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2006-11-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

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Object of the search: Vladimir Nabokov's teaching philosophy.

Notable and quotable

Connolly, Julian W., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

See Alexander Dolinin in "Nabokov as a Russian Writer" for Nabokov's "transition" from Russian to English literary language. He contends that the two languages were two separate realities for V.N., and that Nabokov treated English "like a beautiful, desired other" but drew sustenance from Russian (55). "It is by maintaining the artistic inferiority of some [of his own] Russian texts that Nabokov justified his idiosyncratic method of rewriting them in English" (51).

See John Burt Foster, Jr.'s "Nabokov and Modernism" 85-100.

Diment, Galya. Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Szeftel is considered to be a model for Nabokov's character Pnin in the novel of the same name. Interesting for Szeftel's parallel Russian, WW II, and immigrant experiences and for sidelights on Cornell, where both Szeftel and Nabokov taught. The biography sheds light on Cornell's lingering anti-semitism. Unlike V.N., Szeftel was not privileged or talented. He came out of the Pale of the Settlement in Russia, suffering the savage anti-Semitism that erupted into genocide during WW II. His mother was killed by the Nazis.

Szeftel was on the committee with Morris Bishop to find a Professor of Russian Literature, but his lomg-term relationship with V.N. was troubled. Morris wrote: "What I want is a man who will suck the students into his classroom by personality and by a creative attidtude toward literature. We have enough footnoters around; if lietrature is to compete with scince, it must be presented as a means to wisdom and as an upbuilder of life. The only person I have in mind is Vladimir Nabokov" (31).

Fink, Hillary L. Bergson and Russian Modernism: 1900-1930. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, c 1999.

Somewhat disappointing; Fink does not treat V.N., who wrote extensively about personal time like Bergson's duree, because he did not "clearly belong" to "Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism,[or] Suprematism" (xiii).

Foster, John Burt. Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1993.

"Nabokov must have discovered Bergson in a Russian setting, perhaps from the Acmeist poets or the formalist critics, both of which were modernist groups with aims paralleing his own. Then, as his Europena side developed, Bergson offered a positive alternative to Freud among early twentieth-century speculative psychologists. If Nabokov vehemently rejects psychoanalytic conceptions of sexuality, the unconscious, the role of muyth, and the very desirability of theory, he strongly endorses Bergson's experience with the lived experience of time, the enriching effects of memory, and the imprtance of creativity. In these three areas he somewhat arbitrarily saw Bergson as nearly identical to Proust, as the philosophical prsychologist whose thought prepared for the Recherche [Proust's masterpiece].
Taken together,Bergson and Flaubert account for Nabokov's polemical neglect of Anglo-American modernism; his own modernism has a markedly Gallic slant (14).

I found despite V.N.'s Cambridge education, as a teacher he had little to do with English literature as such, and nothing to do with English Departments.

Gibian, George and Stephen Jan Parker, eds. The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov: Essays, Studies, Reminiscences, and Stories. Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1984.

Contains the handy essay by Brian Boyd "Nabokov at Cornell," an overview from his biographer of his most important teaching post. "Assuming more difference between Wellesley and Cornell students than was to prove the case he calculated that his new classes could be expected to read three to four hundred pages per week, ten thousand pages in the course of a year"(131).

Also contains a reminiscence by Alison Bishop, widow of Morris Bishop, "Remembering Nabokov." "Just as quick as (Bishop] could, he got him here. Somehow or other, Russian literature joined the Romance Languages Department. I don't quite know why" (216).

Gibian, George and H.W. Tjalsma. Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde, 1900-1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Also does not mention Nabokov, but discusses some of the Russian poets VN. absorbed in his youth.

Nabokov, V. D. V.D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917. Eds. Virgil D. Medlin and Steven L. Parsons. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.

The introduction by Robert Browder gives a biographical sketch of V.N.'s father, the leading candidate for head of a reform government or government in exile of Russia. As a journalist and former parliamentarian, he indignantly denounced the anti-Semitic Beilis case in Kiev from 1911-1913. Memory of this stance gained his his son V.N., wife Vera, and their child Dimitri a place on one of the last Jewish relief ships sailing before the Fall of France to the Germans in WW II. A believer in Constitutional Monarchy, he was killed during an assasination attempt against the Left leader Miliukov by two "former tsarist army officers," who "ended their infamous careers as assistants to the notorious Alfred Rosenberg under the Nazi regime" (8).

Nabokov, V. D. The Provisional Government. Ed. Andrew Field. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1970.

As Richard Pipes says in the introduction, "The Constitutional Democratic Party of which Vladimir Nabokov pere was one of the founders and leaders was the most influential political party in pre-revolutionary Russia" (ix). It was also a tragic failure due to the success of Lenin and an ideologically driven police state in Russia.

Many of V.N. opinions, at least his political ones, seem to have been fixed by the trauma of this event, just as his literary and pedagogical approaches seem to be fixed by his loss of Russia at a particularly brilliant period of its development in thought and art. It took decades for Europe to catch up with Russian innovators like Bahktin, for example. Nabokov was loyal to a body of culture he felt obliged as a writer and a teacher to preserve in exile, even across languages.

2006-11-27T19:41:00.000-08:00

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Bibliographic additions of note to the Vladimir Nabokov project:

Page, Norman. Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

An interesting compendium of critical articles on V.N.

Parker, Stephen Jan. Understanding Vladimir Nabokov. Columbia, South Carolina, Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1987.

Subtle, Vera and Dmitri-approved critical study.

Schuman, Samuel. Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K.Hall & Co., 1979.

Good model of a literature review.

2006-11-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

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"The Pedagogy of Vladimir Nabokov"
Notes for a Literature Review

First, why look at the teaching of Vladimir Nabokov?
What can we find out from it?

Nabokov was not a born teacher; he taught because he had to. He had two obsessions 1) writing and 2) catching and classifying butterflies. As a famous Russian novelist who came to the U.S., he quickly learned to readjust his academic requirements to what he perceived as poorly prepared American students. At his pedagogically most successful, he performed pre-written lectures on literature at Cornell. Rumor claimed his wife Vera was the teacher behind the teacher, and she took over his courses when he became seriously ill at Wellesley in 1948.

We want to know about Nabokov's pedagogy because he was a literary genius. He also came to this country as a stateless immigrant, a trilinguist and a poor man who obtained insecure and badly paid positions in the growing American educational establishment. Despite academic success he was never what he regarded as well-paid for teaching; he had to supplement his salary with income from writing.

He had seen the rise of two police states in Russia and Germany. His response as a writer was to reify individual perception, creativity and memory, the intricacy of "reality" and the freedom of Bergson's "creative evolution in his work.

How did his pedagogy reflect this preoccupation?

For Vladimir Nabokov the brilliant, avante-garde culture of Russia's Silver Age was destroyed in Russia by Lenin's Revolution and the Russian Civil War. His father, a statesman and constitutionalist was murdered in Berlin in 1921. These shocks impelled Nabokov to recreate the Russia of his youth though exacting and artistic nostalgia and to raise Russian literature to new heights of novelistic technique and expression for the exiled Russian intelligensia.

In 1940, he lost that audience when he finally escaped with his wife and son from Nazi-occupied Europe. His wife Vera was Jewish. His brother Sergei died in a concentration camp.

What was his preparation for teaching in America?

Brian Boyd in "Nabokov at Cornell" cites the famous remark by Roman Jakobson at Nabokov's review for a special chair at Harvard in 1956 "Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?"

Nevertheless, Nabokov knew the difference between literary lions and humble instructors. He had written desperately to friends to get a job, any job, to escape from Nazi Germany. England was unwelcoming. In 1939 Mark Aldanov offered V.N. a job at Stanford he could't take, and V.N. "began preparing lectures on Russian literature" (Boyd 121). He and his family arrived in NYC with 100 dollars.

He had been retraining himself to write novels in English. He even wrote the biography of a great Russian writer Nikoloi Gogol in English (He later criticized his handling of the subject.) Unlike the hero of his novel Pnin,he had no difficulty with the language per se, but felt profoundly the loss of his Russian literary language. He also lost his literary reputation in the new country. (Jakobson's remark indicates that he regained a literary reputation in English by 1956.)

Educated by tutors, at a Russian progressive secondary school and Cambridge, Nabokov was prepared to teach French and Russian languages and French, Russian, and European literature.

What did he teach?

He was forced to teach language instruction just as he had tutored private students in Berlin. He considered his speciality to be Russian literature, but his most popular course was Masterpieces of European Fiction.

What did he hope to impart to his students?

At Cornell: "Nabokov would have liked a better paid job in an autonomous Russian Department [...] where he would have no obligation to prepare quite new material in which he was no specialist. All this, though, changed very quickly when he started rereading Bleak House and Madame Bovary and Ulysses with an eye to teaching. He soon surrendered to their enchantment and the idea of putting students under their spell" (Boyd 134). He taught the "Masterpiece" course starting in 1950.

Where did he stand in relation to American scholarship? What kind of research did he do as a lecturer?

Nabokov was not in an English Department; he was part of Cornell's Division of Literature. He had read French and Russian at Cambridge, and felt unprepared in English literature. Critically, he was not out of harmony with historicism or New Criticism, the two dominant theories of the English Departments of the period. He felt obliged to extensively translate the Russian literature he taught in English himself, and became increasingly literal. He published his translation with notes of the ancient Song of Igor's Campaign, of Lermontov's Hero of Our Time (with son Dmitri Nabokov), and most stunningly, the four-volume translation and commentary to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

He did not oppose the notion of a canon of great works; however,many works then accepted as masterpieces were not on his list. Edmund Wilson persuaded him to read Jane Austin for his course; he taught Mansfield Park. Most of his Masterpiece course authors were dead white males.

What were his classroom techniques?

In a CBC interview quoted by Dmitri Nabokov the author said of his lectures: "I was on my own, founding my own tradition, following my own taste, creating my own artistic values and trying to impress my approach to art upon the minds of my students--or at least some of my students. I am responsible for having taught these best children of my time a method of appreciation based on the artistic and scholarly impact of literature" (160)

Are Nabokov's artistic values really transferable? What is meant by literature's "scholarly impact"? Does it still exist, and if so, what is it?

And there are many more questions....

Boyd, Brian. "Nabokov at Cornell." The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov. Eds George Gibian and Stephen Jan ParkerIthaca, NY:Center for International Studies, 1984. 119-144.

Nabokov, Dmitri. "Translating With Nabokov." em>The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov. Eds George Gibian and Stephen Jan ParkerIthaca, NY:Center for International Studies, 1984. 145-177.

2006-11-19T20:26:00.000-08:00

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Origins and early history of College English:

To recap James Berlin in Rhetoric and Reality, the formation of the National Council of Teachers of English in 1911 was a reaction to the MLA's lack of concern with teaching, and in protest against "college domination of the high school curriculum" through "Uniform Reading Lists" (33)

"Its attention to college teaching [...] led to a college edition of English Journal in 1928, a publication that became College English in 1939. The committment of English Journal to the undergraduate curriculum makes it the most reliable source on information on the thought guiding the teaching of English--both literature and composition--in American colleges in the early years of the century" (33).

It is reasonable to see chapters 3 and 4 (32-91)in Berlin as reflecting both the history of the discipline and the history of College English, one of his important sources.

First Issue: The "advisors' of the first issue are either from prestigious (Yale, Princeton) or teaching and land grant colleges. It was printed, fitting, by the University of Chicago press.

Of the issues's articles, two are on Thomas Wolfe--his posthumous novel had just come out--one is on freshman English (which see), one is on reading literature, several articles are on points of grammar, and two are on pedagogical practices. An English forum, news & notes, and long and short reviews are also included.

Note: College English is one of many NCTE publications including the current English Journal. College English has appeared without uninterruptedly since 1939.

2006-11-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

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A brief, partial history of College English 1960-95 through Paul Wadden's "Reading the texts that read the profession: ads for literature texts in College English, 1960-1995." College Literature (West Chester Univ., PA) (26:3) [Fall 1999], p. 59-81. Literature Online.

College English constitutes "a historically prominent record of literary studies in North America over most of the present century [...] in the three-and-a-half-decade period that I cover here, College English was probably the most widely thumbed journal in the profession. In 1960, as its circulation appraoched 10,000, the new editor, James Miller, observed that the journal was 'undoubtedly read by more college English teachers than any other professional publication' (front matter). One of its appeals to the rank-and-file literature teacher--and to textbook publishers who invested large sums of money in ads--was that it had not abandoned pedagogy, as had the MLA earlier in the century [...] College English sought to reach the teacher-scholars and the literature instructors who throughout the nation's four-year colleges and land-grant universities significantly outnumbered their more elite MLA colleagues" (2 of 25).

Wadden correlates the change in ads for textbook offerings with changes in critical and pedagogical approaches. For example, he finds 1959-60 ads offer "the instructor a choice of New Critical Methods, [...] historicism [...] and traditional genre study" (4 of 25)[...] chronicl[ing after Gerald Graff] the clash of the same literary ideologies from 1940 to 1969 [...] the historicist stance [...] and the New Critical view 95 of 25).

By the mid 1960's, a "symptom of the New Critical-historicis imbroglio--and the fact that both were interpretively running low on gas--was the increasing viability of myth criticism and the appearance of the first textbooks with openly billed structuralist assumptions" from "anthropology, sociology and psychology" (8 of 25-6).

Despite social change in the 60's "Anything resembling politics" was excluded."minorities were all but invisible. The canon "of a stable, determinate set of masterworks" was organized around "largely white male writers" (10 of 25).

"College English's first issue of 1970" confronted "the issue of race" in a "newfound emphasis on social relevance" (11 of 25). Feminism emerged in 1975 (12 of 25) but in an emergence that "coincided with the near disappearance of race" (14 of 25).

"The 1980's were the great bourgeois sleepwalk" (16 of 25). Ads suggested that "competing theoretical or canonical claims could be adjudicated and reconciled" (17 of 25).

Ads for gay studies appeared only in 1995. In addition, "the lack of widely advertised and clearly identifiable deconstructionist texts--in contrast to the influential New Critical texts [/...] may have signalled the movement's demise as early as the late 80's" (20 of 25). However, "textbook appeals of the 90's" "play on the watchwords 'literary theory' and 'teextuality' to signal their non-traditional assumptions about text," and invoke the "ideological issues of race, class, and gender;" anthologies include "women, minority writers and writers from other cultures" in more than token percentages (20 of 25).
My comment: the pace of these advertising shifts, even granted the lead time of publishing houses, seems to paint the College English readership/textbook buyers as relatively mainstream in timeline and taste.

2006-11-19T14:23:00.000-08:00

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A brief, partial look at College English, the last ten years ("Literature Online" has CE up to 2006 and includes many articles in full text).

July 2006: issue theme of "Language"
July 2005: on death penalty debate; comp & visual culture; on film
September 2004: Chicana feminism; Native American identity; Pidgin; "Hawaiianness;" Funk
September 2003: issue theme of writing the personal; creative non-fiction
September 2002: issue theme of queer pedagogy
September 2000: "whitenesss;" globalization; psychoanalysis; Foucault; colonialism
September 1999: cluster of 4 pieces on Chaucer; first female rhetor; Martin Luther King; The Music Man
September 1998: ethics of teaching lit by Wayne Booth; Cather & Woolf; 4 original poems; reenvisioning the English dissertation
September 1997: Invisible Man; Conrad; narrative theory; original poems; media, culture & identity
September 1996: Sahkespeare studies; Truth & Methods; humanism; "scholardom;" 3 original poems; teaching across cultures

2006-11-19T13:54:00.000-08:00

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In chapter ten of Writing Soace: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print(2001) by Jay David Bolter, Bolter looks at the construction of the social self, or "affiliation and community" through electronic technologies (203). He points out correctly that Americans are prone to joining groups, but that those affiliations are "horizontal instead of vertical" (204). The electronic network enhances this capacity for "multiplicity, heterogenity, and immediate, if temporary, connections" (204). Bolton points out, however, that the new capacity "for leverage" though "networking" is exclusive, middle class, and "limited to North America, Europe, Israel, and [parts] of the Far East. Our economic sphere, in other words. He might also add, it is dominated at the moment by usage of the English language and some French.

Because on the Internet popular and commodity culture are equally situated in non-linear hyperspace with elite culture, "the ideal of high culture" has been abandoned, as well as typographical standards in language use. The fixedness and stability of print has been replaced by a "writing sytem that changes to suit its audience of readers," no the other way around (206). Likewise, authoritative canons have been replaced by "special interest groups" in "almost all humanistic fields" (206-7). The benefit of total access is accompanied by almost no familiar "indications of quality" (208).

Bolter claims "by the time the Web had become a cultural phenomenon and attracted the attention pf the government bureaucracies it was too late" to change the non-authoritarian, non-centralized architecture of the Web (210). However, it seems clear at this point that in fact there are many interferences, from viruses, to pop-ups, to delivery systems, not to mention "economically dominent groups" that severely compromise democratic access--or the information-collecting role of government.

Nevertheless, as Bolter says, "the reforming or remediating potential potential of the new writing space has probably not been exhausted" (212). But he ends on a dubious note: given that "it is becoming easier to generate as well as receive multimedia" "it is fair to wonder whether the late age of print may also become the late age of prose itself" (213).

In chapter eleven, "The Web Site" Bolter explains how, as he says elsewhere, the present text is supported and extended by "an associated Web site" which replaces a previous "hypertext version on a diskette" (214). The printed text and the electronic Web site thus thus act in concert. The Web site remediates the print version by adding interactivity among other things, but remains dependent on the text.

2006-11-11T23:15:00.000-08:00

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Thanks to Tanya for the conference call for proposals. Gwendolyn Pough's "Personal Narratives and Rhetorics of Black Womanhood" fits the proposal call, and it was informative to have it.

The "neglected persuasive discourses" are four 1990's "autobiographies of Black women who have come of age in an era of hip-hop" (112), stories which fashion knowledge (vide the proposals) about forced roles, including not only "slave, concubine, mammy, second-class citizen, bitch, ho" as Queen Latifah says in Ladies First, but "strong Black woman and domineering Black mother" (113). Some of the former images "have reached new heights of popularity due to contemporary rap music" (113) but Pough does not take on rap per se as popular culture, male or female. Rather in her look at the autobiographies she focuses on the supposedly less invidious image of "strong women." The "domineering mother" Pough finds arising from "the pathological bent of the Moynihan report" in the 60's, "a government-funded study of the state of the Black family" (115).

Pough does not take on the report, possibly because of its subtext of divisiveness between "the African man and woman in America and our ability to relate to and love one another in healthy lifegiving relationships" as Sister Soul writes in No Disrespect (112-113. The report had the effect of implicitly sanctioning the kind of hypermasculinity that resubjugates Black women on a McFreudian oedipal warrant. Instead Pough wisely crtiques the notion of "strong Black" superwoman by focusing on mother-daughter relationships. "Black women, motherhood, and Black sons have been analyzed ad infinitum; whereas, until recently, the interaction between Black mothers and daughters has been largely ignored" she says (115).

"The mother's strength or lack of strength shapes each writer. Each weaves her mother's story through her own Where Queen Latifah becomes a strong woman because her motherwas a strong woman, Sister Souljah became a strong African woman because her mother was not. Whereas Quenn Latifah, Chambers, and Morgan grew up wanting to emulate the strong Black women that they believed their mothers to be, Sister Soulja creates an image of Black womanhood that was denied her beacuse of poverty and racism" (115).

In one disturbing image, in Veronica Chamber's Mama's Girl, the mother "remains calm after being hit in the head with a hammar by an abusive husband (116), She picks up her purse and takes herself to the hospital. This facade, however crumbles, and "unlike Souljah, CXhambers does not write her mother off [..] at the first sign that she is just a 'reglar' Black woman (116). Chambers, for one, "realizes that the superwoman is a magic trick" (116.

The paper finds the four autobiographies, "read in conversation with one another" highlight how to grapple with all the baggage that that comes with coming of age in an era of hip-hop (117).

2006-11-06T22:15:00.000-08:00

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Alan Bloom,The Closing of the American Mind (1987. Stanley Fish "Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses," Nov. 5, 2006 NYTimes

The two are almost exactly the same. If you had a museum with a particular kind of academic, Bloom who taught through the 60's and Fish, one of the highest paid university employees in the nation, would be subspecies of each other. The tone is exactly what I am looking for for my Nabokov project. V.N. may have actually agreed with these two white males's opinions, but the cranky, bland, highly intelligent reactionaries--to the ghost of revolution (Rousseau! Nietzsche!) and "evil" ideas--with such a skilled sense of audience, are probably the kind of tenured old boys who put V.N.'s teeth on edge. Their self-assurance about general cultural trends would have annoyed him.

Somehow, the university is failing. And somehow, the failure is sited in the material university, but in the lofty arena of ideas.

An interesting glimpse into the culture-bound who do not know they are bound.

Also, Bloom apparently taught at Cornell, where V.N. taught until Lolita, through the student demonstrations. (He's particularly bitter about them.)

2006-11-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

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Eileen has already done a good job talking about "Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption," by Joy Ritchie and Kathleen Boardman.

"Feminism seemed absent from composition but present among compositionists" (588). You've already see 1) inclusion 2) the congruity of feminism and composition 3) and disruption of hegemonic narratives. Example of the latter:I just saw in the paper a feminist critique of war as a killer of chiefly kids and women otherwise known as colateral damage.

It does seem to me that there are a lot of inclusion/revisionist narratives, and that they are wide ranging, only they are not in this particular field. So import them into the field. In one area I happen to know a little about, Dickinson, Sharon Wolosky looks at Dickinson as A Voice of War.Needless to say, Dickinson told the truth about the suffering of war, and that means about the pandemic mourning of women. She never rolled a bandage.

If we go back to Dickinson's Academy, there are a number of woment interesting enough to discuss both as teachers and students.

French feminists surely belong in the question of women's "different style" (594).

I'm not perfectly happy with the idea that composition per se runs parallel to feminism; any more than say, early female nursing. It would seem to be the job women are stuck in, and nothing more intrinsic. If women took over composition because they taught the youngest children their letters after we got the idea for general literacy, after, in other words, privilege was no longer attached to literacy, that follows similar patterns for other jobs. Or am I missing something here? Is it a profession that cultures compliance because it offers such intangible perks? Are we out there improving the lot of everyman (so to speak)?

2006-10-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

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Chapter 2, "Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary America" in Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), by Deborah Brandt looks at literacy in what Brandt calls "documentary America," an increasingly legalistic, bureacratic corporate and technological culture. She says "the pace of change and the place of literacy in economic competition have both intensified in the recent past. It is as if the the history of literacy is in fast-forward." This leads to the "lag or gap" in literacy "we call the rising standard of literacy [italics mine]"(57).

She looks at two men from two socio-economic groups perhaps the hardest hit by such a gap in literacy, one man a blue-collar union worker, Dwayne Lowery, and the other an African American who entered the prison system, Johnny Ames. Lowery was overtaken by and lost what may be called the literacy race. Ames moved painfully but successfully "from illiteracy to literacy" and freed himself from prison (57).

Brandt establishes the terms of "a budgeoning documentary society" (50), what Dorothy Smith calls the "documentary reality" of work and life "highly processed through print and other symbolic media" (48). Growing competition over "written instruments" and "access to information" characterize "the explosion of information workers over the course of the twentieth century and the rising norms in literacy skills" (50).

Brandt looks at the two men as exemplars of the reality of information as an intensifying site of competition. Dwayne Lowery was an auto worker who became a union representative as the economy moved from "a thing-making, thing-swapping society to an information-making, service-swapping society" (52).

When Lowery became a full-time representative in the 70's, his political and verbal skills helped the union grow "in strength and influence" (53). However, soon, Lowery said, "ninety percent of the people I was dealing with across the table were attorneys" (54). "'It used to be we got our way through muscle or through political connections," he said, 'Now we had to get it through legalistic stuff'" (54). The writing of briefs, and "the college graduates [...] increasingly assigned to his district from union headquarters" gradually pushed Lowery out of his union position.

Johnny Ames similarly faced an unequal battle with legalism. He did not understand the documents at his own trial because he was functionally illiterate. As "an inmate for more than 16 years in maximum- and medium-security prisons in the Midwest" (57), he learned to deal with an arbitrary and complex legal system from within prison and successfully appealed his conviction, which was overturned in 1981. but he "would remain in the prison system on technicalities for another 11 years" (63). In freeing himself by "reading books by ex-slaves with dictionary in hand" Brandt says "Ames was reenacting a scene by which many African Americans learned to read in the decades before and after Emanicpation" (68).

These two lives illustrate rapid and profound changes in American literacy from the late 1970's to the early 1990's.

2006-10-22T18:43:00.000-07:00

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Section Four of Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, ed. Victor Villanueva, "Talking About Writing in Society" replicates the collaborative conversation it is concerned with, and along the way interrogates hidden and not so hidden assumptions of power.

One of those assumptions is "positivism, the view that all valid knowledge must be based on the methods of empirical investigation established by the natural sciences" (Abrams 329).

As the Cross-Talk introduction to Section Four says, composition studies searches for alternatives to this dominent paradign of Western Society in social construction, poststructuralism, and Stanley Fish's anti-foundationalism (413).

Kenneth Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" kicks off the discusssion by calling for process-oriented collaborative learning. Bruffee suggests a model of authority in "knowledge communities."

Some of the questions he raises or leaves unanswered are addressed by Greg Myers in "Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Teaching," and John Trimbur in "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning."

The postion of those "outside" the current conversation, is considered by Patricia Bizzell in "'Contact Zones' and English Studies," and by Min-Zhan Lu in "Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone," both of which also respond to Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone."

Altogether the order and assemblage of the essays in Section Four work elegantly as a conversation on collaborative learning, and we can jump into it.

As I read this section, a few key terms kept recurring: knowledge, community, authority/power, individualism, difference. I would like to note one of these themes, authority/power, as it recurs across Section Four.

Bruffee:

London's collaborative learners "were committed during the Vietnam era to democratizing education and to eliminating [...] what were perceived then as socially destructiv authoritarian social forms" (416).

"collaborative learning [...] provides a [...]a particular kind of community--a community of status equals: peers" (423).

"Collaborative learning [...] challenges the authority of knowledge by revealing [...] that authority itself is a social artifact" (430)

It also "challenges the traditional basis of the authority of those who teach" (ibid).

Rather than deriving authority from being close to the "mind of God" or to "a person of genius" CL teachers derive authority from being "certified representatives of the communities of knowledgeable peers that students aspire to join" (431).

Greg Myers, "Reality, Consensus and Reform...":

"I will be criticizing" two appeals for teaching writing in groups, the "authority of concensus and an appeal to the authority of reality" (439).

"The danger is that the teacher has merely embodied his or her authority in the more effective guise of class consensus. This guided consensus has a power over individual students that a teacher can not have alone" (442).

I am annoyed with [Sterling] Leonard's [1900-1930]rhetoric as a reformer because he assumes authority over other teachers and over students while denying he has it. He assumes authority as trained expert, university professor, empirical researcher, voice of the downtrodden students, bringing enlightenment to normal-school-trained teachers. But he denies his personal authority by saying that students are controlling the classroom, and his curiculum just follows the real world, and his reforms are based on the latest research" (448).

For [Peter] Elbow, as for Leonard, power over real audiences comes from an immediate connection with reality gained through a breaking down of stifling conventions. Writing with power requires authenticity of expression ('voice') and unmediated perception of reality" (449).

"Students can be both docile and convinced of their autonomy, freedom of choice, and control of their lives. A school that reproduced this ideological construct would be a sucessful school" (453).

"Research will not change the basic antagonism of student and teacher" (454).

"The kinds of authority embodied in the school are present in the rest of the culture as well" (455).

"We should begin by realizing that our interests are not the same as those of the institutions that emmploy us, and that the improvement of our work will involve social changes" (455).

John Trimbur, "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning":

"In Bruffee's social constructionist pedagogy, the language used to reach concensus acquires greater authority as it acquires greater social weight" (461).

"Without a critique of the dominant power relations [...] left-wing critics hold [...] collaborative learning may, unwittingly or not, accomodate its practices to the authority of knowledge it believes it is demystifying" (462).

"Consensus, I will argue, can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak" (462).

"It is through the social interaction of shared activity that individuals realize their own power to take control of their situation by colllaborating with others" (463).

"Rather than the liberation of the individual it claims to be, fear of of 'group-think' is implicitly teacher-centered and authoritarian [...] what Brufee calls 'authoritarian-individualistic': the atomization of students locks them into a one-on-one relation to the teacher, the repository of effective authority in the classroom" (464).

"Bruffee's formulation of collaborative learning in the early seventies offers an implicit critique of the culture of the classroom, the sovereignty of the teacher, the reification of knowledge, the atomized authority-dependence of students, and the competitiveness and intellectual hoarding encouraged by the traditional reward system and the wider meritocratic order in higher education" (464).

"Bruffee has asked what it means to reorganize the social relations in the classroom and how the decentering of authority [...] might change [...] the authority of knowledge and its institutions" (465).

'Conversation becomes the only true free market, an ideal discursive space where exchange without domination is possible" (466).

"Left-wing critics want to redefine consensus by locating it in the prevailing balance of power, as a marker that sets the boundaries between discourses. As Myers suggests, we need to see consensus in terms of differences and not just of agreements" (468).

'The interacting vernaculars that we experience contending for our attention and social allegiance, however, are not just plural. They are also organized in hierarchal relations to power" (469).

"The conversation, in Bakhtin's word, is 'heteroglot,' a mosaic of vernaculars, the multi-accented idiomatic expression of race, class, and gender differences" (469).

"We must acknowledge that one of the functions of the professions and the modern university has been to specialize and to remove knowledge from public discourse and decision-making, to reduce it to a matter of expertise and technique" (472).

"The effect of Bruffee's use of consensus is to invest a kind of 'real world' authority in the discursive practices and tacit undertsandings that bind the discourse communities of specialists and experts together" (472).

"Invoking the 'real world' authority of such consensua practices neutralizes the critical and transformative project of collaborative learning" (472-3).

"We should represent conconsensus not as the result at any given time of the prevailing conversation but rather as an aspiration to organize the conversation according to relations of non-domination" (473).

"A rhetoric of dissensus can lead [students] to redefine consensus as a utopian project, a dream of difference without domination" (476).

Patricia Bizzell, "'Contact Zones' and English Studies":

Quoting "Mary Lousise Pratt's concept of the 'contact zone'":

'I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths, as they are lived out in many parts of the world today'" (482).

"For example [...] from about 1600 to about 1800 [...] Europeans and Native Americans were struggling for the power to say what had happened in their relations to each other" (483).

"The richest literary treasures could be found in situations in which different histories, lifeways, and languages are trying to communicate and to deal with the unequal power distribution among them" (484).

Min-Zhan Lu, "Professing Multiculturalism...:

"We are increasingly interested in contesting the second class status of work in composition" (488).

"English courses are now informed by a view of language as a site of struggle among conflicting discourses with unequal socio-political power" (489).

"My aim here is to discuss a teaching method formulated out of my attempt to apply a multicultural approach to student writing: an approach which views the classroom as a potential 'contact zone'" (492).

I ask students "to consider their choice of position in the context of the socio-political power relationships within and among diverse discourses and in the context of their personal life, history, culture and society" (493).

"Since the 'foreign' student writer position is here being cast as that of someone lacking knowledge and experience in formal and idiomatic English and thus the least powerful of the three, I am most interested
in furthering the students' existing construction of that position so it is not so easily silenced" (497).

2006-10-21T15:20:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes

Summary "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" by Kenneth A. Bruffee (1984) Cross-Talk in Comp Theory ed. Victor Villanueva.

Although Kenneth Bruffee says he is simply trying to "encourage other teachers to try collaborative learning" (416) he seems to have written one of those essays that sends discussion of composition teaching off in a new direction.

He begins with some history: collaborative learning in the 50's and 60's among secondary and medical students in Britain began in an effort to eliminate "from education what were perceived then as socailly destructive authoritarian social forms" (416). In America, however, collaborative learning was a response to a perceived deficit in students' performance in the 70's. Peer tutoring was seen as "not an extension of but an alternative to traditional classrom teaching" (418). Bruffee finds, no doubt correctly, that "Collaborative learning [...] harnessed the powerful educative force of peer influence" (418).

Bruffee says he will "outline the rationale of collaborative learning" in three sections: 1) "Conversation and the Nature of Thought and Knowledge," 2) "Educational Implications: Conversation, Collaborative Learning and Normal Discourse" 3) "Collaborative Learning and the Authority of Knowledge." He will then end the essay by talking about what he calls "abnormal discourse" in 4)"Collaborative Learning and New Knowledge."

1) Bruffee couples collaborative learning to Michael Oakenshott's "unending conversation" which Oakenshott claims (after Lev Vygotsky) purportedly "takes place within us as well as among us, and that conversation as it takes place within us is what we call reflective thought" (419).
If so, thought is not an essential attribute of the human mind, but instead "an artifact created by social intereaction" (420).

The reader may object that this is too simple a correspondence. Are there really no differences between conversation and thought? What about the formation of personal identity through social separation? What about intense solitary experience that produces insight, including immersion in specialized interests? If we are in constant conversation, why do we even need to think? What about non-verbal thought, for that matter? What about oversocialization (peer pressure) and an overreliance on others for cues--is that "thought, too?

Perhaps anticipating the need to account for "specialized knowledge," Bruffee says, as Thomas Kuhn argues, "to understand scientific thought and knowledge we must understand the nature of scientific communities" (421). Then Bruffee goes on to generalize "that to understand any kind of knowledge we must first understand how knowledge is established and maintained in the 'normal discourse' of communities of knowledgeable peers" (421). Perhaps anticipating arguments about personal identity, he quotes Stanley Fish: "interpretive communities may also be in large measure the source of what we regard as our very selves" (421).

2) Bruffee goes further and claims "If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized" (422). Although collaborative learning allows students to "experience and practice the kinds of conversation valued by college teachers" (422),importantly, collaborative learning provides "a community of status equals: peers" (423).

Bruffee has to accomodate student and non-student discourse (including presumably groups of scientists and academics) under the rubric "normal discourse," and not surprisingly, the definitions of "knowledgeable peers" becomes strained.

Bruffee acjknowledges the large question, "how can student peers who are not members of knowledge communities they hope to enter [...] help other students to enter them?" (424). At this point he must performe bring in authorities outside the peer group, the teacher structuring of the conversation and the "demands of the teachers's assignment" (425). Teachers might even need to help peer tutors remediate, "help tutees begin at the beginning" (425). Nevertheless, primarily, what students do in collaborative learning is "converse in order to reach concensus" (426).

3) As if in response to the very dilemna of authority his discussion of 2) has exposed, Bruffee questions our old understanding of "humanistic disciplines" and our old theories of knowledge. MORE--

2006-10-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes

Apropos of nothing, well maybe collaborative learning, saw an article today in the Post-Standard suggesting video games could be harnassed for educational puposes. Thinking about what that implies for learning skills and cognition.

2006-10-16T20:05:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes

More..."William Perry and Liberal Education" by Patricia Bizzell (1984) from Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, ed. Victor Villanueva.

Patricia Bizzell summarizes the work of psychologist William G. Perry, who wrote Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years, on "nine developmental stages" college students pass through from childhood to adulthood" (319).The nine stages are divided into "three world views, 'Dualism,' 'Relativism,' and 'Commitment in Relativism'" as Bizzell says, depicted "primarily in terms of the young person's attitude toward schoolwork"(319).

At this point, the reader can already see that Perry is not talking about developmental stages, but really about what some critics today excoriate universities for doing: changing students' black and white ideas into relativism. As Bizzell observes, "Perry drops many hints that what he is describing is what happens to young people when they receive an education" (321).

Perry, she says, incoporates Piaget, (but not psychologists of ethical development like Kohlberg, apparently) but focuses "particularly on liberal arts education and the world view it inculcates." Perry, Bizzell notes "assigns values to his developmental stages" and "must either defend the values or be charged with bias in research" (322).

Of course, he is biased. He is a proponent of the "creation of [...]'the liberally educated man,'" (322).

I think it is safe to say that a sort of scientism ("psychology," "development") serves the same purpose here that Bizzell talks about in her essay on Flower and Hayes. However, Perry's enterprise was surely a dominant concept of that day. The questioning, raticionating individual "with self-reflective intellectual maturity" was a model, and English Departments especially, seemed to have turned them out by the dozens, "although Perry does not discuss the place of writing in the development for which he argues" (323).

Bizzell's dryly humorous summary of Perry turns up his "cow" writing and "bull" writing, and I wonderhow self-reflective those terms are. But although Bizzell "would argue that we should not use Perry's scheme as a blueprint for writing curricula," she thinks "Perry's world should make us realize that as we bring our students through the process of liberal education, we [...]are teaching them to think in a certain way" (325).

In 1984 the ideal of liberal education was still very much in place. But are universities today really taking most students through a process of liberal education?

The article points back to a time when education was unquestionably believed to change minds in the direction of one sort of cultural literacy. Perhaps Perry's success can be partially explained by the undyign American belief in education, another dominant idea of the period.

2006-10-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
"William Perry and Liberal Education" by Patricia Bizzell, Cross-Talk i n Comp Theory: A Reader, ed. Victor Villanueva.

Only in 1968, it seems, could William G. Perry have done what Patricia Bizzell says he did: set up a simplistic theory of "development" based strictly on self-reporting interviews ("Perry looks at nothing other than what the student tells the interviewer about his experiences" [323])with Harvard students, and then argue on behalf of this process. "Let other colleges, Perry implies, follow Harvard, as they have done in the past, in defining 'the very heart of liberal education'" (323).

Bizzell, however, finds a use for Perry's work: "to provide us with a sort of philosophical map of the changes liberal education seeeks to induce in our students" , a map of why "typical problems students have with writing in college should be regarded as problems with accepting the academic community's preferred world view" (326).
More to come....

2006-10-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
"Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing," (1982) by Patricia Bizzell.

Patricia Bizzell chiefly critiques in detail the methodology of "the two most important researchers" (393)in so-called inner-directed theory of the composition process, Linda Flowers and John R. Hayes.

Her critique serves the purpose of a "larger point," "that no scientific research, no matter how rigorously it is conducted, possesses the kind of authoritative certainty inner-directed theorists are seeking." She says it is "necessary to treat this knowledge as provisional, the way scientists treat their findings, if inquiry is not to end" (406).

This is obviously an important point, with theoretical implications. However, Bizzell also makes shrewdly insightful comments on why she claims "inner-directed theorists are so ready to invest their results with final authority and rush to pedagogical applications [...] For one, until recently, composition studies was a low-status enclave it was hard to escape; a powerful theory would help us retaliaye against the literary critics who dominate English studies. Moreover, such a theory might help us survive what appears to be the long slide of all humanistic disciplines into a low-status enclave. A scientific-sounding theory promises an 'accountability' hedge against hard times" (406).

If that is not provocative enough, Bizzell continues: "The strongest appeal of certainty, however, is its offer of a solution to our new students' problems that will enable us to undertake their socialization into the academic discourse community without having to consider the ethical and political questions about what we do because writing teachers have been under a terrific strain. Pressured with increasing asperity by our colleges to prepare students for their other courses, we have also felt anxious in the classroom both when our teaching worked--because we sensed we were wiping out the students' own culture--and when it didn't--because we were cheating them of a chance to better their situation [...] The corollary [to inner directed pedagogy] is that students for whom the pedagogy doesn't work need no longer be seen as victims of our incompetence but simply as innately inferior" (406).
Comments? I think so!

2006-10-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes Check out these articles: The current Wilson Quarterly, Autumn, 2006 vol. xxx, number 4 :The Global Race for Knowledge:Is the U. S. Losing? with a special section including "The New Ivory Tower" by Christopher Clausen, "China's Current Revolution" by Sheila Melvin, "Germany: The Humboldt Illusion " by Mitchell G. Ash, "India: Tiny at the Top" by Philip G. Altbach, and "Why the Liberal Arts Still Matter" by Michael Lind.The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 6, 2oo6 has "What Happened to the Professoriate" by Stanley Katzt!

2006-10-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
"Grammar, Grammars and the Teaching of Grammar" by Patrick Hartwell, 1985 (Cross-Talk in Comp Theory 205-233).

Quotes: "The grammar issue is embedded in larger models of literacy, part of quite different assumptions about the teaching of composition" (208).

"Grammar teaching is [...] supremely interesting, naturally a dominent focus for educational research" (208).

"The grammar of Latin, ingeniously warped to suggest English"--Charleton Laird (211).

"The more we learn about Grammar 1--and most linguists would agree we know surprisingly little about it--the more abstract and implicit it seems" (212).

"Formal grammar study would be 'to invite a centipede to attend to the sequence of his legs in motion"--Francis Christensen (216).

"We need to redefine error, to see it not as a cognitive or linguistic problem, a problem of not knowing a 'rule of grammar' (whatever that may mean), but rather [...]as a problem of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness, a matter of accessing knowledge that, to be of any use, learners must have already internalized by means of exposure to the code" (223).

"Stylistic grammars encourage overuse of the [cognitive] monitor" (225).

"Such a model places language, at all levels, at the center of the curriculum [...] as literal stuff, verbal clay, to be molded and probed, shaped and reshaped, and, above all, enjoyed" (226).

"The grammar issue is embedded in larger models of literacy, part of quite different assumptions about the teaching of composition" (208).

In this rich and multivalenced article,Patrick Hartwell finds grammar teaching either unrelated or negatively related to improved writing.
1) In a closer look at our preconceptions about grammar, he revises many of them.
2) He divides "grammar" into five new categories.
3) He looks at cognate research into "grammar" including invented langauge learning and draws conclusions from it.
4) He examines exactly how the teaching of grammar rules seems to operate cognitively and finds that it works largely by suggestion and "alchemy."
5) He takes a fresh look at what we consider "error."
6) He winds up the article with a look at the history of experimental research, and finds that this research supports his claims.

"Grammar teaching is [...] supremely interesting, naturally a dominent focus for educational research" (208).

1) Hartwell claims, after Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer (1963) "the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing" (205). But he also says the issue "is a complicated one" and remains controversial. The grammarians and anti-grammarians are unable to agree on how to interpret "seventy-five years of experimental research"(205-6).

My comment: Grammar is controversial, and how! There is a hypocrisy about teaching it: do it but don't talk about it. Teachers have been known to say digramming sentences was fun. At this point in the article, I was reminded of ESL students relieved when given "grammar rules" to help them make sense of the chaos (to certain writers) of English word order.

Hartwell incidentally touches on the "ouch" of grammar instruction when he cites a three-year experiment in New Zealand which finds it turns off students' interest in writing (207). But because the results of such studies are open to interpretation, Hartwell appears to side with Noam Chomsky's position that "there will be 'good experiments' only in domains that lie outside the organism's cognitive capacity. For example, there will be no 'good experiments' in the study of human learning" (207).

Accordingly, Hartwell's "goal in this essay is to articulate the grammar isse in different, and, I would hope, more productive terms" (207-8). The "rich and complex interaction [s]" in learning literacy comes up against "rigidly skills-centered and rigidly sequential" teaching with grammar "as the first step" and Hart3well says that "those of us who question the value of teaching grammar are in fact shaking the whole edifice of traditional compostion structures" (208-9).

My comment: those are large claims, and I myself don't remember being taught grammar in relation to writing. Nevertheless, the clash certainly exists among those with opinions about teaching, usually non-teachers, in cyclical panic about illiteracy.

"The grammar of Latin, ingeniously warped to suggest English"--Charleton Laird (211).

Hartwell excerpts three of his five meanings of grammar from W. Nelson Francis (1954): Grammar 1) "the set of formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged" Grammar 2) "the branch of linguistic science which is concerned with the description, analysis amd formulization of formal language patterns" and Grammar 3) "Linguistic etiquette," which Hartwell says is "not grammar at all, but usage" (209-10). Hartwell, after Charles Fries, precipitates another grammar out of Francis's Grammar 2, "scientific grammar," "school" or unscientific grammar. In addition, he finds the "grammatical terms used in the interest of teaching prose style" to be Grammar 5, "stylistic grammar" (211).n

Hartwell says Grammar 1, "an internalized system of rules," is "profoundly affected by the acquisition of literacy" (211). He gives a useful example in the innate ability of speakers of English to order adjectives by these "rules," but then points out that they are hardly rules, but a shifting, abstract, and implicit system now in the process of being redefined by new features and angles of approach. Certain corollaries like "divine::divinity and seren:serenity" arise strictly from the ability to read(214. Through this interrogation of what grammar may be, Hartwell concludes that such "natural concomitants of literacy [...] seem best characterized not as isolated rules but as developing schemata" (215).
Grammar 2, scientific grammar, Hartwell finds far from scientific. He also claims "the rules of Grammar 2 are simply unconnected to productive control over Grammar 1" and he demonstrates this by "a trivial rule of language--the choice of definite article, indefinite article, or no definite article" (217).

My comment: ESL speakers often have problems with articles, and I found the chart Hartwell publishes on 216 about articles actually useful. However, one of the anxieties of ESL students is their lack of control over English and resulting frustrations. I have to admit that Hartwell's later claim, that adducing a rule makes already-internalized information available to the student, is convincing. If a student feels she knows the right rule, she evinces relief.

"Formal grammar study would be 'to invite a centipede to attend to the sequence of his legs in motion"--Francis Christensen (216).

Hartwell brings cognate research on second language acquisition into the discussion to demonstrate inference of internal "grammar rules" in a pure form. The languages are imaginary, but "providing formal rules" for the made-up language "remarkably degrades performance" in acquiring the rules.

My comment: This study, as well as the idea of "monitor" versus writer, seems to indicate that there is a cognitive division between two types of learning involved in language structure, and that applying "rules" is far less efficient than inference of language structure.

Hartwell attempts to explain, after Stephen Krashen, why. Language mastery is divided betwee "acquisition" and "monitoring." He uses Krashen's knowledge circle vs actual teaching: "not all the rules taught will be learned, and not all those learned will be available" (220). Two more studies that suggest formal rules "seem to have no value whatsoever" paradoxically indicate to Hartwell that "even inadequate rules are of heuristic value, for they allow them to access the internal rules they actually have" (220).

He develops this line of reasoning by quoting an acronym by technical writers: "clear only if known" or COIK. "Hyperliterate adults" may think they are using rules, when they are actually "accessing tacit heuristics honed by print literacy" (221). This is not such a vicious circle: although grammar rules are "incantations" they really can work. nevertheless, the Harbrace Handbook he quotes requires a strenuouys and clumsy learning process in order to recognize sentence fragments. "Such advice is, at best, COIK" (222).

"We need to redefine error, to see it not as a cognitive or linguistic problem, a problem of not knowing a 'rule of grammar' (whatever that may mean), but rather [...]as a problem of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness, a matter of accessing knowledge that, to be of any use, learners must have already internalized by means of exposure to the code" (223).

A better system comes from recognizing "error" as "a problem of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness," and Hartwell uses a nifty example: a sentence that contains four errors, three grammatic and once conceptual. Studies suggest that "metalinguistic awareness [of language as language] is a defining feature of print literacy" (223). "Print is a complex cultural code" not learned from the bottom up--ie from grammar to usage (224).

Grammar 5 overencourages the use of the "monitor;" the best avenue of competence is to use language as "verbal clay to be molded and probed" (226).

Hartwell gives a useful sketch history of experimental studies which support his claims. He finishes with the suggestion that "the thrust of current research and theory is to take power from the teacher and to give that power to the learner. At no point in the English curriculum is the question of power more blatantly posed than the issue of formal grammar instruction" (228).

2006-10-02T23:12:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytesLots of good questions. Bear with me...
Writing as discovery--the experienced writer it seems to me discovers language as part of the writing of discovery, and that means making many more bad choices than the inexperienced writer. Of course that means they have more bad choices to make. The experienced writer (original writer, talented writer) writes more that's awful in ingenious and astounding ways. This of course is forbidden in school, so experienced writers by definition develop out of school most times. And the terrible stuff they write is often born as generic: wretched melodrama, sweentiment, girlie poems by Dickinson, bad drama by Browning, Milton's high IQ lying polemics. This could be like a sculptor who learns to scuplt from negative casts. We recognize this writerly secret a little bit when we ask students to write a terrible thesis statement,, for example.

2006-09-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
Summary for "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" by Nancy Sommers, CCC 31.4 (December 1980).

This apparently ground-breaking case-study approach to revision compares the strategies of student and experienced writers.

Sommers says that James Britton's linear model of writing fails to take revision into account, regarding revision "as a separate stage at the end of the process" (44).

Sommers cites Roland Barthes to support her claim that this linear model is "based on the irreversibility of speech" (44). In Britton's model, she says, revision is both outside and extra to a "'preconceived' product"(44.

She says this linear model produces "a parody of writing" because according to Barthes in reality "'writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible'" She says "the possibility of revision distinguishes the written text from speech"(45).

Sommers describes a three-year study to examine the revision processes of student and experienced writers. Not surprisingly she finds that student writers (pre-1980) define revision in a scanty, personalized sense, but that experienced writers define revision in global terms.

My comment: the results of the three-year study is distilled to only a handful of succinct quotes from both sets of writers, and to comments about them: one page in total.

Sommers claims the chief concern of students' revision is vocabulary "because they perceive words as the unit of written discourse" (46). They practice the economy of the linear model, swabbing away "needless repetition, redundancy, and superfluity"[...] unnecessary in writing" because it can be reread (47).

My comment: redundancy and superfluity are precisely what invention is about, and Sommers' experienced writers attest to wholesale re-creation of their drafts. But I wonder if students'preoccupation with words might be due to their stage of development: acquiring a new college writing vocabulary. (Gustave Flaubert also thought the right word was everything.) Sommers concludes that the students are dedicated to the linear model, but does not adduce their earlier high school writing curriculum as proof.

Sommers produces a high ratio of theory and commentary to summarized evidence: she claims students place a "symbolic importance" on word selection (47) but (my comment) a sense of the sacredness of the written word, a kind of self-hypnosis may also be at work with these naive writers.

But it seems clear that students leave out both "audience" and genuine stylistic considerations in their revisions.

Sommers says: "What is curious [...] is that students are aware of lexical repetition but not conceptual repetition" (47)and calls this "symptomatic of problems at a deeper level" (48). Students don't have new eyes to see their writing. Students have a false idea of inspiration (ie a romantic one--my comment)as the lubricant of writing, guaranteeing no need for revision. Student rigidity is enhanced by their committment to an introductory paragraph from the linear model; the only "modification of ideas" occurring here (48).

Sommers suggests the students need "a set of strategies to help them identify the "'something larger' that they sense is wrong" with their essays (48). Teacher-based rules and mechanical forms dictate the limits of students' revisions. In a struggle between general rules and the demands of a particular text, she claims, the text loses.

My comment: Sommers' comparison between experienced writers and student writers seems oblivious to the fact that all experienced writers were once student writers, but more importantly, that contrasting the revisions of "experienced writers" unfavorably with "student writers" superimposes, at least unconsciously, a model of "experienced writer" as a product of the correct process of learniong how to write. The model is also implicitly the old English Department model of "literary genius" as the exemplar of good writing, although some of Sommers' examples seem rather to be academic writers.

When discussing experienced writers' superior revision processes, Sommers cites Sassure's "difference" as dissonance, concluding ultimately that good writing is good argument: the handling of dissonance. She also claims that "the complicated relationship between the parts and the whole in the work of experienced writers [...] destroys the linear model; the experienced writer seeks "to discover (to create) meaning" through this dissonance. Discovery is possible because written words are recorded in space and fixed in time (51-52).

Comment: It is precisely the sense of the whole that the student is missing since they don't understand writing as an exogenous body of "information" with a life of its own.

The experienced writer perceives revision as holistic and recursive (52(.

Comment: Sommers makes a sharp distinction between students' concern with vocabulary and experienced writers' unconcern (52). In fact, many experienced writers find words the most important issue at every stage of writing; (I've already mentioned Flaubert); I think Sassure would agree.

However, experienced writers are not wedded to their own text, and are capable of making massive and dramatic cuts and revisions.

Sommers concludes by saying that student writers fail to have a sense of writing as a process of discovery. She paradoxically says: "students need to rely on their own internalized sense of good writing" and "see their writing with their "own" eyes," but does not say where this internalized sense or personal vision comes from. She then returns to the Barthian issue of writing versus speech, and the dissonance in writing necessitating the struggle of revision that she says is the essential difference between writing and speech.

Comment: I teach and have taught writing at the college level as exploration and discovery. Sommers' article has obviously made an impact, and generally I agree with her. But a study of freshmen is actually a study of high school writing. The idea that writing is speech for these students seems contradicted by the invocatiuon of five-paragraph and linear models. Actually it would seem that the students are imitating a template. I contend discovery comes out of a grasp of convention and the questioning of it. It's difficult to question a convention that is not yet grasped. Imitation is a classical model of teaching writing, but with the expectation that the best students should surpass the model.
Can we "teach" discovery?

I'm off to the Dodge Festival to hear some experienced writers.
Immy

2006-09-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
Notes for Chapters 5 & 6 The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders:

After the detailed, narrative case study of Lynn in chapter 4, Janet Emig returns to a more
seemingly objective comparison of her small sample group of seven twelfth graders with Lynn and with each other. The reasons Lynn seems especially chosen for a detailed narrative may be because of her transparency vis a vis the writing process.

Emig begins with a table of the characteristics of the secondary schools all eight students attended, then a narrative of their aggregate family literacy. They seem to be similar in family position. Several were early readers--one of them, Bradford, was a pre-school writer-- and 25% of their parents were teachers. Their similarity points to a selection of students not only for their writing ability, but for convenience: several of the students have extensive files of their earlier school writing available.

Emig continues her discussion of general background by further reporting the group's writing interactions with adults, chiefly parents, but also with peers. She analyzes the nature of peer interaction and find that two students had peer role models: "embryo professional writers." For "self-sponsored writing," in contradistinction to school-sponsored writing, the significant others were peers.

Emig surveys four writing folders "containing all writing assigned during the eleventh grade" available to her for the pieces' prompts or "Stimulus." 41 of 58 are seen as literature-based: 1) a specific style imitation 2) a generic style imitation and 3) an orignal piece. Emig returns to narrative anecdote for three examples: 1) "John's" imitation, especially of Hemingway; 2)"Victoria's" response to the genre of satire, which she found useful for expressing hostility and 3) Bradford's poem.

The non-literary examples are scanter, all written in the 3-5-or-7 paragraph format, but Emig finds few in "the reflexive mode;" she also finds the boys fearful of expressing feelings. There are striking differences, she finds between the girls and the boys. Two boys do not write on their own; the girls do, and write in all fields of discourse including creative writing. Of the boys, only Bradford writes creatively.

Emig now turns to the specific process of writing: Planning, Starting, Composing Aloud, Tempo of Composition, Reformulating, and Stopping & Contemplating Product. Only Bradford was other than matter-of-fact in starting the admittedly artifical method of composing aloud while being taped. The most informative part of the study would seem to be its observations on "composing aloud." Emig breaks this process into smaller categories for comparison: she finds similarities in sentence work, "program" style and recursive and anticipatory composition techniques among the group.

She looks at the tempo of composition more specifically, and finds only John to diverge from Lynn and the group's composition in his "startling" lack of hesitation. "How he writes this piece [without hesitation] must remain the most extraordinary aspect of this inquiry, if not its chief mystery." Four of the students reread after they finish a paragraph.

Their levels of reformulation or revision are time-dependent and vary widely, from none to major reworking.

Emig claims that finishing up a piece is a mundane moment for all of the students, and that none of them "contemplate:" their finished product. However in the previous chapter, Lynn displayed satisfaction in the course of composition, especially in problem-solving. It seems arbitrary to assign this moment strictly to the end of a (synthetic) writing task.

The rest of the chapter reflects on the students' experience with the teaching of writing, and devolves (as chapter 4 did) into a critique in the students' own words of grammar-school teaching, obsessed as it is with mere mechanics and programmatic 3-5-7 paragraph essays. However, it's hard to see how the students would be better writers without this onerous preoccupation. Rather, they would likely all be excellent writers, but they are an exceptional group with above-average literacy resources.

Chapter 6 is a short summary generalizing the project's findings. In the project-engendered categories of composition--reflexive and extensive, ("personal" and "objective") reflexive had a longer prewriting period, while extensive writing was detached and reportorial.

Emig summarizes unchanged the "other" intervention of adults and peers in the student's writing, and the nature of prompts.

Again, and not surprisingly, she finds prewriting much longer in self-sponsored writing.

She finds competent students do almost no outlines for shorter school assignments.

Students did what they were asked without resistance except some boys who did not write reflexive pieces.

Emig then recaps her description of the hesitations of "composing aloud," and repeats her assertion that some stylistic directives in composing aloud seem to come from ealier teachers.

Contemplation: Emig says here some students pause to appreciate their self-sponsored writing and more readily revise it than school assignments.

Emig critiques grammar school teachers herself by saying they "set rigid parameters to students' writing behaviors [...] that students find difficult to make more supple."

She returns to her model earlier in the book of established writer's composing processes and suggests that students' awareness of the difference between these and their own practices lead to "outward conformity but inward cynicism and hostility." It's difficult to find in the study to this point, however, evidence that students clearly understand those differences.

Her final point is that evaluation in most school assignments is based on technical incidentals rather than subject, rhetorical nuance and "fulfillment of intent." This critique smacks of backwards blaming.

Since all the students are clearly enriched writers, the less privileged student is not taken into account.

2006-09-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
Riderbits: I had many X-rays for my fall from a horse and find that, just as in childhood, the embrace of gravity was innocuous.
Writerbytes: The "Selected Bibliography on the History of English Studies" by Maureen Daly Goggons has loads of good resources. But I should point out that any bibliography--especially in English studies--"serves others" a la the "feminization" issue, although it is also solid, original research.
Nice phrase: "The new knowledge eco-systems..." (64)which implies "impact" of an intellectual field on other fields.
This is a "selected" bibliography, and the author anguishes a little the five categories she makes for it: literary studies, speech communication, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing. (Nice to see creative writing there.) She doesn't want to "reinscribe the very divisions I hope to challenge" (67). The bibliography would prove useful.

"Composing a Discipline: The Role of Scholarly Journals in the Disciplinary Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition Since 1950" is likewise a tabulation, this time a chronologically arranged emergence of journals in the discipline. The author wants the "essay to trace some of the attributes of the post-WWII emergence of rhetoric and composition as a discipline" (332). It would be especially useful for a historian of the time period a period also covered by Berlin.

The authors find journals reflect the developing discipline, in three stages: 1) establishment, 2) amplification, and 3) consolidation. (

It seems rather premature to claim consolidation of Rhetoric and Composition.)

The essay notes the "artifical time" "divisions" "in which we cut the continuous thread of time into manageable lengths" (326) but uses chronology as a handy orderer anyway. I'm not sure about "the two ingredients necessary for the creation of a discipline" "a professional organization and a journal" (327). Surely it also needs a body of work?

The peregrinations among journals and composition produce gems like the journal RTE that "signalled a new alliance between those in the field of education and those in departments of English," otherwise sworn enemies (331). We also get examples of what might happen in the spotty history of a journal as it gets off the ground while representing a new trend.

There are lots of works cited, also representing a valuable resource for the historian-researcher.

The most fascinating parts of Berlin's also chronological treatment to me are the fifties and the sixties and the changes they bring. My father was the lucky man who got one of those newly prestigious English Department jobs in the late sixties because he got to go back to school on the golden G.I. bill after WWII. One thing Berlin does not note is how this educational advantage (largely unavailable to women) created a Ph.D pool heavily weighted in favor of the military. Not that everyone who served in the army was acclimated to war--far from it. But they had been educated in war (or in the military culture, which was the same thing.) They often had an attitude formed, not by the pursuit of liberal humanism, but by the various rationales and assumptions that make war possible. It's tempting to think the extreme territoriality and hierarchal construct of English Departments in the period of their glory owed something to boot camp.

2006-09-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
Riderbytes: Today, Buddy, a paint horse, thought the dressage ring was a trap, and bucked me onto the stone dust.
Sue Ellen Holbrook, in the 1991 article "Women's Work, The Feminizing of Composition" proves handily that women do difficult, demanding work in teaching composition, and that this job is paid less than men's jobs in academia. But the reason she gives is slightly too neat: "women have existed in a status inferior to men's. Accordingly, women's work is devalued" (203). Presently work is increasingly devalued because the price of labor is continually undercut by "competition" from the poorer. If women's work is characteristically "serving others," in the global economy more workers of any sex are servers. Meanwhile, formerly well-paid blue collar jobs filled by men are disappearing.
Aside from competently mustering the statistics to prove inequality, Holbrook says "more academic women [are ]in paraprofessional positions than in professional ones" and "part-time faculty are essentially employed as paraprofessionals" (205). (The same paraprofessionialism is happening in medicine and law.) If there is a bright side to this, it may be that the necessity of the so-called "drudge" work of teaching composition in the current culture gives women in part-time composition instruction some leverage to raise their own status.

2006-09-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
In Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams' article on the exclusion of the presence of African Americans from the inscription of the history of Composition Studies the authors briefly review major histories of composition: Berlin, North, Kitzhaber, Miller, Brereton, and Fontaine & Hunter to make transparent, as Berlin's says, their endorsed, priviliged ideology(564). For example, although Kitzhaber discusses the importance of the land grant colleges, he scants the African American "1890 institutions (565)." According to Royster and Williams even by 1991, despite Miller's critique of the white narrative of the history of composition, neither she nor Brereton actually create narratives of "the other," including African Americans. Despite "broadly advertised" appeals for submission to Fontaine and Hunter's call for "other voices" in their collection, the compilers regretted "ethnic minorities were 'conspicuously absent'" (567.)

Jones and Royster suggest such absence is due to expectations produced by the invisible ideology of the historians. "Is it possible [Fontaine and Hunter] were conflating ethnicity in higher education with powerlessness and basic writing (567)?" Valerie Baester's Cultural Divide says in passing "we can learn a great deal by attending to the texts of successful African-American college-level writers" but does not do so herself (569). Instead, she concentrates on Black English Vernacular. The authors suggest that all second-dialect minorities in America suffer from a real cultural divide, not just African Americans. This wrong emphasis ignores "successful students who are African American" and who could also be "insiders in American universities" (570). According to the article, the perception of African American students as "basic" writers became somehow fixed during the 'sixties; actually, they say, before the 'sixties, up to thirty per cent of all entering freshmen were termed in need of "remedial" composition (571).
As we know from Berlin and Crowley, this designation can be suspect even for majority students. Instead of developing the implications of these findings, however, Royster and Williams turn to the history of African American college education in the United States; they find an astounding success story: the post-Civil War growth of thirty-nine African American colleges, mostly in the south, and the incorporation of 17 "historically African American instuitutions" into the land grant system (574). Preememinent institutions like Howard University in the field of African American education are the genuine "space" for African American "scholarly production" and "intellectual development"(575).
The author's look at a history of African Americans in higher education "beginning in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth century" (579) produces a selection of great figures and the impressive figure of "2000" African American college graduates in the immediate post-Civil War period (582).
However, they do not discuss the cultural differences between 19th and 20th century hopes for education. A time of efflorescence after the Civil War was followed by stiffening resistance to progress and increasing racism that might ultimately account for the exclusion of African Americans the authors object to.

2006-09-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

rider bits/writer bytes
On Sept. 4, according to NPR the championship of the TennesseeWalking Horse National Celebration was cancelled after government inspectors found that all but three of the horses showed signs of "soring," an illegal practice that involves blistering and irritating a horse's legs to make its gaits higher.

2006-09-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

CCR 601
Eileen Schell
Sept 12, 2006
Notes to the Reading
Immy Wallenfels

For historiography of this week’s reading, see comments to myself on my own blog.

Punish or Perish

In James Berlin’s discussion of English entrance exams, his classificatory, philosophical exegesis bursts into Technicolor (with some help from Foucault). Even while lowly composition teachers, intellectual day laborers, were becoming overwhelmed by mind-numbing drudgery, a new bourgeoisie source of prestige was growing: the study of English-language literature. Thus the English Department was born.
The dirty little secret here is that extraordinary verbal ability is correlated with the highest levels of success with or without college, and composition teachers would tend to have high verbal skills. Lincoln (with no college education) was the eponymous legend of the “great man” who rose to fame and glory on his rhetorical skills alone. But such skills could not be controlled. Accordingly, they had to be channeled and made predictable. Thus standardized tests were also in the offing.
When Harvard, the dominant institution of higher education required an entrance exam in English, it created an economy of lack of language skills in the student’s own language Harvard said entrants did not have. That naturally put Harvard in the position of being the supplier of this “deficiency.”
This was a subtle social change. Previously, men might have been found wanting because they were “shiftless” or because they were “rascals,” “drunkards” or brawlers-- morally deficient. Now the sons of the new economic elite, businessmen, could be frowned upon for a supposed lack of skill sets.
In a labor-glutted market, laborers were always devalued. The great projects of the day, the railroads and later the Panama Canal, were careless of human life. But it was more difficult to devalue and hierarchize the scions of owners and managers in the East. The memory of the Civil War rebellion of high-flown slave owners, was fresh. If at some level, the new elite recognized that they, as mill owners, railroad men and landowners also disposed of human labor for their own profit, how were they to keep the hubris down? How to make the relatively privileged toe a homogenous standard? How to make them work harder in the new economy that needed their skills, even as the new universities opened up to the practical sons of farmers, to make them engineers, teachers, and writers? Set a standard that could hardly be reached, and make the reaching of that standard perversely valuable.

2006-09-09T21:14:00.000-07:00

Sept. 9
Rider Bit:
Human friendship with horses sometimes leads to romance and extravagent gestures.
"M" talked about juggling kids and horses over a paper Sept. 8 in the Writing Center. Oh, you have horses? I said. Rescue horses, M said. She was in Canada, she happened to have twelve hundred dollars on her, she bought two of the healthiest horses she could see right off a slaughterhouse truck. She called a friend and said I've done something crazy, come up with your trailer to get these horses back to my place. While she was standing on the road with the two survivors, she got an enormous fine (for illegal possession of live horses on a public thoroughfare?)

Later that day I saw in the newspaper that Congress outlawed "slaughtering horses for people to eat" at "three foreign-owned plants. In all, says the article, some 88 thousand horses and mules were slaughtered last year (11/8 Post-Standard).

Buddy, the Paint horse I am leasing, is peculiarly alert to the deisel engine noise that belongs to tractor trailers, the kind that transports livestock.

Writer Bytes:
Does the above--two different treatments of horses--really bring to mind the contrast of James Berlin's "new composition teacher" in Rhetoric and Reality grading the daily themes of some 200 students at the U. of Michigan or Harvard in 1894 (22) with the emerging, privileged English scholar of literature? If the contrast is between being disposable and being given retirement, essentially, yes.

Of course I also would like the leisure, prestige, and freedom from teaching freshmen in a new discipline of literature dissasociated "from the penury and labor of the old curriculum" (23).