I am an teacher of English Language Arts (ELA). ELA, according to the Common Core Standards, is the teaching of literature, informational texts, writing, language, listening, and speaking with the expressed purpose of "making sure that all students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school." The word "literacy" is used 97 times in the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. However, the document does not define literacy rather it uses literacy as an adjective -- literacy skills, literacy components, and literacy development. The word "literacy" is most often used as "literacy in" as in literacy in History or Science.
Assuming that teachers working in any of the forty-five states that have adopted the Common Core Standards will need to "use" the Standards to create curriculum in order to keep their jobs, the questions remain, and are apparently open to interpretation according to the standards, what is literacy and how do we teach it? While we know that a "particular standard was included...only when the best available evidence indicated that its mastery was essential for college and career readiness in a twenty-first century, globally competitive society," we do not know from what particular theoretical framework the authors were working. First, I will say that I agree that it seems appropriate for us to want students to be able to participate in a global society. And, I can get behind the idea that we want students graduating from high school ready for a career and.or college. Nevertheless, the literacy practices we teach and test have implications for the sort of thinking and acting our students will do in this globally competitive society. What will we read and how will we read it with this in mind?
We are at a historical juncture with the new standards to confront the failure of previous reform measures that sought to quantify learning and achieved, essentially, an accumulation of skills and knowledge without the sorts of understanding or thinking that students need to participate in a global society.
The National Endowment for the Art's 2004 publication makes a causal link between literary reading and not only the health of individuals ("focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible," p. vii) but the well being of the nation ("as more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose" p. vii). The Standards seem aligned to this. Part of being career and college ready for a global society means students " actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experiences, and broadens worldviews" (3).I will argue for a literary education for these reasons. Literature when read with certain literacy practices does enlarge experience and broaden worldviews, but I will also argue that was is missing here is the word "understanding," for what is knowledge without understanding and how can one act intelligently without understanding?
One way ELA has been conceived is through the framework of cultural heritage, which sees the English curriculum as bringing students to an appreciation of the finest works of literature. According to Misson and Morgan, this "model encourages readers to yield to all that valued texts offer...readers who give themselves attentively, submissively, to such aesthetically charged works ...become discriminating, subtle readers..." (4). The problem is that this can be seen as conservative and failing to engage with the political agenda of texts and "the ways in which readers are positioned to accede to the ideologies they offer" (4). Another framework is cultural analysis which seeks a critical understanding of the culture within which texts are produced, which encourages readers to "resist the seductions of texts that offer various kinds of gratification, including aesthetic,"' and these readers become discriminating as well but in a different way because the literacy practice of cultural analysis fails to "satisfactorily deal with the aesthetic dimension of texts" or the affect a literary experience brings. Both of these frameworks have implications for the selection of texts for curriculum, the readers' literacy practice, and, therefore, the sort of experiences students have in school. To read one way or another limits the experience and world views that literature offers. In other words, reading habits shape understanding and thinking. Misson and Morgan, suggest a different sort of literacy practice; they see that the "aesthetic and the socially critical are not opposed to one another but, rather, are necessary, complementary components of a rich literacy practice, one that can lay claim legitimately to benefiting both individual readers and writers and the society to which they graduate from English classrooms" (4).
Critical pedagogy is a strand of cultural studies that sees the classroom as a site for not only literacy skills but also political awareness and countering hegemony. Misson and Morgon write that "students are taught how to critique the very bases of knowledge offered to them in the 'commonsense' texts of their culture and schools. And that the 'voices' of marginalised minorities are to be heeded and validated" (13). Regarding cultural heritage, critical pedagogues see traditional literature as serving to create a bourgeois body/subject and is skeptical of interpreting a text. Giroux writes, "How we read or define a canonical work may not be as important as challenging the overall function and social uses the notion of the canon has served" (1992 96).
I think a case can be made that the sort of literacy practice the Common Core is going for is "close reading" or "New Critical reading" or "practical criticism" (Books, 1949; Ransom, 1941; Richards, 1929). In the introduction, we can find this: "Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature" and "read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text." The techniques for close reading inevitably produce certain kinds of reading and value certain kinds of meaning and thus certain kinds of readers and thinkers. Misson and Morgan suggest, by citing Terry Eagleton, that such reading practices are a "recipe for political inertia" (Literary Theory Eagleton 1983) because " they encouraged the illusion that all a reader needed to do was focus on the words on the page rather than on the contexts that produced and surrounded them.
February 18, 2013
February 17, 2013
Narrative Inquiry
Schaafsma and Vinz write, "The beauty of a good narrative -- it doesn't over tell; it doesn't preach; it doesn't lecture; it doesn't explain."
In narrative research, then, the reader is "trusted to do some of the work with the narrator/researcher as guide," and because I see teaching in a similar way -- students should be trusted to do the work with the teacher -- narrative research seems most appropriate for my dissertation. But more importantly, while I am an English teacher, I am foremost a teacher of/with students, human beings, and so when it comes considering what is worth researching and writing about, the answer has to be, as Schaafsma and Vinz say, people. So then because I am a teacher of students in the discipline of English, then it is logical and necessary that I use narrative inquiry to talk about the narrative of our lives: "...narrative shapes our experiences and portrays experiences simultaneously."
Schaafsma and Vinz (2011) tell us that narrative inquiry matters because “it compels us to care about people’s lives in all their complexity and often moves us to action (p. 1). In educational inquiry, research should inform action, so what must emerge on the page is willingness for the author and participants to “grapple with issues of responsibility, power, relations, and ethics as it evidences the importance of learning with others (p. 8). In order to learn with others, I see now that I need multiple voices. And in this, I imagine the voices of legislators, school administrators, teachers, parents and genocide survivors all grappling with issues of responsibility, power, relations and ethics. I see the grappling as a unifying thread in the stories. However, I also see the grappling as a sign of what Schaafsma and Vinz refer to as “first told stories.” When a story is told for the first time, there are gaps and fissures wherein rests “deeper stories, glimpses into people’s beliefs, assumptions, and experiences” (p. 50). To me, this means that I must return for a “re-telling” or another story that goes deeper into one of those fissures; in fact, it is in the re-telling and the re-living of stories that inquiry begins.
Three other books that helped evolve my orientation to narrative inquiry are Danling Fu’s “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995), Greg Michie’s Holler of you Hear Me : The Education of a Teacher and His Students (2009) and Arlene Elowe MacLeod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, The New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991). I realize that the subjects of these two texts are significantly different; however, I think this speaks to the evolution of my orientation to inquiry. I am beginning to read more into how texts are constructed rather than just engaging in the text's content. I see the table of contents as a strategy for telling a story and how that strategy, although deliberate, will always have gaps and fissures that warrant future work.
Danling Fu’s work in “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995) combines narrative and case study. She situates herself in the story in her introduction by telling the reader about her own experience in learning English. Her book is organized with a chapter that is a family story, and then each subsequent chapter goes deeper into the stories of three children in this family. Within each chapter, Fu takes on the role as a research and a practitioner in some instances to draw upon her story as an observer, the teacher’s story, and then the story of the participant. Vinz (2011) expresses concern with characterization in narrative inquiry wondering if the author has the right to tell a story for a “character”: “Should he be speaking for himself? At what point to researchers become guilty of sensationalism or romanticism, especially when they write about populations historically stereotyped by the media and the academy” (p. 109)? By giving her characters a strong voice in her work, Fu avoids such sensationalism. It is clear to the reader that although Fu has a personal stake in her work she recognizes that the personal and social are not binaries but “permeable membranes” that influence and become part of the other (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2005, p. 64). The story does not belong to any one participant in Fu’s book; the stories complement one another bring both light and complexity to second language acquisition.
Michie’s work, while incorporating student narrative set off in complementary yet bold-faced font, is more about his experience than that of his students. Unlike Fu’s work where she is almost re-telling her story through the voices of a younger generation of English Language Learners, Michie is retelling his story is his own words. His story is generalizable to his readers while Fu’s story is generalizable to her participants with student voices woven into the narrative rather that set apart in another section. I think what I see is that there is an intimacy of the subject in Fu’s and an intimacy with the narrator in Michie’s work.
Macleod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991) actually seems closest to the work that I hope to do. This is a bit closer to an ethnographic study only because she is an outsider going into a setting for research where she conducts multiple case studies. Macleod recognizes a phenomenon, lower-middle –class women in Cairo who had not previously veiled adopt the higab. Macleod explores the subculture in which the phenomenon occurs by not only listening to stories but by observing behaviors and investigating conflicting ideologies. Macleod knows that what her participants say is only one part of the story; thus, in collecting many different stories, Macleod is able to unveil the tensions that exposed this phenomenon as an “accommodating protest” or a way of redistricting power. While I include this text here as an example of inquiry, I also consider this concept of “accommodating protest” to be fascinating and wonder if teacher accommodate policy in some form or another.
I wish to study the human experience and to illuminate human actions through the study of experience. The experiences reveal complexity. As a teacher of (more often with) teachers, I see the struggle for answers, for comfort, for knowing the “best way” of achieving results or capturing the attention of students. Teachers seem fearful of doubt or swimming in the tension with their students. I think this is explored a great deal in social justice education, but I think this will be very valuable as I begin to explore how teacher accommodate policy mandates, particularly how teacher have accepted or rejected the responsibility to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. And, I think stories are a place for me to not only collect these experiences and tensions but where teacher can ultimately go to enter into places of crises with their students, stories of survival, stories of grief, stories of disgust, and stories of regret. In the gaps and fissures of stories, we can ask questions together.
References
Auron, Y. (2005). The pain of knowledge: Holocaust and genocide issues in education. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Fu, D. (1995). My trouble is my English: Asian students and the American dream. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
Macleod, A. E. (1991). Accommodating protest: working women, the new veiling, and change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press.
Michie, G. (2009). Holler if you hear me: the education of a teacher and his students (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College.
Mikaelsen, B. (2004). Tree Girl . New York: HarperTempest.
Schaafsma, D. & Vinz, R. (2011). Narrative inquiry: approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College.
Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Book.
Ung, L. (2000). First they killed my father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers.
In narrative research, then, the reader is "trusted to do some of the work with the narrator/researcher as guide," and because I see teaching in a similar way -- students should be trusted to do the work with the teacher -- narrative research seems most appropriate for my dissertation. But more importantly, while I am an English teacher, I am foremost a teacher of/with students, human beings, and so when it comes considering what is worth researching and writing about, the answer has to be, as Schaafsma and Vinz say, people. So then because I am a teacher of students in the discipline of English, then it is logical and necessary that I use narrative inquiry to talk about the narrative of our lives: "...narrative shapes our experiences and portrays experiences simultaneously."
Schaafsma and Vinz (2011) tell us that narrative inquiry matters because “it compels us to care about people’s lives in all their complexity and often moves us to action (p. 1). In educational inquiry, research should inform action, so what must emerge on the page is willingness for the author and participants to “grapple with issues of responsibility, power, relations, and ethics as it evidences the importance of learning with others (p. 8). In order to learn with others, I see now that I need multiple voices. And in this, I imagine the voices of legislators, school administrators, teachers, parents and genocide survivors all grappling with issues of responsibility, power, relations and ethics. I see the grappling as a unifying thread in the stories. However, I also see the grappling as a sign of what Schaafsma and Vinz refer to as “first told stories.” When a story is told for the first time, there are gaps and fissures wherein rests “deeper stories, glimpses into people’s beliefs, assumptions, and experiences” (p. 50). To me, this means that I must return for a “re-telling” or another story that goes deeper into one of those fissures; in fact, it is in the re-telling and the re-living of stories that inquiry begins.
Three other books that helped evolve my orientation to narrative inquiry are Danling Fu’s “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995), Greg Michie’s Holler of you Hear Me : The Education of a Teacher and His Students (2009) and Arlene Elowe MacLeod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, The New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991). I realize that the subjects of these two texts are significantly different; however, I think this speaks to the evolution of my orientation to inquiry. I am beginning to read more into how texts are constructed rather than just engaging in the text's content. I see the table of contents as a strategy for telling a story and how that strategy, although deliberate, will always have gaps and fissures that warrant future work.
Danling Fu’s work in “My Trouble is My English” Asian Students and the American Dream (1995) combines narrative and case study. She situates herself in the story in her introduction by telling the reader about her own experience in learning English. Her book is organized with a chapter that is a family story, and then each subsequent chapter goes deeper into the stories of three children in this family. Within each chapter, Fu takes on the role as a research and a practitioner in some instances to draw upon her story as an observer, the teacher’s story, and then the story of the participant. Vinz (2011) expresses concern with characterization in narrative inquiry wondering if the author has the right to tell a story for a “character”: “Should he be speaking for himself? At what point to researchers become guilty of sensationalism or romanticism, especially when they write about populations historically stereotyped by the media and the academy” (p. 109)? By giving her characters a strong voice in her work, Fu avoids such sensationalism. It is clear to the reader that although Fu has a personal stake in her work she recognizes that the personal and social are not binaries but “permeable membranes” that influence and become part of the other (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2005, p. 64). The story does not belong to any one participant in Fu’s book; the stories complement one another bring both light and complexity to second language acquisition.
Michie’s work, while incorporating student narrative set off in complementary yet bold-faced font, is more about his experience than that of his students. Unlike Fu’s work where she is almost re-telling her story through the voices of a younger generation of English Language Learners, Michie is retelling his story is his own words. His story is generalizable to his readers while Fu’s story is generalizable to her participants with student voices woven into the narrative rather that set apart in another section. I think what I see is that there is an intimacy of the subject in Fu’s and an intimacy with the narrator in Michie’s work.
Macleod’s Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (1991) actually seems closest to the work that I hope to do. This is a bit closer to an ethnographic study only because she is an outsider going into a setting for research where she conducts multiple case studies. Macleod recognizes a phenomenon, lower-middle –class women in Cairo who had not previously veiled adopt the higab. Macleod explores the subculture in which the phenomenon occurs by not only listening to stories but by observing behaviors and investigating conflicting ideologies. Macleod knows that what her participants say is only one part of the story; thus, in collecting many different stories, Macleod is able to unveil the tensions that exposed this phenomenon as an “accommodating protest” or a way of redistricting power. While I include this text here as an example of inquiry, I also consider this concept of “accommodating protest” to be fascinating and wonder if teacher accommodate policy in some form or another.
I wish to study the human experience and to illuminate human actions through the study of experience. The experiences reveal complexity. As a teacher of (more often with) teachers, I see the struggle for answers, for comfort, for knowing the “best way” of achieving results or capturing the attention of students. Teachers seem fearful of doubt or swimming in the tension with their students. I think this is explored a great deal in social justice education, but I think this will be very valuable as I begin to explore how teacher accommodate policy mandates, particularly how teacher have accepted or rejected the responsibility to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. And, I think stories are a place for me to not only collect these experiences and tensions but where teacher can ultimately go to enter into places of crises with their students, stories of survival, stories of grief, stories of disgust, and stories of regret. In the gaps and fissures of stories, we can ask questions together.
References
Auron, Y. (2005). The pain of knowledge: Holocaust and genocide issues in education. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Fu, D. (1995). My trouble is my English: Asian students and the American dream. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
Macleod, A. E. (1991). Accommodating protest: working women, the new veiling, and change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press.
Michie, G. (2009). Holler if you hear me: the education of a teacher and his students (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College.
Mikaelsen, B. (2004). Tree Girl . New York: HarperTempest.
Schaafsma, D. & Vinz, R. (2011). Narrative inquiry: approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College.
Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Book.
Ung, L. (2000). First they killed my father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers.
February 4, 2013
Nussbaum: Poetic Justice/ Novels and the Public
Notes from Nussbaum:
Literature and its limitations
Nussbaum
Wayne booth- the company we keep. An ethics of fiction--like yagelski's writing as a way of being in public life--the act of reading and assessing what one read is ethically valuable precisely because it is constructed in a manner that demands both immersion and critical conversation, comparison of what one has read with one's own unfolding experience and with the responses and arguments of other readers
9 - if we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might find in it am activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society
8 - the novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is context -specific without being relativistic, in which we get to potentially inversely e concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through imagination
Novels embrace the ordinary -- that which is common and close at hand but which is often, in its significant strangeness, the object of profound ignorance and emotional refusal 10
Empathy and compassion as highly relevant to ciizenship
10-Booth shows that many popular works entice the reader
The lives of the insignificant would not be I biography or history
32- narrative features if the novel that it shares with other genres
1. Commitment to the separateness of persons and to the irreducible quality to quantity
2. It's sense that what happens to individuals in the world has enormous importance
3. It's commitment to describe the events of life not from an external perspective of detachment but from within as invested with the complex significances with which human beings invest their own lives
Novel is more opposed than other genres to the reductive economic way if seeing the world, more committed to qualitative distinctions 32
The novel's capacity to give pleasure -35-- it binds us to the characters because it causes us to take pleasure in their company
Fancy- fiction-making imagination, the ability to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another -- things look like other things or the other things are seen in the immediate things
52- addressing the reader as a friend and fellow agent, though in a different sphere if life, the authorial voice turns readers' sympathetic wonder at the fates of the characters back on themselves, reminding them that they too are on the way to death, that they too have but this one chance to see in the fire the shapes of fancy and thee prospects they suggest for the improvement if human life... It's claim is that the literary imagination is an essential part of both the theory and the practice of citizenship
To argue fur literary education in the public realm we must make some defense if the emotions and their contributions to the public rationality
What are emotions?
What is reason and does it exclude emotive elements such as sympathy and gratitude
Are emotions if a certain sort essential elements in a good decision, rational judgement
Are emotions in a normative sense irrational and thus inappropriate as guides in public deliberation? And so what us the public role if literature?
4 objections
1. Emotions are blind forces that have nothing to do with reasoning lacking the stability and solidity of the wise person . Stoics urged their pupils to pay attention to literature only from a viewpoint of secure critical detachment without thought
-emotions are ways of perceiving -a belief might be false but rational if formed on good evidence; and it may be true but irrational but in no case will emotions be irrational in the sense if bring totally cut off from cognition and judgement
2. Emotions as closely linked to judgments and beliefs about the worth of external objects
-
3. Emotions focus on the person's actual ties or attachments, especially to concrete objects or people close youth self - binding the moral imagination to the self and not even handed not getting distant lives or unseen sufferings so novels would be encouraging a self centered and unequal firm if attention to the suffering if other humans
4. Emotions are too much concerned with particulars and not sufficiently with larger social units such as classes 59.. Making novels useful only in the private domain
-70-while the novel emphasizes the mutual interdependence of persons, showing the world as one in which we are all implicated in one another' s good and ill, it also insists on respecting the separate life of each person, and on seeing the person as a separate center of experience
- 70 mass movements in the novel fare badly because they neglect the separate agency if their members, their privacy, and their qualitative differences
There is no reason to dismiss emotions because they can go wrong
Aristotle argued that compassion or pity requires the belief that another person is suffering in a serious way through no fault if their own and to feel thus one must believe that their own possibilities are similar to those if the sufferer
Readers have both empathy with the plights if the characters experiencing what happens to them from as if from their pov and pity or compassion which goes beyond empathy; involves spectatorial judgment that the characters misfortunes are indeed serious and gave arisen through no fault if their own -- necessary for social rationality
Rousseau and Emile
Utilitarian - each human being should count as one and none as more than one
Numerical analysis comforts and distances
Intellect without emotion is value- blind; it lacks the sense if the meaning and worth of a person's death that the judgements internal to emotions would have supplied -68
69- a certain degree of detachment from the immediate - which calculations may help to district in some people - can enable us to sort out our beliefs and intuitions better and thus to get a more refined sense if what our emotion actually are, and which among them us must reliable
Aristotle insists that removing the family, rather than ensuring impartial and equal concerns for all citizens, will ensure that nobody cares strongly about anything
80- the poet is no whimsical creature , but the person best equipped to "bestow in every object or quality its fit proportion" duly weighing the claims I'd a diverse population , with its gaze fixed on norms of fairness and in history" both of which are always at risk in democracy
Adam Smith - judicious spectators
84- what we ate after is not just a view of moral education that makes sense of our own personal experience, but one that we can defend to others and support along with others with whim we wish to live in community
92- when one idea manage for whatever reason to take up to the individual the literary attitude of sympathetic imagining, the dehumanizing portrayal is unsustainable at least for a time
Literary understanding ... Promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred 92
97- the reader perceives the character in a very different way from the way of the people around him or her ; those around the character cannot permit themselves to imagine for a moment what it might be like to be him it her but the reader dies imagine and ya fully aware all along that he is neither the same nor a monster meaning the reader is a judicious spectator aware in a way the characters are not of the stigmatizing effect if societal prejudice and if the helplessness it creates ...enlisting readers as partisans of equality by making it easy to see the character as Simons they or one if their friends might be/99
As symmetry of positions must be considered in life and do literature is good practice for such deliberation but I would argue because if the representation of discourses
111-Is nussbaum saying that posner's argument is literary ?
120- intimate and impartial, loving without bias, thinking of and for the whole rather than as a partisan if some particular group or faction, comprehending in fancy the richness and complexity of each citizen's inner world, the literary judge ... sees in the blades if grass the equal dignity if all citizens -- and more mysterious images, too, of erotic longing and personal liberty
Sent from my iPhone
Reading literature, as I discuss it in my dissertation, is an intervention of sorts; however, I do not necessarily see it as a revolutionary intervention. Reading literature is a low-risk act where each person counts as another -- something democratic and antihierarchical. How one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of aquaintance or perception (George Herbert Mead, pragmatist) is an essential understanding for reading literature and for being a citizen. If rational argument is essential to democratic, social participation and if we are to say that literature supports such rational argument and ultimately participation in public discourse, how is story-telling and literary imagining essential in rational arguments? How does literature work to achieve a social intervention?
Nussbaum wants to compare aspects of law and literature. She claims that legal discourse and literary discourse rely upon an "imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities." Specifically, Nussbaum wants to consider economistic issues that attempt to make human being and their actions measurable (Cintron). Nussbaum resists such thinking, thinking in terms of a quantifiable imaginary, to emphasize autonomy and the "irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person's experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home -- hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism" (Gorman). It seems that Nussbaum's intent is not to "mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing...human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview." This position supports my own thesis,which is that literature can help students to get inside this worldview, a view of the darker side of modernity and thus the potential of literature in public life -- a public life where we make decisions that affect all our citizens. This might be the Atticus Finch argument to "walk in someone else's shoes."
Nussbaum claims that the argument works on us by appealing to our sympathy, the ability to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others. No doubt many readers encountering Tree Girl for the first time have heard a talking wound. Nussbaum suggests that such insight is morally valuable with the potential to modify our moral understanding. Empathetic imagining cultivated in the literary experience is another way of attending to life's problems. "Economic utilitarianism" is an aspect in need of empathetic imagining...Nussbaum wants a political economy that does not reduce people to numbers, but can literature accomplish this? She suggest that leaders or "Guardians" must read literature in order to develop the necessary sympathy . Such an argument treads along the lines of cultural imperialism, such that there would be a common fund of knowledge to create a unified citizenry. By focusing, then, on literature for the purpose of generating sympathy for the marginalized, but what might be the political uses, and then once we ask for political use, we invite rhetoricality. Hesford argues that no genre is immune to spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
Narratives produce a sort of enlightenment as they draw us into sympathetic involvement with the characters as individuals, perhaps imagining what it might be like to be or be with these imaginary individuals. This is not to say that informational texts, non-literary texts do not produce a narrative In fact the press can elicit our sympathy. Such stories can inspire and lead readers into the public discourse and right action; nevertheless, the sympathy- eliciting function of narrative can lead readers into the "wrong" direction. If we consider Hesford's Spectacular Rhetorics, we might see how such narratives enact a spectacle, an exploitation of victims, for example, to provoke sympathy. And then, how productive is sympathy that mirrors the Western values, the values of the target audience. Therefore, while Nussbaum encourages sympathy-based considerations, such a claim overlooks non-sympathy-based considerations.
Nussbaum writes: "For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth centuries b.c., there were not two separate sets of questions in the area of human choice and action, aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions, to be studied and written about by mutually detached colleagues in different departments. Instead, dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical inquiry in ethics were both typically...seen as ways of pursuing a single and general question: namely, how human beings should live." Nussbaum wants literature to be useful -- to ask What does all this mean for human life? Of course, these questions are not terribly welcome in our discipline. Tension between argument and narrative -- philosophy and literary. -- as though one sort of understanding blocks out another while, perhaps, achieving the same end (eudaimonia). Nussbaum suggests that both philosophy and literature need each other. Emotions are not opposed to reason. "Moreover, Nussbaum argues, there are some kinds of knowledge that are accessible to us only when we experience certain eotions such as love. There is a reciprocal relationship between love and knowledge: we love people because of what we know about them, to be sure, but we also come to know them more fully because we love them" (Jacobs). Just as I mention above, Jacobs notes that Nussbaum does not consider what would happen if "one's personal telos as 'holiness' or 'righteousness" rather than goodness." Jacobs further argues that , according to Shelley, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and that "of the poets' legistlative role were to be publicly recognized and accepted, then poets would be in the position of having to acknowledge their responsibility and accountability to those whose behalf they are legislating. But such an acknowledgement would be utterly at odds with the Romantic belief in the autonomy (which is to say the unaccountability to anything but itself) but the poetic imagination."
Literature and its limitations
Nussbaum
Wayne booth- the company we keep. An ethics of fiction--like yagelski's writing as a way of being in public life--the act of reading and assessing what one read is ethically valuable precisely because it is constructed in a manner that demands both immersion and critical conversation, comparison of what one has read with one's own unfolding experience and with the responses and arguments of other readers
9 - if we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might find in it am activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society
8 - the novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is context -specific without being relativistic, in which we get to potentially inversely e concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through imagination
Novels embrace the ordinary -- that which is common and close at hand but which is often, in its significant strangeness, the object of profound ignorance and emotional refusal 10
Empathy and compassion as highly relevant to ciizenship
10-Booth shows that many popular works entice the reader
The lives of the insignificant would not be I biography or history
32- narrative features if the novel that it shares with other genres
1. Commitment to the separateness of persons and to the irreducible quality to quantity
2. It's sense that what happens to individuals in the world has enormous importance
3. It's commitment to describe the events of life not from an external perspective of detachment but from within as invested with the complex significances with which human beings invest their own lives
Novel is more opposed than other genres to the reductive economic way if seeing the world, more committed to qualitative distinctions 32
The novel's capacity to give pleasure -35-- it binds us to the characters because it causes us to take pleasure in their company
Fancy- fiction-making imagination, the ability to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another -- things look like other things or the other things are seen in the immediate things
52- addressing the reader as a friend and fellow agent, though in a different sphere if life, the authorial voice turns readers' sympathetic wonder at the fates of the characters back on themselves, reminding them that they too are on the way to death, that they too have but this one chance to see in the fire the shapes of fancy and thee prospects they suggest for the improvement if human life... It's claim is that the literary imagination is an essential part of both the theory and the practice of citizenship
To argue fur literary education in the public realm we must make some defense if the emotions and their contributions to the public rationality
What are emotions?
What is reason and does it exclude emotive elements such as sympathy and gratitude
Are emotions if a certain sort essential elements in a good decision, rational judgement
Are emotions in a normative sense irrational and thus inappropriate as guides in public deliberation? And so what us the public role if literature?
4 objections
1. Emotions are blind forces that have nothing to do with reasoning lacking the stability and solidity of the wise person . Stoics urged their pupils to pay attention to literature only from a viewpoint of secure critical detachment without thought
-emotions are ways of perceiving -a belief might be false but rational if formed on good evidence; and it may be true but irrational but in no case will emotions be irrational in the sense if bring totally cut off from cognition and judgement
2. Emotions as closely linked to judgments and beliefs about the worth of external objects
-
3. Emotions focus on the person's actual ties or attachments, especially to concrete objects or people close youth self - binding the moral imagination to the self and not even handed not getting distant lives or unseen sufferings so novels would be encouraging a self centered and unequal firm if attention to the suffering if other humans
4. Emotions are too much concerned with particulars and not sufficiently with larger social units such as classes 59.. Making novels useful only in the private domain
-70-while the novel emphasizes the mutual interdependence of persons, showing the world as one in which we are all implicated in one another' s good and ill, it also insists on respecting the separate life of each person, and on seeing the person as a separate center of experience
- 70 mass movements in the novel fare badly because they neglect the separate agency if their members, their privacy, and their qualitative differences
There is no reason to dismiss emotions because they can go wrong
Aristotle argued that compassion or pity requires the belief that another person is suffering in a serious way through no fault if their own and to feel thus one must believe that their own possibilities are similar to those if the sufferer
Readers have both empathy with the plights if the characters experiencing what happens to them from as if from their pov and pity or compassion which goes beyond empathy; involves spectatorial judgment that the characters misfortunes are indeed serious and gave arisen through no fault if their own -- necessary for social rationality
Rousseau and Emile
Utilitarian - each human being should count as one and none as more than one
Numerical analysis comforts and distances
Intellect without emotion is value- blind; it lacks the sense if the meaning and worth of a person's death that the judgements internal to emotions would have supplied -68
69- a certain degree of detachment from the immediate - which calculations may help to district in some people - can enable us to sort out our beliefs and intuitions better and thus to get a more refined sense if what our emotion actually are, and which among them us must reliable
Aristotle insists that removing the family, rather than ensuring impartial and equal concerns for all citizens, will ensure that nobody cares strongly about anything
80- the poet is no whimsical creature , but the person best equipped to "bestow in every object or quality its fit proportion" duly weighing the claims I'd a diverse population , with its gaze fixed on norms of fairness and in history" both of which are always at risk in democracy
Adam Smith - judicious spectators
84- what we ate after is not just a view of moral education that makes sense of our own personal experience, but one that we can defend to others and support along with others with whim we wish to live in community
92- when one idea manage for whatever reason to take up to the individual the literary attitude of sympathetic imagining, the dehumanizing portrayal is unsustainable at least for a time
Literary understanding ... Promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred 92
97- the reader perceives the character in a very different way from the way of the people around him or her ; those around the character cannot permit themselves to imagine for a moment what it might be like to be him it her but the reader dies imagine and ya fully aware all along that he is neither the same nor a monster meaning the reader is a judicious spectator aware in a way the characters are not of the stigmatizing effect if societal prejudice and if the helplessness it creates ...enlisting readers as partisans of equality by making it easy to see the character as Simons they or one if their friends might be/99
As symmetry of positions must be considered in life and do literature is good practice for such deliberation but I would argue because if the representation of discourses
111-Is nussbaum saying that posner's argument is literary ?
120- intimate and impartial, loving without bias, thinking of and for the whole rather than as a partisan if some particular group or faction, comprehending in fancy the richness and complexity of each citizen's inner world, the literary judge ... sees in the blades if grass the equal dignity if all citizens -- and more mysterious images, too, of erotic longing and personal liberty
Sent from my iPhone
Reading literature, as I discuss it in my dissertation, is an intervention of sorts; however, I do not necessarily see it as a revolutionary intervention. Reading literature is a low-risk act where each person counts as another -- something democratic and antihierarchical. How one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of aquaintance or perception (George Herbert Mead, pragmatist) is an essential understanding for reading literature and for being a citizen. If rational argument is essential to democratic, social participation and if we are to say that literature supports such rational argument and ultimately participation in public discourse, how is story-telling and literary imagining essential in rational arguments? How does literature work to achieve a social intervention?
Nussbaum wants to compare aspects of law and literature. She claims that legal discourse and literary discourse rely upon an "imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities." Specifically, Nussbaum wants to consider economistic issues that attempt to make human being and their actions measurable (Cintron). Nussbaum resists such thinking, thinking in terms of a quantifiable imaginary, to emphasize autonomy and the "irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person's experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home -- hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism" (Gorman). It seems that Nussbaum's intent is not to "mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing...human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview." This position supports my own thesis,which is that literature can help students to get inside this worldview, a view of the darker side of modernity and thus the potential of literature in public life -- a public life where we make decisions that affect all our citizens. This might be the Atticus Finch argument to "walk in someone else's shoes."
Nussbaum claims that the argument works on us by appealing to our sympathy, the ability to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others. No doubt many readers encountering Tree Girl for the first time have heard a talking wound. Nussbaum suggests that such insight is morally valuable with the potential to modify our moral understanding. Empathetic imagining cultivated in the literary experience is another way of attending to life's problems. "Economic utilitarianism" is an aspect in need of empathetic imagining...Nussbaum wants a political economy that does not reduce people to numbers, but can literature accomplish this? She suggest that leaders or "Guardians" must read literature in order to develop the necessary sympathy . Such an argument treads along the lines of cultural imperialism, such that there would be a common fund of knowledge to create a unified citizenry. By focusing, then, on literature for the purpose of generating sympathy for the marginalized, but what might be the political uses, and then once we ask for political use, we invite rhetoricality. Hesford argues that no genre is immune to spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
Narratives produce a sort of enlightenment as they draw us into sympathetic involvement with the characters as individuals, perhaps imagining what it might be like to be or be with these imaginary individuals. This is not to say that informational texts, non-literary texts do not produce a narrative In fact the press can elicit our sympathy. Such stories can inspire and lead readers into the public discourse and right action; nevertheless, the sympathy- eliciting function of narrative can lead readers into the "wrong" direction. If we consider Hesford's Spectacular Rhetorics, we might see how such narratives enact a spectacle, an exploitation of victims, for example, to provoke sympathy. And then, how productive is sympathy that mirrors the Western values, the values of the target audience. Therefore, while Nussbaum encourages sympathy-based considerations, such a claim overlooks non-sympathy-based considerations.
Nussbaum writes: "For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth centuries b.c., there were not two separate sets of questions in the area of human choice and action, aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions, to be studied and written about by mutually detached colleagues in different departments. Instead, dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical inquiry in ethics were both typically...seen as ways of pursuing a single and general question: namely, how human beings should live." Nussbaum wants literature to be useful -- to ask What does all this mean for human life? Of course, these questions are not terribly welcome in our discipline. Tension between argument and narrative -- philosophy and literary. -- as though one sort of understanding blocks out another while, perhaps, achieving the same end (eudaimonia). Nussbaum suggests that both philosophy and literature need each other. Emotions are not opposed to reason. "Moreover, Nussbaum argues, there are some kinds of knowledge that are accessible to us only when we experience certain eotions such as love. There is a reciprocal relationship between love and knowledge: we love people because of what we know about them, to be sure, but we also come to know them more fully because we love them" (Jacobs). Just as I mention above, Jacobs notes that Nussbaum does not consider what would happen if "one's personal telos as 'holiness' or 'righteousness" rather than goodness." Jacobs further argues that , according to Shelley, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and that "of the poets' legistlative role were to be publicly recognized and accepted, then poets would be in the position of having to acknowledge their responsibility and accountability to those whose behalf they are legislating. But such an acknowledgement would be utterly at odds with the Romantic belief in the autonomy (which is to say the unaccountability to anything but itself) but the poetic imagination."
February 3, 2013
Gallagher: "The Rise of Fictionality" (Paradoxical Fictionality)
In this article, Gallagher argues for a recovery of discussions about fictionality in the novel.She begins with an analysis of mideighteenth century British narratives to demonstrate how the nature of fictionality changed during this century, which in turn influenced narrative fictionality in Europe and American in the nineteenth century and thus influencing our expectations of novels today.
Gallagher suggests the the novel had to differentiate itself from other genres establishing a unique and paradoxical fictionality. On one hand, the novel tried to hide behind realism making claims about truth offering a sort of ambivalence towards its fictionality. The 18th century novelists "abandoned earlier writers' serious attempts to convince readers that their invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people"while still concealing "fictionality by locking it inside the confines of the credible" (337).However, what seems important about fictionality is that as a discursive mode readers "developed the ability to tell it apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception" (338). Indeed, fantasy genres such as allegory and fables are easy to identify as fiction, but Gallagher argues that "plausible stories are thus the real test for the progress of fictional sophistication in a culture" (339). In the 18th century, novels that did not contain the obvious fiction of talking animals but rather seemed referential were accused of fraud. Such fictionality was not accepted nor welcome. Allegorical novels with imaginary kingdoms and talking animals may refer to contemporaries; a reader can tell it apart from reality (i.e. not deceptive) yet not clearly set apart from fact as it still alluded to a referent. Is the truth, then, a disguised reflection and thus fictionality,and can we distinguish fictionality from fiction? It seems that Gallagher is wanting to explore the fictionality as features that satisfy some sort of wanting in the readers, a wanting that is specific to modernity.
In the 18th century, Gallagher argues, two things were missing in discussions of the novel: 1) a conceptual category of fiction and 2) believable stories that did not solicit belief (340). In consider how the novel developed an awareness of fictionality as such, Lennard Davis argues that it developed out of the "news-novel matrix" -- a tangled mass of journalism, scandal, and and political and religious controversy. By calling it fiction, some authors avoided libel eventually being enjoyed for itself without reference to "the person satirized" (341). In addition to the fiction alibi, Gallagher points out that fictionality expanded the idea of truth to include verisimilitude. So we see this idea of historical as truth to a sort of simulated experience as truth. Furthermore, fictionality assumes that the novel is about no one in particular with no particular referent yet a "proper name in a believable narrative an an embodied individual in the world." And in doing this -- resisting a particular referent -- readers can "contemplate their own deformity, and endeavor to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame" (342). The fiction writer is no longer a libeler because the "nonreferentiality could be seen as a greater referentiality." Nonetheless, any invention of a person to represent the universal would prove to bee too narrow to cover all the cases; thus, this feature of fictionality is problematic if not paradoxical.
"For the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their presenting accounts that are versified or not versified...' rather, the difference is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history. For poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particulars. "Universals" means what kinds of thing a certain kind of person will say or do in accordance with probability or necessity, which is what poetic composition aims at, tacking on names afterward" (Poetics, ch. 9, 301-2).
Gallagher suggests here that the "novel may be said to have discovered fiction." The use of fictionality is a special way of shaping knowledge through the fabrication of particulars. Writing about something that was probably was not necessarily an indicator of fiction. The question Gallagher asks "what it was about early modernity in the first capitalist nation that propagated not just realist fiction but realist fiction. What is the modernity-fictionality connection?..to explore what it means to read a narrative as credible while thinking it affirms nothing" (346). (I feel like education reform is fictitious in a similar way if we consider what it means to read its dominant narrative as credible when it affirms nothing.)
Considering the position of the reader external to the fiction and capable of speculating on the action, the novel seeks to suspend such disbelief; fictionality is about believability or plausibility rather than reality. Such was modernity in the 18th century and modernity in the 21st century,both with interests in capitalism, development, and anticipation of progress. Consider paper money and credit. We do not live in reality but on plausibility Gallagher writes, "Indeed, almost all the developments we associate with modernity -- from greater religious toleration to specific scientific discovery -- required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit" (347).
Nevertheless, fiction asks for a willing suspension of disbelief, and so reading a novel allows the reader to suspend skepticism and detach from the mental effort of critique or doubt. Fiction absorbs the reader asking for a suspension of disbelief yet not going so far as to believe. The form brings the reader into imaginary experiences presuming interference with volition (348).
Coleridge says of this: "It is laxly said that during sleep we take our dreams for realities, but this is irreconcilable with the nature of sleep, which consists in a suspension of the voluntary and, therefore, of the comparative power. The fact is that we pass no judgment either way: we simply do not judge them to be real, in consequence of which the images act on our minds, as far as they act at all, by their own force as images. Our state while we are dreaming differs from that in which we are in the perusal of a deeply interesting novel in the degree rather than in the kind (1960: 116).
The fictionality of a novel ask for pleasure or a "deep immersion in allusion because {you} are protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief" when you pick up the novel. The enjoyment or the experience is a fictional encounter without a "tangible profit or practical advantage" thus fictionally experiencing. Here is the paradox: "the novel reader opens what she knows is a fiction because it is a fiction and soon finds that enabling knowledge to be the subtlest of the experience's elements. Just as it declares itself, it becomes that which goes without saying" (349).
In considering characters, Gallagher discusses the problematic that the novel encourages naive essentialism: "the reader's involvement in the dominant modern form of fiction has generally been thought to come about through some sort of psychic investment in, or even identification with, the characters" (350). However, as fictionality became more commonly understood, writers also realized that reader identified with characters not because of their realness but because of their fictionality. In other words, "they noticed that the fictional framework established a protected affective enclosure that encouraged risk-free emotional investment. Fictional characters, moreover, were thought to be easier to sympathize or identify with than most real people" (351).
Gallagher discusses the characters' "peculiar affective force" as "generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth, the link between their real nonexistence and the reader's experience of them as deeply and impossibly familiar" (356). Knowing their fictionality makes it easier to surrender and be intimate. The character is what Jeremy Bentham in "A Fragment on Ontology" called an "imaginary nonentity." This is fascinating: "We would not be able to enter represented subjectivity while subliminally understanding that we are, as readers, its actualizers, its conditions of being, the only minds who undergo these experiences" (357).
The fictionality is the ontological contrast. The narratorial mode elucidates this further. First person narrations differentiates the narrator and the implied author whereas third person omniscient narrators "must sustain the illusion of opacity of the characters surrounding them...vehicles for the epistemological uncertainty that modernists were anxious to produce" because of the intimacy between the narrator and the characters. Paradoxically, the representational tactics that make the character seemingly knowable are "peculiarly delimited" because the character is a textual being. The character is also and always partial or incomplete as a fictional construct.
The naming of the character, for Barthe, however, "imports the supplement of personhood, the ideological assumption that the character is everything attributed to it by the text, and everything else that is needed to make up a human being. Where it is not purposely prevented from doing so...the proper name draws together and unifies all the semantic material, and we have...the ideologically suspect pleasure of sensing a person on the other side of the text" (360).
In the end, Gallagher explains how fictionality which seemingly originated in the mid 18th century novel extended into the 19th century and now informs modern readers' anticipations and expectations of a novel's fictionality. She writes: "What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character. On the one hand, we experience an ideal version of self-continuity, graced by enunciative mastery, mobility, and powers of almost instantaneous detachment and attachment. We experience, that is, the elation of a unitary unboundedness. On the other hand, we are also allowed to love and equally idealized immanence, an ability to be, we imagine, without textuality, meaningfulness, or an other excuse for existing" (361).
Gallagher suggests the the novel had to differentiate itself from other genres establishing a unique and paradoxical fictionality. On one hand, the novel tried to hide behind realism making claims about truth offering a sort of ambivalence towards its fictionality. The 18th century novelists "abandoned earlier writers' serious attempts to convince readers that their invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people"while still concealing "fictionality by locking it inside the confines of the credible" (337).However, what seems important about fictionality is that as a discursive mode readers "developed the ability to tell it apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception" (338). Indeed, fantasy genres such as allegory and fables are easy to identify as fiction, but Gallagher argues that "plausible stories are thus the real test for the progress of fictional sophistication in a culture" (339). In the 18th century, novels that did not contain the obvious fiction of talking animals but rather seemed referential were accused of fraud. Such fictionality was not accepted nor welcome. Allegorical novels with imaginary kingdoms and talking animals may refer to contemporaries; a reader can tell it apart from reality (i.e. not deceptive) yet not clearly set apart from fact as it still alluded to a referent. Is the truth, then, a disguised reflection and thus fictionality,and can we distinguish fictionality from fiction? It seems that Gallagher is wanting to explore the fictionality as features that satisfy some sort of wanting in the readers, a wanting that is specific to modernity.
In the 18th century, Gallagher argues, two things were missing in discussions of the novel: 1) a conceptual category of fiction and 2) believable stories that did not solicit belief (340). In consider how the novel developed an awareness of fictionality as such, Lennard Davis argues that it developed out of the "news-novel matrix" -- a tangled mass of journalism, scandal, and and political and religious controversy. By calling it fiction, some authors avoided libel eventually being enjoyed for itself without reference to "the person satirized" (341). In addition to the fiction alibi, Gallagher points out that fictionality expanded the idea of truth to include verisimilitude. So we see this idea of historical as truth to a sort of simulated experience as truth. Furthermore, fictionality assumes that the novel is about no one in particular with no particular referent yet a "proper name in a believable narrative an an embodied individual in the world." And in doing this -- resisting a particular referent -- readers can "contemplate their own deformity, and endeavor to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame" (342). The fiction writer is no longer a libeler because the "nonreferentiality could be seen as a greater referentiality." Nonetheless, any invention of a person to represent the universal would prove to bee too narrow to cover all the cases; thus, this feature of fictionality is problematic if not paradoxical.
"For the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their presenting accounts that are versified or not versified...' rather, the difference is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history. For poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particulars. "Universals" means what kinds of thing a certain kind of person will say or do in accordance with probability or necessity, which is what poetic composition aims at, tacking on names afterward" (Poetics, ch. 9, 301-2).
Gallagher suggests here that the "novel may be said to have discovered fiction." The use of fictionality is a special way of shaping knowledge through the fabrication of particulars. Writing about something that was probably was not necessarily an indicator of fiction. The question Gallagher asks "what it was about early modernity in the first capitalist nation that propagated not just realist fiction but realist fiction. What is the modernity-fictionality connection?..to explore what it means to read a narrative as credible while thinking it affirms nothing" (346). (I feel like education reform is fictitious in a similar way if we consider what it means to read its dominant narrative as credible when it affirms nothing.)
Considering the position of the reader external to the fiction and capable of speculating on the action, the novel seeks to suspend such disbelief; fictionality is about believability or plausibility rather than reality. Such was modernity in the 18th century and modernity in the 21st century,both with interests in capitalism, development, and anticipation of progress. Consider paper money and credit. We do not live in reality but on plausibility Gallagher writes, "Indeed, almost all the developments we associate with modernity -- from greater religious toleration to specific scientific discovery -- required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit" (347).
Nevertheless, fiction asks for a willing suspension of disbelief, and so reading a novel allows the reader to suspend skepticism and detach from the mental effort of critique or doubt. Fiction absorbs the reader asking for a suspension of disbelief yet not going so far as to believe. The form brings the reader into imaginary experiences presuming interference with volition (348).
Coleridge says of this: "It is laxly said that during sleep we take our dreams for realities, but this is irreconcilable with the nature of sleep, which consists in a suspension of the voluntary and, therefore, of the comparative power. The fact is that we pass no judgment either way: we simply do not judge them to be real, in consequence of which the images act on our minds, as far as they act at all, by their own force as images. Our state while we are dreaming differs from that in which we are in the perusal of a deeply interesting novel in the degree rather than in the kind (1960: 116).
The fictionality of a novel ask for pleasure or a "deep immersion in allusion because {you} are protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief" when you pick up the novel. The enjoyment or the experience is a fictional encounter without a "tangible profit or practical advantage" thus fictionally experiencing. Here is the paradox: "the novel reader opens what she knows is a fiction because it is a fiction and soon finds that enabling knowledge to be the subtlest of the experience's elements. Just as it declares itself, it becomes that which goes without saying" (349).
In considering characters, Gallagher discusses the problematic that the novel encourages naive essentialism: "the reader's involvement in the dominant modern form of fiction has generally been thought to come about through some sort of psychic investment in, or even identification with, the characters" (350). However, as fictionality became more commonly understood, writers also realized that reader identified with characters not because of their realness but because of their fictionality. In other words, "they noticed that the fictional framework established a protected affective enclosure that encouraged risk-free emotional investment. Fictional characters, moreover, were thought to be easier to sympathize or identify with than most real people" (351).
Gallagher discusses the characters' "peculiar affective force" as "generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth, the link between their real nonexistence and the reader's experience of them as deeply and impossibly familiar" (356). Knowing their fictionality makes it easier to surrender and be intimate. The character is what Jeremy Bentham in "A Fragment on Ontology" called an "imaginary nonentity." This is fascinating: "We would not be able to enter represented subjectivity while subliminally understanding that we are, as readers, its actualizers, its conditions of being, the only minds who undergo these experiences" (357).
The fictionality is the ontological contrast. The narratorial mode elucidates this further. First person narrations differentiates the narrator and the implied author whereas third person omniscient narrators "must sustain the illusion of opacity of the characters surrounding them...vehicles for the epistemological uncertainty that modernists were anxious to produce" because of the intimacy between the narrator and the characters. Paradoxically, the representational tactics that make the character seemingly knowable are "peculiarly delimited" because the character is a textual being. The character is also and always partial or incomplete as a fictional construct.
The naming of the character, for Barthe, however, "imports the supplement of personhood, the ideological assumption that the character is everything attributed to it by the text, and everything else that is needed to make up a human being. Where it is not purposely prevented from doing so...the proper name draws together and unifies all the semantic material, and we have...the ideologically suspect pleasure of sensing a person on the other side of the text" (360).
In the end, Gallagher explains how fictionality which seemingly originated in the mid 18th century novel extended into the 19th century and now informs modern readers' anticipations and expectations of a novel's fictionality. She writes: "What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character. On the one hand, we experience an ideal version of self-continuity, graced by enunciative mastery, mobility, and powers of almost instantaneous detachment and attachment. We experience, that is, the elation of a unitary unboundedness. On the other hand, we are also allowed to love and equally idealized immanence, an ability to be, we imagine, without textuality, meaningfulness, or an other excuse for existing" (361).
February 2, 2013
Misson and Morgan: Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic
Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic: Transforming the English Classroom by Ray Misson and Wendy Morgan investigates literacy education based on the poststructuralist understanding that all language is socially textualized, meaning that all texts are ideological in nature and that such texts are "fundamental to the construction of our identity." The authors take up the question of how critical literacy deals with aesthetic texts (like poetry).
Understanding critical literacy to have an agenda and to be about discourse, genre, subject position, and resistant reading, the authors ask how such a framework might be compatible with desire and performativity. They imagine how critical literacy and poststructuralism work in the classroom reading practices. Essentially, the authors argue about the limitations of critical literacy and resistant reading offering a way to reconfigure it to allow for aesthetic and pleasure.
For middle and high school teachers, this book wants to be in conversation with you about how you are currently teaching English. The authors assume that you use a "conventional model of narrative, thematic, stylistic, or issues-based analysis, alongside a regime of tasks that may ask for creative responses but in the end values most the analytic essay or the book report." I think Common Core and previous learning standards also value this sort of model considering text-based questions and responses. Teachers are encouraged to take on the culture of the school, and the values of that school with regard to reading practices and meaning making. Reading the text "conventionally," which I take to mean without resisting or rather without consideration for ways of knowing, is the sort of practice this book calls into question. . The authors, however, do not intend for this book to be about teaching literature inasmuch as they are interested in teaching literacy or the reading texts that are both literary and nonoliterary because their argument is that the aesthetic is an element in all texts.
To read a text the critical literacy way is to consider the text as a product of culture that positions the readers to see the world in potentially sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist ways and then to read to resist such. I think some classrooms do this sort of work. Such a position, however, has the potential to strip the text of pleasure. Critical literacy then strips the aesthetic delight of the text, and so Mission and Morgan are interested in how to accommodate aesthetics to critical literacy or rather accommodate critical literacy to deal with aesthetics. The author's treatment of aesthetic is to define it or rather position it as located across a process rather than elements that can be found or identified in a texts.. Locating beauty in an object is problematic because not everyone will find the same object beautiful; thus, beauty is more in the experience of beholding the beauty; however, to behold, one must be able to notice certain qualities or what the authors refer to as "way of knowing." it is in this that talking about aesthetics offers a similar problematic as critical literacy. Aesthetic, as I understand it, "entails a creator, the work created, and an audience" (33). in other words, to have an aesthetic, the text must have a maker and a responder -- a relational quality. Where is the location of the aesthetic? In the responder or the stimuli? What from the text is the stimuli? Isn't the aesthetic the product of reading (39)? The aesthetic, then, seems to be equally implicated in the text as a product of culture needing to be exposed as critical literacy.
Is all knowledge culturally determined? Is aesthetic bound up with ideology?
Ch -1 Notes:
valuation -- people place value on things they like; we want others to share what we enjoy; how are "good" texts chosen in the English classroom; what is valued by the dominant society is deemed good
textual politics -- poststructuralist theory -- texts are constructed within a society; meanings can change with different times, places, and readers; meanings in text reflect the assumptions and values of that society
identity politics -- marxist theory -- examines the positional of social classes; feminist/gender theory -- women critiqued their invisibility in literature; female writers were brought to light beside the privileged male authors; the right to appreciate texts that validate their experiences and culture
Williams and Eagleton -- good literature could no longer be determined by the author's genious; the literary value was not intrinsic but given by the institution that created the category -- aesthetic as a product of the ideology of the dominant group****- lecturers schools, teachers produce a reading that values certain meaning -- develops readers who can PERFORM the reading and find satisfaction in it
Is an aesthetic experience a deception? Is pleasure an ideologically driven effect -- we are supposed to like it because we were taught to value it.
critical view -- made inquiries into who held power in society; traced ideologies of cultures; label masses as fooled by culture industries in power; saw mass culture as enemy; teachers job was to enlighten students by revealing the deception in the common sense offered in the texts
view of the popular -- more inclusive accepting and appreciative of a range of cultural forms, practices and texts; looked at how people engaged with entertainment; less concern with power
radical pedagogy -- critical pedagogy -- advocates opposition to the status quo; politicizes the concsiousness; struggles in the community and classroom become learning opportunities for political awareness; students taught how to critique the knowledge offered to them in the common sense texts of the culture and school; sought to cure students of their investment in popular texts
critical literacy -- focuses on texts and language not the schooling reform agenda of critical pedagogy; scrutinizes the selective representation of people, places, and events; examines the tendency to privilege some matters and marginalize others; interested in the politically charged silence in texts; identifies position readers are offered and encourages resistant reading positions
media studies -- puts deceitful media studies on trial; looks for bias, distortions of reality, manipulations of audience; evaluated based on assumptions of value and culture similar to Marxist critics; teacher seen as bearer of the light of pure, critical reason bringing students out of their darkness
multilteracies -- recognizes the multimodal nature of literacies in our technologically and visually soaked world of texts; all literacies positions within particular cultural and social contexts
teachers-- A - -resist introducing popular text forms as equal within literary texts; popular text forms take away from worthwhile texts; do not know how to teach popular texts productively; find it difficult to credit pop culture texts with artful design or aesthetic satisfactions that literary texts offer
B -- less comfortable with trad. literary texts; don't know how to facilitate poltiical criticism; only comfortable using pop texts if they give a voice to historically silenced interests, such as indigenous rights
gap between university English and high school English -- high school regimes encourage or require teachers to conform to the norms of their school and their profession; busy teachers are not expected to read, reflect, theorize, and translate those theories into classroom activities- 21
ch 3 -- The Social Nature of the Aesthetic
Understanding critical literacy to have an agenda and to be about discourse, genre, subject position, and resistant reading, the authors ask how such a framework might be compatible with desire and performativity. They imagine how critical literacy and poststructuralism work in the classroom reading practices. Essentially, the authors argue about the limitations of critical literacy and resistant reading offering a way to reconfigure it to allow for aesthetic and pleasure.
For middle and high school teachers, this book wants to be in conversation with you about how you are currently teaching English. The authors assume that you use a "conventional model of narrative, thematic, stylistic, or issues-based analysis, alongside a regime of tasks that may ask for creative responses but in the end values most the analytic essay or the book report." I think Common Core and previous learning standards also value this sort of model considering text-based questions and responses. Teachers are encouraged to take on the culture of the school, and the values of that school with regard to reading practices and meaning making. Reading the text "conventionally," which I take to mean without resisting or rather without consideration for ways of knowing, is the sort of practice this book calls into question. . The authors, however, do not intend for this book to be about teaching literature inasmuch as they are interested in teaching literacy or the reading texts that are both literary and nonoliterary because their argument is that the aesthetic is an element in all texts.
To read a text the critical literacy way is to consider the text as a product of culture that positions the readers to see the world in potentially sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist ways and then to read to resist such. I think some classrooms do this sort of work. Such a position, however, has the potential to strip the text of pleasure. Critical literacy then strips the aesthetic delight of the text, and so Mission and Morgan are interested in how to accommodate aesthetics to critical literacy or rather accommodate critical literacy to deal with aesthetics. The author's treatment of aesthetic is to define it or rather position it as located across a process rather than elements that can be found or identified in a texts.. Locating beauty in an object is problematic because not everyone will find the same object beautiful; thus, beauty is more in the experience of beholding the beauty; however, to behold, one must be able to notice certain qualities or what the authors refer to as "way of knowing." it is in this that talking about aesthetics offers a similar problematic as critical literacy. Aesthetic, as I understand it, "entails a creator, the work created, and an audience" (33). in other words, to have an aesthetic, the text must have a maker and a responder -- a relational quality. Where is the location of the aesthetic? In the responder or the stimuli? What from the text is the stimuli? Isn't the aesthetic the product of reading (39)? The aesthetic, then, seems to be equally implicated in the text as a product of culture needing to be exposed as critical literacy.
Is all knowledge culturally determined? Is aesthetic bound up with ideology?
Ch -1 Notes:
valuation -- people place value on things they like; we want others to share what we enjoy; how are "good" texts chosen in the English classroom; what is valued by the dominant society is deemed good
textual politics -- poststructuralist theory -- texts are constructed within a society; meanings can change with different times, places, and readers; meanings in text reflect the assumptions and values of that society
identity politics -- marxist theory -- examines the positional of social classes; feminist/gender theory -- women critiqued their invisibility in literature; female writers were brought to light beside the privileged male authors; the right to appreciate texts that validate their experiences and culture
Williams and Eagleton -- good literature could no longer be determined by the author's genious; the literary value was not intrinsic but given by the institution that created the category -- aesthetic as a product of the ideology of the dominant group****- lecturers schools, teachers produce a reading that values certain meaning -- develops readers who can PERFORM the reading and find satisfaction in it
Is an aesthetic experience a deception? Is pleasure an ideologically driven effect -- we are supposed to like it because we were taught to value it.
critical view -- made inquiries into who held power in society; traced ideologies of cultures; label masses as fooled by culture industries in power; saw mass culture as enemy; teachers job was to enlighten students by revealing the deception in the common sense offered in the texts
view of the popular -- more inclusive accepting and appreciative of a range of cultural forms, practices and texts; looked at how people engaged with entertainment; less concern with power
radical pedagogy -- critical pedagogy -- advocates opposition to the status quo; politicizes the concsiousness; struggles in the community and classroom become learning opportunities for political awareness; students taught how to critique the knowledge offered to them in the common sense texts of the culture and school; sought to cure students of their investment in popular texts
critical literacy -- focuses on texts and language not the schooling reform agenda of critical pedagogy; scrutinizes the selective representation of people, places, and events; examines the tendency to privilege some matters and marginalize others; interested in the politically charged silence in texts; identifies position readers are offered and encourages resistant reading positions
media studies -- puts deceitful media studies on trial; looks for bias, distortions of reality, manipulations of audience; evaluated based on assumptions of value and culture similar to Marxist critics; teacher seen as bearer of the light of pure, critical reason bringing students out of their darkness
multilteracies -- recognizes the multimodal nature of literacies in our technologically and visually soaked world of texts; all literacies positions within particular cultural and social contexts
teachers-- A - -resist introducing popular text forms as equal within literary texts; popular text forms take away from worthwhile texts; do not know how to teach popular texts productively; find it difficult to credit pop culture texts with artful design or aesthetic satisfactions that literary texts offer
B -- less comfortable with trad. literary texts; don't know how to facilitate poltiical criticism; only comfortable using pop texts if they give a voice to historically silenced interests, such as indigenous rights
gap between university English and high school English -- high school regimes encourage or require teachers to conform to the norms of their school and their profession; busy teachers are not expected to read, reflect, theorize, and translate those theories into classroom activities- 21
ch 3 -- The Social Nature of the Aesthetic
January 27, 2013
Staunton: Deranging English and Education
Staunton, John A. Deranging English/education: Teacher Inquiry, Literary Studies, and Hybrid Visions of "English" for 21st Century Schools. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2008. Print.
Staunton's 2008 book is a welcome contribution,perhaps the only contribution, to the hybrid field of English and Education. In many teacher education programs, English as a discipline is treated as separate from/than education, and I am not even sure that programs would label education as a "discipline." Education course work is generally seen as "covering" the history of education or surveying strategies to fill the teacher tool box. Thus, Staunton's work in this book asks that we re-see ourselves as more of a hybrid of the two to avoid mirroring back to those in power their assumptions about teaching,learning,literature, and students.
In this book, Staunton works to move beyond the paradigm of teacher success that looks more like transmitting the American canon of literature to something more about a joint endeavor of uncovering -"what you discover you're capable of doing in the face of student confusion, textual resistance, or serendipitous collisions" (85).
Not unlike Freire, which I don't believe he cites, Staunton sees the teacher and student as co-teachers and co-learners. (I am attempting to share the "teaching space" as well in this semesters ENGL 489 at UIC. We are all uncomfortable as "students" co-lead a seminar on Rosenblatt or teach a 10 minute lesson demonstrating active learning. During the Socratic seminar, I can feel them waiting for "my take," and I can feel myself resisting.) The "undercurrent" here is really social justice, as Staunton seeks to alter the relationship between teacher and student, student with one another.
One key concept is the notion of "found pedagogy" teaching literature for and with students (90).whereby our task is not to articulate meanings about literature or texts but to put those meanings in conversation with others" (148).
Below are notes from the final chapters -
Ch 4- anchoring points
Song of myself
92- Curricular informants moving from the sidelines of the curriculum to the front lines of the knowledge base of what and how American literature means
93- Or have we practiced so long to learn to read and to get at the meaning of poem that when confronted with the sound of language struggling with the mysteries of being in the world we are struck dumb and at a loss for words
Song of myself
92- Curricular informants moving from the sidelines of the curriculum to the front lines of the knowledge base of what and how American literature means
93- Or have we practiced so long to learn to read and to get at the meaning of poem that when confronted with the sound of language struggling with the mysteries of being in the world we are struck dumb and at a loss for words
97- What has the potential to unravel what we think we know about offering students freedom to explore their ideas in classroom settings that then close the door on any real application or test of the freedom
Disrupting the trans mission of American literature
Disrupting the trans mission of American literature
104- To read Whitman's lines and not allow students a chance to filter meaning from their own experiences is to miss it crucial opportunity to create experiential learning and occlude a key component of the poem's own agenda
Picture- 108- It models a way of approaching history and literature that allows both to speak to contemporary context without being totally removed from their own fields of production
Picture- 108- It models a way of approaching history and literature that allows both to speak to contemporary context without being totally removed from their own fields of production
118- online discussion boards
122- That I need to work against the transmission of a master narrative about American literary history that is both historically and ideologically suspect
He argues for teachers to have an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of American literature from exposure to primary texts historical and contextualizing documents and cultural artifacts from across media and artistic modes
To prepare students not to rely on the history package by their anthologies and curriculum guides which send it next messages about the content of American literature
Ch 5- what counts as knowledge
James gee -- the public discourse model - Shapes the expectations and assumptions of and about teacher candidates discourse models are theories storylines images explanatory frameworks that people hold often unconsciously and used to make sense of the world and their experiences in it
Common sense- but socially situated meanings and practices that Hyde powerful assumptions about people, communities, and literary values -124
133- finally mentions the actual students they will teach
Recognizing that either position throws us into existing and powerfully defining discourses about who we think we are when we are teaching English thrown ess into a discursive wilderness pedagogy marks the boundaries of one horizon of understanding. What we do and who we are is marked by what has come before us the way out is one that can be discovered through shared inquiry and recognition of those student students who join us on the way- 148
Ch 6
153-The work they do in English remain separate from an alien to the things they do in their pedagogy courses
122- That I need to work against the transmission of a master narrative about American literary history that is both historically and ideologically suspect
He argues for teachers to have an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of American literature from exposure to primary texts historical and contextualizing documents and cultural artifacts from across media and artistic modes
To prepare students not to rely on the history package by their anthologies and curriculum guides which send it next messages about the content of American literature
Ch 5- what counts as knowledge
James gee -- the public discourse model - Shapes the expectations and assumptions of and about teacher candidates discourse models are theories storylines images explanatory frameworks that people hold often unconsciously and used to make sense of the world and their experiences in it
Common sense- but socially situated meanings and practices that Hyde powerful assumptions about people, communities, and literary values -124
133- finally mentions the actual students they will teach
Recognizing that either position throws us into existing and powerfully defining discourses about who we think we are when we are teaching English thrown ess into a discursive wilderness pedagogy marks the boundaries of one horizon of understanding. What we do and who we are is marked by what has come before us the way out is one that can be discovered through shared inquiry and recognition of those student students who join us on the way- 148
Ch 6
153-The work they do in English remain separate from an alien to the things they do in their pedagogy courses
Draws out this concern for social justice an undercurrent throughout this book
January 20, 2013
Hesford: Spectacular Rhetoric Notes
Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics
4/6/2013
“A task that consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (Foucault, 49).
Cintron, in his notes about Hesford's book, suggests that Foucault is more interested in power, especially how institutions manage to shape power on behalf of some and not others. Rhetoric, as the study of language in action, must always be about something more -- the formation of political life whether or not the signifiers match up to anything real or even probable.
Hesford's emphasis is on recognition: "The history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition. As this history suggests, struggles for recognition are also struggles for visibility...The stakes are precisely the unseen in vision -- the process through which something is seen or not seen (30).
Her aim is to "integrate the visual into, rather than set it against, textual approaches and to scrutinize the objectivist model of visual evidence -- seeing is believing -- foundational to contemporary human rights politics" (8). Here I am reminded of one of my students who in response to the question "How do we imagine the unimaginable and speak of the unspeakable and know of the unknowable? " (with regard to trauma and atrocities) answered that she knew it because she visited a concentration camp -- as if seeing the camp today is knowing, understanding, and believing.
Cintron writes that the "very structure of the human rights claim is a kind of spectacle in which intersecting ideologies, visual technologies, rhetorics, and so on fuse to create a reality (or the representation of reality) that reinforces certain dilemmas regarding the dominated and the dominating. In this sense, human rights discourses seem to contain the residue of colonialism, and in an ironic way continue neocolonialst thinking. So ekphrasis, then, (to bring before the eyes), which seems so foundational to rhetorical theory because it is bound up with notions of proof and persuasion, of certainty as opposed to contingency, becomes the rhetorical figure that is exploited in the human rights spectacle."
Hesfords working with Levinas: "To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him" (198).
Introduction:
Chapter Five -- Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Poltiics of (In)visibility
Chapter 3: Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle
4/6/2013
“A task that consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (Foucault, 49).
Cintron, in his notes about Hesford's book, suggests that Foucault is more interested in power, especially how institutions manage to shape power on behalf of some and not others. Rhetoric, as the study of language in action, must always be about something more -- the formation of political life whether or not the signifiers match up to anything real or even probable.
Hesford's emphasis is on recognition: "The history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition. As this history suggests, struggles for recognition are also struggles for visibility...The stakes are precisely the unseen in vision -- the process through which something is seen or not seen (30).
Her aim is to "integrate the visual into, rather than set it against, textual approaches and to scrutinize the objectivist model of visual evidence -- seeing is believing -- foundational to contemporary human rights politics" (8). Here I am reminded of one of my students who in response to the question "How do we imagine the unimaginable and speak of the unspeakable and know of the unknowable? " (with regard to trauma and atrocities) answered that she knew it because she visited a concentration camp -- as if seeing the camp today is knowing, understanding, and believing.
Cintron writes that the "very structure of the human rights claim is a kind of spectacle in which intersecting ideologies, visual technologies, rhetorics, and so on fuse to create a reality (or the representation of reality) that reinforces certain dilemmas regarding the dominated and the dominating. In this sense, human rights discourses seem to contain the residue of colonialism, and in an ironic way continue neocolonialst thinking. So ekphrasis, then, (to bring before the eyes), which seems so foundational to rhetorical theory because it is bound up with notions of proof and persuasion, of certainty as opposed to contingency, becomes the rhetorical figure that is exploited in the human rights spectacle."
Hesfords working with Levinas: "To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him" (198).
Introduction:
- How do human rights internationalism get translated into cultural forms that target American audiences-14
- Consider the rescue narrative how human rights law is depoliticize into a humanitarian intervention discourse
- Consider how the discourse of American nationalism produces subjects who see themselves as a free in comparison to developing worlds
- The human rights spectacle or spectacular rhetorical is the appropriation of human suffering to deflect Nationalist issues
- This book considers Intercon textuality how arguments travel across contexts
- The book thinks in terms of transnational rather than global because of the national or nationstates that impact others--Nationstates are relevant in human rights context and in presenting images of issues
- Ranchers-16- Emancipation starts to distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection it starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or monetize that distribution.... Interpreting the world is already means transforming it or reconfiguring it
- 17- I highlight the rhetorical intercurrent textuality of images and their meanings and approach the human rights spectacle as a rhetorical phenomenon through which differently empowered social constituencies negotiate the authority of representation. Furthermore I argued that spectacular X and the contradiction that they stage are emblematic of the political and ethical struggles with which human rights advocates and scholars are engaged.
- 19-I argue that instead of thinking about the spectacle as a narcotic we need to understand it as heterogeneous and as a rhetorically dialogic process that is nevertheless subsumed within repetitive forms. Truth telling genres are the most ardent hosts of human rights spectacle.
- How do deployments of the spectacular rhetoric advance political cultural and moral agendas? How do truth telling genres and the contexts they generate support the spectacular and increasingly panoptic culture of US internationalism and its regulation of human rights subjects?
- 20- I demonstrate that no genre is immune to the spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
- 21- The studies are intended not to represent an exhaustive survey but to highlight examples of how international Human rights law and cultural practices work together to create sites of political engagement and creative intervention.
- 21- I seek to counter the common assumption that legal approaches are the only politically viable means of taking action against human rights violations by the states and nine state actors...******
- Attending to the intercontextuality, I will cultural and law based human rights discourses we are able to grasp how the suffering body becomes sutured to the spectacle and incorporated into the visual economy of human rights....issues of who has the power to represent home and which events are rendered visible or invisible are profoundly important...and examination of interventions or transformations of the spectacle that challenge hierarchical social relations and the fixity of identity categories and yet and down at the human rights subject with agency-22
- 23- How truth Telling achieves political effects and to manipulate affect
- 26- Convergence of human rights and humanitarian discourses and representing non-western women and their children as sympathetic I text unappealing and site for Western audiences... Children as symbolically appealing and as passive victims... How about spectacle of childhood innocence and the transformation of the child from object property to agent
Chapter Five -- Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Poltiics of (In)visibility
- Rights bearing subject deflect attention from or draw it to the social and economic conditions that shape children's lives
- Questions depoliticizing the victim of children's human rights law
- There is a subversive element of children's agency when the substance of that Universalism is not innocence for children sense of familial and social responsibility-- and this is evident in so e genocude literature .. It resists victimizing demonstrating agency in the child... What is the mediator's role-- a call for greater collaboration between human rights activists artists and scholars in investigating how the axes of ethical engagement are regulated through the often conversion discourses of humanitarianism and human rights internationalism
- Educating as rescue narrative--159--This was in part a narrative in tree girl and was a narrative in my unit of about tree girl ; It is also a narrative at my melody school
- A humanitarian narrative of self actualization with an imperialist history emerge as a virtuous reporter and advocate whose value and agency are affirmed by the lacking other--160
- Teaching about international or transnational atrocities is dangerous for the teacher because the spectacular figure of the exploited child is most often depicted as foreign racially or ethnically different and non autonomous and innocent being betrayed by familial and cultural traditions
- Do the books and try that out western intervention the characters cannot be saved? Is there no agency?
- Is there a larger transformation narrative which moves from pain and trauma to personal expression and growth
- 162-The literacy math graff -- The universalizing Idea that you respective of the particularities of any given context literacy correlates with social standing and economic advancement
- The taxpayers witness to a journey through their creation of a rhetorical space of transnational intimacy between children and an imagined western audience-163
- 174- The challenge is not to reproduce the colonial legacy of anthologizing societies as uncivil and repressing the agency of both children and adults then re-creating the spectacle of salvation through such interventions
- 174- Developmental narrative.. It plots a story of socio-civil incorporation by which the human rights personality becomes legible to the self and others
- 175-Cosmopolitan aesthetic... Redemption as subjects of a heroic narrative in which they and the imagined Westernview were triumphant over the deficient moral aesthetic boundaries of the brothel
- This transformation narrative distracts attention from the severe poverty and exploitation to which the children are subjected in favor of the expertise of the cosmopolitan arch critic which the children are encouraged to emulate and new forms of neoliberalism and its regulation of social difference subjectivity and public morality
- Darker side .. What is needed is a multidimensional analysis of children's agency that considers that interdependency of human rights including how poor labor conditions for adults inadequate wages lack of health for disability benefits unsafe working conditions contribute to the family's dependency on child labor176
- This confronts modernity
- Be skeptical of the dualisms forced versus chosen moral versus immoral to terminate representations of women and children
- Account for the transnational national and cultural forces and narratives that define our alignments with children and those that limit children's agency has moral and political subjects
- The process that children are cultural actors the documentary reformulate what it means to see children as complex subjects who subjectivity is not grounded in a struggle for recognition but in their ability to respond to impoverished, social and economic circumstances.--182
- By focusing on the children's daily struggles and resilience the film counters the spectacle of children as passive victims that is common to human rights and humanitarian campaigns specifically those that target Western audiences--183
- The film does not have a transformation or rescue narrative there are no heroes or villains the film documents to children struggles the lack of choices and resources and the generational cycle of poverty and it exposes the contradictions of advocacy work 184
- Moments that kid viewers an opportunity to think about their role as witness a small dessert and otherwise continuous observation page and the potential pedagogical role of the film in the context of its making
- 185- ranciere- The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible the sayable and ithe thinkable.
- a refusal to construing the children as mere victims or to infantilize their families or the society in which they live
- 186-The film persuades by enabling a relationship built on the recognition of children as cultural actors and moral agents and by not translating the children's experiences in terms of idealized western models of development...reimagining the discourse of childhood dependence***
- Tensions between individual capacity and vulnerability in between protection and empowerment are not easily resolved
- See child agency as a matter of social and economic rights and not solely civil and political rights as a matter of both political recognition and the rest redistribution of resources. ... In order that the issue of children's human rights to be ethically grounded
Chapter 3: Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle
- 95--Hesford critiques Mackinnon's anti-pornographic stance and causal argument that pornography created conditions whereby Serbian men raid Muslim and Croat women ... McKinnon is more interested in linking human rights violation to her anti-pornography stands then in exploring these women's testimonial for what they say about the complexities appointments victimization cultural location and agency.. Thus the text is in-service of her argument and not in service if the women.
- Pedagogically we need to be aware of how we use the tax and her classrooms are they in service of the conceptual idea or framework or in-service of complicating the subjectivity of the people
- 95- Consumption of great as spectacle exemplifies the pervasive visibility of women as rape victims and international news media and US public discourse and the emphasis and women's human rights campaigns and violence against women
- 96- If human rights images and testimonies aim to create a rhetorical space of intersubjectivity of bearing witness how can human rights activists and scholars account for ruptures and identification and crises and witnessing?
- 98- Bearing witness--a critical stance of bearing witness wherein the witness listener reviewer does not take the place of the other... The original subjects themselves did not register the experience in the fullness of its meaning (Baer) There is a danger in responding to trauma that indulges in the illusion that we might somehow be able to assimilate atrocities fully into our understanding.
- 99- The process of documenting human rights violations is paradoxical in that violence is often represented in order for it to be resisted...." And for me this is a problem in the classroom because we are reading representations of violence in order to confront progress and development for its darker side, so we are reading violations and projecting narratives-- hero narrative, rescuer narrative-
- Hesford asks what forms of empathic engagement are constituted as solutions to violence and what are the limits of such forms? She talks about the crisis of witnessing referring to the risks of representing violence
- Life writing studies-- the mediated nature of the testimonial genre and the editorial process if collaboration and mediation
- 100- She argues the need to recognize the interdependence of witnessing and listening... The paradoxes of representation involved in becoming a rhetorical witness of rape warfare as genocide and of the allegorical structure of human rights claims to this recognition. The paradox that such representations bring front and center of course this configuration of the individual has an embodiment of group identity and group vulnerability a sense of collective identity recognized by the genocide convention.
- 103-- secondary witness- gets stuck in the gap between what is said in testimony in the way of speaking body or written text says it
- Cambodia
- What assumptions about children contributed to Khmer rouges plan?
- What beliefs about progress and development?
- Can our research tell the truth? Can a memoir testify?
- How do they make sense of their experiences, how do they channel their pain into a struggle for justice, the process if recognizing themselves as human rights subjects -- not interested in what happened to the people(as victims).
- Works against western expectations that victims were all poor an uneducated
- Memoir/ testimony- the individuals trauma is implicated in the social regardless if whether she chooses to speak -- live witness's speech act is a violation as it makes her live through it again; the witness and viewer recreate the spectacle of victimization as a scene if forced recognition.
- Can one testimony speak for a collective?
- Tensions between witnessing and spectacle
- Inadequacy of representation - limits of narratability and public reproduction and exposure of the private
- Think about how the global economy and international politics including the United States have intervened is supposedly local conflicts, and how such are configured rhetorically-- how and why would it matter if accounts of systematic violence and its legacies were part if our memorial landscapes-- 122
- Hesford deliberates the potential if a differentiated politics of recognition that move beyond recognition
January 13, 2013
Fecho: Teaching for the Students
Bob Fecho is a professor at the University of Georgia's department of language and literacy education. The book provides a framework for creating a classroom built on dialogue, inquiry, and critique. He addresses concerns that education students bring to class. While I am an 8th grade English teacher, teaching full time, I am also a teacher educator and know that I am in a unique position to not only inform but shape teacher practice.
It is interesting to note that Fecho acknowledge Bakhtin's work as the "backbone of this book" given that my current dissertation committee has found problems with my use of Bakhtin as a framework for my argument to teach novels in this age of Common Core's movement toward informational texts.
Chapter Notes
Fecho
12 the intent of dialogue rather than to destroy is to create without creation there can be no dialogue
The purpose of the chapter case to emphasize the importance of Generative lesson. It is done and service of gaining confidence to develop their understanding of future Texts and genres they encounter
Ch 2
P22--What made this teaching critical for me was the overt focus and tacit implication that we live in a political society and that all social institutions including schools are driven by powerful political forces
24---Don't drive ideas into the ground where they won't be turned over examined and perhaps be considered--Instead post questions Perdenalas alternatives engage in dialogue and provide tools which current and future dialog could be achieved
Ch.3
Transaction--When we read we are encountering the text and ways for which only our experiences can prepare us; There are no generic readers or generic interpretations that only innumerable relationships between readers and texts -29
My experiences don't preclude me from imagining or engaging in dialogue in order to gain insight into other perspectives but they do color, inhibit, enable, spin, or somehow shape my eventual understandings
31 My job to teach students how to read and respond to those and other text... Helping students develop skills for unpacking text and using writing as a means for doing so. Much more motivational weight
... Works as complex investigations of the human condition and wanted my students to have the opportunity to save those texts in order to have the text shape them
33--I seek yo create wobble in the dialogic classroom. - To get students to notice and consider their beliefs and the worlds they inhabit
Ch 4-- tension , squeeze and release
41-I believe it's not tension itself that represents a concern but how we respond to end-use tension that causes complications in our lives... The point isn't necessarily to remove tension to gain insight into the tension and have that insight support your efforts 43
Ch 5 difficulty
Ch 6 wobble
Wobble US on the shoulder and induces us to ask why it nudges us toward action it suggests we get out at our chair and do something
54- The intention of the course is not to develop a consensus of understanding but to create an atmosphere and which wobble takes place
56- The paradox that a class where it is safe to investigate complex ideas sometimes feels risky and unsafe to the participants
Make it safe to experience such uncertainty
ch 7
p. 69 -- to be a dialogic teacher is to question the engagement that occurs in your classroom; if you are unhappy with the current state of that engagement -- it it seems that too many students are merely occupying seats and waiting out time -- then you need to admit to yourself ..it's you
ch 8
p. 75 -- by not realizing the importance of changing contexts, we tend to position our learning experiences in narrow ruts of understanding. Our sense making can go only so far because we have fenced it in.
ch 9
p. 81 - Is it just about going from not knowing to knowing, as if we all cared about the same ideas, learned a the same pace, and prioritized what we learned in the same ways...Shouldn't our intent as educators be to understand the make-up of these varied contexts and what powerful potential they bring to our learning? Isn't it important for us to have insight into the diversity among and within individuals and how that rich mix contributes to learning in different ways?
p. 83 -- Love...is an act of courage and unless we enter classrooms with love, humility, and faith in the power of humans to create and recreate, we will fail in our attempts to dialogue.
Of course, from Peter Elbow I know that part of grading student writing is that you have to choose to "like" it, and I have been known to use the word "love" with my students as in "I do this because I love you." There are times, however, that I get stuck in this "I have the answer" routine and feel like the class is against me only too late realizing that I failed at the love and humility and the faith in my students to dialogue with me on a topic. Such moments eat away at me until I see them again and ask for a redo or just try harder to love, possess humility, and have faith in them.
ch 10
questioning
ch 11
constructing a simultaneously unified and diverse self...p. 96 "Who we are becoming depends on where we are, how we have constructed ourselves to date, and to what extent we remain in dialogue with our contexts and diverse identities."
p. 101 -- "But if we who educate can grasp that all of us are entered into a complex mesh of dialogical transactions with our selves and our many contexts, then we can also grasp that we teach for so much more than competency on a test."
ch 12
seamlessness
It is interesting to note that Fecho acknowledge Bakhtin's work as the "backbone of this book" given that my current dissertation committee has found problems with my use of Bakhtin as a framework for my argument to teach novels in this age of Common Core's movement toward informational texts.
Chapter Notes
Fecho
12 the intent of dialogue rather than to destroy is to create without creation there can be no dialogue
The purpose of the chapter case to emphasize the importance of Generative lesson. It is done and service of gaining confidence to develop their understanding of future Texts and genres they encounter
Ch 2
P22--What made this teaching critical for me was the overt focus and tacit implication that we live in a political society and that all social institutions including schools are driven by powerful political forces
24---Don't drive ideas into the ground where they won't be turned over examined and perhaps be considered--Instead post questions Perdenalas alternatives engage in dialogue and provide tools which current and future dialog could be achieved
Ch.3
Transaction--When we read we are encountering the text and ways for which only our experiences can prepare us; There are no generic readers or generic interpretations that only innumerable relationships between readers and texts -29
My experiences don't preclude me from imagining or engaging in dialogue in order to gain insight into other perspectives but they do color, inhibit, enable, spin, or somehow shape my eventual understandings
31 My job to teach students how to read and respond to those and other text... Helping students develop skills for unpacking text and using writing as a means for doing so. Much more motivational weight
... Works as complex investigations of the human condition and wanted my students to have the opportunity to save those texts in order to have the text shape them
33--I seek yo create wobble in the dialogic classroom. - To get students to notice and consider their beliefs and the worlds they inhabit
Ch 4-- tension , squeeze and release
41-I believe it's not tension itself that represents a concern but how we respond to end-use tension that causes complications in our lives... The point isn't necessarily to remove tension to gain insight into the tension and have that insight support your efforts 43
Ch 5 difficulty
Ch 6 wobble
Wobble US on the shoulder and induces us to ask why it nudges us toward action it suggests we get out at our chair and do something
54- The intention of the course is not to develop a consensus of understanding but to create an atmosphere and which wobble takes place
56- The paradox that a class where it is safe to investigate complex ideas sometimes feels risky and unsafe to the participants
Make it safe to experience such uncertainty
ch 7
p. 69 -- to be a dialogic teacher is to question the engagement that occurs in your classroom; if you are unhappy with the current state of that engagement -- it it seems that too many students are merely occupying seats and waiting out time -- then you need to admit to yourself ..it's you
ch 8
p. 75 -- by not realizing the importance of changing contexts, we tend to position our learning experiences in narrow ruts of understanding. Our sense making can go only so far because we have fenced it in.
ch 9
p. 81 - Is it just about going from not knowing to knowing, as if we all cared about the same ideas, learned a the same pace, and prioritized what we learned in the same ways...Shouldn't our intent as educators be to understand the make-up of these varied contexts and what powerful potential they bring to our learning? Isn't it important for us to have insight into the diversity among and within individuals and how that rich mix contributes to learning in different ways?
p. 83 -- Love...is an act of courage and unless we enter classrooms with love, humility, and faith in the power of humans to create and recreate, we will fail in our attempts to dialogue.
Of course, from Peter Elbow I know that part of grading student writing is that you have to choose to "like" it, and I have been known to use the word "love" with my students as in "I do this because I love you." There are times, however, that I get stuck in this "I have the answer" routine and feel like the class is against me only too late realizing that I failed at the love and humility and the faith in my students to dialogue with me on a topic. Such moments eat away at me until I see them again and ask for a redo or just try harder to love, possess humility, and have faith in them.
ch 10
questioning
ch 11
constructing a simultaneously unified and diverse self...p. 96 "Who we are becoming depends on where we are, how we have constructed ourselves to date, and to what extent we remain in dialogue with our contexts and diverse identities."
p. 101 -- "But if we who educate can grasp that all of us are entered into a complex mesh of dialogical transactions with our selves and our many contexts, then we can also grasp that we teach for so much more than competency on a test."
ch 12
seamlessness
November 11, 2012
Writing as a Way of Being: Yagelski
In Writing as a Way of Being, Yagelski explores what anyone who has ever written something they believed at the time was important already knows: that the actual experience of writing is actually quite separate from the text. And this is why, once the piece of text is "finished" that a writer feels separate from that text, even distanced, and, I would go so far as to say somewhat depressed realizing that the "finishing" of the text was nowhere near as exhilarating as the writing itself.
Thus, when teachers talk about writing as having the potential to change things, they often overlook that it is the experience of writing that often has greater potential to move the writer to a place of greater understanding of himself and the world rather than the information in the text or the information that is communicated when someone else reads it. With an emphasis on skill-based learning and correct text production in the writing classroom, teachers and students are missing out on this, Yagelski's ontological argument. He emphasis a pedagogy that focuses on the "writer writing" rather than the "writer's writing":
As an answer to the thin pedagogy of skill-based pedagogy and learning correct writing, this type of pedagogy is what Yagelski calls a "pedagogy of community," and as I argue elsewhere, closer to the type of democracy we should be practicing -- inclusivity, critical engagement and participation. To make education about "rightness" or "correctness" is to narrow the purpose of education, which should be about enabling us to imagine a better more sustainable future. It requires innovation and imagination, but it also requires a connectedness with each other and our world. It is such a limited goal to make writing about communication and being academically successful. Yet, I will admit that I have to deliberately conscious resisting such rhetoric in my teaching. If our goal is to prepare them for workplaces defined by economic globalization, we are perpetuating the status quo that has caused this crisis of sustainability (139). It is a Western value that oppressed the "other" and exploits resources, so it is less about creating a better world and more about merely participating in a world that is already constructed for our students, a world unsustainable.
If you have ever allowed your class enough time to settle into writing, you can see the beauty of the act of writing.
Yagelski also criticized the progressive pedagogies -- which I tend to practice -- by saying that writing as political action or community service is still focused on the product and not the act. He argues that even the process movement "has effected little change when it comes to where we cast our collective gaze in our efforts to understand and teach writing: Our eyes remain fixed on the text" (144). The cautionary message here is that if writing is reduced to writing as a skill," it is distancing the act of writing from living in all its complexity." In other words, it limits it to an activity rather than its potential for being. The challenge then is to teach students to learn from the and through the act of writing rather than write in the service of learning or to produce.
In line with my argument for doing inquiry, Yagelski cites Bartholomae's overarching purpose in writing as a "critical project" to cultivate a critical perspective of the world and "to help them develop a set of intellectual skills to interrogate the texts they encounter, including their own" (152). Because Batholomae's focus in on critical academic skills, Yagelski argues that it is too narrow. That said, the part that is consistent with writing as a way of being is that " the goal isn't simply to make a better text but to provoke genuine inquiry that can lead to insight into and understanding of the issues that emerge from the writing" (152). Bartholomae's pedagogy wants to expose the master narrative that is in the essays students write and seeks to trouble the frames for producing, revising and evaluating texts -- all frames of a master narrative. Thus, mainstream instruction that emphasized writing "good texts" fails to interrupt the master narrative and cultural values that have produced the society that we have, the one that exploits and oppresses.
As students revise or work on drafts of any writing, Yagelski suggests a pedagogy that asks about the experience that was the focus of writing (not the text). Teaching writing is engaging in writing as an act of inquiry into their own experience of the world. Writing is participating in the world and who they are in this world. Peer response is valuable in this pedagogy because it is an act of community building and shared meaning making and because it is not limited to improving texts. The other side to this is that writing is individual and social. Thomas Kent wrote that there can be no meaning without the other; writing itself acknowledges the other; an individual contains many voices.
The challenge of schools, therefore, is to cultivate curricula and pedagogies that take into account the complexities of human learning and human life that is part of distinct and overlapping global communities (163). The narrow curriculum that is prescriptive and measurable is an attempt to control such complexity.
Teaching how to produce texts has not achieved the goal of teaching students how to do school nor do they use it in the workplace. But, Yagelski argues that what if we would have taught these kids writing as a way of being. Might it have "opened up a capacity of writing to understand anew their experience of themselves in the world...What might the communities they created look like?"
Thus, when teachers talk about writing as having the potential to change things, they often overlook that it is the experience of writing that often has greater potential to move the writer to a place of greater understanding of himself and the world rather than the information in the text or the information that is communicated when someone else reads it. With an emphasis on skill-based learning and correct text production in the writing classroom, teachers and students are missing out on this, Yagelski's ontological argument. He emphasis a pedagogy that focuses on the "writer writing" rather than the "writer's writing":
The text does not appear in this pedagogy, but rather than being the focus of writing instruction, it becomes a component of the process of inquiry into self and world that the act of writing can be. In this way, the text becomes part of a larger act of inquiry through writing, which in turn becomes a vehicle for truth-seeking, in Couture's sense of that term. In other words, we write as a way of being together in the world -- as a way to understand ourselves and our connection to what is around us; in this formulation, we write with the text rather than to produce a text. (8)
As an answer to the thin pedagogy of skill-based pedagogy and learning correct writing, this type of pedagogy is what Yagelski calls a "pedagogy of community," and as I argue elsewhere, closer to the type of democracy we should be practicing -- inclusivity, critical engagement and participation. To make education about "rightness" or "correctness" is to narrow the purpose of education, which should be about enabling us to imagine a better more sustainable future. It requires innovation and imagination, but it also requires a connectedness with each other and our world. It is such a limited goal to make writing about communication and being academically successful. Yet, I will admit that I have to deliberately conscious resisting such rhetoric in my teaching. If our goal is to prepare them for workplaces defined by economic globalization, we are perpetuating the status quo that has caused this crisis of sustainability (139). It is a Western value that oppressed the "other" and exploits resources, so it is less about creating a better world and more about merely participating in a world that is already constructed for our students, a world unsustainable.
If you have ever allowed your class enough time to settle into writing, you can see the beauty of the act of writing.
Yagelski also criticized the progressive pedagogies -- which I tend to practice -- by saying that writing as political action or community service is still focused on the product and not the act. He argues that even the process movement "has effected little change when it comes to where we cast our collective gaze in our efforts to understand and teach writing: Our eyes remain fixed on the text" (144). The cautionary message here is that if writing is reduced to writing as a skill," it is distancing the act of writing from living in all its complexity." In other words, it limits it to an activity rather than its potential for being. The challenge then is to teach students to learn from the and through the act of writing rather than write in the service of learning or to produce.
In line with my argument for doing inquiry, Yagelski cites Bartholomae's overarching purpose in writing as a "critical project" to cultivate a critical perspective of the world and "to help them develop a set of intellectual skills to interrogate the texts they encounter, including their own" (152). Because Batholomae's focus in on critical academic skills, Yagelski argues that it is too narrow. That said, the part that is consistent with writing as a way of being is that " the goal isn't simply to make a better text but to provoke genuine inquiry that can lead to insight into and understanding of the issues that emerge from the writing" (152). Bartholomae's pedagogy wants to expose the master narrative that is in the essays students write and seeks to trouble the frames for producing, revising and evaluating texts -- all frames of a master narrative. Thus, mainstream instruction that emphasized writing "good texts" fails to interrupt the master narrative and cultural values that have produced the society that we have, the one that exploits and oppresses.
As students revise or work on drafts of any writing, Yagelski suggests a pedagogy that asks about the experience that was the focus of writing (not the text). Teaching writing is engaging in writing as an act of inquiry into their own experience of the world. Writing is participating in the world and who they are in this world. Peer response is valuable in this pedagogy because it is an act of community building and shared meaning making and because it is not limited to improving texts. The other side to this is that writing is individual and social. Thomas Kent wrote that there can be no meaning without the other; writing itself acknowledges the other; an individual contains many voices.
The challenge of schools, therefore, is to cultivate curricula and pedagogies that take into account the complexities of human learning and human life that is part of distinct and overlapping global communities (163). The narrow curriculum that is prescriptive and measurable is an attempt to control such complexity.
Teaching how to produce texts has not achieved the goal of teaching students how to do school nor do they use it in the workplace. But, Yagelski argues that what if we would have taught these kids writing as a way of being. Might it have "opened up a capacity of writing to understand anew their experience of themselves in the world...What might the communities they created look like?"
October 20, 2012
Gourevitch
Gourevitch
Page 19 the best reason I have for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it the horror as for interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand it's Legacy
He writes that evidence of the genocide is in visible world yet even the occasional exposed bones the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deformities scars and the super abundance of packed orphanages could not be taken as evidence that what had happened you Roandaa was an attempt to a lemonade people the only way we know what happened was because of the peoples stories. 21
The stories in this book our testimony the author Gourevitch uses his stories as testimony the survivors bear witness and Gurevich is the listener also bearing witness; However it is not just one story but many stories that he we've together trying to fill the caps as more questions are exposed into move closer to the truth for example when he's talking to Samuel about being locked in the church and the priest sends word for an intervention from Dr. Gerard or the pastor one Memory is that the church president said "your problem has already found a solution you must die" but one of Semuels colleagues remembers the phrase differently "you must be eliminated got no longer want you" 28
A story conveyed about community is great important here in another reason why genocide is an appropriate topic for the English classroom Carlanda convoy explains while Baltar was stranded one night they heard cries it was a woman... He explained that the Springwheat heard was a conventional distress signal and then acaridan obligation in 20 years descry you do to move and then you must come running you have no choice you must and if you ignore this crying he would have to answer to it this is how Rwandans live in the hills; people live separately together; there is responsibility and if you don't help you must answer: are you with the criminals, a coward, what do you expect when you cry? This is community he says...34
Yes this is moral compasses the moral of teaching but this is the moral I think this is the logic of ethics that we must introduce in the dialectic of freedom freedom in relation freedom that's informed as green would say
Can this be used against community...accusing accomplices?
Tutsi refugees in Laredo where the priest who lead the genocide lived organized a march outside his residence at the same time Serbs had daily news coverage 1994--it was not covered in the press
In 1996 there was an indictment and our author went to Laredo to find Pastor and first met his son or Dr. Ntaki. when he found him, he met his wife , mixed, and of course they have their own story. They say witnesses are the new government tools saying what the gov. wants.
"Power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality -- even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood" (52). Gourevitch goes on to discuss the colonial history of Rwanda as evidence saying, "The Belgians could hardly have pretended they were needed to bring order to Rwanda. Instead, they sought out those features of the existing civilization that fit their own ideas of mastery and subjugation and bent them to fit their purposes....The scientists brought their measuring tapes and calipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they believed all along. Tutsis had "nobler," more 'naturally," aristrocratic dimensions than the "coarse" and "bestial" Hutus" (55=56). Belgian went about regimenting (Scott) Rwandan society along ethnic lines shifting the internal and structural power to Tutsis able to levy taxes against their Hutu neighbors in the early 1930s. In 1933, Belgian issued ethnic identity cards making it impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis. It was no longer a class issue - -no social mobility was possible; it was not an employment issue, not an economic issue, and not even a blood issue. It was the state categorizing citizens, marking them and thus constructing the stage for genocide.
Hutu was roughly 85%, and the Tutusis were about 14% (Twa were the remaining percentage). In 1957, a group of Hutu intellectuals argued for a Hutu state on the basis of majority rules, actually using the identification mechanism for their argument. Such was the logic of democracy of the time -- ethnicity. The construction of the ethnic binary and desire for an ethnic state was the beginning of political violence between Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda. Gourevitch calls this the "social revolution" of Hutus organizing a violent campaign against Tutsis using the rhetoric of democracy or Westernization (as Mignolo would say) in the logic of colonialism. Colonel Logiest, a Hutu revolutionary, said: "It will not be a democracy if it is not equally successful in respecting the rights of minorities...A country in which justice loses this fundamental quality prepares the worst disorders and its own collapse" (quoted 61). Clearly, the social revolution was not considering "rights" as a central issue. In 1962, Rwanda was granted independence, but not before the UN warned "that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsis" (61). Gourevitch puts this story of fratricide in conversation with the story of Cain and Abel and the failure of the "blood-revenge model of justice."
"Between December 24 and 28 1963, Vuillemin [a schoolteacher] reported, well-organized massacres left as many as fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Ginkongoro alone...by mid 1964 as many as a quarter million Tutsis had fled the country...Sir Bertrand Russell described the scene in Rwanda that year as 'the most horrible systematic massacre we hae had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis'" (65).
The strength of Gourevitch's book is not just rendering the stories but entering the conversation with the voices; he tells when he reflects on how the testimony went how he was listening is the most valuable part in his narrative
I'm page 71 he says we are each of us functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us and looking back there are these discrete tracks of memory the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others ideas of us and the more private times when we are Freer to imagine ourselves
His reason is discovered as a listener when he listens to Odette it accursed him that if others have so often made your life their business and perhaps you want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolability your own
He says remembering has its economy like experience itself and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom and I grand I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in your memories and I felt that we were both glad of it
Page 95 and strange as it may sound the ideology or what Rwandans call the logic of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it to the specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace , and the individual always an annoyance to totality-- ceases to exist
killing brings people together
Studying several different examples of genocide important we discover in this text issue of the United Nations and how because of the history of the UN in Bosnia and Somalia the Rwandans to not trust the viewing so in addition to learning about resilience of the people or Hegemony, The text into conversation the mechanisms that fail; Students can understand some historical context for the current global issues for example the retired United Nations Sec. Kofi Annan on his written a new book criticizing the in and calling for reformation
Odette's story continues but Gourevitch adds Paul Rusesabogina's story who was in a position to complicate the binary of perpetrator and victim as he tells of negotiating for people's lives
The author is a witness as he listens to stories he's listening to testimony he is bearing witness he is listening and bearing witness she writes on page 122 I had the impression with him more than with others that as he told it she was seen the events he described a fax that as he stared into the past the outcome was not get obvious and that when he looked at me With his clear eyes a touch Hayzee he was still seeing the scenes she described perhaps even hoping to understand them for the story made no sense the major who had spared his life may have recognized Thomas but to Thomas the major was a stranger and this is an example of the testimony that Feldman talks about... The testimony is the history only in looking back are you creating history and the moment it's not history it's the present
Page 128 the authors of the genocide understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength and the gray force that really drives people's power hatred and power are both in their different ways passion the difference is that hatred is truly negative while power is essentially positive you surrender to Hatred but you a spire to power
Gourevitch complicates the story between Paul and Odette; he adds the priest story when Wenceslas who is a priest later charged in France with providing with lists of Tutsi refugees at his church, publishing refugees out of hiding to be killed, attending massacres without interfering, sabotaging United Nation efforts to evacuate refugees from the church and calling teenage girls to have sex with him. Wenceslas says, " I didn't have a choice; it was necessary to appear pro- militia. If I had had a different attitude, we all have disappeared"(136).
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