Blogs

Blogging will be light for the next four or five days, as I'm home for Thanksgiving. I've missed hearing people say "up yonder" and "sociacurity" (an elision of "Social Security," similar to "preeshaytit" in that sense), and I've missed the way my mom pronounces the word "employee" (em-PLAW-ee). :D

The latest issue of Rhizome has a report on blogging, and there's a special issue of Logos devoted to Election 2004. I'm going to try to read all the essays in the latter if I can; problem is, I don't know where to start. Any suggestions?

I feel good today (possibly because I've worked on my dissertation prospectus all weekend). If I still lived in Knoxville, I'd hop in my car and run off to the Smoky Mountains and to Hot Springs, where I'd lounge in a hot tub among pine trees all day [edited to add: all kinds of trees, actually. Lots of cedars, as I recall. Doesn't the limestone in the soil enable them to thrive? That's what I've heard.]. I'd relish the drive, and I'd blast these songs, among others:

"You Got the Car" -- Kasey Chambers (*)
"Let There Be Rock" -- Drive-By Truckers (*)
"Daddy Sang Bass" -- Johnny Cash (*)
"Two More Bottles of Wine" -- Emmylou Harris (*)
"A Boy Named Sue" -- Johnny Cash (*)
"Righteously" -- Lucinda Williams (*)
"Last Hard Bible" -- Kasey Chambers (*)
"C'est La Vie (You Never Can Tell)" -- Emmylou Harris (*)
"Barricades and Brickwalls" -- Kasey Chambers (*)
"Joy" -- Lucinda Williams (*)
"Walking in Memphis" -- Marc Cohn (*)
[Edited to add "Get Right With God" -- Lucinda Williams (:o How could I forget that one?!)] (*)

Anyone else want to come along? :)

Rana's back! :grin:

Like Jenny, I can't get enough of group hug. I have a paranoid fantasy that the administrators of the site are collecting information on the contributors through some behind-the-scenes means and are waiting to do a massive blackmail. Have you read what people write there? Lots of stuff that would get folks in trouble, like violent 1nc3$+, etc.

Speaking of Jenny, go congratulate her! Her piece in Postmodern Culture just came out.

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what flavor pocky are you?

[c] sugardew

I've been preoccupied with revising my teaching philosophy statement. I had one that I wrote during my

master's program, but I've lost the file, and I'm sure I'd cringe if I could see it now, anyway. I've

attended these kinds of workshops

on how to write a teaching philosophy statement, but I remain unsatisfied with the statements they advise

us to write, and indeed with how a lot of people not associated with these workshops advise graduate

students with regard to teaching statements. Often the teaching statements I'm talking about are more like

leadership statements, consisting of not much beyond

href="http://trc.virginia.edu/Publications/Teaching_Concerns/Spring_1998/TC_Spring_1998_Chylack.htm">first-order principles

; they're mostly "what I do in the classroom to accommodate diverse learning styles"

and not very philosophical at all with regard to rationale. I'm interested in creating a

discipline-specific teaching philosophy statement (and maybe that's one of the problems with the teaching

philosophy statement workshops I've attended: They're trying to teach people in many different disciplines

how to write a teaching philosophy). One key variable here is the fact that in my department, there's an

emphasis on a high level of consistency across sections of first-year composition. In fact, at each of the

three schools where I've taught, there have been certain books, topics, and genres I was required to

assign, and I guess it'll be that way wherever I go in the future too. My point is, I don't know how much

of my teaching philosophy is going to be a retroactive justification of what I already do, and how much

will be a vision of what I'd do were I given free reign (and what would I do? I don't exactly know.).

Before I haul off and write a teaching philosophy, I have to think through the have-to/would-do issue and a

few others. Here I'm trying to survey writing pedagogy from a distance and figure out what I'm aligning

myself with, what I think is worthwhile and effective. I'm only raising questions and problematizing terms;

no answers here, sorry. First, there's the murky idea of "good writing." What's that? What definition do I

agree with? I only bring it up because it's an obvious goal of rhetoric courses, which reminds me: If

possible, I want to have a coherent teaching philosophy I can implement in first-year composition, public

speaking, and technical communication classes. What is "academic discourse," and is it an acceptable term

to use? Sometimes I get the sense that it's verboten. "Academic discourse" has been criticized for being

disconnected from experience and the personal and being positioned outside of students' grasp, both in

terms of accessibility and potential for authority and ownership. It has been characterized as language

that is hegemonic and elitist, marginalizing women, students of color, and working-class students. Some

have questioned its value in the "real world" for students who don't plan on going to graduate school.

Okay, so we have the tricky terms good writing and academic discourse. I'm going to hit pause

on those for the time being and turn now to what I consider the most important question my teaching

philosophy statement should answer: Why? What do I think is the architectonic principle guiding

college-level writing? Is it to prepare students to get a job and enter a corporate setting? Is it to

prepare students to be informed, ethical, articulate citizens of the polis? Are these two mutually

exclusive? (No, not at all, a point made quite well by

href="http://www.slimcoincidence.com/blog/archives/000481.html">one of Krista's mentors

.)

If the goal is to help students become informed, ethical, articulate citizens of the polis, this goal can

be embodied in any number of assignments and curriculum designs, such as: letters to the editor, service

learning projects, visual rhetoric assignments such as posters, flyers, etc., research papers on current issues, new media work like

href="http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~edbauer/blogs/jenny/archives/001063.html">documentaries

about the

city, raps in the style of

href="http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Why-lyrics-Jadakiss/D51CB439F9F5669748256EAA0005A88C">Jadakiss

' "Why"

or

href="http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/I-Can-lyrics-Nas/27BA8A58E4406BED48256C93000A5718">Nas' "I

Can,"

and the work on sentimental discourse that some of my friends in literature are doing (which is

great stuff, and I have an aside on it). I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Even the

much-maligned "critical pedagogy" works in the service of the citizen goal, as does the personal essay,

which I'll readily admit despite

href="http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2004/11/15/assignment-sequences/">my reservations

about

it, and I know I'm being a real crabcake in that thread. :) Which curriculum designs and assignments do I think are the best suited to meet the larger goal?

These are the questions I'm thinking about so far. I know I'll need to speak to the implementation

of the philosophy with descriptions of exercises I do in class, and I need to discuss other issues too, such as authorship, collaboration, audience, and my use

of weblogs, which I intend to foreground. Any thoughts to help me? I'd appreciate them.

[This post is an aside to another post on composition pedagogy.]

I've been in conversations lately with students of literature who are studying the political impact of the sentimental novel. For some time, I'd listen to them talk about their work, but I was still confused; I still couldn't quite see the connection between the political and the sentimental. I thought about it some more and finally summoned an example from among the literature I've read that cleared it up for me: It's like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, no doubt a sentimental novel that had a huge political impact on the abolitionist movement, in no small part because the sentimental discourse and affective bonds portrayed in the novel helped readers to identify with Tom. I realized how connected this work on sentimental discourse is with Burke's theory of identification, how identification as Burke theorizes it is the mechanism through which sentimental discourse does its work:

4. IDENTIFICATION: DESCRIBES THE RHETORIC OF MOTIVES



a. As different than persuasion: consubstantiality (compensation for
division; still within the terms of the logology).

b. As a concern which more fully involves non-public modes.

c. A new definition for Rhetoric? The generation and fulfillment of
expectations through the use of symbols (forms)



Rooted in the notion of substances (physical objects, occupations, friends, activities, beliefs, values)

which we share with those with whom we associate. Sharing substances makes us consubstantial with others.

There are various possible substantial connections among and between interactants. Our symbolic ways for

marking consubstantiality are
identifications, upon which rhetorical action is based: "you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk

his language by speech, gesture,
tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, IDENTIFYING your ways with his." Here, identification is a

supplement to persuasion. Burke puts this more strongly--he might say that identification replaces

persuasion.

d. Three ways to use identification

i. as a means to an end

ii. to create antithesis (against some common foe)

iii. unconsciously and/or out of the conscious awareness of sender and/or receiver

I'm impressed. This is something I'd be interested in bringing into my pedagogical practice somehow. Last Spring, I took a modern rhetorical theory seminar with Art Walzer, who one day in class speculated on how different the study of rhetoric would be if identification, not persuasion, were the focus. The idea has stuck with me, and I'd like to see how scholars of sentimental discourse take it up, whether they do so in an explicitly Burkean framework or not.

Feministblogs.org is an aggregate of weblogs about feminist and politics from a feminist perspective. Check it out! So far, the contributors (not including myself) are:

• BlackFeminism.org
• Rad Geek
• Mouse Words
• Rox Populi
• Sappho's Breathing
• Sheelzebub
• Trish Wilson
• Wicked Muse
• feministe

Here's how to get your feed in there. I forgot to tell Rad Geek, who started this project, that he could just use my category-specific feeds for feminism and politics, but I can do that now, I guess. :)

Anyone interested in feminist theory, particularly as it applies to technology, ought to peruse the gender_cyber_archive, unless you already have and I'm the last to find out about it. In the archive are written essays and audio lectures in .ram format. I'm especially interested in these:

• Joan W. Scott, Fictitious Unities: «Gender,» «East,» and «West»
• Donna J. Haraway, Alpha Bitches Online: the Dog Genome for the Next Genderation
• Anne Phillips, Feminist Politics: Facing the Future
• Susan Stanford Friedman, Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy
• Angela Thomas and Valerie Walkerdine, Girls and Computer Games
• Maria Pini, Girls on Film: Video Diaries as 'Auto-Ethnographies'

Cross-posted to Kairosnews.