A Hopefully Helpful-ish Prelude to Tomorrow's Discussion

I would like to begin this post with a brief recount of my day and where I’m at now.  Thank all the goodness in the world that the International Congress on Medieval Studies is being held this week in Kalamazoo, Michigan because it has inadvertently afforded me a day off to work.  Most of my morning was spent on a writing assignment for the cancelled class, meal making, an advisement meeting with Linda and what was meant to be a conference with a student that the student failed to show up to.  So I spent from 2pm – 6:30pm reading all the articles and meticulously taking notes.  I now have a Word document of notes that is 12 pages in length and vague notions of what to do with those notes in order to synthesize them into a cogent blog post.  So bear with me while I try to figure this out, and please feel free to correct, complicate, add, or subtract to what you read.

So I guess I’ll begin with brief synopses of each article and then move in to trying to find ways of connecting them.  I’ll begin with Lu & Horner’s “Composing in a Global-Local Context: Careers, Mobility, Skills.”

Lu and Horner begin their piece by differentiating between Instrumentalist/Pragmatic Pedagogies and its nemesis Critical Pedagogies.  They then transition into an explication of their aim, which is to get us to understand that we need to address global and immediate concerns productively by articulating the mutually constitutive relationship between them, and to do so, we must embrace and use both types of opposed pedagogies.  They then go into the need to demystify terms like “career” and “job security” in order to show how the FYC (First Year Composition) classroom can serve as a space and occasion for teachers and students to jointly explore the uneven and unstable shift from fordist career models to the current trend of globalization and how such a shift has affected college students and college teachers.

The authors then discuss the need to work with students on revising our and their understanding(s) of the meaning of our and their career concerns and desires, and the global-local contexts within which these arise, and in response to and on which these operate (118).  They confirm that we need to do this through the act of listening (in spite of the complexity of such a process) and through the analyses of student writing.  From here, Lu and Horner get into describing the older image of a “company man” and how it has unstably shifted to the image of the “mobile portfolio man.”  They note that students and teachers must find different ways to deal with the different meanings of mobility endorsed by fordist and flexible capitalist regimes, and that we shouldn’t lose sight of the uneven character of the spread of any hegemonic force across globe and of the resistance it encounters in particular regions, professions, and scenes of individual students’ learning and writing (124).

They end their piece by offering up suggestions for how we can use writing to think through “the implications of globalization for the daily—and nightly—practices of households, diverse local workplaces, and organizations, face-to-face communities, and non-elite embodied and social embedded actors” (126).

Next, I read “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach” by Horner, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur.  Their piece is clearly marked “Opinion” in the College English article title, an interesting aspect that may or may not help readers understand and/or place the article.  The authors begin by describing the way classrooms, communities, and the wider world have always been multilingual instead of monolingual and compare this point to how college composition is still heavily infused with the traditional notion of reinforcing traditional norms of linguistic homogeneity.  They explain that the purpose of their article is to argue for a new paradigm, that of taking a translingual approach to language difference – one that sees difference as a resource instead of as an insurmountable variable.  They go on to detail the two historical prevailing approaches to language difference: the traditional that seeks to eradicate difference and the newer one that acknowledges difference but keeps it contained.

Horner et al continue on to explain the need to redefine “mastery,” “fluency,” and “proficiency” in terms of language and its continuous, fluid, changing nature.  They briefly discuss ESL, bilingual education, foreign language instruction (and make a point to say “so-called foreign language” which I thought was interesting), language rights, immigration, and state language policies.  Finally, they end with the implications of a translingual approach for writing classrooms, saying that it will require a reconsideration/revising of writing programs and curricula.  They also offer up a FAQ section about implementing translingual approaches to the comp classroom and provide an extensive, interdisciplinary bibliography of supplemental reading material.

Finally, I reread my selection, “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition” by Fan Shen.  Shen begins with a personal story that explains his Chinese to English education and enculturation in terms of composition.  He asserts that his aim is to “show how his cultural background shaped—and shapes—approaches to writing in English and how writing in English redefined—and redefines—his ideological and logical identities” (459).  He talks at length about the “be yourself” rule of English composition, and how acclimating to such a concept not only challenged him to examine his own writing practices, but how it also challenged him to examine the cultural underpinnings that inform Chinese and English writing practices. 

He notes that he tactically imagined himself in a new body or a new skin, and this helped him to enact a “mask” that allowed him to effectively isolate and put aside his Chinese self to make room for and construct his new English self.  He discusses then the old, mystic-like Chinese concept of creative and critical composing called “yijing” and how it differs from Western composition in terms of logicality.  Shen also explains how Chinese composition in general differs from English composition in that it’s like an onion – one must peel away the layers to get to the core/point, whereas in English composition the point is laid out very blatantly at the beginning.  He closes his article with the suggestion that English comp teachers dealing with ESL students who are largely unfamiliar with English composition and how it reflects Western ideals should take the initiative to point out cultural differences and how those differences might help students re-envision their own writing processes in order to make a smoother transition to Western writing processes.

Whew!  If you skipped or skimmed through most or all of that, I don’t blame you.  But for me, laying these things out is helpful in keeping my thoughts organized or at least close to some form of semblance.  Now I guess I would like to talk about my own personal reactions and connections to and between the articles and pose some questions that we can explore further during class discussion.

I’ll begin with the ways in which I see the Horner et al and the Shen pieces overlapping.  To follow me, you might refer back to p.303-05 in Horner et al where the authors explain in great detail what constitutes a translingual approach to language difference.  In the last full paragraph on p.304, they say, “This approach thus calls for more, not less, conscious and critical attention to how writers deploy diction, syntax, and style, as well as form, register, and media.  It acknowledges that deviations from dominant expectations need not be errors; that conformity need not be automatically advisable; and that writers’ purposes and readers’ conventional expectations are neither fixed nor unified.”  To me it seems it is exactly this kind of thinking that allows us to recognize the intrinsic value of Shen’s early attempts at English composition.  For even though the excerpts from his essays on Wordsworth and Williams are largely imagistic, pictorial, and poetic instead of straightforward, thesis-driven, and “logical,” they are still argumentative.  Without Shen’s explication of some of the tenets of Chinese culture and composition and Horner et al’s translingual approach, we might (as teachers of Western composition) be tempted to say something like “well that’s really pretty and all, but it’s not persuasive in the way I was looking for it to be.”

In terms of the translingual approach, we might approach an essay like this by acknowledging this “deviation” as different, but not an error.  We might inquire as to Shen’s purposes for writing in the style and form that he did, and ask how he envisions the piece’s reception; and in doing so, the value of the essay becomes quite clear. 

While I read these excerpts again, I connected them to the split between rhetoric and poetics that occurred as a result of Aristotle’s desire for a logocentricity in argumentation.  Is that why Shen’s old English teacher responded “interesting, but strange”?  What have we lost and what—in some respects—is still missing because of this split?  This also made me think of Villanueva’s inclusion of poetry in his articles and his discussion of memory and pathos being severely discredited aspects of composing.

In terms of the rhetoric/poetic split and the lack of pathos in academic discourse, I started thinking about it in terms of capitalism, marketing, and public relations – which may or may not relate vaguely back to “Composing in a Global-Local Context.”  I keep thinking of Adam Curtis’ four part series Century of the Self.  In Century of the Self, Curtis explores the evolution of capitalism through Freud’s work on psychoanalysis and how Freud’s cousin Edward Bernays used psychoanalytic methods to control and cultivate the American masses to consume.  Remarkably, Bernays’ tactics succeeded in controlling the masses by appealing to the individual and making consuming personal; thus, one might arguably say that consumerist marketing relies very heavily on pathos passed off as logos.  Now I’m definitely not advocating for marketing strategies in academic discourse, but I’m definitely arguing alongside Villanueva (and Andalzua, even though she doesn’t outright say this in anything we read for this class) that pathos is a serious, important element of discourse that could serve to greatly enrich academic discourse alongside ethos and logos.  Shen, Villanueva, Andalzua, and the others we’ve read who have put poetry or poetic prose into their essays all clearly see the value of it, and I think we do too as we realize something different and exciting is going on in their pieces that hasn’t been going on in the others. 

(Click here to watch all four episodes of Century of the Self for free)

Why do you think we’re so wary of pathos in academia, especially when it comes through in FYC writing?  What might things start to look like if pathos became equally valued as ethos and logos in academic writing, both that of students and that of teachers?

Furthermore, I’m wondering what everyone in the class feels about Shen’s early essay excerpts.  I know it’s impossible to say with any certainty because of the hypothetical situation and the fact that we only get excerpts of the essays, but what would you do if you were handed an essay like that?  How would you grade it?  How would you talk to the student about it?

I guess that’s all I’ve got for now.  I look forward to talking to all of you about these pieces!  Thank you for your time J