“Authority” in Composition Scholarship

Ellen Cushman and Terese Guinsatao Monberg expand notions of sensitivity toward cultural, social, and gendered identities in developing critical composition pedagogies in their essay. Most of the scholarship that Perspectives on Research has been concerned with this quarter has proposed a need for awareness and sensitivity to issues of identity in the context of the University; more specifically, in the context of the writing classroom.  The message seems to have been, thus far, that some deeper thinking needs to be done, on the parts of composition scholars as well as instructors, in developing new pedagogical methods for teaching student writing. Essentially, there has been a call for an expanded view of composition and what it should accomplish in the university classroom, rather than suggestions that the current system itself is fundamentally and irreversibly flawed. Ellen Cushman and Terese Guinsatao Monberg’s essay, however, seems to suggest just that notion. In their contribution to this identity in composition conversation, they argue that there is a need to rework the entire set of ideologies behind the scholastic system. These scholars contend that the productive solution lies with the acts of “Re-Centering” and “Re-Positioning”. Basically, it is not the composition pedagogies themselves that need so much attention; but rather it is the methods and ideologies from which these pedagogical approaches are developed that must be re-worked.

Much of Cushman and Monberg’s essay focuses on “questions of ethnographic authority” (167). They explain the relevance of the authority question by arguing that “While recent moves in composition and cultural studies scholarship have encouraged academics to cross borders and boundaries, many of us have remained skeptical, protective, and hesitant. For example, Jacqueline Jones Royster, bell hooks, Gesa Kirsch, Malea Powell, Janice Gould, and Patricia Sullivan, have all asked, warned, and/or demanded that scholars be more careful of where they step and for whom they speak” (167).  This is a notion that the entire essay seems to struggle against. Scholars must be free from limitations concerning authority and representation is effective critical composition pedagogical and research approaches are to be achieved. Their essay seems to move away from notions of political correctness in suggesting that certain boundaries have to be opened up within the discipline of composition studies and its growing relationship and relevance to cultural studies.

Activist Teaching and Research

The largely general conversation surrounding issues of cultural, social, and gendered individuality that various essays in Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice have been concerned with, specifically the ways in which these questions of the construction of identity have real implications within the academy  and the writing classroom,  seems to be grounded in a more specific and practical context in Gail Y. Okawa’s essay “Coming (in)to Consciousness: One Asian American Teacher’s Journey into Activist Teaching and Research”. Okawa’s essay seems to have actual suggestions for pedagogical awareness and approaches for teaching writing to students with backgrounds that differ from the more “mainstream” university population.  This essay was particularly interesting in that we very rarely get to hear contributions to this kind of conversation, concerning sensitivity to student individuality in the composition classroom, from a scholar who is actually a self proclaimed “teacher of color” (283). I doubt that the notion of using teaching as a platform for “activism” is something that is readily considered in discussions of critical composition pedagogies, or in considerations concerning research, so her take on the issue creates an interestingly new direction for thinking about implications for the writing classroom.

Relevant to this notion that Okawa develops about activist teaching is her discussion of the effectiveness of autobiographical narrative as a writing medium (282). She says of this specific medium, “I believe such writing provides a means of resistance to the isolation and objectification typical of the academy. As a way of accessing subjective knowledge and experience while simultaneously becoming the representation of that knowledge and experience, teacher narrative has the potential for both personal and social value” (282). Interestingly, the importance of student background has expanded to include the importance of the background and experiences of the teacher in the composition classroom. Rarely have I read composition theory written in the style of an autobiography.  It is usually expected that critical scholarship will be presented in the scholastic prose style typical of conferences and journals. The revisiting of the autobiographical medium is, I think, a very interesting aspect of Okawa’s essay; and allows for expanded definitions of what “good” writing can be.

Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities

Finally, the feminist discussion comes into the research class!!!! In their collaborative essay, “Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities”, Anne Donadey and Francoise Lionnet offer an overview of the changes that have occurred within the field of feminist studies during the past twenty years. What I found so interesting about Donadey and Lionnet’s treatment of feminism in the humanities lies with the fact that they offered such an unexpected approach to the larger feminist discussion. Instead of segregating feminist concerns, as is usually the case with all things “feminine”, they tried to incorporate them into a more comprehensive discussion of identity rather than just gender. Whereas feminism is usually this foreign concept that carries with it all kinds of connotations that are unique and separated from the rest of the academic disciplines, Donadey and Lionnet make feminist studies relevant to academic scholarship as a whole by blurring the boundaries that are often placed around it. At one point they contend, “The boundaries among “feminisms, gender, sexualities,” “race and ethnicity,” “migrations, diasporas, and borders,” and “cultural studies” have become more and more porous, and the corresponding essays in this book are most productively read in dialogue with one another. Feminism as we conceptualize it is as much about race and colonialism as it is about gender and sexuality” (225). Essentially, this essay draws a clear connection between the other material we have read this quarter and brings the discussion full circle. Donadey and Lionnet expand the definition of feminism in a way that I had never considered. I honestly had never considered issues of race and colonialism relevant to feminist studies.      

Ethnographically Sensitive Composition

In his essay “Keeping Honest: Working Class Students, Difference, and Rethinking the Critical Agenda in Composition”, David Seitz argues that ethnographic research should be incorporated into developing critical composition pedagogies. It is because of a lack of consideration for the ways in which students’ class and cultural backgrounds can influence their response to the application of composition theory in the writing classroom that many writing instructors lack significant “persuasive authority for some of these students in the classroom, or more importantly, in the practice of their everyday lives” (65).  Seitz calls for an increased effort, on the parts of composition teachers and theorists, to make considerations involving ethnographic research in all aspects of composition and the writing classroom, if they are to have any real impact on the students that enter these classrooms. It seems that Seitz’s theory is following in the tradition of most contemporary scholars in that he is forging a means beyond thinking about writing as some foreign practice that exists only in the composition classroom; instead, writing is being addressed as something that can have real civic implications.  

Seitz makes the point that, not only do students miss out on effective instruction when their cultural and socio-economic circumstances are not considered during the implication of critical composition pedagogies, but the academic community as a whole loses out on “views from outside middle-class institutions that imply valuable critiques to these theories and their application in the writing class” (65). In order to place his discussion into a more concrete context, he evokes specific references to three individual students in order to prove the negative effects of leaving ethnographic considerations out of composition: Lilia, Diana, and Mike. Seitz claims that the school histories and differing community values individual students bring to their writing will help to determine their response to their writing and the writing classroom in general. He notes that, “As the situations of Diana, Mike, and Lilia show, these contexts and values will shape different students’ approaches to these calls for critical engagement” (77).   

David Seitz’s essay succeeds in opening up a more wholistic discussion of composition and its place in reflecting and determining student identity. He concludes, of ethnographic research in looking at student demographics, “This research must continually try to understand the relations between their various ways of knowing and behaving in multiple domains” (78). His essay seems to be particularly relevant to a course focusing on research in that he is able to provide a new route for composition research and scholarship by integrating ethnographic concerns and concerns about writing pedagogy.

Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders

In this essay, Susan Stanford Friedman attempts to explain the studies of migration, diasporas, and borders both as three distinctive disciplines, as well as their tendency toward becoming ”increasingly interwoven and mutually constitutive in literary studies”. While admitting her own awareness of the exceedingly complex nature of the discussion relevant to these three areas of study, and of the unlikelyhood that an entirely exhaustive discussion can be achieved, she does provide an extremely useful overview of the philosophical, practical, political, historical, global, and local ideology associated with each of these concepts, respectivley, as well as points where the three seem to meet.  Friedman provides a useful summation of her goals for this particular text when she states, “I have attempted to name some of the many lines of inquiry; the pathways of exploration; the kinds of questions people have been pursuing; and the spectrum of concerns from material and political to metaphoric and psychological, cultural, and aesthetic.”

I find Friedman’s discussion of Borders and Borderlands particularly interesting, given that the notion of “border” is significantly ambiguous and contradictory; the ambiguity and contradiction surrounding “border”, then, also permeates Border Studies as a discipline. The ambiguity surrounding borders lies in the fact that they can be either physical geographic borders, or figurative and metaphorical. The contradiction lies, to name only a few of many points, in the fact that “Borders are fixed and fluid, impermeable and porous. They separate but also connect, demarcate but also blend differences. Absolute at any moment in time, they are always changing over time [...] Borders are used to excercise power over others but also to empower survival against others.” Essentially, borderlands refers to a kind of liminal space, a state of being inbetween. In order to contextualize her discussion of Borders and Borderlands, Friedman evokes Gloria Anzaldua’s “touchstone text for border studies”, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA.

Although Anzaldua’s text, as well as Friedman’s essay as a whole, seems to focus a good deal on borders as they relate to the construction of identity, it is made quite clear that borderlands can refer to the liminal space “across all kinds of differences: psychological, spiritual, sexual, linguistic, generic, disciplinary.” The idea that borderlands can exit across disciplines is one that is quite relevant to the concerns of a course designed to develop various perspectives toward research. It seems that research itself exists in a kind of borderland; it situates itself inbetween numerous academic disciplines, and, to be truly apt as a researcher, one must learn to navigate within this borderland. In this particular discussion, Friedman calls for collaboration across disciplines in truly sorting out the interwoven and individual concepts associated with Migration, Diasporas, and Borders. She says, “Perhaps a fitting end for this overview is a blending of the humanities and the social sciences evident in the geographers’ characterization of what they have learned from the rich literatures of migration, diaspora, and borders.” Essentially, Friedman has further complicated, or expanded, the possibilities for what “English Studies” can be.       

Cultural Studies

In his essay entitled “Cultural Studies” Jean Franco attempts to establish some kind of ideological boundaries, albeit a very loose set of boundaries, for what cultural studies has consisted of historically, as well as what it has become in a more contemporary sense; especially in the context of how it fits into the university as a scholarly discipline. In order to attempt a somewhat comprehensive discussion of what cultural studies is, Franco dedicates a good deal of his discussion to considering the distinction between cultural studies as it  has appeared in Britain, the United States, and Latin America. I found his discussion of cultural studies in the United States particularly interesting because of the complexities inherent in it as a subject of study in a country with such a mixed population. As opposed to the, largely, homogeneous collective identity in other regions of the world, the United States is made up of individuals. Hence, a strict definition of cultural studies would be difficult. Franco also mentions the influence that results from “migration and cultural hybridity” and the increase of globalization. He explains, “All aspects of cultural life are undergoing rapid change. Technology allows for the distant consumption of serially produced goods, and these agents of cultural production and dissemination have changed from states to financial institutions, cultural foundations and chains of art galleries related to finance capital or high-tech industries.”

It is also interesting to note, in terms of trying to formulate a set boundary for what cultural studies is, that  “there is considerable tension among national, regional, and international forms of cultural studies that is as yet unresolved.” Hence, cultural studies has a tendency toward being quite political in nature. The notion of cultural studies being a fundamentally political field is something that I had never really considered. Thinking about it after reading Jean Franco’s essay, however, it makes a good deal of sense. This, then is another component of the difficulty in grounding cultural studies in some scholarly discipline. The political nature that surrounds it is bound to complicate any ideology that comes out of it.

Franco concludes, at the end of the essay, that it “by no mean exhausts the subject of cultural studies or recognizes all its practitioners.” However, I think that the essay does succeed in opening up the conversation for where cultural studies is presently, particularly with regards to how it has begun to get incorporated into the university. Toby Miller is likely on to something significant when he contends that cultural studies is “a tendency across disciplines, rather than a discipline itself.” In terms of relating this discussion to concerns of scholarly research, it is helpful to think about cultural studies in this manner. Basically, it is meaningful to incorporate elements of cultural studies in as many aspects of our scholarly endeavors as possible. Not to see it as a solitary idea that exists in isolation, but to view it as a very real thing that can exist in many aspects of our educational experience.

Interpretation

Jerome McGann’s discussion seems to parallel a relationship between the notions we have been discussing in class regarding research and the process of interpretation. During the course of the past couple of weeks, it has become quite evident that research, in its true sense, is not about the end result of producing a research paper that comes to some kind of profound conclusion on a given topic; instead the research process itself is of primary importance. The act of researching, of reading various sources, considering different points of view, and attempting to understand and place oneself within the larger conversation surrounding  that topic should be the goal of scholarship.  Similarly,  interpretation  should be  perceived in the same respect.  McGann contends that we, as members of an “interpretive community”,  must move away  from the ideal that there is some kind of true  MEANING in a text or document , and, instead,  submit to the notion that “scholarship, like science, is committed basically not to truth but to rigor (as to method), thoroughness (as to empirical evidence), and accuracy (in the treatment of its facts and data).” He claims that views of scholarship and interpretation that suggest that they should be “about something” are inadequate. Rather than looking for some overall meaning, or definitive conclusion, it is more effective to view scholarship and interpretation as “procedures that do something about something.”

As part of his discussion on interpretation, McGann offers a distinction between the different types. He focuses, primarily, though on scholarly interpretation; a conversation regarding scholarly interpretation seems of particular relevance to the concerns of a research class, not only because it involves members of a university , whom he views as being an “interpretive community”, but also because of the direct relationship he establishes between research and the notion of interpretation. An interesting component of McGann’s discussion of scholarly interpretation involves the “double helix” that he views as being  formed by  “the history of a work’s production” and “the history of a works’ reception”; both of which are necessary for serious scholarship. He claims that “the works we examine have all been shaped by that double helix, and so have all our critical reflections on them.”

Essentially, McGann seeks to establish the inadequacy of current, as well as past, interpretive models. He does so, not to suggest that interpretation is an irrelevant waste of time, but to broaden the notion of interpretation to something more than extracting meaning from a text or document. He concludes his essay by stating that “To deliberately accept the inevitable failure of interpretive adequacy is to work toward discovering new interpretive virtues.”

May 5, 2008–Translation Studies

I found Lawrence Venuti’s discussion on the current state, as well as the evolution, of translation studies, in terms of both theoretical ideology as well as translation practices, to be quite interesting and suprisingly comprehensive. Because he breaks down the various components ingrained in the theory and practice of translation in such a comprehensive manner, it seems like a difficult task to attempt to address even a couple of the components of his discussion. Therefore, it will, hopefully, serve to consider one of the concepts he addresses. 

After reading the first couple of pages of Venuti’s text, you arrive at the point where the evolution of translation studies begins to exclude linguistics. He notes, “Here linguistic analysis is minimized and in some cases excluded in favor of formulating theoretical concepts, reconstructing social situations and historical moments, and performing ideological critiques” (295). This really suprised me because I automatically assume that linguistic analysis would be the foundation of any translation. What could be more important than the linguistics features of a text in attempting to translate it right? When you reach the section where Venuit discusses “equivalence and Shifts”, however, this actually begins to make more sense, and the ideology behind it actually seems justified.

Venuit explains, “The sheer number of definitions shows that equivalence cannot be ascertained by merely comparing the foreign and translated texts; a third, metalinguistic term must be applied to establish and specify a basis of comparison between them. This third term, moreover, is interpretive: not only does” (296). Here, perhaps, the cultural context of the audience can be used to select a method of translation that may achieve a sense of equivalence. Languages have their own structures and their own unique connotations attached to the meanings of words; and these connotations are determined by the members of that language community. Simply transferring words, therefore, from one language to another doesn’t usually work. There has to be something else there for the new text to make sense to the new language community that is going to read it.

An interesting note: I’ve always felt familiar with the notion that some things get lost in translation. But i never considered that so much can actually be gained through translation. I think Venuti’s text is so effective because it seeks to find balance between these two realities.     

Lost In Translation

Professor Pilinovsky’s discussion during Tuesday’s class meeting was both interesting and enlightening in a couple of respects. Obviously the most significant notion that her discussion contributed, for the purposes of a research class, is the idea that research is, as Professor Rhodes so often puts it “a living thing.” In a college setting, which usually involves writing countless research papers for various classes, it is easy to begin to see research as some foreign, redundant, and boring activity that exists no where else besides the classroom; and is only useful in the respect that it will earn you a grade on a paper. Hearing experiences from someone actively doing research in her field, however, kind of brings a sense of renewal and appreciation for the research process and the idea behind it. When you begin to think of research in terms of what it actually is, a of quest for knowledge, it becomes this whole new thing. Research doesn’t always have to be done for the sole purpose of producing a paper. Research can actually be just discovering things you didn’t know before, answering burning questions you have about something, or gaining a more in-depth and comprehensive knowledge about your profession or chosen field of study. In any case, it is a quest for knowledge, not a formulaic process designed by Professors to make writing papers more difficult.

Some of the things Professor Pilinovsky had to say, specifically, about translation were also quite interesting and seemed to be fairly relevant to the concerns involving a research class. She discussed translation as involving elements of “revision”, “collection”, and “adaptation”. Understanding translation as involving these elements provides a way to think more criticly about texts, especially when it concerns using various texts and documents for the purposes of research. Looking at the translated version of a text means that some kind of manipulation has ocurred. That is not to say that the translation has no value, it just helps to make one more aware how it has been adapted to fit a given social, cultural, or historical context. Considerations concerning translation basically adds another layer to the research process (looking at original manuscripts, including other scholars in your research whose translations you trust, etc.).

Professor Pilinovsky’s discussion also helped in opening up the prospects for potential research interests. Her interest in researching fairytales demonstrates that you really can take your research anywhere you want it to go. Essentially, for the purposes of academic and professional research, you just need to be concerned that you are grounding your passion in an accessible field, so that it makes sense to other scholars, or members of the given community, that you share it with.

“Language, Culture, and Society” By: Doris Sommer

Doris Sommer’s discussion concerning “Language, Culture, and Society”  is a very interesting, yet extremely complex, analysis of the various components of reading, writing and speaking practices, as well as the factors that influence and determine them. Interestingly, Sommer has labeled reading, writing and speaking as being forms of “verbal creativity”. This is what makes Doris Sommer’s presentation worth  further discussion; she  takes the notion of “text” and further problematizes it by  complicating the very idea of language, “correspondence” and communication itself.

The method Sommer uses to accomplish this is to analyze the evolution of bilingualism and monolingualism over time and how the two have been both accepted and rejected by society at varying points in history. She begins her discussion at a place where i think most readers today find ourselves: “The redundancy of a single word that named both language and territory performed a kind of enchanted stability.” In thinking about language in communication, it seems almost second nature to talk about language in this manner, to assign language to a specific place (a particular society and political environment); and after reading “Language, Culture, and Society”, it becomes clear why this ideology can be problematic when dealing with “verbal creativity”.

Her discussion of “Spanglish” as a means of communication for many Mexican-Americans makes this discussion particularly relevant to today’s society and the ways in which culture and society shape language and thought; or, as Herder would argue “language does much more than simply give expression to thought; it determines it.” Now we are gaining an understanding of language as much more than conveying people’s thoughts to one another, but as a means for determining what those thoughts will be.

Bakhtin’s inclusion into Sommer’s discussion made it even more interesting. I thought that Bakhtin’s statements created a way for each of us to question, not only the way we our selves read and understand texts, but the way we understand each other. “Life, Bakhtin observed, occurs in clusters of competing voices, through different registers of one language but also in alien alternatives. Heteroglossia is the word he coined to describe the normally multifarious condition of any one language, because of the variety of social and regional styles that make it more than one. Therefore it is almost impossible for anyone to be truly monolingual.”