nudity, community art, and composition

My students recently posted freewrites about lies in response to the epigraph from Mary Karr's memoir The Liar's Club. After looking at what some of them chose to expose in this particular genre/medium, Dave reminded me of this community art project--postsecret. Today I opted to show them this website as a lead-in to having them write about what it means to write in a particular rhetorical situation and what that means for what they decide to include and/or exclude in their writing. In other words, I wanted them to reflect upon the context(s) in which people choose to share secrets and lies in writing and why these choices are made.

So I explain to them the concept of this postsecret project (which has also resulted in a couple of books, not just the blog site) and I scroll through a few of the online "secrets." Of course the first one turns out to be about having cyber sex with dad. I don't know what to do and consider not actually looking at the posts--just leaving it at the concept, but I want to show them a little about the types of secrets that come out in this venue, so I carry on. I see a picture of a woman's naked breasts coming, and I abruptly stop (though I know they too saw what was coming) and have them freewrite. It's fine and all, but I wonder at myself. I mean most of these students have probably seen full frontal nudity (at least of women) in movies. They should be old enough to handle looking at art, and yet I stop before showing them this part of a community art project. I feel like I just encouraged a double-standard somehow. Or I acted like a naked woman is an image we should not view.
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As far as the blogging goes: One section has a particularly HUGE computer literacy gap that--today--has become very difficult to manage. While some students don't know how to copy and paste (for example how to copy a URL to create a link to it within their blogs), others have already completed the assignment at hand. This is a tough classroom situation to navigate. I can't really move ahead when there are some who are behind and frantically trying to catch up. But, at the same time, those who understand are sitting there bored, half asleep--in short, feelingl like they are not getting their money's worth. The situation gets much more complicated when you take into account that fact that maybe only a portion of the "bored" contingency truly understand, while others have simply shut down.

Today I was talking with a colleague who likened it to her experience teaching in classes that had large population of ESL students. It comes down to a language/literacy gap.

my project makes sense!!!

Yesterday I met with my dissertation committee chair. When he summarized my project it made sense to me. It sounded really promising. It sounded cohesive. It felt--in short--like a miracle! I wanted to try to capture here that summary, but already--in my head--it doesn't sound nearly as well put together as when he articulated it.

"Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people." --Arundhati Roy

I want this to be the epigraph to my dissertation, or at least to one of the chapters....

Okay, it makes sense, but maybe not yet to me...?

technology...or my life as of late

Lots of problems with technology in the classroom today. Today I dislike technology. It feels like it is making life more difficult rather than easier. And I'm not...at the moment...feeling the payoffs. Right now I'm blogging along with my ENG105 class. We are doing this in lieu of in-class freewriting. For the first section I actually followed along with the prompt I gave them and posted by freewrite over at expos-i-story.

The main problem today has been with laptop users who downloaded Flock on Tuesday and at the time subscribed to the blogs of their peers. Today, however, I had at least four users so far whose feeds only gave them an error message. None of the feeds were working properly!!! It slowed class down tremendously, as the only way I could get it to work was to have them clear out all of the feeds; save the OPML file for their class to their desktop and import the feeds to Flock. They're working now, but I fear it will happen again.

In the first section I was really into demonstrating the "magic" that is RSS, but after they all posted their in-class writing, many of them couldn't get their reader to update, so they couldn't see the new articles magically load. That was a frustrating disappointment as well. And they kept asking me when will it update, when will it update. For PocketFlock users we tried closing out of PocketFlock and going back in again. That worked to an extent, but many of the blogs still hadn't updated. For Flock users I told them to hit refresh, but it only worked for one person. I can't make sense of any of this.

Two minutes to post time.... Back into teaching mode.

youtubing teachers

Yesterday's Inside Higher Ed has an article about students putting up videos of their professors and teachers on YouTube. I just find it bizarre that this article about the potential for rights being violated--intellectual property rights, privacy, etc.-- included links to the videos. Not that I didn't click on the links and waste many minutes of my morning in the time-suck that is YouTube.... Still, I thought the article could have done more to explore the "other side," but all it had was this one overly simplified comment:

Among the issues being raised are whether this form of expression — however upsetting to faculty members — is an example of students acting on their feelings and expressing themselves, something composition instructors in particular tend to encourage.

And this idea is taken from discussion of this issue over at the blog digital digs. But again, these blogs that say they don't want to give too much attention to the issue (or the actual videos themselves), give the links to them. We are, after all, the reality show culture, so we want to see "the reality." Show me this stuff really is happenin'. And I am a product of this as well.

Jeff Rice in his blog Yellow Dog provides an interesting perspective on this genre of YouTube videos by exploring the conditions within which the teachers are situated. This perspective seems relevant then to the series of comments left under one of the videos where the teacher is screaming at his students during "the pledge." A number of comments are all about how and why this video represents why teachers should be hated and should *not* be respected, but the last comment questions the previous ones, asking what the problem is with a teacher trying to make "a bunch of arrogant jerkoff kids stand during their country's national anthem." And while I'm not sure about making anyone stand during the national anthem--that seems to be missing the point--this comment seems the only one with even minimal awareness of the teacher's situation.

the technology sweat

In the past I've tended to avoid a lot of technology use in the classroom. I have done some small projects like having students edit and write articles for wikipedia, but wikipedia, of course, is already set-up for us. Today's class, however, involved one hundred minutes of computer use that included downloading, posting blog entries, creating links, subscribing to and reading RSS feeds, etc. (For more complete coverage see Dave's posts on classroom blogging over at academhack).

Teaching something that you're not incredibly certain of and comfortable with is tough. Technology, of course, always runs the risk of not quite doing what you want it to do (or maybe a server goes down something...). Anyway, as I'm working on maintaining this open source model of ENG105, I can't say that BB wouldn't have made life a *little* easier, BUT the added pedagogical benefits of doing it this way are worth it. And, as Dave has reminded me, it's the first run-through. We're still working out the quirks. In terms of the pedagogical benefits for the students, I find that BB simply acts as a mask--it obscures real life writing conditions. Writing, as we might tell our students, does not happen in a vacuum, particularly writing that is done online; however, BB is a vacuum--closed off from the rest of the campus community and the rest of the world. It's kind of like buying vegetables at Price Chopper as opposed to getting them from your backyard...or at least the farmer's market.

Today was mostly successful--except for the fact that PocketFlock doesn't allow the option of importing feeds. I had collected and saved the feed for each student's blog in an OPML file with the hope of passing that file along to each student to import to her/his version of Flock, but anyone using PocketFlock wasn't able to do this. In the second section we had everyone (as the majority in that class are using PocketFlock) manually add the blogs to their Flock news reader. This was quite time consuming, however, and we've now decided to build specific versions of PocketFlock that already contain that appropriate feeds.

More importantly though is the fact that students appeared to be "into it"--truly invested in gathering the feeds for their peers' blogs and launching their first couple of practice posts. I'm looking forward to maintaining this energy and exploring the rhetorical situation that is...blogging!

inside higher ed.

Here is a rather disturbing article about the report from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which was approved by the members of the American Council on Education in early August. That is, until last week when Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector division, decided she didn't like the inclusion of references to open source software and open content projects in higher education.

The report's original paragraph (with which Elliott took issue):
The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.

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In terms of local news...that is, my project. I've decided that I want to create more of a two-way street. So far I've mainly been criticizing critical pedaogy for its relative ignorance of/toward the corporatized University as discussed by many scholars including Bill Readings (his specific rendition of the corporate U as University of Excellence is key to my project), Wesley Shumar, Stanley Aronowitz, Michael Apple, and Leslie and Slaughter (to name a few). But in thinking more about this I find it interesting that Readings so clearly wants to distance himself from both critical pedaogy and cultural studies, and yet I think he may have had a rather narrow view of what critical pedaogy does and can do. There are critical pedaogogues out there doing work much like the work Readings wants to see in his "scene of teaching." Joe Marshall Hardin seems to me one example. At the end of Opening Spaces, Hardin spends a good deal of time rejecting oppositional, resistant, and emancipatory discourses and pedagogical approaches, claiming they only serve "to support the hegemony of dominant ideology in a perpetual dialogue of left versus right" (113). To me this seems quite relevant and similar to Readings' idea of a community of dissensus, which "would seek to make its heteronomy, its differences, more complex. To put this another way, such a community would have to be understood on the model of dependency rather than emancipation" (190). This gets a little confusing here because Readings' idea of "dependency" could be mistaken with Hardin's (and Laclau's) formulation of right and left as "dependent on each other; they serve as two sides of the same coin" (107). But all in all, I feel that if Readings had the opportunity to read and/or interact with Hardin (and others like him), he might have a slightly different view of critical pedaogy and cultural studies.

worried? or just plain paranoid?

My students' first blogging assignment is simply to create their blog. The assignment is now posted. I'm hoping it is not too rudimentary, but of my sixty students only around three or four of them have ever blogged before.

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Today at the end of class I was talking to a student about blogging, while the next class was coming in (not sure what class it was). The instructor overheard me and asked if I am using the new blogging feature in Blackboard. I told him no, that we're using wordpress. He proceeded to tell me a bit about the new BB feature. I told him that I am familiar with it, and that it is "quite nice." Why did I say that? I don't think it's "quite nice." I think it limits student creativity and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Finally I said to him, in barely a whisper, that I'm opposed to Blackboard/proprietary software in general. I whispered as if I have to keep my class plans and pedagogical philosophies on the "down-low." But when I read things like this, I can't help but worry. I mean I've never received explicit instructions from CSR to use only their server/software, but then again it just seems to be assumed that EVERYONE at CSR uses BB. The entire campus community uses it to communicate. Using BB has just become so naturalized. It's frustrating. And it's ridiculous to feel like I need to sneak around to give my students an open source model of education and to simply give them some amount of creative control over their blogs (which BB gives them none).

first day of school

Not a lot to report. Completed one (of three) section of ENG105. My first time teaching in a computer lab, but I'm excited about adding technology to my courses, so it makes sense to have this kind of access. I asked the students to indicate on their questionnaires if they blog--only two out of twenty do, so for most of them this will be an entirely new experience.

I've already caught the start-of-semester-cold, which made it rough to talk at length today, but with three-quarters of the class new to college, I wanted to be particularly thorough in my explanation(s).

I still think wordpress was a solid choice for student blogging, but I'm having my own difficulties with it in that it won't really allow me use code or HTML of any sort. It will only allow me to modify and create using its tools, so I'm having trouble embedding google calendar into my sidebar. I've created the class schedule for the year at google calendar so that they'll have an online version that they can access. For now I've provided links on a separate page. I also need to figure out the best way of posting PDF files.

On Wednesday and Thursday I'll be assigning the students to set-up their wordpress blogs, so I'll have more of an update then.

Tonight it is all exhaustion...and it is deceivingly hot outside, but still I have Dar Williams' "End of the Summer" in my head. It seems that every year at this time I walk around humming this song to myself (hopefully just myself):

The summer ends and we wonder where we are
And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car
And you both look so young
And last night was hard, you said
You packed up every room
And then you cried and went to bed
But today you closed the door and said
"We have to get a move on.
It's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
We push ourselves ahead."

triage

I guess I am in what could be described as triage mode in terms of studying for exams. I've tossed the strict text/day study shedules and now keep referring to this map, which I keep playing with, altering, updating, etc. I am using it as a "kind of" outline to writing the second and third chapter sections of my prospectus--trying to ensure that I adequatetly provide the history of critical pedaogy and the connections between critical pedaogy and composition that will be crucial for my dissertation. I'm also using it as a guide to the texts that I need to quickly review, read through, harvest quotes from, etc.

For this revision/studying/review task I am also using a combination of what my friend Tara has dubbed "Tasks Not Time" and the use of an alarm/timer to take breaks that don't extend into long projects. 43folders has suggested this life hack called (10+2)*5. It has seemingly worked for many folk, but for me it is a little too ADHD/manic for me...or at least for this particular task. I can't possibly work on writing my prospectus in ten minutes increments and expect to produce break-through thoughts and any amount of sustained, serious inquiry, so instead I implement Tara's "TNT." I'm sure she could explain it better, but essentially it involves covering up the clock and focusing on the task at hand, getting in the "zone," and spending a seemingly unknown amount of time working on that. As I start to get tired, I set a last minute goal for myself (this is my addition to TNT)--something like getting a particular thought down on paper or reading one more paragraph or page. Then I allow myself my "break." This is where the ever-helpful timer comes in. In fact, I downloaded Pester, which has proved invaluable. My "breaks" involve still working, but not working on my prospectus--so I might deal with email for ten minutes or blog (as I'm doing now).

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Updated "map":

Exercise in mapping and classifying:

Lineage of Cultural Studies: Hoggart – Williams – (rereadings of/with/through Gramsci and Althusser) – Hall (slightly more marginal figures: Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Angela McRobbie, Jorge Larrain, Stanley Aronowitz)

Compositionists working with Cultural Studies: James Berlin, Richard Ohmann (kinda), Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Alan France, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Bruce Horner (?), John Trimbur




Lineage of critical pedagogy: Freire – Shor – Giroux – Ann E. Berthoff (compositionist) – McLaren – bell hooks

Compositionists in critical pedagogy: Amy Lee, William Thelin, Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Andrea Greenbaum, Joe Marshall Hardin, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Richard Miller, Russell Durst

Texts to review/read through:

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2003.
Fitts, Karen and Alan W. France. Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
Giroux, Henry and Peter McLaren. “Radical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Beyond the Discourse of Critique and Anti-Utopianism.”

organization obsession

So I've been playing around with flock's blogging option because I'm probably going to have my students utilize flock for both RSS reader and blogging. It feels strange to launch my posts from this unfamiliar text window--strangely, makes me feel like I'm going to forget something, but it is surprisingly clean and easy.

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Lately I've become obsessed with "life hacker" stuff, getting things done, etc., reading sites like 43 folders, but as I think often happens with these organizational techniques, I start to spend more time looking at options to become more efficient than I do actually doing things. I get on the computer and all I want to do is clean, sort, file, see how fast I can read through my RSS reads, download programs, interrupt myself by figuring out how to deal with interruptions, etc. It's bad. Instead of streamlining my reading, I seem to be adding more and more sites that will "help" me get things done more quickly and efficiently. But is is working I wonder?

Still, as the fall semester rapidly approaches I find it important to get organized. So now I'm thinking about the kinds of folders I will need to purchase...maybe today?

So far I have yet to find any suggestions for what to do on those days when you just *cannot* concentrate. Those days when your mind wanders repeatedly, when you've been on the same line of text since for an hour. My approach is to generally set a very short period of time for myself. Yesterday it was fifteen minutes. I told myself that if I simply read for fifteen more minutes I could leave and take the rest of the day off!!! I ended up reading for about twenty-five minutes.

My BIG distraction is biking. I've become obsessed with biking...and...of course...thinking about biking. I'm in the market for a mountain bike, as I'm increasingly frustrated with riding in traffic and think that unless I'm commuting or doing a long ride somewhere without a lot of cars, I should be off-road.

So I've added some bike blogs to my reading as well, and oil is for sissies is my favorite so far.

blogging project for fall

I am busy experimenting--getting ready to finally use blogs as a part of the first-year writing courses that I'll be teaching this Fall. I am trying to decide between hosting these blogs directly through wordpress or hosting them through edublogs, so I've set up two blogs to play with, experiment with:

expos-i-story

an exposition of writing

I will be documenting the experience--getting set-up, logistics, the pedagogy, etc.

more testing

here is blah blah blah

testing flock

After the bloodiest day for Israel in the Middle East Conflict, the Israeli death toll has topped 75. Twelve soldiers were killed Sunday in the town of Kfar Giladi and three civilians were killed in Haifa. As the world awaits an official comment from Tel Aviv on a long-awaited UN ceasefire proposal, we go to Haifa to speak to Erez Gellar of the Israeli relief service Magen David Adom. [includes rush transcript]

Democracy Now!: radio and TV news

Friday dog blogging

the picture we don't see

Read this haunting, beautiful piece from salon.com
How Lebanon rescued me by Alia Malek.

I think it does a wonderful job of counteracting the images we are so often given by the media. Even without photos, it paints the picuture we don't often get to see of the Middle East.

in praise of thought as material/action/activism

Interestingly, after, earlier today, struggling with alix olson's definition of an activist, I returned to an article by Eric J. Weiner, which I'd forgotten all about: "Beyond Doing Cultural Studies," and he reminded me:

Unfortunately, thinking theoretically as a political practice has been denigrated by those on the right and the left and must be re-legitimized as a form of pedagogical praxis. On the right, the logic of the bottom line encourages thought primarily as it applies to accumulating capital. On the left, the production of theory is seen as both a luxury of privilege and an excuse for not engaging in 'real' political work.... Common sense tells both that meaningful 'work' is constituted by the production of material things and is essentially pragmatic. (59)

How susceptible I am to this line of thought--the naturalization of theory as not "real" of thought as not "work"...even when I think I'm not.

alix olson--on the one hand--mac specific programs on the other

I have designated this morning as play around with the computer and try to increase productivity morning. This of course came after watching an episode of work out.

So far I've downloaded: text expander; quicksilver; flock; and net news wire. I think that is all...well, in addition to DevonThink of course. I maybe went a little overboard, setting myself up for frustration in terms of the learning curve, but so far I am quite enamoured TextExpander. It's pretty magical. For example, I get so tired of typing out critical pedaogy and cultural studies over and over in my work. Now I need only type the abbreviation CP or CS and voila out comes critical pedaogy and cultural studies. Flock and NetNewsWire are programs I'm playing around with in order to potentially utilize them in the Fall when I start using blogs in my classes. All of these programs are mac specific, and this all is thanks to my friend Dave over at academHacK (and he has some references to PC equivalents as well).


On the other side of all this computer use and my great enthusiasm for the ways in which it could/can make life easier, is the fact that it also makes me feel a bit ADD, raises my anxiety, and might contribute to depression...? Sometimes I have so many applications running that I forget what I'm doing. Sometimes I surf in haphazard fashion when I should be doing something else entirely. I feel like the fragmented individual that so many have written about. Two mornings ago I went to the library--sans computer--I just read, stayed focused. It felt nice.

Technology offers so many overwhelming possibilities, and I feel the need/want to take advantage of them all--until things like uploading photos to flickr stays on my "to do" list for weeks at a time. Blogging ends up there often as well. Each day it seems I have more little post-its in various places that say "blog this."

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In other news...

We went to Brattleboro this weekend and saw alix olson. She was wonderful, as always--even funnier than I've seen her before. I think this is because she is really striving to find happiness, joy, laughter amidst the anger and frustration that art and activism can embody. She had this great metaphor about having a duplex inside of us. In one side is that activist--angry, enraged, paying attention, and frustrated. On the other side of the duplex is the happy, nature-lover, who says lets go canoeing, life is great and wonderful. Often the duplexes are in conflict, but we are the landlord--they have to work it out...somehow.

She also defines an activist as anyone who even *thinks* about what is happening the world today. I struggle with this definition, because I don't know that I agree with it, though I'd like to, as I constantly struggle between the academic/activist parts of myself. I feel like academe is a much safer haven than "actual activism," but again, Olson would disagree with this split--maybe I should take that to heart a little bit.

Exercise in mapping and classifying

Lineage of Cultural Studies: Hoggart – Williams – (rereadings of/with/through Gramsci and Althusser) – Hall (slightly more marginal figures: Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Angela McRobbie, Jorge Larrain, Stanley Aronowitz)


Lineage of critical pedagogy: Freire – Shor – Giroux – Ann E. Berthoff (compositionist) – McLaren


Compositionists in Cultural Studies: James Berlin, Richard Ohmann (kinda), Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Alan France, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Bruce Horner (?), John Trimbur


Compositionists in critical pedagogy: Amy Lee, William Thelin, Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Andrea Greenbaum, Joe Marshall Hardin, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Richard Miller, Russell Durst

This is not so much a comprehensive mapping, but rather an attempt to organize the scholars, theorists, pedagogues whom I will be most often addressing. Still, am I missing anyone? Other versions of these maps/histories?

Now, the difficult part is to revise my prospectus so as to incorporate these histories and make clear the relationship(s) between cultural studies and critical pedagogy and composition.

quote of the day

This is my favorite quote that I read today. Taken from "The Writing Class" by John Carlos Rowe.

The rhetorical power of postmodern capitalism is its capacity to translate its products into different discursive registers and achieve even a limited proliferation that opens markets for yet other acts of representation. In this context, the traditionally defined proletariat is defined less by the theft of its physical power [ala traditional Marxism]—labor power per se—than by its exclusion from the diverse media through which the economy produces its effects. The primary basis for formulating class interests and articulating class consciousness would thus have to begin with redefining what we mean by rights to the mass media and the technologies they embody. Such rights or competencies would have to be understood today as the political and economic refunctioning of the narrowly educational rights to cultural literacy.

I love the way Rowe manages to pack into one powerful punch—the debate around cultural literacy, the debate over theories of class, a reformulation of class theories, and a critique of mass/corporate media control. Rather than simply falling into the trap of seeing cultural literacy issues as purely social issues, Rowe ties them to the economic.

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Today I ended up getting wrapped up in this article, and while I had difficulty getting through it, ended up taking almost three pages of notes. I didn't get to the other two scheduled article/essay. And I have to get ready for tonight's tennis match. Hopefully I'll have enough energy when I get home to cover the Bizzell piece.

debate: student blogging: proprietary vs. open/free

On Wednesday I attended a workshop at the institution where I will be employed full-time this coming year. The workshop was a Blackboardtraining, focused specifically on some new additions that CSR has purchased for this software (though these additions were purchased from a different company—Learning Optics (?)): “journals” and “team sites.” “Team sites” are supposed to be the equivalent of wikis, and “journals” are supposed to emulate blogs.

While I am philosophically opposed to using proprietary software, I have been using Blackboard and WebCT over the past few semesters, because with teaching four courses/semester and working toward exams, I had little time to construct an alternative. This coming semester I want to begin having students blog and assumed I would use wordpress or blogger for this purpose, but thought I should check out this workshop anyway. Unfortunately, the lure of using Blackboard is strong once again—the “journals” option is so eeeaasyyy. There is very little “set-up” time involved. No teaching students how to use RSS feeds in order to easily read each other’s blogs. Etc.

Here is what I am wondering/thinking about: If the students don’t know the difference between keeping their blogs on blogger versus keeping their “journals” on blackboard, does it really make a difference in terms of where they keep them? The way this question is worded is kind of a cop-out—a kind of “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” concept. I guess the more important question should then be—do we make explicit our choice and explain the difference to them?

Overall, I believe all of this sounds a bit weak on my part—like I am trying to rationalize the easier route. I’m not. I just want to know a bit more about how or if we should involve—in a pedagogical way—the debate around proprietary vs. open source/free source/open knowledge. And also to get the views of others on the differences between using University sanctioned (but closed/privatized) software and other open/free versions.

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In other news...
Yesterday: did 31.3 miles on the bike--Lake George, NY

plan of study--two more weeks

Week Three 7.24 – 7.30

Monday 7.24
France, Alan “Assigning Places: The Function of Introductory Composition as Cultural Discourse”
Rowe, John Carlos “The Writing Class” from Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture ed. Mark Poster
Bizzell, Patricia “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies”
(also finish notes on Judith Goleman’s Work Theory)

Tuesday 7.
Crowley, Sharon Composition in the University

Wednesday 7.26
Ohmann, Richard The Politics of Letters

Thursday 7.27
Grossberg, Lawrence “Formations of Cultural Studies”
Althusser, Louis “Ideology and Ideological State Apparastuses”
Adorno, Theodor “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

Friday 7.28
Williams, Raymond Marxism and Literature

**Saturday = catch-up, catch-all day—finishing notes, organizing lists, etc.
also, go see alix olson at the Hooker-Dunham Theater in Brattleboro, VT
**Sunday hit my old stomping grounds--The Brattleboro Food Coop on our way back home…. And back to work.


Week Four 7.31 – 8.6

Monday 7.31
Marx: Capital

Tuesday 8.1
Marx: German Ideology

Wednesday 8.2
Eagleton day
“Base and Superstructure Revisited”
“The Contradictions of Postmodernism”
“The Rise of English”

Thursday 8.3
Jameson, Fredric “On ‘Cultural Studies’” from Social Text no. 34 (1993)
--- “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
Williams, Raymond “The Future of Cultural Studies”

Friday 8.4
Morley, et. al Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues….


**daily goal of 2-3 pages single spaced summary and integration of other notes, blog entries, etc.

brief update

Stayed at parents' house an extra day--so difficult to leave the water in a heat wave--so I've really thrown myself off in terms of my study schedule.

Yesterday after traveling back home, I did twelve miles on the bike.

Today I will devote myself to Amy Lee's Composing Critical Pedagogies. Plus at some point I'd like to read the latest College English cover to cover.

Oh...and I thought that while I was visiting the 'rents, I would be able to finish House of Leaves. No such luck. I still have to read it in spurts, which is not ideal for this particular novel, but regardless, it really messes with a person. I swear the book writes itself while I'm sleeping or something.

call for a critical critical pedagogy

As Berlin argues in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, no category of investigation can ever “be given an unquestioned first place in analysis” (76). Here he is borrowing from Teresa Ebert’s idea of “resistance postmodernism”—meaning that even modes of investigation (and my interest is primarily those of composition pedagogies) need to realize their situatedness; that their methods are never transhistorical/universal, but historically specific. My fear for much of composition theory/pedagogy is disciplinary/intellectual stasis. It is not enough just to examine and offer critique, which is what, I contend, too much of cultural studies and critical pedagogy does, but instead it is necessary “to inquire into the power relations requiring such suppression” in the first place” (Ebert qtd. in Berlin 75). In this instance Ebert is referring the suppression caused by/created by hierarchy and binaries (the focus of much postmodern inquiry), but I believe this can be extended to the work that cultural studies and critical pedagogy attempt to do when in their “unveiling” mode—the uncovering of social injustice. The goals of critical pedagogy are, according to Amy Lee, to do this kind of rewriting that Ebert points to in her rendition of “resistant postmodernism.” Lee writes, “Critical pedagogy does not propose that we tell students about democratic possibilities or espouse radical empowerment. Rather, it proposes that we work toward these goals with our students, reflecting on and working to alter the conditions that impede them” (106). This is also what Ebert insists “resistant postmodernism” can do—work for “equal access for all to social resources and for an end to the explitative exercise of power” (75). But too often, I’ve found, cultural studies and critical pedagogy get caught up in mere ideology critique; thereby inadvertently (I believe) avoiding the conditions of the historical moment. Because I believe that the University as TNC would certainly impede both “democratic possibilities” and “radical empowerment,” I hold critical pedagogy, particularly that critical pedagogy of the writing classroom, as responsible to and as in need of responding to the bureaucratic University that Readings lays out for us. And instead critical pedagogy, with its explicit reference to the act of critique and/or critical thinking and/or analysis, ends up adding to the vocabulary that is, what I describe as the “vocabulary of ‘excellence.’” That is, “critical,” has become empty in much the same way that Readings has described “excellence” as empty—lacking a referent or signified. “Critical” and “excellence” are both terms we, particularly in academia, assume to be uncontestable ground. But “excellence” is the language of accounting, which is the language of businesses and corporations—pointing to critical pedagogy’s complicity in the University in “ruins.”

But all of this also points to the ability of critical pedagogy and cultural studies to help us read and respond to the “ruins.” As Berlin puts it, “resistance is always possible, since the contradiction between signified and signifier…continually provoke opposition to hegemonic ideologies” (75). It is this continual opposition that we can see as a possibility for Readings’ idea of the open-ended dialogue and community of dissensus. For example we have our signifiers—“excellence” and “critical” let’s say—and then we have the actual conditions of the University as corporatized—and possibly in the conflict and struggle between these signifiers and the actuality of the University’s contemporary situation we can create the resistance to excellence that Readings so strongly calls for.

history

In going over all of these Berlin texts for the past few days it is interesting to note that while I often feel resistant to reviewing the history of English Studies, rhtetoric, composition, and their relationships (because I feel like I'm missing out on the pulse of what is currently happening), it is so important (and often scary) to remember the ways in which history repeats itself in our field. Frightening to note the lack of change in attitudes and the debates.

i hate disclaimers

So I’ve spent a day and half (yesterday and today) getting off track/schedule. Yesterday I hardly made a dent in the coverage of Cultural Studies in the English Classroom that I wanted to accomplish. I did spend a lot of time reading blogs and writing. The night before, I had sat up reading my new book, and in it she talks a lot about simply accumulating pages (much in the vein of freewriting); she encourages a lot of writing in order to think and putting down on paper (or screen) every glimmer of an idea. These are all things I know, of course, but sometimes reading a book like this is like giving yourself permission to actually do these things. My committee members have also given me this advice/permission, but it seems that for much of this experience I’ve remained paralyzed by the thought of writing.

I also know that many of the blogs I read are comprised of seemingly well thought-out and carefully constructed entries containing bits and pieces of that particular writer’s project, and maybe that will come, as I’m further along in my own process and have accumulated all of these pages of text that Bolker talks about, but for the moment, yes, this is my disclaimer; this is that start of glimmering ideas and following them no matter how seemingly silly and/or irrelevant; and this is what I thought about yesterday:

At this point much of the argument that I want to be making about cultural studies and critical pedagogy (within composition studies) is, that even with their Marxist roots, they seem primarily interested in ideology critique (the idea of “unveiling”) as opposed to focusing on the present conditions of the corporate University within which they are working. But what does the classroom in ruins—the classroom that acknowledges those ruins—actually look like? What does it mean to have a classroom that creates present value in writing? Maybe it is that the text is no longer a reader or writing handbook, but the campus and its policies—the construction of the campus itself—or a study of NAFTA, or of corporations and their increasingly trans-national tendencies. I’m just not sure…. Does picking some sort of social investigation equate to a cultural studies approach? But what about giving that investigation value in the present? This seems to be the point at which publishing student texts comes into play, but that also has its own ties to capitalism and the system that is the corporate University. Another aspect of acknowledging the “ruins” would be to work toward changing the immediately oppressive circumstances within which we work and teach: “such as the way part-time faculty and students are successfully silenced within our own departments” (CS in Eng Class 21).

I also have this idea that creating a composition classroom in keeping with a Marxist/materialist philosophy would be to have (harken back to) a current-traditional approach (and this is not a positive/answer). Here are some similiarities between Marxist though and current-traditional rhetoric:

• the “real” is located in the material world and truth exists prior to language
• rhetoric as science
• truth is to be discovered through “correct” perception, through an objective examination of the material world

Here really is the problem with notions of Marxism within rhet/comp theories: Current-traditional rhetoric does seem to share these philosophies with Marxism, but of course the outcome, as Berlin tells it in Rhetoric and Reality is that “the doctors or lawyers or engineers or business managers—having been certified as experts, as trained observers, in their disciplines—felt they were surely correct in discovering that economic and political arrangements that benefited them were indeed in the nature of things” (37). Then we have the expressivist rhetoric, which could potentially be looked at as resisting the corporate structure of higher education, but which ultimately is complicit in it through its focus on “rugged individualism,” autonomy, and the private. These are two of the approaches to writing that have withstood the test of time and are the basis for much of what is thought within composition studies even today. Though there have been the alternatives: social/poststructuralist/rhetoric of pubic discourse, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. These alternatives have come along to say—hey, what about the cultural and the social, and with CS and CP’s ties to Marxism, I expect them to say—hey, what about the economic? Only, they often fail to acknowledge the most immediate economic structure within which they are located, and that is the corporate University.

The similarities too between the social constructionist/poststructuralist/rhet of public discourse that Berlin describes in Rhetoric and Reality and his definition of cultural studies in Cultural Studies in the English Classroom are also striking:

• preparation of students for participation in the democratic process
• “While social reality is bound by the material, it is everywhere immersed in language…. [Reality] is the result of the interaction between the experience of the external world and what the perceiver brings to this experience” (R&R 47).
• While subjectivity is understood differently than this (last bullet) within CS (where the subject is comprised of multiple constructions shaped by myriad signifying practices), CS is described as the “study of the ways social formations and practices are involved in the shaping of consciousness, and this shaping is seen to be mediated by language and situated in concrete historical conditions. Signifying practices then intercede in the relations among material conditions, social arrangements, and the formation of consciousness” (CS in English Classroom ix).

So ultimately the social turn of the 80s with its poststructuralist bent (e.g. Bartholomae, Bizzell) is entirely relevant to the social turn that can be described through the rise of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Yes, CS may use the vocabulary of Marxism, but it has a particularly poststructuralist slant, which might be part of why it has been taken on by composition studies (and probably also explains why I am drawn to studying/working with it).

goals

Today I came up slightly short of my goals; yesterday I was right on:

Yesterday
--three articles
--three pages single spaced notes/musings
--tennis match

Today
--3/4 of Rhetoric and Reality
--1 1/4 pages of notes
--threw frisbee ("disc") for about an hour

I am leaving Friday morning open as a kind of "catch-up"/"catch-all" time.

---
For my birthday I received a Barnes & Noble gift certificate (online purchases only) from two of my friends. I went ahead and purchased myself a copy of Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, as recommended by culture cat, who gives a number of helpful tips for the dissertation writing process.

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TVland: Very, very excited tomorrow kicks off Project Runway

reading/study schedule

I've set up a two week schedule of readings/texts for my comps. I guess this week is Berlin week...

Week One 7.10 – 7.16

Monday 7.10
Bartholomae Day
“Inventing the U”
“Writing with Teachers…”
“Interchanges”

Tuesday 7.11
Berlin, James Rhetoric/Reality

Wednesday 7.12
Berlin, James CS in English Classroom

Thursday 7.13
Berlin, James Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures

**go home for mom’s b-day Fri.-Sun.


Week Two 7.17 – 7.23

Monday 7.17
Lee, Amy Composing Critical Pedagogies

Tuesday 7.18
Durst, Russell Collision Course….

Wednesday 7.19
Fitts and France Left Margins….

Thursday 7.20
Crowley, Sharon Composition in the University

Friday 7.21
Greenbaum, Andrea. Insurrections

Saturday 7.22
Hardin, Joe Marshall Critical Pedagogy and Resistance Theory in Composition

Sunday 7.23: bike ride

**daily goal of 2-3 pages single spaced summary and integration of other notes, blog entries, etc.

So far it is proving more difficult than the way I had romanticized it. This is actually the first time--since I began studying for exams (a long, long time ago)--that I've had a block of time when I'm not teaching and able to dedicate myself completely to my research/exam/diss project.

I find that I start each text with a burst of energy, taking copious notes, finding a good amount of useful (relevant to my work) information to highlight, think about, comment upon. And then, I am not sure if it is me...or just every text I have on my reading lists, but about half way through, I am completely uninterested and/or lost and/or falling asleep. This happens much too often with my reading, and I have way too many half read texts lying around my home. I am not sure if it is simply burn-out, or is it that most texts of this kind are strongest in their first and last quarter?

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In other news, I’ve taken up Ultimate Frisbee…or, rather, Ultimate, as those true Ultimate players call it. I’ve been biking, playing tennis and Ultimate, and lifting quite a bit. My “down days” are spent mowing the lawn, gardening, etc. I hope to keep this up and avoid running all together.

no phone, no computer

I just spent a glorious four days disconnected. We were in Provincetown--biking, dancing, ocean swimming, football throwing, walking, people watching, Spiritus Pizza eating, etc.. At the bottom of the street that our B&B was on is the Wired Puppy-- Ptown's free wifi coffee shop. When I'd go in for my "hair of the dog" coffee, the thought crossed my mind to check my email, but I was able to resist. It felt amazing.

Now I'm back. The garden is monstrous. Pics to follow.... Looking at the garden, it is hard to believe that it was only four days.

I'm back to work now too. The piles of student writing are monstrous. My goal though is to get through the grading by Monday, and then embark on a whirlwind study schedule for the next two months. I will post a weekly schedule/reading list--"public" accountability might do me some good. I will also use DevonThink to get myself organized...as outlined by academHacK.

I've just been informed that my blog does not format properly in Internet Explorer for PC. I apologize for those of you using such a browser. I really don't know how to correct it...at the moment...but I'll work on figuring that out. Though I am slightly amused and entertained to realize that I've never opened up a Internet Explorer PC window in order to come to this realization myself.

struggling to make the connections

As I work on the rewrite of my prospectus, I 1) see how many holes existed in the first draft and 2) struggle to close those holes. In my head, I can make sense of the movement from chapter one to chapter two, but on paper it doesn't connect. I thought maybe using a new medium, clean slate I could quickly move through the "steps":

Chapter 1: Will focus on the material conditions of compositionist labor in the contemporary corporate University.
Okay--so within that concept I want to include
--the "basement"/marginalized status of composition
--argue that we are not "exempt" from--or somehow outside of--what Ohmann describes as English Studies’ place within
“the long, historical crisis of capitalism”
--our marginalized status has caused a lot of focus on gaining disciplinary recognition (including making ourselves into or
out to be a "science")
--this focus on gaining status, recognition as a field, etc. has only served to be a distraction from our classrooms, our
students, and--as I intend to argue it--from the ways in which our potentially counterhegemonic position has been
subsumed by the popularity of cultural studies/critical pedagogy

I guess that, in part, this is where I get stuck. I am not sure whether I even believe that argument. I know that eventually I will argue that CS and crit. ped. have distracted us from the corporatization of the U. and that they haven't been as self-aware of their place within this corp. U as a "un-veiling"-type pedagogy should be, but I am not sure that our quest for disciplinary recognition has anything to do with CS and crit. ped. and their shortcomings within the writing classroom.

So it seems I have solved one problem, but created another. How to get from chapter one to chapter two???

bike karma?

Today I biked to school, in the extreme heat. I haven't been on my bike that much this summer, and lately...well, my body hasn't exactly been my temple, so it kind of kicked my ass, but it also could have gone a little more smoothly: When I arrived on campus, my chain fell off. I thought I knew this neat trick to put it back on with a sturdy stick, so as to avoid getting completely grease covered. Well, there were no sticks sturdy enough, apparently. I arrived at the humanities building red-faced and grease-stained. After washing up, getting some coffee (!) and teaching, I made the ride back home, only to end up with a flat tire. I was in my own neighborhood at that point, but I had to walk back wearing my bike shoes. Quite frustrating--klomping noisily through the streets, sweating and wearing a much too tiny tank top (or so it suddenly felt). Also, this morning I was trying to open something and ended up stabbing myself with scissors.

Tonight I have a tennis match, but the heat seems to have sucked all my energy. Hopefully it will go well.

my weekend to do list...or Friday afternoon compromise

• clean car--thoroughly--inside and out


• write letter for Rosemary


• write thank you cards for birthday presents--mom/d and grandma/Grandpa


• weed garden...(well, enough for now...in this heat)


• help mow the lawn?


• laundry


• work on prospectus revision and the creation of exam questions (this should REALLY be at the top of the list...)...minimally


• create fiction revision assignment sheet


• finish responding to student exercises

Oh yeah...all this, but I want to spend the rest of my Friday...doing...nothing! Okay, I'll head out for some caffeine and bring the student papers or a book with me. Compromise with self.

Added: Monday, June 19, 2006 2:18pm
But in addition to the things I did AND did NOT get done--I worked out (lifted) and cleaned the house and had a lovely (pizza) dinner w/ D on Burden Lake. And called my D, of course, for Father's Day.

this week...

Organizational Skills Needed

I am--on the whole--a very organized person; however, I have approached my exams and dissertation project in the most haphazard and unorganized fashion. If only I had been a bit more careful and diligent. But no, my notes are all over the place: some are on the computer, others in notebooks; some are labeled, some aren't; some texts that I read only have marginal notes. It is all very confusing. I need to create a system to somehow organize this mess I've made for myself.


Laws of Physics

On Monday, D and I chaperoned her niece's field trip to The Great Escape. I really love rides and always have, but I've learned that at this age, I have to be careful not to overthink them too much. When I realize that I'm relying upon the laws of physics, I get a little freaked out. Maybe it's the English major in me--I'm sure the laws of physics are quite reliable, but when I was on that Bobsled ride, unattached to any kind of track...that REALLY freaked me out. I think it is something like centripetal force that is holding us on there. The entire time I had this intense visual of a picture from my high school science book of a car going around a sharp curve.

politics vs. economics--are they really that distinct?

I just finished reading Michele Barrett's The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. I found it to be a helpful mapping of ideology debates and a clear explanation of Foucault's critique of Marxism (or the ways in which Foucault would critique Marxism, if that is what he were directly setting about to do).

Still, I must remind myself to be careful with these types of "secondary" sources. Barrett has clearly aligned herself from the moment of her dedication: For Stuart and Catherine Hall, and so even while she summarizes, paraphrases, elucidates it is all for the sake of making an argument. I am easily seduced.

And yet, I AM seduced by post-structualist critiques of Marxism. They DO make sense to me, and yet by the end of the book I am still missing Barrett's alternative to class interest (as the point around which ideology coalesces). She argues that the point of class interest in Marx's concept of ideology is "simply inadequate, for all the reasons that have been brought forward in this book. Hence the concept of ideology that I would propose applies equally to processes of mystification that arise around other (non-class) social divisions and other forms of social power and domination" (167). I guess the thing that bothers me--granted I have NOT gone back through and reviewed the book...not yet--is that I am left guessing as to what these non-class social divisions and forms of power and domination are. I mean, I can GUESS what they are, but I don't like the fact that they aren't very explicitly named and explored. She alludes to gender...and maybe at some point race. I intend to go back through the book shortly, so who knows...maybe I'll take this back...but Foucault says it is okay...even expected...to do that, so what the heck....

thinking through some ideology and curriculum Part I

Looking at Michael Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum.

How I’m using Apple in my project: To reiterate (the now, slightly old) argument that the school is an ISA (in Althusser’s words). In Apple’s words (paraphrasing Gramsci):

As Gramsci argued, the control of the knowledge preserving and producing sectors of a society is a critical factor in enhancing the ideological dominance of one group of people or one class over less powerful groups of people or classes. In this regard, the role of the school in selecting, preserving, and passing on conceptions of competence, ideological norms, and values (and often only certain social groups’ ‘knowledge’) – all of which are embedded within both the overt and hidden curricula in schools – is of no small moment. (57-58)

In other words, schools reproduce the economic and social stratification in society. Apples encourages us to question whose interests are served through school curriculum and makes the, by now, generally accepted argument that classrooms are not insulated from the outside world and education is inherently political. Apple goes on to point out that schools have a history and a relationship to “other powerful institutions in ways that are both hidden and complex” (62). The “knowledge that got into schools in the past and gets into schools now is not random. It is selected and organized around sets of principles and values that come from somewhere, that represent particular views of normality and deviance…” (63). While Readings sees Universities as ideologically empty, he does propose that we question “the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges” (177). And the question should be “what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past” (177). Readings’ argument through here is complex and compelling, and I see it possibly intersecting with Apple in interesting ways—pointing to both their similarities and dissimilarities.

Readings suggests a certain “rhythm of disciplinary attachment and detachment” that ultimately requires disciplinary structures (and therefore, in my mind, the grouping of knowledges) to “imagine what kinds of thinking they make possible, and what kinds of thinking they exclude” (176). In this way Readings seems to carry on a version of Apple’s thinking that the formal and informal knowledge that is taught in schools “need to be looked at connectedly…. For these everyday school practices are linked to economic, social, and ideological structures outside of the school buildings” (65). It is here that I see Readings doing something “new” and something critical pedagogy and cultural studies should take into consideration. Much of critical pedagogy seems to work from this idea that Apple (among many others) puts forth and espouses an “unveiling” of this link between education and the “economic, social, and ideological structures outside of the school buildings.” But the point Readings makes is that these forces are not outside the University—the corporatization is the current structure of the University. It is within. It has infiltrated. So the difference lies in seeing school as a part of the socio-economic structures, one that reproduces these structures and seeing it as the site of the economic itself, the site of corporatization both in the way it is beholden to corporate interests and in the way it is becoming (or has become) a University in its own rite. So while Apple focuses on school as the site of producing workers for industrialized society, Readings can look at both that and the way the University is producing consumers.

yesterday's very obvious, not terribly insightful thought

Just a thought—probably nothing new—probably not my own, but in ruling out expressivism, we seem to be perpetuating the creative/expository (or academic, essay, etc.) writing split.

---
I thought this yesterday. And it mostly seemed worth noting because of the way it sits, uneasily, with me. I'm sensing a potential expressivist revival, and I need to explore my own discomfort with this. This comes after reading this yesterday.

it's summer, but what does that mean?

I still have not gotten into the rhythm of summer. I've never taught first summer session before, and it is further throwing me off. I feel like I never got my break. I had a week. I spent it in Asheville, sick.

I obsess about having a desk chair where I can sit half-lotus while still comfortably accessing my computer. In fact, I am doing that now...except for maye the comfortably part. And this has little to do with my lack of rhythm, but it is something I often think about when blogging. When I picture myself at my computer, I see myself half-lotus, with a cup of tea by my side. I'm doing this now, but leg just got sleepy/pins 'n needles, so I had to drop it down.

I've been reading "for fun." I feel like it is summer, and that is what people--even academics--do when summer comes. While I traveled, I read two pieces of lesbian fiction: Ann Wadsworth's light, coming back and Michelle Tea's Rose of No Man's Land. I escaped into them wholeheartedly. And was as delighted by Tea's book as I was melancholy over Wadsworth's book. For the flight home I treated myself to a copy of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. I've been wanting to delve into this text since Dave introduced me to it, as he's working with it as part of his dissertation. I'm relishing it.

But now I'm not on a plane, and I'm wanting...no NEEDING...to take exams in August, and yet all I want to do is read about this house. All I want to do is read about this house and watch TV and hang out and do nothing. I don't even feel like working out, riding my bike or playing tennis. It's appalling. It's so unlike me. And it's freaking me out.

Oh...at least I've accomplished this:
The garden is in. And I loved every minute of it.

And all I want to do is blog without structure and without academia.

And all I want to do is go house-hunting on the internet. Go to open houses. Dream about what is out of our/my reach.

And eat ice cream.

Sounds like summer.... I guess.

my trip to Asheville

I recently returned from a trip to Asheville, NC. My friend gave birth to baby girl, Ruby, and I went to assist during her partner's first week back to work. There were many complications. My friend nearly died from complications following a C-section birth. Initially she had a midwife and planned a drug-free, water birth, but because of the baby being posterior this just didn't work out. After twelve days spent in the hospital, with some of that time spent in a coma, my friend needed much more help than we'd originally thought. Problem was--I ended up being very sick for two weeks and couldn't go near the baby. So my trip to Asheville looked like this:

--Thought head would explode on airplane.
--Made some food, did some dishes, did some laundry, cleaned some floors, read aloud.
--Went downtown one day, bought some books, ate a portobello mushroom sandwich and drank a smoothie.
--Went to an interesting cafe called Outspoken. Saw some lesbians. Got very nervous. Worked on my teaching philosophy.
--Drank a beer at a nearby pub. Thought it made me feel better. Played a game of pool.
--Cried over the intensity of love between my friend and her partner. Cooed over the baby that I couldn't really help with. They are a beautiful family, and they look like this:

getting nowhere...slowly

Though the end is in sight--grades are due by Friday, and I'm down to two stacks of final papers--I don't see how I am possibly going to have a revised version of my exam prospectus into my committee. I'm stuck on "ideology." I thought that maybe starting to write through my problem here might help, though I'm not entirely hopeful (many long walks have not solved it).

If I'm using Bill Readings and his concept of the "bureaucratic University of Excellence" as my framework and lens through which to read and critique cultural studies and critical pedagogy within composition/writing classroom, and Readings argues that "excellence" is non-ideological, as it has no content: "It has not external referent or internal content" (23). So, according to Readings, the University of Excellence is a non-ideological space, but I disagree. This is where I'm stuck. While I believe Readings can provide a powerful framework for my particular critique of CS and CP, how do I address a University of Excellence that is in my mind ideological??? Readings idea is based on the notion that corporations are non-ideological. I'm not sure I understand this entirely.

Excellence has no content. It is the thing we all agree upon without knowing what it is. It is not a criterion. It is empty. So it is actually the discourse of "excellence" that is empty? The use of the word is meaningless, but the representation is the University of Excellence, which seems to have content. Corporatized content.

I'm getting nowhere.... Try back later.

movie break

According to this blog it would seem I take more breaks than I spend time doing work. That is the thin slice of life that is blogging though.

Dawn and I went to see Friends with Money. It was alright. Definitely a wait-for-the-DVD-and-rent-it type of film. But for me it was kind of nice to be reminded of how great my life really it. I mean, the film had no plot, was completely dialogue driven, which I often like. And, in this case, the dialoge was real. And it was nice to go sit for an hour and a half and listen to everyone else's problems. I thought the movie was a bit heavy-handed in terms of its portrayal of male/female (supposed)differences. But again, sometimes it is just about escaping into the conversations of people whose lives are way more f-ed up than mine.

Okay, avoiding grading, for a bit. Must get to it. Friday looms large.

grading break

What makes the best break from grading stacks and stacks of papers? I am sure I must ask this question each semester.

Check email and sign a petition against the tracking of phone calls by the NSA.

Have a horribly terrifying experience where a big, scary looking spider is crawling on my mouse just as I'm about to put my hand on it. Have to figure out a way to catch spider; work through my fear so I don't just slam a book down on it; bring the spider outdoors--heart racing and feet moving fast.

Blog, "play" on the computer, but this ususally does not end up feeling like a break, and then I end up needing another break...

Talking on the phone.

Doing dishes, laundry, picking up little household messes, but this is always a HUGE risk. That risk being an entire house cleaning that could take hours...days even.

Walking around, stretching.

Meditating.

TV, but this is never a quickie. I get sucked, zoned, seduced, all of it.

Upload photos to flickr....

read the latest College English

Tonight I'm going to an WNBA game:
Phoenix @ Detroit Preseason
Pepsi Arena - Albany, NY
That should be a fun break.

My legs are still weak from the spider....

abstract

The Dialogic Writing Classroom

In University in Ruins, Bill Readings calls for a “teaching scene” based on dialogism as opposed to dialogue. This idea of dialogism, borrowed from Mikail Bakhtin, has potential to open up space for, what I call, a critical critical pedagogy and for responding to Amy Lee’s assertion that “critical pedagogy foregrounds the teacher or educator…. The students’ role is largely ignored” (Composing Critical Pedagogies 7). What if composition studies were to take seriously Readings’ concept of Thought, which is “thinking together” as a “dissensual process”? If critical pedagogy devotes itself to a liberatory classroom space that works to recognize and read critically the social and material conditions out of which its work is produced, it might do well to consider these “ruins” Readings describes as the University in which the critical pedagogue’s writing classroom is situated.


um...now i just have to write the paper. i feel clueless as to how to even begin.


In other news...
I have a job interview at a community college on the 28th. My first interview. I'm nervous as hell, but trying to see it as simply gaining experience, as I'm not even "on the market" yet (officially). It's for a full-time tenure track position. I'd certainly be thrilled to get it, as I wouldn't have to leave the area, and therefore wouldn't have to leave my partner. The thought of a future long-distance relationship is simply scary to me, though I know there is a good chance we'll end up in that predicament. Ah...the life of an academic is simply so glamorous:)

if things weren't bad enough...

So I am going through this really rough patch in my life. *Really rough*

So this morning--on the verge of tears and little sleep--I go to the Dunkin' Donuts to get a coffee and a bagel to force feed myself, as I have a tennis match at noon and need some sustenance but really do NOT feel like eating. As usual it is a mob scene. I'm trying to turn left off of Lark Street and into the parking lot. I let two cars out and then decide it should be my turn to pull in. I get about a quarter of D's car pulled into the opening of the lot (with the other 3/4 hanging out into Lark St.), and this guy in an enormous red truck (I know NOTHING about cars) pulls through the parking lot and cuts me off, blocks my way, and nearly hits the front end of Ds car (if I thought things were bad now...). So I say, "What the f--k? Did you not see me here? F--ker." And then neatly flip him off. As I pull into the parking spot, I see him back up in his big ole red truck...and I'm like uh-oh. When emerge from the car, he says, "Why do you have to go flipping people the bird?" I can't remember what my answer was. He then goes on to explain that it was a big cluster in the parking lot and he was simply trying to "do the right thing" and get out of the way (only--I did not add--he moved directly into MY way). Then he says, "It's Sunday." And for a moment I feel horrible. He's right. I was not raised to flip people off on Sundays. But then I thought, well if it was Thursday would that really be better? I mean, come on, buddy. So then he tells me that he wasn't even getting coffee, and there I go flipping him the bird. And I'm wondering WHY is he in the flipping Dunkin' Donuts' parking lot that is a huge cluster f--k on a Sunday morning, if he doesn't need coffee!?!? THEN he informs me that he's a minister and I just flipped him off on a Sunday. So, I say, "I'm sorry." Then I say, "I guess I'm going to straight to hell now." Then he tells me I just need to calm down. Just calm down he says. I think he is trying to say go in peace and don't be mean to people. I tell him that if he had my life, he would not be calm. Then, I just say, "Sorry." And leave.

But the whole episode is following me around. I have this strange compulsion to drive around town and look for his truck, and ask him a bunch of questions and fight with him some more. Because I *always* have to be right. And that problem is what got my life in such a mess, so I shouldn't drive around town looking for that "minister." But, if he's a minister, why did he have orange cones in the back of his truck? And, just because he's minister, does he get the special privilege of not getting flipped off when he cuts someone off? And, why, am I spending my time wondering these things???

getting on a blogging-roll?

What?? I cannot have had this blog since 2004. It's embarrassing. What little and ill use I've made of it. But I'm scared of commitment. So to sit here and say I'm going to start blogging voraciously and with great consistency is an impossibility.

Goals for "Spring" Break:
1. Write my paper for the UAlbany Graduate Student Conference
2. Grade three stacks of papers.
3. Revise my prospectus.
4. Take care of my summer textbook order.

Can this really be my life???

the political as expressivism

It is interesting that on the day I left Laura’s office reconsidering the use of personal writing (in the classroom) as political, I opened up the latest College English to find Timothy Barnett’s article ” “Politicizing the Personal: Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, and Some Thoughts on the Limits of Critical Literacy”. Although I must admit that it did not renew my hope in personal writing in the way I was hoping for. It is funny because I keep thinking to write “expressivism” in all the places where I’ve written personal writing. And it’s funny that Barnett rarely, if ever, uses the word expressivism in his piece. Instead he equates personal writing (as political) with the tenets of critical pedagogy. I don’t understand this as one of the goals of critical pedagogy per se.

He begins the article: “The idea that ‘the personal is political’ is both a commonplace in composition studies and something we have not yet fully theorized” (356). I am all for fully—or even partially--theorizing the idea of personal/political writing in composition, but I don’t see Barnett as having achieved this goal by the end of this essay. Instead, it seems to be a standard, overused defense of personal writing as valuable in a political way. Granted, he does suggest that both critiques of and arguments for the personal seem to miss “the deep links between personal writing and social critique” (356). And he acknowledges the critique of the personal as being too focused on the individual. Barnett responds to these arguments by saying they undermine “some basic tenets of critical pedagogy” (356). And then writes, “From the viewpoint of critical pedagogy then, personal writing can help students understand personal lives as linked to and reflective of social and political norms.” He accuses critical pedagogues as not fully exploring “a critical pedagogy tied to personal experience.” I guess that this then accounts for my confusion over whether or not this is part of a critical pedagogy, but to me it seems as though Barnett is forcing critical pedagogy to merge with expressivism in order to create an argument in favor of expressivism that somehow fits into “today’s” composition theory after a number of years of critique of expressivism.

Barnett does seem to make a critical pedagogy “move” when he compares/equates his students to Richard Wright and Frederick Douglass (instead of Brazilian peasants—let’s say).

The center of Barnett’s argument is that we need to understand the personal “as necessarily linked to the political” (357), and I tend to agree that it is. But, in my mind, the goal of critical pedagogy would be to have students make that move—that connection to the political within or maybe in response to (analysis of) their own/personal writing. With Barnett’s student, “Heather,” we never see this move. It begins and ends on “Heather” in a seeming celebration of the therapeutic effects of writing, which only further fuels the critiques of the personal as focused on the individual with a romanticized notion of individuality/subjectivity—the autonomous subject. I get that all of Heather’s writing, as a part of Heather herself, is socially constructed. But without the “unveiling” of that construction, I’m not sure I see how this fits into the framework of critical pedagogy.

I am left thinking that maybe Barnett is right—maybe critical pedagogues haven’t given enough thought to personal writing—but maybe that isn’t their goal.

Readings' critique of critical pedagogy

Although Readings only mentions critical pedagogy once in the entirety of University in Ruins, I believe his various critiques of what he describes as “the scene of teaching” can be applied to critical pedagogy and much of rhet/comp pedagogy as well. So while Readings doesn’t offer up the following critique in direct reference to critical pedagogy, I am using his arguments as my “lens.”

Readings’ critique of critical pedagogy, though brief, shares similarities with other charges lodged against this particular classroom method—that critical pedagogy is simply a replacement of the professor with the student—an “inversion of the hierarchy so that the students embody the real University” (163). But while the argument may seem redundant, the how and why of how he got to this critique is important, and it is especially important for (the future of) critical pedagogy to take into account.

Readings is of course addressing a specifically bureaucratic university—one he deems as a potentially transnational corporation. He is residing in this “ruined” university as he searches for a “resistance to the discourse of excellence,” and he finds this potential for resistance “in the scene of teaching” (150). As critical pedagogy and much of composition theory dedicate themselves to this scene he describes, I find it especially important that we take into account his arguments. He goes on to argue that this potential can be realized through the decentering of teaching: “By the decentering of the pedagogic situation I mean to insist that teaching is not best understood from the point of view of a sovereign subject that takes itself to be the sole guarantor of the meaning of that process…” (153). Based on this definition, it would seem that critical pedagogy would have this decentering potential—that it is in fact based on this potential (the decentering of teacher as authority), but Readings doesn’t stop there: “Neither the administrator taking the system in hand, nor the professor taking the student in hand, nor the student taking him- or herself in hand will do the trick” (emphasis mine 153). With much of critical pedagogy devoted to the idea of students taking themselves in hand, it would seem, that if we buy Readings’ arguments, critical pedagogy can be problematic and not entirely effective when it comes to resisting “the discourse of excellence.” So that pedagogy is not about creating a resisting or “oppositional subject;” but rather it is about thinking “beside each other and beside ourselves, is to explore an open network of obligations that keeps the question of meaning open as locus of debate” (165).

Readings addresses three pedagogic pitfalls—the second of which can to attributed to critical pedagogy: “the demagogic mode”—“the students’ autonomy is assumed as an a priori given, is asserted from the beginning as the unrecognized condition of possibility of education. Students have the autonomy to decide what it is they know, what it is they should or should not learn…” (157). So while the movement away from expressivism within rhet/comp has often been based on the critique of expressivism’s promotion of the autonomous self, I argue that the self-reproduction of that autonomy is problematically ever present within critical pedagogy as well. This privileging of the autonomous self did not meet its end with the movements away from expressivism; the 1980s social turn in composition also allowed/s for this belief in self-autonomy.

“In place of the lure of autonomy…I want to insist that pedagogy is a relation, a network of obligation…” (Readings 158); so while critical pedagogy seeks potential liberation and freedom from the exploitative structures of society, Readings puts pressure on the necessity of obligation within a specifically bureaucratic University. He sees this freedom/liberation—the myth of the truth setting us free—as a freedom from responsibility to each other. The next step that Readings tackles is to situate this responsibility and network obligations not in a community of consensus, but one of dissensus. In other words, in a community that avoids appeals to nostalgia and a romanticized version of community—“where thinking is a shared process without identity or unity”(192). Certainly this seems to be another idea relevant to composition pedagogy in its own appeals to classroom community through workshop groups, collaborative projects, and peer review. I believe that various composition pedagogies/theories can make better use of Readings’ argument for “dialogism rather than dialogue” (192). In what ways does critical pedagogy in its constant working out of teacher/student relationship with an eye toward egalitarianism turn a blind eye toward the possible use of difference and dissensus? How can we “think beside each other” without simply inverting the classroom hierarchy (teacher/student to student/teacher) as critical pedagogy might be prone to do?

CFP: "Changing the Subject: Poeisis, Praxis, and Theoria in the Humanities"

> Call for Panels and Papers: Deadline 3/1/06
>
> The English Graduate Student Organization (EGSO) of the University
> at Albany, SUNY announces its annual graduate student conference
> Saturday April 22 and Sunday 23, 2006:
>
> Changing the Subject: Poeisis, Praxis, and Theoria in the Humanities
>
> Robert Scholes is the Keynote Speaker, presenting a paper titled
> "Changing the Subject: Periodical Studies"
>
> Call for Papers and Panels: Praxis
> The Praxis and Pedagogy division of UAlbany’s Graduate Conference
> invites proposals for papers and panels that consider the
> intersections of theory and practice in our pedagogical approaches and
> in our roles as intellectuals.
>
> Karl Marx defined PRAXIS as "revolutionary, critical-practical
> activity," asserting, "The philosophers have only interpreted the
> world…the point is to change it." A substantial line of
> thought—including Freire, Giroux, hooks—has argued that teaching is an
> act and the classroom a space where social change can take place
> through a politics of resistance and social critique. The word has
> become so affiliated with the teaching profession that the national
> system of standardized tests for individuals becoming school teachers
> is called PRAXIS.
>
> Why is pedagogy almost exclusively linked with the field of rhetoric
> and composition? Why is pedagogy, and therefore the field of rhetoric
> and composition, so commonly affiliated with the concept of PRAXIS?
> What other forms of PRAXIS are alive and well in and around the
> academy? Is the classroom still, or perhaps more than ever, a site for
> "revolutionary, critical-practical activity?" As one of the few
> locales where strangers gather together regularly, is it necessary to
> rethink the classroom in terms of presence and embodiment, as a place
> where the "public" comes "inside" the university? What is the
> reciprocal, then, of the teacher leaving the university? How does she
> find or shape her public there?
>
> We welcome panels as well as individual papers/presentations. Topics
> can include:
> the status and role(s) of the public intellectual
> the division between the teaching of reading literature and writing
> development of an academic discourse quite separate from "everyday"
> writing and speech
> forms of action valued and/or overlooked in the academy
> curriculum and course design as practice
> classroom as a public space
> effects of corporatization on pedagogical practices
> effects of theory on the teaching of literature
> status of speech in the classroom
> online classes and universities
> theory out of practice
> effects of the poststructural turn toward writing/language on
> concepts of public speaking and teaching
> exploration of institutionalized boundaries between
> artist/academic/activist
> Please submit a 250-400 word proposal for papers and/panels by
> March 1, 2006 to Jennifer Marlow and Tara Needham at
> egsoalbany@yahoo.com.
> For more information visit:
> http://www.albany.edu/english/grad_conference_06/
>

Sidonie Smith lecture

On Thursday night I attended a Sidonie Smith lecture at the College of St. Rose. She called the presentation, "Victims, Perpetrators, Beneficiaries: Storytelling Stances in Human Rights Campaigns." Throughout the lecture she constantly complicated the proximity of (and roles of) victim, perpetrator, and beneficiary. She used three South African "narratives" as examples: the Winnie Mandela trials, A Human Being Died that Night, and Country of my Skull by Antjie Krog.

During the Q&A the conversation turned to prison narratives. John Edgar Wideman's introduction to Mumia Abu Jamal's Live from Death Row was discussed because it addresses the idea of prison narratives so often becoming neo-slave narratives. Wideman attributes both Abu Jamal's success, as well the the controversey and fear surrounding him, to the fact that his writing doesn't do this.

Zarvarzadeh on Pleasure and Crisis 1

Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s 1994 “article,” “The Pedagogy of Pleasure 2: The Me-In-Crisis” is both a rant against the idea of the personal and an urgent plea for students (and scholars) to engage in a “rigorous critique of their situational in history” through ideology critique (and rigorous intellectual work, producing scientific knowledge). Zavarzadeh is vehemently opposed to the idea of the individual and strongly in favor of collective; he’s against experience and for science/knowledge; he’s against “talk” and for “reading.” In other words, Zarvarzadeh defines subjectivity as historical and class-founded, as opposed to subjectivity as individualism. At this point, I am with Zavarzadeh. We are on the same page. But Zavarzadeh takes this difference in subject formation and uses is as a jumping off point to rail against experience--seeing experience as used only to illustrate difference and thereby perpetuate the myth of the individual as distinct from others (as the “me’s” experience is not the same as the next “me’s” experience). Here he argues that experience’s “main political outcome is to mystify the historicity and class-founded nature of subjectivity.” This is because experience focuses on effects (according to Zarvarzadeh) and obscures causes: “causes have to be KNOWN through CONCEPTS.” In other words, we can’t KNOW anything through experience. Power must be theorized, not “talked” about.

This stance leads him to critique feminism and feminist pedagogy, which he describes as anti-intellectual. His goal of course here (and he as much as admits this at the end of his “article”) is to antagonize, and he does it well, but while Zavarzadeh is busy critiquing students, scholars, feminists, etc. for ignoring and/or obscuring and/or failing to recognize causes and their own situational, he fails to acknowledge the ways in which the types of knowledge and idea of CONCEPTS/CONCEPTUALITY that he calls upon are training in patriarchal modes of thinking, learning, speaking, and writing. He fails to question the ways in which the formal paper that he assigned also protects the privileges of the bourgeois subject (something he accuses his student of doing)--the ways in which a formal paper (presumably written in formal academic discourse) fails to “confront the historical and socio-economic structures of the subject in history.”

language/class/language

I haven’t finished reading Julie Lindquist’s A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working Class Bar, so I may be jumping ahead of myself, trying to question points she is making that she later in the book addresses, complicates, and/or answers.

Still, I have questions:

On page 74 Lindquist states that “Smokehouse ideologies of class are highly narratizable, yet stubbornly unnamable.” (Background: The Smokehouse is the working class bar, which Lindquist is referring to in the title. She works there as a bartender while attaining her doctorate. In part, Lindquist is looking at the ways in which the Smokehouse regulars—“Smokehousers”—express and/or interpret class/experience through their daily discussions.) What ideologies of class are nameable? At numerous points in the book (so far), Lindquist comes to the (seemingly surprising, to her) conclusion that the Smokehousers lack a language for class, yet don’t most people? Not just working class, bar regulars…?

I am constantly running into this predicament—not having a language with which to speak about class, not having a framework for the unsatisfactory language that we do have. Because, from the folk who frequent the Smokehouse to the students who sit in our classrooms—the people don’t read class theory.

reading 2: pleasure-in-crisis

So far this summer I have not read a single book "for pleasure." Today I went to the town library to grade papers, while sucking in the AC, and I took out a book: The Book of Salt. I think I deserve to read it.

Earlier in the summer I started reading Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. I wasn't terribly impressed with the writing, but I was intrigued enough to keep reading, so I would like to finish it.

I think that one or both of these two books should join me on my three day bike adventure next week. In addition, I'll bring along Zavarzadeh's "The Pedagogy of Pleasure 2: The Me-in-Crisis." Not sure what else from the academic world will come along.

Maybe the book I'm (I've been) currently reading--the one that really does not seem to apply to my project in any way (I could say this about A LOT of the things I'm reading right now--e.g. Althusser)--A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working Class Bar.

reading

Currently *should*/could/can be reading:

The German Ideology
Capital
Marx/Engels Reader
Fulkerson article, "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" in CCC
A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working Class Bar
Althusser on ideology
Mapping Ideology
Critical Dialogues (Stuart Hall/ed. by David Morley)

I've been spending a lot of time lately avoiding blogging. I'm not sure why. I spend a lot of time being afraid of blogging. It is a bit silly. I make a lot of "blog this" notes to myself in margins and on post-its, but then I never actually bring the material to the "page."

As I logged in today, for the first time in a long time, I lingered over my screenname because ofthis, after reading BitchPhD's response to the case. As a "former" Vermont resident (my heart still resides there) and friend to a number of Middlebury graduates, it makes me feel shame and sadness to read this. For me, the only drawback to Vermont is the lack of diversity. Yet I've always loved the (predominantly) live and let live mentality, along with the progressive politics and (mostly) foward-thinking residents. Reading about this Middelbury case puts a damper on some of those feelings.

So I'm prepping my summer course, 300Z Expository Writing, a class I have not taught before (at least not at this institution or this level). Creating new curriculum/prepping is always one of my favorite activities, but I also end up filled with this strange mixture of excitement and trepidation. Still, as I'm working on the prep it consumes me. I fall asleep creating assignments, shifting readings around, and thinking of discussion topics.

Here is my reading list so far:

300Z Course Packet Contents

Introduction from The Art of Truth

“How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

Kathryn Harrison from The Kiss

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Live from Death Row

John Edgar Wideman: Brothers and Keepers

Selections from A Place to Stand by Julie Lindquist

Daniel Miller “Making Love in Supermarkets”

Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel-and-Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

George Orwell: “Politics and the English Language”

Excerpts from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well

Hmmmm...well, looking at it from this perspective, it doesn't seem entirely coherent, but there *is* much thought put into this. I hope it all comes together.
The course will begin with dicussions about dealing with the concept of "T/truth." That will be something we continually come back to throughout the six week course. Initially I am trying to cover writing about "self" (memoir); moving from there into writing about "other" (**I'm having trouble here with framing this/knowing what to call "it"--"other" seems like a loaded word to be using and I'm not sure it is saying exactly what I want it to say. Yet simply saying, write about somebody else, doesn't seem to work that well either). Finally, we'll do come cultural criticism/literary journalism. It is important for me to make it clear that these are not three distinct categories at all, and the readings I've chosen (for the most part) illustrate this "blurriness," "messiness" of genre and theme (etc.)--Brothers and Keepers does this particularly well.