too broad vs. too narrow

Anne Donadey with Francoise Linonnet have written in their article "Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities" that "The boundaries among 'feminisms, genders and sexualities,' 'race and ethnicity,' 'migrations,' diasporas,' and borders," and "cultural studies" have become more and more porous"(225). I would argue that this is to the extreme. In this article they bring in almost every type of person. By the end of the article, the authors bring in "women, LGBTQ, people, people of color, post colonial people, women with disabilities, etc." The subject matter that they cover in this article is simply too wide to be of much use. I recently watched a television show that covered the MTF sexual reassignment as well as the FTM sexual reassignment and that itself can't just be thrown in with modern feminism or people of color. That each of these different cultural communities have scholars is important and informative but that is not to say that they all belong in the cultural stew Donadey has dreamed up. She would argue that, "transnational, comparative perspective has become central to indigenous studies." That in itself begs the question: are MTF and FTM scholars indigenous to anywhere? If not, are they marginalized? I don't see how all the different types of people named in this article are being brought together and I don't feel that they can all be fairly analyzed or compared one to the other. The only common denominator that I can see is that of liminal living...people who are perhaps between worlds, although Donadey does not actually say that. If I had written this article I certainly would have included the liminality that each of the written about communities share, and investigated the influence their scholarly writing.

On the other hand, I found Venuti's article "Translation Studies" too narrow, simply because the whole book containing this article could be based on translations. I've learned through the duration of this course that translation is everything. It seems to be the most important factor in a thorough scholar's work. Venuti gives a nice overview of the practice, but the variety of people involved in translating works over the years as he mentions it leaves out so much of what translation does to a piece of work, to the translator, and to the readers. It isn't his fault, as I am sure he meant for this essay to be an overview, as he himself states that he has been "necessarily selective" (308). I understand that he is focusing on key problems. Nevertheless, his focus is too narrow for my tastes.

good vs. bad in today's reading

The article “Race and Ethnicity” by Kenneth W. Warren dovetails and compliments that article which comes after it, “Migrations, Diasporas and Borders” by Susan Stanford Friedman. The first article is replete with examples of racism but also brings up the topic of race itself. An important question here is, “Might we not want to have race if racism didn’t come along with it?” I personally think the races are fine the way they are, and it’s fine if we mix them up, and I am truly sorry that the human race ever started thinking in racial terms to begin with. Another very important question brought up in “Race and Ethnicity” is the question of “whether or not the forms of collective identify compatible with race can be understood as necessary to our humanity” (249). It is most definitely necessary to our humanity! If we were all the same color and the same size and had the same culture, think of how boring life would be. I don’t want to live in a world where there are no different cultures. I enjoy the reading of different cultures in books, the different cultural foods; different cultural music… all of it is important to me and makes my life richer.
Meanwhile, we have the problems of people having to leave their native land where their own personal culture is at the forefront, and come to a new land where there are other predominant cultures. This leads me back to my original statement about race… the races are a good thing and should not be melted into one. The writing and the culture and the heritage of people who have to emigrate or immigrate for whatever reasons are important to all of us as humankind. We will lose all of the richness and the glory of what it is to be human if we in any way disparage or undervalue that which peoples from other lands bring when they leave their homeland and relocate.

Holquist et al compare/contrast

Holquist certainly gives us a lot to think about. I did not know that comparative literature was it's own field. It seems that all the work we do in the master's program is in some way related to comparing "this" to "that" in terms of what others have said about something and what we have to say about something. As it says in this weeks TSIS reading assignment, we have to make sure our sentences are related. But what is related in Comparative Lit? I do not actually see the need for a special comparative literature department or chair, but then again, I do not know a whole lot about what goes on in the inner workings of college administration. Based on all I know about high school administration, I don't even WANT to know what the head honchos at our campus or any other campus are coming up with. Holquist does present the point that "better comparison depended on deeper analysis of textual components (210). That is what we do in all the classes I have taken as a master program student! For me, Holquist does not succeed in convincing me that Comparative Literature is different than what any English major does.
Comparing literary works is a form of interpretation, and as Jerome McGann says, "The ideal interpreting agent can know the presence of the whole but never the sum of the parts." This is in direct opposition to Holquist, who seems to feel that comparing the parts is the way you find the whole. All in all, comparisons are a form of interpretation, and interpretation is the bigger issue, in my view.
Comparing and contrasting what a person reads over time is more than likely a natural occurance. Reading Siddhartha makes me think of certain parts of The Odyssey, so does that make me a comparative scholar? I don't think it does. I believe we compare what we read automatically, even if it is as simple as "I liked this book and I didn't like this one." That is still a valid, if oversimplified, comparison. But to interpret the book you liked AND THEN compare it to the book you didn't like is scholarship, therefore I think interpretation is more important than comparison.

Interesting opportunity

I am doing my research on John Updike and it just so happens he will be speaking at UCLA this Thursday. Here is the link.
http://www.calendar.ucla.edu/event_detail.cfm?MeetingID=173671
I would thrilled to go, since I am a huge fan, but I don't know if I can make it to LA Thursday night. I was just casting around for ideas on what you guys think I should do.

comparing and contrasting this week's texts

Why would Doris Sommer suggest that migrants play games of odd man out with their language? Is it really a game when African Americans signify a word to keep others in the dark? I believe the origins of African Americans “signifying” certain words come from being able to keep their secrets from the white people who owned them. I think that her use of the term “games” trivializes something very important. Sometimes people need a safer way to communicate. She comes back to this at the end of her essay by quoting Gates and Morgan but she doesn’t retract her use of the word “game” which makes the linguistic capabilities of people who can hide their real meaning from certain other people seem less important than it really is.
That being said, she seems to veer off towards a more thoughtful interpretation of multilingualism in the next sections of her essay. She moves through a high number of “they say” sentences about multiculturalism. I am learning this quarter about these “moves” of showing what others have said on a certain subject and then including what I have to say on that same subject. My problem with Sommer is mainly that she explains in depth and on many levels the issues that affect speakers of more than one language, but I didn’t feel that I was ever hearing her part of the conversation once she got rolling into the other strangely named sections of her essay. GOOD DAY? A JEALOUS SPIRIT? I used these divisions and tried to summarize what each separate section was about but could not do it. It surely has more to do with my lack of understanding than her writing, but I am trying to learn from the reading I do, and in her writing, I was mostly confused about what she was saying as opposed to what the people she was quoting were saying. Maybe her transitions are just so agile that I didn’t see them, therefore I could not distinguish her voice from those she quoted.
In contrast, Paul J. Hopper writes in a way that I can understand. Perhaps it is the fact that I like linguistics and I have already read about or studied much of what he writes about. I want to read “Historical Linguistics” by Larry Trask after reading about it in Hopper’s article. In fact, I want to memorize much of what Hopper says in this article because the information reminds me of how much the topic of linguistics excites me and the more I find out the more I WANT to find out. I want to know all there is to know and Hopper takes the time and the skill to give me a huge dose of linguistics in a lovely and learned way. “This process, whereby a sound that was once a mere phonetic variant comes to be an autonomous phonological unit, is known as phonologization.” Indeed! I read and reread that, almost wanting to applaud the simplicity of the explanation! Hopper has included everything I’ve learned so far in the field and added to my knowledge. I will return to his essay again and again. The material there is priceless.
Heidi Byrnes article is more about how we get language. I enjoy reading theories on how we acquire language because it helps me understand why I am STILL unilingual. I learned some new stuff about teaching my students that have English as their second language but I am most defeated by my inability to learn Spanish, not to mention Gaelic. I would love to move to Ireland and be a teacher there but the teachers there ALL have to be bilingual, English and Gaelic. I’ve been taking Gaelic lessons for a year and I can’t speak a word of it and can’t understand it either. I think everyone should be bilingual at a minimum but I can’t take my own advice. I tell the parents of my students all the time, speak your native tongue in the house; I don’t care what it is. Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean...The more the better and it makes me feel like just a sorry-assed old white lady to only know English.
The last reading for this week was TSIS pages 51-73. I can summarize that chapter quickly by saying that I had no idea what points Sommer was agreeing or disagreeing with, so I completely understood what TSIS was pointing to, and I agreed with, nay, was excited by, what Hopper wrote, and would use the techniques for agreeing with that TSIS gives on pages 56-57. By the time I finished reading the TSIS chapter, I was refreshed by the new knowledge of ways to show agreement (but with a difference) or disagreement.

To Quote or not To Quote

and I quote, "Antecedent and ConsequenceVery similar to cause and effect, this topic of invention invites one to consider events or consequences that follow given actions or conditions. The difference is that what follows may not be caused by what preceded it, but will naturally flow from those earlier conditions." The reason I found this so interesting is that our TSIS book seems to flow rather naturally from the article Textual Scholarship by Leah S. Marcus.

If we must quote lines from other writers in order to enter into the bigger discussion of the subject, how can we even know that what we are quoting is the original, or that it has not been changed in some way? I ask my students to always support their quotes in their essays, just as TSIS says, because otherwise the quote is just dangling out there. It needs a "sandwich" if you will. On the other hand, Marcus makes it clear that the very quote itself might be compromised, especially if it is from an old text.

What concerns me is how much of the learning and reading have I done that was in some way erroneous, because of ancient transcribers? How much can I believe of anything, or do I have to doubt everything?

(P.S. How many of you teachers can't use the blogger from your classroom computer? I can't and it pisses me off.)

Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature

The article Rhetoric by Susan C. Jarratt in our textbook (named in the title) is more than I can understand. If this is some one's idea of an "introduction" then we have different understandings about what an introduction actually is. It appears that the article is about the history of how rhetoric got started. She references many names, so many in fact that I got lost in the names. When I am reading a text I try to summarize every few paragraphs or so for my own notes and understanding. I was unable to summarize anything from Jarratt's article. I believe that using too many references in a paper does the opposite of show authority, especially in an "introductory" article. I get frustrated when I read something I can't understand, and Jarratt's article frustrated me.
Composition by David Bartholomae was easy by comparison to Jarrett, although it was not an easy read. The way the article is organized is in a more user-friendly way, and I found Bartholomae's voice was much more accessible. This might be because I understand composition. I teach high school composition all day every day. I have never had to teach anything about rhetoric... the word is seldom used in any of my teaching guides or teacher meetings. The research quoted by Bartholomae is tied in with anecdotes about the research, which makes it understandable, for me at any rate. Bartholomae's article taught me some interesting new ideas about writing. Jarratt's article made me feel stupid because I couldn't understand what points she was trying to make.

teaching writing is very difficult

In our textbook They Say I say: The moves that matter in academic writing, authors Gerard Graff and Kathy Birkenstein contend that templates are a good solid foundation for beginning writers. Writing templates can be used to break the spell of the writer’s block, to show writers where to pick up and start from, and a host of other well thought out plans for helping struggling writers be good writers and good writers become fantastic writers.
This might be true to the degree which they present in their book. I agree that with several different templates from which to choose, a person might be able to take into account what others have said on a topic, comb it in with his or her own ideas about the topic in a genuinely original way, and come out with a paper that is truly unique.
My problem stems from the fact that they offer several different templates and I am only allowed to offer one. It becomes a matter of degree for me as I read through this book. I teach high school English and the only template we are allowed to use is The Jane Schaffer Writing Program. In her writing program we are given ONE template to use and I suspect, especially after reading what we’ve read so far in TSIS, that one is not enough for the whole population to get. We appear to be stuffing all of our writers into one basket of noncreative crud. Graff and Birkenstein are way ahead of me on this argument, moving to counteract it before I even said it. On page 10 they say, “Many of our students complain that using templates will take away from their originality and creativity.” Yes, indeed, with just one template for the whole student body, how can it do anything but?
At Redlands High School we use the JSWP exclusively and it does not help the students that I have seen do anything except pass the CAHSEE. CAHSEE essay graders just look for those key elements of the template and therefore they can get through the piles of grading more efficiently. As a result of having to teach the JSWP for the last five years, I have grown to hate it. I have to agree with Graff and Birkenstein that there may be ways that templates benefit the writer, but mostly, to this high school teacher, one template above all (The Grand Jane Schaffer) makes essays that get turned in to me looking like little nooblets on parade with their little noob templates in rows. I know that some of my freshmen have intelligent thoughts. I read them in their journals. But the work they turn in with their required JS essays is mostly shite.

graduate program

It's so much more challenging than I was expecting. I have an appointment with Sunny Hyon on Monday so hopefully I'll get some real answers. I have felt like I was floundering every since I started the program, so a little bit of structure will help me quite a bit.
A little bit more energy would help me a lot too. Those energy drinks do not give me as much as I need and espresso makes me have weird angry mood swings. Not that any of this matters AT ALL, I just want to get in the habit of coming to this site and contributing something.

Tuesday blog

There's nothing of note for me to say, I'm just making sure I remember how to use this program.

First day of class

This is my first blog for Dr. Rhodes class. I HAVE to get an A this time, so no mercy.