Lend Me Your Ear – Chpt. 2

Brueggemann describes her method in this chapter as a Rhetorical-Cultural approach: “I want to consider where (and who) the terms come from, the social and rhetorical milieu surrounding their inception and usage, how they are used, and, certainly who they are used on as well as how those persons react to them” (28). Note here that she says “who they are used on” rather than “who they are used for” or “used by.” She’s clearly laying claims that these terms are created by outsiders (and I would agree), and implicitly making connections between these terms and weapons – which are the only thing I can think of that we would use on another person. Perhaps we would use our powers of persuasion on somebody, but I tend to also think of that as a type of rhetorical attack. She chooses this method over a straight historical method because histories are often “about the people “instead of “of the people.”

Brueggeman is looking for a “place” (notice here the emphasis on space, at least rhetorically) where the terms and people interact, so she focuses on the issue of “literacy.” She uses three sections to redraw deafness in the nexus of literacy: 1) the “problem” of deafness in education from a rhetorical framework 2) the “literacy legacy” of view literate acts as either language or communication 3) a turn to the subjects and their own signification.

The “problem” of deafness in educational from a rhetorical framework:
Education, historically, has been based on Quintillian’s work on how to educate a rhetor, with a focus on speaking well and the method of imitation. If students are deaf, they cannot hear the speaker to imitate. Additionally, people who are deaf will most often have difficulties with speech, which additionally excludes them from Quintillian’s model. During the enlightenment when education became a more widespread institution, deafness began to be seen as a group trait rather than an individual one. This is when deaf institutions or asylums were formed.

“Literacy Legacy” as Language or Communication
Literacy as communication suggests a one-way, perfectly understandable, interaction. In this model, literacy is “a product to be bought and used, according tothe package instructions, by illiterate consumers (those who have not), “sold” to them by it’s literate owners (those who have)” (36). It is a product, a set of skills, and an end in and of itself. Literacy as language allows for individuals to “become involved in language, to interact with the process of language, to change and fashion it, and to place themselves somewhere in the activity” (36). It involves critical engagement with the world.

The Speaking Subjects
When interviewing deaf students, the number one topic that came up was “passing.” Many students did not want assistance in their classes because it would make it hard for them to pass in a social way (i.e. it would clearly mark them as different), but Brueggeman notes that this also made it difficult for them to pass in an academic way (getting good grades) because they had trouble hearing the teacher.

At the end of this chapter, Brueggeman includes several interviews she has done with students from Gallaudet college about the difficulties they had with English classes.  One student went through twelve introductory English classes before he was diagnosed with a learning disability (presumably because the teachers and/or advisors thought his difficulties with English classes were due to his deafness).

These interviews are especially poignant because, even though both interviewees had difficulty with English in the education system, both profess a love for the English language.  Brueggeman suggests this is due to a separation between English as communication (as taught in their English classes) and  English as an expressive language (which is the aspect that they love).

Lyons – Rhetorical Sovereignty

Lyons argues in this piece that Native Americans have lost their sovereignty as a people, both political and rhetorical.  He uses rhetoric to suggest that Native Americans were once thought of as politically sovereign, but that gradually eroded, despite some people’s best of intentions.  Now, the colonizing force of the United States culture has even taken away their rhetorical sovereignty by choosing which stories get told, and how, in order to “reclaim” their past.  Even though many who are telling these stories have the best of intentions, they still greatly misrepresent the ideologies behind Native sovereignty, such as their focus as a people (explained below) rather than a government.

Definition of rhetorical sovereignty:  “The inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in [the attempt to revive not their past, but their possibilities], to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse” (449-450).

Used to see Native Americans as sovereign – the United States once referred to Native Americans as “nations” which they would make treaties with.  This suggests that they saw Native Americans as being on an even playing field when it came to political sovereignty.  Despite the fact that these treaties were exploitative, they still assume that the Native peoples had to right to the land that they lived on and thus were able to give it away.

This vision eroded – Later the Native Americans were referred to as “tribes” (assuming savagery and lack of government, hence lack of political sovereignty) and the treaties became known as “agreements.”  Lyons explains, “the erosion of Indian national sovereignty can be credited in part to a rhetorically imperialist use of writing by white powers, and from that point on, much of the discourse on tribal sovereignty has nit-picked, albeit powerfully, around terms and definitions” (453).

Procedure vs. People – Lyons draws from Kant in defining sovereignty in western “civilized” thought: “sovereignty became essentially procedural, the exercise of reason and public critique generated by the bourgeoisie who as ‘the people’ construct the nation-state through the act of making coercive laws, and subsequently as ‘sovereign’ coerce through them as a nation and are coerced by them as individuals” (454).  To highlight here – for the United States, sovereignty was a system of government that had rule over individuals through a procedure of reason by the group of individuals.  The thing that keeps the system working is this sense of reason and critique, the idea that the nation is always able to change and thus the current system must be making sense until we reason it not to.

With the Native Americans, on the other hand, they saw sovereignty as belonging to peoples – groups that “always conducted out of regard for the survival and flourishing of the people” (454) through “a privileging of its traditions and culture and continuity” (455).

Different than multi-culturalism: Multi-culturalism isn’t enough because it tends to abstract the struggles of real people.  It denies the link between rhetorical sovereignty and self-governance/political sovereignty.

What we can do instead:  Look at the real cases of Native Americans fighting for their rights to sovereignty and the ways that they have reclaimed their stories.  This includes political actions.  The article gives resources for teaching these issues such as the Tribal Law and Government center in Kansas and the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force.

Political Action and Education termed “The New Ghost Dance” – “calls Native and non-Native people to join together and take action” to promote “a basic understanding, respect, and appreciation for American Indian and Alaskan Native cultures… [and would work for] a revival of tribal life and the return of harmony among all relations of creation.”  (464)

Buchanan’s Regendering Delivery – Chpt. 3 “Performing Gender and Rhetoric”

This chapter lays out the essentials of Masculine and Feminine rhetorical styles of the 19th century, citing several examples of each, and recommends that rhetorical history equally consider rhetors from both styles, not only those utilizing a masculine style. This equal acknowledgment would be “an important step toward regendering the fifth canon, requiring scholars to acknowledge the innovative strategies of disenfranchised speakers and to redefine what counts as delivery” (80).

Feminine delivery style, “a ladylike form of rhetorical subversion” (90): Used traditional gender guidelines in quietly subversive ways in order to help the needy and increase educational rights for women. Rather than speaking in public places, directly, about political matters, and/or to mixed company, feminine style rhetors used sort of parlor tricks to get around those “sins” while still conveying their message to the public. They would discuss political matters via the domestic sphere – both ideologically and spatially. Ideologically by claiming that political matters were within the domestic sphere (republican motherhood means that a child’s school district is included in a women’s sphere); spatially by conversing with senators in small groups within the home. They would get husbands or male family members to introduce them to senators who they would have private conversations with if in public spaces. If they needed a more public and direct venue (i.e. formal lecture), they would have a “surrogate delivery” where a male family member would give the speech while the woman sat silently on stage. Other feminine strategies included reading a written text instead of reciting and sitting instead of standing to lessen physical size and eye contact.

Examples included: Emma Willard who “labored to expand women’s educational and professional opportunities” (80-81); Dorothea Dix who “traveled the state documenting the plight of the mentally ill and [arguing against] their inhumane treatment” (88); and Catherine Beecher who “conducted lecture tours throughout the East, soliciting funds to train and settle women teachers on the western frontier” (97).

Masculine Style: Direct oratory, speaking on political issues, to mixed audiences, in public spaces.

Example: The Grimke sisters. Though they did not begin by trying to challenge men’s and women’s speaking roles, their popularity encouraged them to take to lecture halls for women audiences, and men began to attend, refusing to leave even when asked. The Grimke sisters thereafter pushed for women’s rights to speak, regardless of audience or “sphere.”

Contrast: Feminine styles were more accepted during the time period, but in historical perspective we honor the masculine style as rhetoric (often ignoring the feminine style completely or dismissing as other than oratory because the women didn’t deliver public speeches). Also, note how the content that each example women was discussing. None of the “feminine” style women here were fighting for abolition – do you think that the arguments about civil rights in abolition rhetoric lent itself to a more masculine approach? In the end, how useful are “appropriating cultural codes” (83) as the women did with feminine rhetoric?

Further thoughts and questions:  Do we achieve more by this sort of consenting or by complete rebellion?  Where the Grimke sisters only able to defy gender in speaking because they were so popular already?  Do we need to work up to rebellion?  Like Reva mentioned before, when you’re a part of the inner clique, you can kind of choose what you want to do instead of jumping through all the hoops.

There was a lot of talk about spaces in this article that reminded me of how we discussed the importance of space in the Hush Harbor article.  Specifically when it mentioned how the change of space influenced the way people saw the Grimke sister’s oratory – a household = talks, but the same material in a hall = lecture (95).  How does space change our views of rhetoric?  How much does publicity really matter?  We questioned a few weeks ago with Bacon whether reception mattered more than intent; does content matter or delivery style/medium/space?

The section on Willard provides a great example of performance = argument.  Simply by her physical presence at parties could Willard make an argument that an educated woman would not try to defy her gender-sanctioned roles (84).

My two favorite/interesting tidbits (that I’d love to hear comments about):
“Finally, reading allowed Willard to keep her eyes on the page, making her the object of the legislators’ gaze rather than the gazer herself” (85)

“When antebellum women spoke for persuasive purposes in spaces gendered as masculine, they defied dominant gender ideals mandating their public silence, a rhetoric constraint that posed serious obstacles to their effectiveness (78, my emphasis).

African American Rhetoric(s), Chapt. 4 – The Literary Foremother

I think it would be helpful to open this post by quoting the preface’s introduction to this article:

Jacqueline K. Bryant mines the Afrocentric freedom rhetoric of the “Literary Foremother” [a concept taken from Alice Walker]. The rhetorical strategies and power of Black women, whether orators (as explored by Logan), writers, scholars, or astronauts, for that matter, have been woefully undertheorized. As Bryant points out, this is even more so in the case of the everyday Black mother (whether she was blood mother or community mother) who stood up under the weight of the Black and White communities in slavery.

Key Terms: The Literary Foremother - “older Black women [who] were creative despite the constraints of physical and mental abuse, space, and time … pass on creative genius in the forms of storytelling, language style, and creative arts … is unaware that her voice is laden with cultural wisdom, spiritual insight, and generative power … possesses hope so intense that it directs circumstances … guides those who hear her minimal and often inarticulate voice” (74) Foremothers “‘ knew what we must know ithout knowing a page of it themselves” (80, qtd from Walker).

Afrocentric Rhetoric: Rhetoric that centers the Black perspective rather than simply relating it to the dominant white perspective.

Mammy Figure: “the faithful, submissive, hardworking, older Black woman whose language and behavior perpetuate the myth of White superiority” (73).

Why this article is significant to our class discussion: Bryant applies the literary device of “foremother” to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by looking at the way that two older Black women use rhetoric to subvert the traditional “mammy” stereotype and instead act as foremothers (though Bryant tends to complicate/confuse her own article by then focusing on how Aunt Nancy is more of a foremother than Aunt Marthy). This chapter takes on a more “literary studies” bent, focusing on individual character and classification than on the uses and powers of the rhetoric on/towards the reading public. A key link between the two occurs in the following passage:

Jacobs argues that the enslaved Black woman does not live under the same conditions as the White woman, and thus she believes ‘that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others’ (p. 56). Jacobs speaks clearly and consistently for all enslaved women. Even though the title of her work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself connotes singularity, Jacobs speaks for women and to women. Hers is a battle against oppression that is consistently communal and gendered. … Jacobs redefines sexual morality for the sake of all enslaved women. She imparts vitality outside the rigid boundaries of marriage, race, and even outside her respect for Aunt Marthy’s inflexible views. (79)

Though Bryant sees the characters within the work individually, she suggests in this passage how the work as a whole may be viewed communally, taking a stand as rhetoric for all Black women.

Why these characters count as “Foremothers”: Both women, Aunt Marthy and Aunt Nancy, resist white superiority in their words and actions, and this resistance/”Elements of this prevailing ideology are ften incorporated in the mulatta’s [heroine's] world view … the mulatta generates specific responses in the forms of language activity, behavior, decisions, and/or actions that can be linked to the generative power of the foremother’s words” (75). They subvert the “mammy” stereotype by seeming to oblige to white superiority in order to survive, but both actively working to resist it in their “private”/real lives.

Bryant contrasts these two women in terms of their voices – Aunt Marthy having a continuously heard voice and Aunt Nancy having a rarely heard but repetitive voice. Ironically, though Aunt Marthy is outspoken, her greatest resistance against white oppression occurs through action rather than words when she steps up onto the auction block in order to make the selling of her into a public, rather than private, affair. Aunt Nancy, however, seems to be most powerful due to her rarely-heard but consistent message of “freedom at any cost.” These two women also have different outlooks on how to obtain freedom. Aunt Marthy believes in working through the system by trying to buy freedom. Aunt Nancy believes that “Oppressed people do not work for freedom or ask for freedom; they take freedom” (79).

Interesting but Undeveloped Aspect:  This article mentions that “Omission and silence are meaningful in language use” (82), but leaves the idea undeveloped.  This would be an interested topic for class discussion if anyone would like to posit on the idea.

Humblest May Stand Forth Chpt. 6 – Rhetoric and Empowerment: The Marginalized Abolitionist and Beyond

This chapter looks at how the rhetorics described in the previous chapters have been taken up by later rhetors for African-American rights, specifically Ida Wells, Archibald Grimke, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. The chapter focuses on four key ideas: Self-Help rhetoric, depictions of racial difference, use of patriotic rhetoric, and signifying the “black truth.”

Self-Help Rhetoric: Wells’ rhetoric rejected the idea of self-help in her anti-lynching arguments because “Not only would self-help not protect African Americans, but prosperity could in fact lead to violence” (222). Many hate crimes explicitly targeted prosperous Africa-Americans. This is in contrast to Booker T. Washington’s rhetoric of self-help, who spoke at the same time. “Because rhetoric like Washington’s suggested a polarization between self-help and political rights, rhetors like Wells, who argued for political change, would naturally distance themselves from self-help messages” (223). Malcolm X’s speech ‘The Ballot of the Bullet” and his ideas of Black Nationalism still precedent themes of self-help. Rather than catering to the white perception of Blacks, Malcolm X encouraged an amelioration of African-Americans’ own community image. This is self-help rhetoric, but no longer in the “conservative” sphere of Washington.

Depictions of Racial Difference: “As in the time of the marginalized abolitionists, contemporary white Americans often ignore the racial dimensions of their lives and beliefs, and race continues to be an ‘invisible’ or unnamed factor in discussions that implicitly engage racial issues” (224). Therefore, it continues to be important to foreground racial differences when discussing issues, so that the “colorblindness” trope does not erase the need for social action. Reminiscent of Walker’s physical descriptions of African-Americans, A. Grimke’s speeches physically describe the white man in order to bring to light the normally invisible category of “whiteness” so that it can be engaged into the discussion. “Grimke’s act … demonstrates that race influences the lives of all Americans, not just people of color. … revealing that racial categories are nt only arbitrary, but can be appropriated and redefined by those who are oppressed” (225).

Grimke also appropriates the travel rhetoric of Douglas and Remond, but rather than suggest that travel makes one forget their race, Grimke suggests that it makes racial difference all the more obvious. “African Americans’ experiences in France make them more conscious of racial difference in a way that empowers them to fight oppression… in fact, after one is treated as an equal, one gains racial pride” (225).

Issues of racial differences are often selective in the rhetoric of abolitionists. Audre Lorde takes issue with feminist rhetoric because it tends to favor identification of “women” over alienation of race. She adopts an “ousider-within” viewpoint as described by Patricia Hill Collins, challenging the actions and ideologies of white feminists who engage with feminism on an intellectual level, but then subjugate black women because of racial or class differences.

Patriotic Rhetoric: This section is pretty straightforward, acknowledging ways that rhetors continue to use rhetoric from American documents or highly patriotic figures for the cause of African American rights, though they were not historically associated with African Americans. Examples include Malcolm X’s speech “The Bullet or the Ballet” which is in direct reference to “Give me Liberty or Give me Death.” Wells appropriates the ideology of the Star-Spangled Banner, stating that “every member of this great composite nation will be a living, harmonious illustration of the words, and all can honestly and gladly join in singing” (229). Grimke mocks the words of the Preamble (“We the people”) and suggests writing the words “Sham” and “Hypocrisy” on the Declaration. In this way, “America’s texts are challenged and even altered by the realities of American society” (230)

Signifying:  This concept essentially entails using language to represent a perspective other than the dominant by changing the meanings of the dominant signs/language to those of the oppressed. The image of Thomas Jefferson is quoted as an example – white historians only saw Jefferson in a liberatory sense because his words suggested liberation, but African Americans saw him differently because of his actions.  For generations the “legend” of children from Jefferson and Sally Hemings was passed down through the African American community, signifying the “black truth” of the situation, whereas white historians refused to listen until they had irrefutable evidence.  The “black truth” was not the actual “truth” for these historians – rather it only signified a racial difference.  Similarly, the “black truth” of a particular passage of rhetoric may be different than the “white truth” or assumed truth of the same passage.  “When African Americans engage in dialogue with white America’s texts – a fundamental component of signifying – new truths, “black truths,” are revealed” (234).

The chapter ends with a reflection on the title words – “The Humblest May Stand Forth.”  These words represent that “the marginalized have a particular authority in American society, that the ‘humblest’ emerge as uniquely powerful rhetors precisely because of their position in society …. They also challenge and revise fundamental assumptions bout traditional rhetoric, revealing ways that we must rethink conventional theories to account for the persuasion of those who are marginalized in society” (235).   This last point is essential to our class conversation.  It is a suggested answer to the question, “Why study social histories of rhetoric?”  It’s not only because certain voices have been left out in the traditional study, but because those voices contain theories and methods of persuasion that cannot be seen in traditional accounts, that cannot exist in traditional accounts of rhetoric.  If the only rhetoric we studied was the rhetoric of the already-powerful, we would completely miss the persuasive methods and theories of the oppressed, or of the someday-powerful.  Methods that can grant power rather than simply hold it, or raise us from positions that the already-powerful have never been in.  Not only do we need to acknowledge the voices of those “left out,” but also their unique positionings and uses of rhetoric.

Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor: Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Gendering of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric

*Please note – this summary contains mostly patchwriting without citation*
This chapter details the way that Sarah Josepha Hale influenced women’s roles in the nineteenth-century through her position as an editor for Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1834-1872. She constructed representational norms that assumed hegemonic functions within a constituency of women who, although not yet enfranchised (because they could not participate in public debate, still could exercise significant sway over political action. Most of Hale’s appeals for an increase in women’s roles and/or status came through the idea of Republican Motherhood (mothers who needed skills in order to teach her sons how to be patriots).  This ideal of RM still kept women in the private or domestic sphere, but allowed them access to education and activities that they would otherwise be excluded from.  This sort of public/private split suggests that politics might have a private dimension and anticipates the more general move of fragmentation (from a collective) and specialization.  Hale’s rhetoric is complicated in this manner.  She tends to write for a collective audience with “collective” rhetoric, yet the issues that she advocates for begin shaping society into an individualize rhetoric.  However, Hale’s collective/consensus is usually one based on gender differentiation (she very much wanted to keep women’s and men’s roles separate) and one of class.  Hale did not seem to want to put women into the public sphere, but merely looked for ways to bring the public sphere into women’s private domain.  the physical dictaes of print encouraged a more private political participation – public discourse taken up in the home via silent writing.  She acknowledged for her readers a guarantee of quality for what would go into the magazine, even explaining her choices for accepting or rejecting pieces in an editorial column so that the practice would be visible to all her readers and could help cultivate them towards better writing in the future.  This guarantee became a hallmark of Godey’s, assuring readers of a certain degree of literary/moral respectability.  The Godey’s reader was as careful a construct as was its editor.  Well-read, entitled to masculine respect, this reader was a woman who had a right, indeed an obligation, to hold political opinions.  She modeled her editorial practice on oral precedent, representing her readership not as private and individual silent readers and writers but as a community of like-minded women.  The format was based on conversation – it would not agonistic but would depend on a common understanding, claiming high purpose without encroaching upon serious political matters.  It would instead claim a womanly perspective on them, emphasizing moral application, subsumed under the ideal of Republican Motherhood.  Because she constructed her readership this way, as a good of like-minded peers, Hale would orchestrate them into concerted political action like joining gender-specific groups in support of an issue or fund-raising for some action (under the guise of RM).  Under this same guise she advocated for women’s education, claiming that a woman’s first right is to such education as will give her the full develpment of all her personal, [not public or political] mental and moral faculties.  She suggested that if women were educated then they could raise their children in an all-around manner without having to send them to school (which she saw as unnecessary within our democratic and industrial society).  She insisted that women’s domestic duties were sciences – cooking involved Chemistry principles, etc. – and they should therefore be taught about these underlying sciences.  In the Godey’s Book, Hale gave reports on the present state of women’s education in Europe and America, the most celebrated women’s seminaries, and literary works as were particularly designed for women (which you could order through the book if you did not live close enough to purchase them otherwise).  She outlined a course of reading that women should do at home, which, while she intended it to solidify the collective through shared experience, also encouraged individualism by asking women to engage with the texts as individuals (re-creating context, responding via mental composition, and keeping a common-place book with comments about thoughts and readings).  Though, this dangerous individualism is allayed somewhat by Hale’s assertion that the thoughtful reader’s decisions would be made “rightly.”  She encouraged women’s employment (granting they were single or widowed), and pushed for the use of gender-specific titles.  For instance, she claimed that “it would be more honorable and respectable for such a lady to claim her own title – ‘Doctoress’ – and ennoble it … by her own merits” (172).  The extent and agitation in this regard marks the connection between language and modes of thought and behavior.  Such an undertaking has the effect of shifting the entire struggle for political power from the level of physical force to the level of language.  Plus, she accounts that women have the best position for studying language acquisition during the raising of children – thus, Hale openly claimed philology to be a profession suited to women.

Closer to the end of her career, though, Hale could feel her presumed collective readership slipping away.  The United States was expanding westward (as were her readers), literacy rates were on the rise in all classes, and class mobility began to be a reality for many.  Hale increasingly devoted coumn space to issues of spoken English (where she felt you could tell the true class of a person), rather than focusing on written English which could hide class identity.  In this she met a paradox.  For her instruction in language, such as the fine points of vulgarity and pronunciation, may be seen to have functioned both as self-instruction for newly bourgeois women and as a system inscribing the undeniable indicators of social class by which upstart women might be identified and identified-against.

Key point: Even as she nurtured revolution, she still held tenaciously on to the old ways of thought, the old patterns of meaning, the old system of exclusion.  Hale and women like her both fueled rhetoric’s transformation and impeded it.

Stygall – Resisting Privilege

Stygall, Gail.
“Resisting Privilege: Basic Writing and Foucault’s Author Function.”

Keywords: Author function, Foucault, basic writing, basic writers, master discourse, transgression

Summary:
Stygall appropriates and uses Foucault’s concept of the author function as a way to juxtapose sanctioned writing (writing of the canon) and unsanctioned writing (“basic writers” and the text they produce). She asserts that the author function is a “master discourse…and that the teaching of basic writing is formulated around the educational discursive necessary to keep the author function dominant” (321).  Stygall recounts her attempts to analyze the circumvention or continuation of these routines by starting a letter exchange between her class of Comp. graduate students at Miami (Ohio) and a basic writing course at IUPUI.  The exercise doesn’t go as well as planned.  Stygall insists—at the end—that this activity nor its outcomes are “not [a] surrender to the inevitable” (340) but a way to foreground resistance in “training new teachers of composition” (339).

Notes/Quotes:
“First, we should make the historicity of the basic writing “problem” visible to our colleagues and administrators” (339).

“the power of Foucauldian analysis is best used in reconceptualizing contemporary politics and resisting disciplinary power.  But we must act from the analysis” (340).

**The focus of Stygall’s study is on the grad students and not the basic writers.  This reverses the order of most Basic Writing studies – how do we in the institution maintain the master narratives of the author function**

“Even more than basic writers, graduate students in English departments are subjects of the master discourse, the apprentices who must subscribe to reigning educational discursive practices if they intend to remain in the academy” (##).

Reading Stygall for Method:
Research question: can consciousness of master discourse keep grad students from perpetuating the master discourse of the author function. “I wanted to know whether being self conscious about differences and their implications would result in less re-inscription of status.  Would the letters acknowledge difference and resist masking it?” (##)

Method: Textual analysis of letter exchange between grad. students and basic writers.  Analysiing specifically for discourse/textual cues that signify perpetuate re-enforce the author function as defined Foucault.

Material: Letter exchange and some comments on student drafts.

Evidence: length of letters, content (refusal to engage with race, socio-economic personal academic/Access Center struggles, the re-enforcement of education as positive, the benefits of writing, cult of literacy propaganda)

Significance: Requiring self-reflexive behaviors of people teaching basic writing at the graduate level.  Realization of the pervasive influence of institutional discourse concerning basic writers.  Being comp students doesn’t negate those influences.  Stop using temporary faculty/grad students when teaching basic writing.  One course doesn’t allow for the cultivation of attitudes and/or strategies that combat the stigma of basic writing.

Related texts: (theory text) Foucault “What is an Author?”; (model for experiment) Brodkey, Linda. “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in the ‘Literacy Letters.”

Problems With the Study:
Stygall points out that her students didn’t elide the educational matrices like she wanted them to, and points out that this never occurred (to paraphrase her) since they are graduate students performing for their instructor.  “Where but the graduate seminar does the panopticon discipline so well?” (##).  Not only did her gaze influence the study, but also the objective that she assigned to the students for their letters: “[We set] off to other institutions to bring back exotic knowledge about the basic writer.  And ‘knowledge about’ – rather than changed practices – is what we brought back” (##).

How Theory is Used “As Method”:

Theory is used as the lens to set up the background of where Basic Writing discourse is at the current time – we currently inscribe the author function on our basic writers – and to textually analyze the letters.  Results based on whether the texts fit the theory of author function or resisted it.

-Is this theory as method, or simply theory as lens?  Is there a difference?

-Is this study successful?  Why or why not?

-Could this study have been done without the theory of Author Function?  What did the idea of Author Function add to this particular study?

Anderson – Argument and Ethos

Anderson, Amanda.
Chapter Six, “Argument and Ethos.”
The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory.

Keywords: Foucault, Habermas, Foucault-Habermas debate, ethos, character, argument, power, liberalism, democracy, procedural, habit.

Summary
Ethos in literary theory has given way to other concepts like identity, hybridity, preformativity, disidentification,  embodiment; and speaking subject often identify themselves through broad sociological terms like gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality.  Anderson bemoans the loss of the concept of ethos in the rhetorical sense of character.  Several may assign this as a way to disparage or identify certain proponents of opposing theories, but few—if any—speak of ethos as an enactment of theory by a theorist.  In particular, Anderson uses Foucault and Habermas and their often cited (though never actually happened due to Foucault’s death) debate.

In the way common to the current moment, each Foucault and Habermas have had an ethos assigned to them that identifies them as polemic to the other’s ideas and theories.  Foucault is often seen as chic, ethically superior by refusing to participate in a discussion that would lend credence to positivism, a universal concept of reason, and a debate that would contradict his theories: critique is power, and power can not be used to criticize power.  On the other hand Habermas is assigned the ethos of being plodding, dense, pedantic, old fashioned, and stuck in the utopian worldview of Marxism.  Foucault’s ethos is critiqued as proof that his theories is incoherent, while Habermas’ position on ethos is said to be as an immature act of persuasion that appeals to the emotions of readers/ an audience.

Anderson posits that both ethical positions are missed opportunities to see their respective ideas in action.  Foucault’s negative argumentation is the physical embodiment of the care of self, the refusal to participate in an argument that extends the reach of the nodes of power.  Only in refusing to open oneself to the world can one refuse to participate in the panoptic structures that society needs to function.  Habermas ethos is much more nuanced, and has to do with his vision of collective, procedural ethos.  While Habermas does think the use of ethos to convince others of ideas is childish, he also thinks that it takes away from the larger ethos of the collective institutions to act in the name of active change for a better world.  The problem with Habermas, according to Anderson, is that procedural ideologies aren’t flashy, and in contrast to Foucault’s assigned ethos of saint/celebrity, Habermas is always already seen as slow and stodgy, inept, a proponent of unthinking purism unable to adapt to a world without the theoretical structures of modernity, causing readers to dismiss the complexity of his theory.

Notes/Quotes
[E]thos is used to trump or eclipse certain forms of reasoned argument, rather than to imagine more productively the ways in which theory might deliberate upon its reason to practice (159-160). (**Anderson’s key claim**)
To some extent, by using the terms [ethos and character] together I mean to evoke the Aristotelian conception of ethos as character, which stress the elements of self-cultivation and confirmed habit (137).

[T] he aversion to formal argument in Foucault becomes, for his many admiring commentators, ethos-defining (143).

[Habermas’] therefore does not simply impose a transcendental claim about the conditions of communicative reason, but rather imagines that the significance and effects of speech conditions are bound up in the attitude one cultivates toward them, the way in which one makes sense of them (158).  (**notice the idea of “attitude.”  How does this relate to the discussion of last week?  Do certain attitudes about discourse necessitate a certain ethos?**)

Reading Anderson for Method:
Anderson’s study    -looks beyond the written texts of the theorists and into:  public speeches, interactions between theorists, reception of theorists work in the critical audience, and habits of theorists that might support or negate their theories in praxis.

-applies a rhetorical concept, ethos, onto the theory/theorists, seeing theory not only as the lens, but as the object of examination

-examines which aspects of a theory elude questioning (in this case, the ethos of the theorist)

White – Foucault Decoded

Keywords: Foucault, Structuralism, language, The Order of Things (Les Mots and les choses), Nietzsche, Positivistic Structuralism, Eschatological, Structuralism,

Summary:
White gives a general retelling of the project laid out in The Order of Things, eg, Foucault’s attempt to show that the human sciences are not dealing in universal constants, but more in trying to describe the concepts of “wealth,” “labor,” and “language” in ways that are particular to their episteme.  White explains that Foucault is asserting that trying to see the different human sciences from four different epochs (INSERT THEM AS DEFINED BY FOUCAULT HERE) as continuous and one culminating in the creation of the next in descending order is a fallacy.  These sciences know nothing about any of the terms that can be extrapolated from one time period and used in the next since they are indecipherable by those in the later epochs; the previous epochs’ definitions are tied into social concerns of their age, and therefore, are interpretations of these concepts that only make sense in that specific time and place.

White continues on to defend Foucault from his critics, one of which is Jean Piaget.  Piaget dismisses Foucault ideas since there is no “transformational system by which to account for the displacement of one ‘epistemic field’ by another” (251).  White insists that Foucault does have “a transformational system built” into The Order… “even though Foucault appears not to know that it is there” (251).  White explains Foucault has rediscovered “the projective or generational aspect of language…[language] constitutes the modality of the relationships among things by the very act of assuming a posture before them” (254).  White also asserts that a kind of “tropological reduction underlies and sustains Foucault’s analysis” (255) of the human sciences from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, much like the four tropes of man as argued by Vico.

Notes/Quotes:
“In reality, Foucault suggests, the human sciences have remained captive of the figurative modes of discourse in which they constituted (rather than simply signified) the objects with which they pretend to deal” (231).

Foucault’s “archeology” – “is interested… only in the ‘ruptures,’ ‘discontinuities,’ and disjunctions’ in the history of consciousness, that is to say, in the differences between the various epochs in the history of consciousness, rather than the similarities” (234).

“as a totality, the sum of which is less than the parts that make it up” (234).

“Any given mode of discourse is identifiable, then, not by what it permits consciousness to say about the world, but by what it prohibits it from saying” (239).

Reading White for Method:
“The French structuralists in general begin by treating all human phenomena as if they were linguistic phenomena” (230).

“Archeology” as an alternative to “history”

Whites breakdown of Foucault’s method:
“One begins with an examination of the prevailing ‘formalizations’ of thought about life, labor, and language in a given epoch and moves from there to a consideration of the lexical and syntactical strategies by which objects of study are identified and the relationships among them are explicated.  This analysis then yields insights into the ‘modes of discourse’ prevailing at a given time, which in turn permits derivation of the ‘epistemological ground’ and the ‘wording’ activity underlying and sanctioning a given mode of discourse” (240).

Questions:

Did anyone find themselves arguing with this piece due to knowledge of Foucault’s later work?  What might this example then show about Anderson’s arguments on ethos?

How different is “Archeology” from “History”?  White seems to imply that it is only “speculative” history (255).  Why might these be considered different methods?

Sorry about the late notice…

in posting these notes.  I struggled with some of these readings, especially in terms of how to read them “as/for” method.  I also can’t guarantee that these will be the exact handouts that you receive in class, but it’s a good start.