Pop Culture at Mizzou

I was riding with a friend to a Mizzou football game recently, and to my right were a large group of young Mizzou college students dancing to the Soulja Boy song “Crank Dat.” Not only were these people Mizzou college students, but they were, by far, young white men, who were dancing to the lyrics. The lyrics are as follows, “Soulja Boy up in this ho, watch me crank dat, watch me roll, watch me crank dat soulja boy, super soak dat ho.” Everyone who loves this songs knows exactly what it means, and I recently found out what the chorus means. It means ejaculating on a woman’s (ho’s) back, pasting a towel on the spot, and watching her wake up to a superman-like experience . . .

It really bothers me when people refer to hoes as a definition for women, then defend themselves by declaring that all women are not hoes. First of all, no women are hoes. Second of all, there is no type of women, there are just lived experiences; there is nothing new under the sun. To call a woman a ho is to undermine the fact that what she may be going through is deserves a definition and not a response or intervention. Behavior is a product of experience and intelligence/understanding. No one is a ho, bitch, slut, or tramp. No man is a dog, punk, or fag. I am tired of people not challenging those words which they have become desensitized to, only because it rhymes with doe, trick (not really), but, or lamp.

People are not thinking and they are not reading. Instead, they are listening and repeating, and it’s dumbing down our students.

Meta-Teaching

I use “meta-teaching” a lot in class. Oftentimes, I’ll wrap up an exercise by saying “why do you think I had you guys do this?” or “what can we learn from this?” Sometimes it helps to have them attempt to summarize the aims of what they’re doing. I usually do this with a little humor–”why do you think we did this today? for fun? because I’m obsessed with writing citations?”

I’ve found that 9 times out of 10, my students have a pretty fair guess about why we’re doing what we’re doing.

The Pedagogical Stance

The first Curzan Damour chapter starts out by talking about teaching as a performance.  This brought to mind the rhetorical stance that Booth talked about in the article we read a few weeks ago.  I think it’s useful to transfer the terms Booth used–entertainer, advertiser, pedant–to the context of teaching, which probably admits more variation than the perfect poise that Booth regards as the highest achievement of the rhetor.   I’m sure we’ve all experienced professors who fall into the persona of the entertainer; academia is full of charismatic types, and that charisma can be a great way to energize students.  I have no chance of ever achieving charisma.  Nor am I knowledgeable enough to be pedantic.  I’m too much of a fuddy-duddy to ever fall into the advertiser’s stance so I guess my only hope lies in achieving that balance Booth talks about. 

Ms. Ericka P. Evans Responsibility 128
Office Hours: MWF 10-11 a.m. History 3711-01
9-9:50 a.m.

W.E.B. DuBois and the Talented Tenth: A Historical Survey of the Movement
W.E.B. DuBois was, arguably, the most well-traveled, educated, and enterprising black American at the turn of the century. The turn of the century, often called the nadir of black life, saw a failed Reconstruction, the publication of Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, in addition to the steady movement of black Southerners to the North, and the United States’s entry into World War I. DuBois thought that the talented approximately ten percent of the black diaspora, who were empowered with education and wealth, would uplift the masses of blacks who were more disfranchised than they were.

This course will endeavor to answer three questions:
1. Whom were the Talented Tenth?
2. How did DuBois employ others to aid in his libertarian efforts?
3. How does Booker T. Washington problematize DuBois’s goals?

Texts (available in the bookstore):
The Harlem Renaissance, An Anthology, by Henry C. Porter
W.E.B. DuBois: 1945-1968, by David Levering Lewis
Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington
Course Objectives:
• To develop skills in thesis-driven argumentation.
• To master the writing process (outlines, revisions, peer review, editing).
• To utilize proper sources and document sources using MLA formatting.
• To produce a formal research paper using MLA documentation.
• To appeal to ethos, pathos, and logos in persuasive writing.
• To become proficient at recognizing a problem, and thinking rhetorically about purpose, audience, and genre.

Plagiarism:

Academic integrity is fundamental to the activities and principles of a university. All members of the academic community must be confident that each person’s work has been responsibly and honorably acquired, developed, and presented. Any effort to gain an advantage not given to all students is dishonest whether or not the effort is successful. The academic community regards breaches of the academic integrity rules as extremely serious matters. Sanctions for such a breach may include academic sanctions from the instructor, including failing the course for any violation, to disciplinary sanctions ranging from probation to expulsion. When you are in doubt about plagiarism, paraphrasing, quoting, collaboration, or any other form of cheating, consult the course instructor.

Classroom Accommodations:
If you have a disability or need classroom accommodations, please notify me as soon as possible. If applicable, you should register with Disability Services by calling 573/882-4696.
Attendance: If a student misses more than five class periods, the student may receive a personal e-mail regarding one’s course outlook. However, it is up to the discretion of the course instructor if a student will be advised to drop the course. As you progress through your course of study, your attendance will be monitored even closer. Please consult me, without the disclosure of information that would make you feel uncomfortable afterwards, when you think that you must miss a class. If you represent the university in athletics, please let me know as soon as possible.
Points and Grading Scale:
Paper 1: 100 points possible
1st submission: 40 pts
2nd submission: 60 pts
Paper 2: 100 points possible
1st submission: 40 pts
2nd submission: 60 pts
Paper 3: 200 points possible
1st submissions: 80 pts
Paper Presentation: 20 pts
2nd submission: 100 pts
In-class Assignments: Each assignment is worth five points.
The total possible points to earn in the course are 430 points.

387-430 = A
370-386 = B+
344-370 = B
327-343 = C+
301-326 = C
284-300 = D+
258-283 = D

Egg on my face

There is something to be said about “not smiling until Christmas.” My approach to teaching usually works, but every once and awhile it fails.

My second class is a nightmare. As I said a couple of classes ago, the text messaging, cell phone ringing, facebooking, and talking when I am has gotten out of hand. In addition, I have several students that won’t write during freewrites, talk during group tasks, and roll their eyes at me when I am talking.

All semester long, I have asked them to stop the talking and get to work, but I did so in a nice way. Now I am exhausted. Honestly, I lost my good mood two weeks before Thanksgiving. They don’t take me seriously, and I took back control of my classroom before Thanksgiving, but it was way too late, and they resent me for it.

I think it is the group. My first class is not like this at all.

I think I was too permissive at the beginning of the semester, and this second class just has strong personalities that took advantage of my good mood. When I decided to discipline and started getting obviously frustrated, it changed the dynamic of my class. Now it is a tad bit uncomfortable in there.

In retrospect, I think I should have been more stern from the get go. I’m going to try that next time around.

Curzan and Damour say it is easier to let up later than to start out too lax and tighten up. They’re right. Egg on my face.

Teaching Evals

Curzan and Damour devote the latter part of chapter nine to teaching evaluations. They say we should read them. I don’t think we should, if we are talking about the fill in the bubble ones or the departmental ones. I can honestly say that every evaluation that I have ever read is worthless. They either brown nose or slam me. Honestly, I don’t even think they are useful.

Of course, this stems from my own experience. I get a lot of “Miss Woo gets excited easily,” “This class was boring,” “I never opened the textbook,” “I hate to write,” etc. What am I supposed to learn from that? Most of the statements are generic: “I liked the class,” “I hated the class.” The bubble forms are even worse. Most students randomly fill them in. I noticed the bubble sheet is arranged differently here at Missouri, but I don’t think that will really change much, as most students aren’t thinking when they fill in those things.

The only good feedback I have received came from evaluation forms that I wrote myself. I did this several semesters ago. I created a series of questions and gave my students twenty minutes to respond to them. These questions asked about specific paper prompts, readings, activities, timing of paper prompts, conferencing techniques, my comments, availability, and ability to generate discussion. I learned my favorite assignments happened to be the assignments my students found most lifeless. I also found that some of the most random things I did in class actually helped my students.

I highly suggest that you create your own evaluation form, as it can help you understand what worked well and what didn’t. Those departmental forms are too vague: comment about your teacher, comment about the course. Those questions are too open ended and give teachers no idea about what works and what doesn’t. These forms encourage comments about hairstyles, personality, and other things irrelevant to the course design. These generic forms also generate generic answers that are either scathing (because you embarrassed a student for their incessant talking or flunked them for shoddy work) or too laudatory.

ESL and Composition

Shen’s article reminded me of my tedious work at Writing Centers. I tutored several Korean and Indian students regularly, and besides the language barrier, I always noticed that they had a hard time writing thesis statements and topic sentences. In fact, it wasn’t what they had to say that was awkward (well, sometimes that was the case due to strange syntax), but it was the way they presented it.

I knew from previous experience teaching that foreign students approached writing differently, and I had read some ESL articles on Asian styles of composition. However, beyond understanding they compose and think differently, I struggled with ways to help them. It just took a lot of patience, as I would see the same mistakes week after week with the same student.

I never really figured out how to help them accelerate their understanding of our style, and I don’t really think Shen offers us very much in light ways to help them. She mentions assigning research specific writing prompts to identify cultural differences, but the purpose of her article is to educate Western teachers of the different ideologies that fuel our approaches to writing.

I would like to comment, as well, that there is another habit of Asian writers that is tied to ideology. As Shen mentions, Chinese writers often defer to authority to make a point, instead of using the individualism associated with Western thought. Well, Asian writers have a hard time grasping our idea of plagiarism. They see no problem in using writers’ words, word for word, without citation, as evidence. This is because they are so used to quoting other people, and it is common in their culture that they feel there is no need to attribute, in some cases, and in most others, to use quotation marks.

Although it is important to understand these differences, I would like strategies—concrete strategies to help them better understand. While I appreciate Shen’s story of unzipping her skin and getting into another, I find it would be hard to illustrate that kind of thing to a student.

Handout Maven?

Allthough many of the tips seemed self-evident, I really enjoyed the Curzan and Damour chapters. I, however, do have some gripes about their claims and generalizations. First of all, their assessment of “Bad Courses” on page 8. They imply that bad courses are entirely the fault of the teacher. Sometimes, we all know, students are equally at fault. They don’t want to learn; they’re resistant, etc. I start my courses with a bargain between myself and my students, in the hopes that the course will not “turn bad.” It’s based on a mutual agreement to behave in a certain way. I think, if you ask most students, they would say that they want each of their classes to be “good classes.” I usually ask them what they would ideally like to happen in this class, eliminating not having to do any work and still getting a good grade. They generally tell me that they want the class to be interesting, informative, and relevant to their future careers at the university and beyond. I promise them to do my best to keep the course interesting, informative, relevant, etc. if they promise to engage with the material, come to class and be attentive, etc. This agreement works out will, usually; I know that “bad classes” aren’t entirely my fault. It’s a cooperative relationship.

I’d also like to add another con to the list of reasons for dressing up on page 14. It’s a bit of an extension to the assertion that dressing up can create distance between you and your students. I think dressing up can also intimidate your students. I have to say, in my years of teaching, my teaching is better when I dress more comfortably and more “me.” Actually, this semester, I asked my students if they thought my authority as a teacher was at all contingent on my dress. They said no, so I asked them how they knew I was the teacher on the first day of class if it wasn’t indicated by my clothes. They said, “Well, you were the one sitting in the front, talking and handing out the syllabus.” I would hope that my behavior and demeanor exude authority in the classroom more than my attire. Obviously, I dress different to teach than I do when I go to the movies, or even to my own graduate seminars. However, when I “dress up” for teaching, I’m horribly uncomfortable. Furthermore, my students can tell that I’m uncomfortable and the class tends to become awkward.

Curzon & Damour chapters

I’m not quite sure why the classroom is an argument, but I did find the three chapters in Curzon & Damour helpful, especially the sections on student evaluations and how useful they are in terms of knowing what to change about your teaching practices/style. But seriously, why is the classroom an argument? And whose argument is it? Mine? I don’t get it!!

A Romantic Reduction of Something Nuanced (the Schell Article) to its Beastly Essence

This article is depressing, as most articles are (the latest I read of this sort were in the Chronicle of Higher Education) whose aim is to step back and evaluate what it’s like for professors and other professionals to work in the academy. I can’t even think of anything scholarly to say after having read it. (This is not to mention Brandt’s article, reductively about how “everybody’s literary practices are operating in differential economies, which supply different access routes, different degrees of sponsoring power, and different scales of monetary worth to the practices in use” [554]. In other words, the very framework within which we make decisions relating to our literacy—how literate we are able to be and the extent to which we are likely to reach this or that desired point along the spectrum of our capacity—and intellectual marketability is determined by those who will have “sponsored” our literacy, either those personal role models we know who have run ideological state apparatuses or the sort of corporate sponsors Brandt mentions are on Little League uniforms.) Back to the point. Schell.

Here I am reading about Kenneth Burke’s parlor of scholarship, in which composition teachers are cleaning up messes so that scholars can come and go talking about Michelangelo, and I read the following testimony: “For the sad truth is that even if I become more knowledgeable—read theorists, attend conferences, present papers, take additional courses—I will receive no additional institutional recognition of any sort. I will not receive a penny more in remuneration for the courses I currently teach, nor will I become eligible for a full-time position or additional employee benefits. In fact, no practical or professional benefit will result” (513). What is this? The speaker is Clare Frost, who wrote an article in Fontaine and Hunter’s book, Writing Ourselves into the Story (1993). Does this sound unrealistic? Is her inability to advance because she is a woman or because she is a composition teacher? If she had been Pat Bazelle, would she still have been unable to advance? My point is that if a composition teacher is Pat Bazelle, or anyone else we saw in that video, she is able to advance professionally, and in such a case the idea that composition teachers are unable to advance because of a myopic university that doesn’t justly reward professional merit makes no sense. Pat Bazelle and others are women and composition teachers, and they are able to advance. The reader will say, “But, hey, that’s Pat Bazelle.” Yes, that’s true: so maybe this article is a disguised lamentation about the fact that the academy is competitive no matter what your gender is, and that you are either superlative, or significantly less than superlative, and in order to be the former you had better work, and work hard, even at the cost of living other areas in your life less fully, until you get to a certain point after which you can afford to slack off a little. I think this article could have been written about any number of professionals in the academy, composition teachers or no, who complain (not unjustifiably) about similar things.

I am not sure what I am saying here. If you do the work, you get rewarded, but you had better do the work on an almost godly level. This seems to be the message that this and other articles are suggesting, at their very core. I wonder if they can be simplified, distilled, in this fashion. The professionals in here sound like several of the laborers whose testimonies on work I recently read for my own English 1000 class. The nature of the complaint is the same as that of a steelworker, to be sure! The environment is impersonal, they get little respect, they feel like they are working for the man, they feel their job is repetitive, and they have to keep their nose to the grindstone and keep their eyes away from the horizon lest they get out of focus: “I am going nowhere,” says another interviewee in Schell’s article, “but to work effectively I can’t let myself confront the issue too often” (512). Here is Mike Lefevre, a steelworker interviewed by Terkel: “It’s hard to take pride in a bridge you’re never gonna cross, in a door you’re never gonna open. […] Working is bad enough, don’t bug me. I would rather work my ass off for eight hours a day than work five minutes with a guy watching me. Who you gonna sock? You can’t sock General Motors, you can’t sock anybody in Washington, you can’t sock a system.” Sounds similar to the lamentations we read in this article. Same business. Blue collar complains versus white collar complaints. It seems like we are being taught that it’s a utopian vision to love what you do; that we are being taught that once you circumscribe your passion, even if your passion is real and not fashioned through years of highly effective self-conditioning, once you circumscribe your passion within the parameters of vocation or occupation, passion wears new colors, bears shadows, is molested. I had better go to bed.

Adjuncts in the composition vortex

This post is in part a response to Anthony’s blog question that wonders about whether the treatment of adjunct faculty is linked with gender discrimination or if it’s a larger issue about how non-tenured track instructors are regarded and treated, particularly within composition instruction. My feeling is that it is the latter. Schell’s article was written ten years ago, and perhaps it reflects a past where the majority of non-tenured track faculty were women. (And perhaps this is still the case, but I wonder…) To me, the more pressing questions are 1) the way adjunct faculty are regarded, paid, treated, etc. and 2) the way composition is regarded within the institution. When Schell interviews composition instructors at the University of Wisconsin, one responds that she feels like “an interchangeable part, ‘not even a person — just a cog’ in the university machine” (514). I think this frustration is mirrored in pretty much everyone I know who has worked as an adjunct, and particularly an adjunct who teaches composition courses. Within the larger university machine, composition instructors always seem to form the bottom rung of a ladder whose higher reaches never seem attainable to them. They are given semester to semester contracts with no job security and no health benefits, and at least at Emerson College, composition courses were also the lowest rung on the pay scale. It was no secret that composition classes were held in disdain by most instructors who longed to be granted upper-level English courses with better pay and linked with greater respect.

All of us who have taught composition courses know just how difficult, time-consuming, and challenging these courses are to teach. But we also know just how important, necessary, and useful these courses are to our students and to the larger university. Composition instructors (men and women alike) put the time and energy in, the commitment and care that Schell’s article discusses, to the courses we teach in order to provide the foundation our students need to succeed in the university. The lack of respect the university grants composition instruction and composition instructors seems like a blind dismissal. Like one interviewee in Schell’s article says, “The students give a lot back to me. The institution doesn’t give me much” (512).

To me, the university labor practices that abuse adjunct instructors, and composition instructors particularly, is a much more universal problem than merely a feminist one. I understand Schell’s points that gender roles and expectations of a woman’s role in the classroom are very real issues, but to me, her points lose their focus and their power when she suggests that problems linked with adjunct composition teaching are linked primarily with gender discrimination.

Composition’s Ghosts

While I was reading Eileen E. Schell’s “The Cost of Caring” and preparing for this week’s presentation, I couldn’t help but find the section on contingent labor’s lack of worth or respect to be specious, since it appears — in my experience any way — to be the way all adjunct feel about how the institutions treat them. Rather than blather on about my experience being an adjunct, it might be helpful for others who have been teaching for some time to address this issue — are adjuncts in general treated poorly as a whole or it is a product of gender discrimination? “We clean up the comma splices. We organize the discourse of our students…” Is the “we” gender specific?

A Burroughsian Composition Exercise

Running out of things to do while you wait for those third submissions? I was, until I started thinking about William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s use of the cut-up technique. Here’s an activity/exercise I’m having my students complete over the next few days:

“The beat generation novelist William S. Burroughs once wrote, “Language is a virus programmed into the human biologic machine used for the current purposes of Control.”

Cut-up is a writing technique made famous by Burroughs in his work, which attempted to challenge the boundaries of language. The simplest way to use cut-up is to type out an article onto a sheet of paper and cut it into four sections. Then, rearrange the sections at random and see what comes out. New words, sentences, and meanings might appear.

Computers, of course, make this whole process a lot easier.

This assignment has three parts:

1. Compose a 250 word piece of writing. This writing can be anything you want. It can be a rant about an issue that bothers you, a short-short story, a poem, song lyrics, a grocery list, a list of everything you ate today, a letter, a speculation about Math Guy’s hobbies, a movie review–you name it, you can write it.

2. Once you have your 250-word piece of writing, visit The Burroughsian Cut-Up Machine. Cut and paste your work into the machine, and play around with it using the “rub out” and “cut up” buttons. Experiment with adding and removing words.

3. When you are satisfied with what you’ve created, post your writing on the blog. Then, write a short, 250-word response to your work with the cut-up machine. Did you like using this writing technique? Why or why not? Do you have any favorite phrases in your piece of writing? Is using a technique like this “real writing?” Why or why not?”

Feel free to magpie this, if it looks useful…

-J.

My Syllabus

http://comp.missouri.edu/~ricejr/wiki/index.php/Image:Creative_Writing_1500.doc

Cultural Difference

The articles about cultural difference for this week made me think about a new dimension for my last assignment in English 1000 this semester. They are doing a version of the “write about a word” assignment invented in the August orientation. For next semester, I think I’m scrapping that assignment and having them do a reflective essay about gender. One of the dimensions for exploration for this assignment was going to be how culture effects gender. But I now realize that I can use this dimension for the word assignment too. I know that several of them have chosen racial/ethnic slurs to write about, but I think they could dig deeper into the cultural construction of profanity, insults, etc. It gave me a new brainstorming topic for them once break is over.

I don’t know if any of you have ever taught international sections of writing classes, but the issue of cultural difference is obviously important should you teach them. I strongly suggest having them do a comparison paper between an American custom or cultural phenomenon vs. the same or equivalent in their own country. That used to be the final research assignment when I taught the international sections, and they are the best papers I’ve ever received.

More theory-inspired questions. Jonas brought up Adorno and Horkheimer, so I’m going to bring up Foucault

We’re studying Foucault in theory class this week and while reading over the responses to Shen’s essay (as well as Shen’s essay itself), I’m struck by the focus on individuality in the classroom and whether this focus, is itself, a false promise anyways. Jonas’s suggestions that writing in a more circular, random way actually made him feel closer to a real investment (and a real interrogation) of his ideas about academics and ideology around writing/thinking made me wonder if notions about individuality (and the writing that foregrounds it) only reinforce power structures in the university. We say we want our students to explore their individual positions and enter into a dialogue with other voices, but what happens when we reinforce topic sentences and thesis statements and arguments?  Foucault writes about the social constitution of the “subject”, using subject as both noun (the subject of a sentence — the “I” in Shen’s case) vs. a person being subjected to power, rules, etc. Our composition classes seem to grapple with both these notions of the subject — on one hand, U.S.-located composition courses privilege the “I” or individual positions, the critical position of the subject in relation to what he/she wants to say about a question, topic, etc. On the other hand, Freire and others remind us that universities exercise a certain power over their student subjects, teaching them to be good intellectuals who play by the rules of an academic discourse, a discourse that, in effect, mirrors external power structures. Foucault is interested in the way discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships and cultural factors that include power hierarchies. Shen’s essay also addresses the social and cultural implications of writing, and more specifically, writing in English. I think it’s important to interrogate, again and again, the particular discourse(s) we are teaching in our classrooms. Shen’s essay reminds us to do that.

O Structure! You tyrant!

E. G. said in another class that students, perhaps because, during their development, their parents reinforce to them how special they are, come to class expecting special treatment. I think that this comment is interesting alongside a point Shen’s article. Although we teach students to avoid the first person personal pronoun in high school, we tend to allow it with a kind of pleasurable acquiescence in college; this is to say, we almost enjoy nodding to admit it, condescending to enable our students, now that they are mature enough not to abuse the idea of personal reflection and personal response in their writing, to indulge in an “I” or two. Maybe it’s because, at a certain point in their intellectual development, students are ready (so we feel) to come to terms with, accept and embrace the doctrines of individualism, of private property, of a person’s inalienable rights, of personal license. I do think the use of “I” and the idea of “being yourself” become “something glorious” (217), as Shen notes. She says that it would have been helpful to her had her teachers “pointed out the different cultural/ideological connotations of the word ‘I,’ the connotations that exist in a group-centered culture and an individual-centered culture” (224). I wonder if we should do this in the classroom during the explanation of an assignment, heeding thus the cultural differences of our students and the unseen barriers of perception and expression that disenable them to write as we would want them to.

I almost just began this paragraph with the phrase “Another thing I find interesting.” But even in the revision of it, in the actual sentence that you see this paragraph to begin with, I am still swallowing the text, making it mine, making my interpretation the focal point. It seems that I can’t write about a text unless I write about how it intersects with my own personal hermeneutic. This is a sort of unsettling realization of the fact that there is ideology behind writing, a fact that Shen discusses: the way I write is a symptom of my self-absorption, my fetish for individualism and personal expression. The topic sentence as representative of making information easy to digest for our readers, because they are in all likelihood busy, or easily distracted, or have a score of other things to read—this seems a very valuable point. I’m trying quite deliberately to write this paragraph in a way nearly antithetical to my typical modus operandi. I find that I can’t even express myself, immediately while writing this paragraph, if I do not adhere to the thought structure that I have internalized, if I do not think in terms of a hierarchical structure of concepts—of superordinate concepts and concepts and subordinate concepts and particulars neatly fitted into each of these categories. I teach students that structure is everything, that even a paper with highly questionable comments and arguments can be made very impressive provided there’s a neat forecast, provided there are encapsulating bits of body paragraphs (pieces of body paragraph topic sentences) in the introductory paragraph, and good road maps along the way vis-à-vis transitions. I don’t even care about attempts to arrive at truth, I tell them, but only attempts to arrive at clarity. How frightening!

I think that I am allowing reason and logic, as implicated in the compositional process, destroy their individuality, rather than preserve it and promote it, as Shen claims topic sentences and similar structures do. Listen to Horkheimer and Adorno talk about Kant. They are talking about how the Western Enlightenment hides the problems inherent in the concept of reason (and the fact that the Enlightenment says that if we are clear about everything, if we reason well, it doesn’t matter that we are of different opinions—reason shall be the settler of disputes, of clashes between bearers of reason). They note:

 […] reason is the agency of calculating thought, which arranges the world for the purposes of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than that of working on the object as mere sense material in order to make it the material of subjugation. The true nature of the schematism which externally coordinates the universal and the particular [Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason], the concept and the individual case, finally turns out, in current science, to be the interest of industrial society. […] Everything—including the individual human being, not to mention the animal—becomes a repeatable, replaceable process, a mere example of the conceptual models of the system. […] reason, operating under the pressure of purposes merely as a systematic science, not only levels out the differences but standardizes identical interest. […] Nor is the concordance of general and particular concealed any longer within an intellect which always perceives the particular as a case of the general and the general only as the aspect of the particular by which it can be grasped and manipulated. (Dialectic of Enlightenment)

 Here we have the reverse of what Shen was saying (she grew up in a Marxist environment, and so can probably identify with the above). That very reason which prompts us to oblige our students to write in topic sentences, and with transitions, and with introductory paragraphs that forecast material (Allen and Bacon stress “old” information before “new” information, which is in keeping with our logic of how we should write)—it is that very reason that standardizes us, say Horkheimer and Adorno, that makes us think about empirical experience and things and our own observations only insofar as these reflections can be packaged in conceptual wholes, according to the hierarchical system explained by Kant. We perceive uniformly, because we are taught to perceive uniformly; and we write uniformly because of the way we perceive.

It’s funny: this entry was a deliberate attempt to get outside of the internalized logic of composition that Shen claims informs our writing habits. I tried to not go in order, to make random statements, to make a sort of collage. And the result of it all is that I feel I have tapped into much more interesting reservoirs of information than I would have had I followed my accustomed practice of listing topic sentences and making relevant information go under them. In fact, this entire entry has made me happy about being an academic, about reading such things as Horkheimer and Adorno and Shen and having fun with intelligent material and meaning-making. I wonder if I should arrange my pedagogy accordingly, and get my students away from structure.

Chinese Composition vs. English Composition

Fan Shen’s essay was fascinating, largely because I never really thought about composition studies in other cultures. My knowledge of educational systems is essentially limited to American and British culture, so the concept of Chinese composition being drastically structurally and ideologically different from American composition hadn’t really crossed my mind. That said, Shen’s words about the struggle to differentiate “I” from “We” and formulate a unique voice seem to echo many things that my students have said this semester. I’m sure all of us have received more than a few papers that begin with “Society feels that…” or “As a nation, Americans believe…” It seems as though the challenge of developing and trusting a unique, personal voice is widespread and international. Maybe it’s because I have yet to teach an international student, but I’ve never really interrogated these ideas in great depth. After reading about Chinese composition, I’m curious about composition and pedagogy in other cultures. Can anyone recommend some other essays that discuss alternative, non-Western forms of composition?