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Berlin part 1

Yay rhetoric!  I was pleased, of course, when I saw that we were going to be studying a book with rhetoric already in the title
I really have enjoyed the book thus far – I thought that Scholes was going to be my favorite, because he tackled some tough issues on truth and English [...]

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Pure Gaze…hmmm

ok, so I wanted to get this all in and typed up prior to class, but this has been a VERY crazy week in the life of Leann. I am so intrigued by this concept of “pure gaze” and would really like to delv into this area and explore more, when time lends itself to [...]

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Cultural Diapers

I apologize for posting so soon before class, but my arms hurt from picking up all of the names Berlin was dropping. (I agree with Eric for once!)
Now on to the post-
My Literary Criticism class last year with Dr. Forsyth got me interested in aesthetics and the evaluation of art, beauty, literature, and the ultimate [...]

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Finally, finding MY place in the text.

Maybe I was just more caffeinated this week, but I found Berlin’s writing refreshing and more comprehensible compared to Graff and Scholes. I’ve only gotten through chapter 3 as of this blog post, but I was more engaged in these three chapters than in most of the other writing this semester.
First I appreciated Berlin’s clear [...]

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The role of education in postmodern production

In the chapter Postmodernism, the College Curriculum, and English Studies Berlin repeatedly emphasizes the qualities that postmodern workers need in order to adapt to the “Post-Fordist” system of production that fosters “flexible accumulation.”  One of David Harvey’s descriptions of this term is as follows: “Flexible accumulation appears to imply relatively high levels of ‘structural’ (as [...]

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Curriculum Shmiculum (that’s the best I could do)

One of the most interesting parts of Berlin was his discussion of the curriculum and colleges’ desire to “provide a stable core of general studies that unified the educational experience of the students” (38).  Coming from a private, liberal arts college, I experienced the core curriculum Berlin describes.  Some classes were interesting, some were useful, [...]

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Guess who’s coming to dinner, whatever that means.

 “What’s for dinner?” my daughter asked me last night as I was reading Berlin’s Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures.
 “What exactly do you mean by that?” I sighed.
 “I mean, what’s for dinner?” she repeated impatiently.
 “Well, Katie, before I answer that question I have to consider the fact that in this postmodern world, the word ‘dinner’ is just [...]

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Thoughts on Berlin

I am definitely enjoying the Berlin reading. His style is more spirited and more assertive than Scholes’, whose efforts on curriculum reform the author clearly finds inadequate: he notes Scholes’ “political timidity… reluctance… to explore fully the subversiveness of the charges leveled at the English department” along with his “scrupulous avoidance” [...]

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Hi, this is Eric. I need to get lunch right now, so just insert a witty title at the beep and we’ll talk about it later.

I’ll start by saying that Berlin’s writing, to me, is a rather dense mess of name-dropping, references and defenses that obfuscates what his point truly is. However, with that being said, I think that despite this he does build a case for his consideration of English Studies, Cultural Studies and whatever the hell else he [...]

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English Studies + Politics = Inseparable

“…given the democratic political commitments of the United States, it is as impossible for us to separate Literary and Rhetorical texts from political life as it was for the citizens of ancient Athens” (xiii). By bringing this quote at the introduction, I thought Berlin wants us to read his text with the understanding that politics [...]

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theoretically, Berlin writes (Berlin 1987)

Chapter 4 would have been a beast to read if I had not taken Lit Crit. It was difficult the first time around to understand signifiers and signified, differance and binaries when we read essays by Derrida, Focault, and Lacan. Lit Crit course content prepared us to deconstruct literary poems and prose, challenge dominant, homogeneuos discourses, and [...]

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Yay for sinus infections!

Strange title, I know. But given the time I had while sitting on the couch, wondering if my brain was going to climb out of my eyeballs, I started to read Berlin. My first impression was a ridiculous similarity to Graff. The same language, the same overall tone toward the reader. I found it interesting [...]

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English means Business

I’m not sure if it was just my mental state this week or what, but I really had a tough time with Berlin. I actually enjoyed reading Scholes the past two weeks, but as soon as I started with the reading for this week, I began to wish that Scholes had written a longer text. [...]

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Dealing in Cultural Capital

One section of the text that I liked was Berlin’s ideas about “cultural capital.”  I really was intrigued by Berlin’s comments that those of us in the educated middle class can never really hope to achieve “bourgeois status,” so instead, we strive to accumulate cultural capital–our educational certificates and academic achievements are what sustain us.  I [...]

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The Unassigned Text

I spoke about my students responding to the “This I Believe” journal prompt last Wednesday. This is a collage of their voices responding to their own lives, which does engage them. And, yes, having this rich of an interpretive community puts a “bad” day of a non-engaging activity in perspective.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
The Unassigned Text
I believe in love. [...]

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ok…sorry this is late…but

ok, so i have been sooo busy lately and trying to keep up with the blogging. This one would have been my first one missed (i think) so I wanted to make sure it was posted, even if it was late. Class last week was engaging as usual and it made me think about the [...]

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Method vs. Material

Favorite section of the reading thus far (or the only section I was awake for? grad school is wearing on me…), hands down:
“Knowledge that is not usable and regularly used is lost. The knowledge that we retain is the knowledge that we can and do employ. There is an important educational principle in the old [...]

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Sholes part 2

I never posted a part one last week, stuff’s just really crazy/busy right now, as I’m sure it is for everyone – work, school, relationships, etc.  Anyways -
My part one came in class, when I discussed my curiosity at how Scholes was attempting to reconcile the teaching of current media-centered rhetoric with the traditional management [...]

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Trivium

I have mixed feelings about his ideas. Because he uses deconstruction on such ideas as the “canon,” should we deconstruct his Trivium? Of course he is talking about the plural of trivial; however, the allusion to triumvirate of power shared among the Roman rulers seems to subvert his “down playing” of his “trivium” of grammar, dialectic, [...]

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