Southern Miss (Noun Followed By Verb)

One of things that really pleases me about Kathleen Blake Yancey’s address/article “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key”—perhaps because it sets her apart from the great majority of rhetoric and composition studies material I’ve read— is her willingness to confront the material conditions, not only of our students and their writing process, but within our own departments and discipline. Yancey doesn’t eschew facts on the ground type analysis of the shift underway in today’s English departments in favor of esoteric and inside-baseball feeling conversations about this vs. that. She realizes the if none of us have jobs, this vs. that isn’t going to matter to any of us in our new careers as bricklayers.
Her discussion of the redistribution of funds from the University to the students themselves “in the form of scholarships called Lucky or Freedom” is interesting and something I’d be interested in learning more about. When I first came to Mississippi, I was impressed by the number of students attending my who had these kinds of scholarships. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think “hey, where is this money coming from?” Perhaps, this is why the photo-copier in our department was used by 13th century Irish monks. Maybe this is why nearly all full time instructor/lecturer positions were eliminated. Perhaps this is the reason why graduate students were, with no warning or chance to protest, cut from 9 credits of tuition to 6 credits tuition in the summer. (The unfairness of this is mindblowing to me. We hold up our end of the bargain by teaching all year and THEN with two months left, they change the deal, reducing our compensation across the board. If this were a business, people would be Up In Arms).
The future of the university, not just English Departments, but the full on shooting match seems to be on a lot of folks mind as evidence by Jed Lapinski’s article in today’s Salon that I happened to be reading —(i.e.) alt./tabbing back forth— while writing this response. Enjoy…
http://www.salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/03/28/anya_kamenetz_diyu_interview

The Only History of Literacy Paper That Could Ever Move Me

While Deb Brandt's "Accumulating Literacy" does a serviceable job of tracing the growth of literacy and the means by which it happened as well as what it meant during the 20th century, where she gets big points from me is for familiarizing me with Dorothy Smith's concept of DOCUMENTARY REALITY-- " so much of what passes for raw data has already been processed socially organized systems of recording and recording."

I agree with Smith and am interested in reading more about her ideas. The idea of filtered reality ascending to become so much the dominant reality that its very filtered-ness becomes unperceived is one of the concepts I'm interested in both in my fiction and in the classroom (In the first Argument and Research classes I taught I forced everyone to write on the cover of their notebooks "Facts all come with points of view"--Talking Heads.)

One of the exercises I used to help students understand this was to look at current event from four or five different points of view on the political spectrum. Today's health care bill passage would work. What's actually happening is largely up for debate. News aggregators like Drudge even work for the exercise-- what narrative is being pushed here.

As our media become fragmented the problem becomes more complex and potentially more insidious.

Graff-tastic!

I'm sympathetic to Graff throughout his essay, but he really wins me over at the bottom of p 72 "Hypothetical students who studied nothing but comics or texts like Vanna speaks would be very unlikely to produce intellectually valuable readings of such texts unless they had also read far more substantial works...(ones) that provided them with models of intellectual analysis."

Right on. I thoroughly agree with the idea of having students examine "lightweight texts" as I find the students are more easily engaged here and if the students are reading the assignments, it's hard to get a conversation going at all. That said we must give students tools to get them to think about this texts in interesting ways.

So here are my top three texts and my top three pieces of guidance:

1. Good Times http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070991/plotsummary
2. The Jeffersons http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072519/
3. The Cosby Show http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086687/

1. James Baldwin "Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind."
2. Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
3. Henry Louis Gates The Signifying Monkey http://www.amazon.com/Signifying-Monkey-African-American-Literary-Criticism/dp/019506075X

Everybody wants to Own the Future

First, I was glad to see the mention of David Russell's Writing in the Academic Disciplines 1870-1990 and Robert Connors Rhetoric-Composition. I think one of the real challenges in the US is getting folks to understand the way things are is not the way things have always been, i.e., this is not their natural state.This is one of the reason I really enjoyed reading James A. Berlin (even if some may say 'hell! no!). We need to trace the development of out institutions, to see the ideological and material forces that shaped them.

I'm also interested in getting 'beyond' (whatever that means) the traditional research paper. My own ideas regarding this have to do with connecting writing assignments to students lives and concerns while developing a further role in the larger political community as a "stakeholder."

The place where Davis and Shadle break down for me is that they can't seem to remember how quickly the present becomes the past. Written in 2000, I would anticipate their article would foresee the shift away from not only Literature based composition course, but the new normal of when it comes to students working with multi-media sources.