiatives, business and technical writing all emphasize the connection between universities and communities and offer numerous sites for writing instruction beyond the first-year composition course” (123)
And the kicker: “Isn’t it time for composition and rhetoric scholars to break from English departments to form their own vertical writing programs within their own departments?” That’s what SU did – how many others have done it independently?
Cushman sees “the need for vertical writing programs to be taught in writing departments by fully enfranchised writing professors” because “we can no longer trust literature professors to do the right thing when deciding where composition will be taught and who will teach it” (125). She cites cases where there are lots of writing courses on the books but not enough professors to teach it because tenure lines are filled with literature faculty.

Rhetoric and Ehtnicity Notes

Gilyard, Keith and Vorris Nunley, eds. Rhetoric and Ethnicity. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004.

Williams, Deborah M. “Race, Rhetoric, and Sesame Street: Learning to See Ourselves Reading.” 137-142

I specifically looked at Williams’ piece in this collection, so I’ll offer a short summary of her article and then try to make some connections between the pieces.

Williams is reimagining the typical multicultural literacy course into one that challenges students to think of narratives – both historical ones and their own – as socially constructed, nuanced pieces. She identifies three common American narrative structures and shows how they form the norm for telling an “American” story. Students must look beyond these narrative structures and reject the distant, objective observer stance embraced by academia when reading these histories in order to find what is being silenced in them, because that is where the true story lies.

Her narrative structures: “1. The Story of the Self-made Man   2. The Story of the Lesson Well Learned   3. The Story of Success through Perseverance (or, its variations – the Story of Virtue Rewarded, and the Story of Good Triumphing over Evil).” (138)

She points out how students’ own autobiographical narratives try to fit these classic molds, and, when they don’t, teachers perceive them as unorganized or confusing. Furthermore, these specific “narrative traditions we inherit cause us to see certain events in our lives and the lives of others as inherently worthy of being narrated, while other events are classified as unimportant, irrelevant, meaningless” (141). What if, instead of asking students to write about a meaningful event in their lives, we asked them to write about what happened last Tuesday? What would we get? Would, through writing this exercise, would our students have a better understanding of their underlying beliefs and values than if their raw identity was smothered in some “important event,” like greasy gravy smothering fluffy mashed potatoes? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Anyway, I thought Williams’ model for a multicultural literacy class was MUCH better than the multicultural literacy class I had to take as an undergraduate secondary education student. My professor tookt the Sesame Street approach – I recall the first day, when we had to go around the room and explain our ethnic background. She gave everyone a nod after they said “Italian,” or “Irish,” or “German,” but when my friend Carmen said that his mother was Brazilian and his father was Sicilian, she almost jumped out of her chair and exclaimed, “Why Carmen, that’s beautiful.” That made me mad – and embarrased Carmen. What’s not beautiful about a Scot? Or any other European for that matter?

I think a central question that’s overlooked in multicultural literacy classes is class itself. If class is not addressed, then the story of a person’s history is incomplete.

Overall Thoughts: I thought this was a thought-provoking collection. I was particularly intrigued by Smitherman’s and Powell’s articles. I thought Smitherman’s call for a course in language diversity was an interesting move to make. What would such a course look like? Could you study something as shifting and as diverse as language patterns? In a grammar course at UNH (one of the best courses I’ve ever taken), we looked at the syntatic and grammatical patterns of “Black English” – it was fascinating and it did change my conception of Ebonics, as I began to appreciate the complexity inherent in it.

And then this…”Language is a person’s identity, culture, and history”  (12)

Five things about me that most people don’t know…

1. It is my dream (and has been since I was a little girl) to own a farm. My dad grew up on a corn-wheat-tomato-soybean farm in NW Ohio, and my uncle Eddie had a farm in the rocky hills of the Berkshires. I cherished the visits we made as a family to those two places. I feel real outside. Connected. Now, I won’t have animals on my farm, but I will have a giant vegetable garden and a baseball field with real dugouts and a backstop. And, when I have my farm, I will host an annual Summer Olympics barbeque for everyone – adults, kids, even pets that day. You’re all invited.

2. I like reading Martha Stewart Living magazine. I want to make yummy butterscotch cookies, throw a Thanksgiving feast in a real horse barn, and paint silhouettes on pumpkins just like her.

3. I like maple walnut ice cream. It’s my grandpa’s favorite, so when I was a little kid, I decided it would be my favorite too.

4. Every summer I have a “personal growth and achievement” project. One summer it was reading as many of the “Top 100 books of all time” lists I found. Another one was learning to play the guitar. Another was learning the swimming strokes that preceded the major four (butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and front crawl) used today: the trudgen, double trudgen, Austrailian crawl, etc. And so on…what will this summer be??

5. My two favorite novels are A Separate Peace and How Green Was My Valley. My favorite poem is “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman. My husband and I read all the time. It’s one thing I like so much about him. He’s interested…

Getting back on track…

Kirsch, Gesa E. and Joy S. Ritchie. “Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Illinois: National Council for Teachers of English, 2003.

Kirsch and Ritchie discuss the implications of research grounded in feminist principles and the politics of location. Researchers must be self-reflexive: they must understand how their own histories and values shape their questions, inquiries, and methodologies. Feminist scholars must strive to bridge the gap between the “known” and the “knower,” positioning themselves closer to their subjects so that they might understand how their subjects’ own histories and values influence their contributions to the research. This close collaboration is more complex, rich, and multivocal than the traditional univocal and “objective” research, yet it is also raises difficult ethical questions at times. How does a researcher separate the personal from the non-personal? Is there knowledge that is a-personal? Feminist scholars must understand their positions of power and approach their work with an “ethic of care,” realizing both that their work has social consequences and that it is their responsibility to help change the systems that oppress the “others” they are working with.

Good Quotes/Thoughts

“If our research is centered on a politics of location it demands an extra measure of responsibility and accountability on our part. It requires using research as “praxis” to help those who participate with us in research to understand and change their situation, to help those who have been marginalized to speak for themselves. Under these circumstances, it will not be possible to walk away from the research site or those who live in it. Our research instead will need to extend to theory-generating in a self-reflexive and mutually dialogic context to help researchers and participants challenge and change the conditions that keep oppressive structures in place. Only in this extra measure of “care” can our research truly be ethical.” (542) I was caught by Kirsch and Ritchie’s passion for their “ethic of care.” I like to ask myself (especially during 670 meetings), “What are we doing here? Why are we doing it?” I find this answer to be an inspiring one – one that stirs the revolutionary passions inside of me. I want to know more: what oppressive structures? The university? Or larger than that? How can we show our students the agency created through composition and rhetoric to create this sort of change? I thought the articles on Poland and South Africa in LWP’s class were intriguing examples of this – showing our students how language creates the world they live in, the world that might oppress them, but that to counteract it, to change it, they use language themselves. Language is the Excalibur that everyone can whip out of their pocket. People just need to be told that they have it there, ready to use.

“Multivocal reports also disrupt the smooth research narratives that we have come to know and expect, highlight rather than suppress the problems of representation in our writing, and expose the multiple, shifting, and contradictory subject positions of researchers and participants.” (541) I get that collaboration leads to these complex, interesting texts that approach perspectives not possible in individual research, but what conclusions can you come to? Is there no conclusion? Or a conclusion just for the moment? And how useful is that in creating a theory that people can use to change the power structures they are entrapped in?

“The questions that guide our data collection, the stories we decide to tell or eliminate from our research narratives, the range of conlcusions we suppress or include – all are guided by our own positionality and must be acknowledged.” (540) I thought this was an elegant way to define how the politics of location shape our research. As I read it, I thought, “What demon in my past is leading me to underline and annotate certain parts of this text?”

“[Traditional ethics] also homogenizes differences in contexts and perspectives and fails to take into account the connection between political and moral questions. In general, feminist philosophers disavow traditional rule-governed ethics based on ‘universal’ principles and on unbending rules, because acting from principle entails acting without experience and context, without a politics of location. An ethic of care often comes to different conclusions than an ethic of principle.” (537) I admit I am excited about seeing ethics as multidimensional and shifting. However, something about the subversion of ethics bothers me more than the subversion of positivist science. Is there value to homogenizing differences? Can you create meaning through seeing the similarities instead of focusing on the differences? I know some call that ignoring the differences, but isn’t ignoring the similarities just as problematic? What would our research look like if we did that?

“We argue that composition researchers need to resist the drive to generalize about men and women, that we can learn as much from studying the multiple ways in which both men and women can express themselves, and that composition teachers need to develop pedagogical practices that encourage students to write in a wide variety of discourse forms.” (527) I was thinking about this when we read the feminist rhetoricians in LWP’s class: it is foolish to categorize and distinguish between “men’s” and “women’s” rhetorics. Feminist scholars need to look out for and help all people – white, black, men, women, rich, poor – challenge and overcome the power structures that oppress them. Is there anyone who is not oppressed? Can we complicate our thinking on oppression?