Hi All,
Herewith, a slice of my book review– I am having a devilish time trying to come up with conf proposal topix…..

Honda, in its earliest days in the US motorcycle market, introduced its products in an ad campaign that quietly suggested, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.” The approach was absolutely brilliant: it directly sought to dispel the disparaging “biker” stereotype of motorcyclists by extending a fresh invitation to the uninformed to investigate for themselves.
Reading James Berlin’s most enjoyable Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures prompted the recollection. Myself being the uninformed in regard to the history of English studies, I recently finished Robert Scholes’ excellent The Rise and Fall of English, and then followed with Gerald Graff’s erudite Professing Literature. Mr. Berlin’s book rounded out the set, and while he is arguably the “biker” of the three authors in some of his professional convictions, it indeed seems to me that one meets the nicest people in English studies.
Berlin is an unabashed, eminently qualified booster for the study of rhetoric, and its critical importance to education, politics, indeed to life. In the book’s introduction, he announces that he is writing “from the perspective of one firmly situated in the rhetorical branch of the discipline”(xiii). He laments rhetoric’s gradual “marginalization” in curriculum, and in wry tones notes examples of its customary exclusion from current English studies bibliographies, even from Graff’s and Arthur Applebee’s histories of English. In this book, he sets out to give rhetoric its due after its “near century-long suppression”(xv), with a compellingly written dissertation that culminates with his recommendations for a better English studies.
The author begins by considering the “explicit” linkage between rhetoric and poetic, and how dominance has alternated between the two throughout history. Berlin states that English studies traditionally has seen the literary/poetic as “important and central”(3), but relegated rhetoric to the inferior position. This was caused, he says, by the vast economic and social changes that occurred in the 18th and 19th century: the aesthetic experience now came to be re-defined in class terms, and was “isolated …from the political and the scientific”(4). From Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, Berlin draws the class-based detail of how the concept of “literature” was re-defined, how aesthetic was elevated in importance, and the evidence for “general valorization of the subjective over the objective”(6); in Graff’s Professing Literature, he finds confirmation of the “institutionalizing of these dichotomies”(8), effectively relegating the lifeless, meaningless, material world to the language of logic. To further buttress his case, Berlin adduces the empirical findings of Pierre Bordieu, related in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bordieu’s admittedly-subversive work correlates the societal aspects of Williams’ and Graff’s writings to the high culture/high class, low culture/lower class binary opposition. Most intriguing is the Frenchman’s discussion of the nineteenth-century-originated “pure gaze”, a class-marker apparently imputed to be as revealing of class-level as the preference of eating solely with the hands.

Women and the Gendering of Talk, Gossip, and Communication Practices Across Media

Charting Transnational Native American Studies: Aesthetics, Politics, Identity

Nationalism(s) and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood

Recent Jewish American Literature and Trauma

Mortified: Representing Women’s Shame

The poetics of Pain: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Representation

I’d like to preface this by saying I’m less than pleased with the result of my book review.  I just couldn’t get into it and thus, I hate it (but I’m pretty sure the assignment hated me, so there you go).  Anyway, here’s a bit of my book review of the Berlin text:

Before diving into his methods and practices for adjusting the field, Berlin takes what seems to be a detour in his “Postmodernism in the Academy” chapter. Berlin’s purpose is to show how the various postmodern theorists and their philosophies can be utilized to “encourage literary criticism rather than a passive acquiescence to things as they are” (61). Berlin proceeds to wander through major postmodern players such as Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, giving overviews of their theories. While Berlin finds these explanations of structural and post-structural philosophies necessary to his argument, he unintentionally loses his reader in the process, and thus, his point for the chapter. Wading through the signs, signifiers, and the “differance” becomes a murky and arduous task for anyone not fully versed in postmodernism.

Unlike his previously mentioned precursors, Berlin recognizes the outside forces that impact the field of English studies; he explores the political, economic, and social state of the country. According to Berlin, it is the job of the English department to educate the students and help them become more critical of their own lives and—in turn—the texts they with which they are presented. Berlin writes, “Our business must be to instruct students in signifying practices broadly conceived—to see not only the rhetoric of the institution of schooling, of politics, and of the media, the hermeneutic of film, TV, and popular music” (100). This is an excellent way to ignite interest among English students who might not otherwise be engaged. With Berlin’s method of involving a number of serious issues as well as pop culture, English becomes more than just reading and writing.

Here’s are some of the ideas that I thought were interesting for a conference paper:

Individuals Shaping the Writing Center- MAWCA This is one the Dr. Lynch-Biniek suggested to the UWC staff and I’d really like to write for this.

Rhetorics of New Media-SWTXPCA Conference

Censorship-Transverse-U of Toronto

Sex, Death and Boredom-Fordham

I, too, am sorry you are ill, Dr. Mahoney (aka “Cuz”)!  You need to get better fast.  Without class tonight, my daughter is suggesting I should cook dinner.  At this point, I am checking all the pockets of my coats to see if I can come up with enough money for a hot dog or two from Yocco’s the  hot dog king.

Here’s an excerpt from my book review.  (I just emailed the entire review to you a few minutes ago.)

    In his last press conference before leaving office, President George W. Bush remarked:  “…I’m telling you there’s an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is.  That’s the reality of the world.  And I wish him all the very best”  (McKeeby).  It is reasonable to assume that the enemy to which “W” referred was an Al Queda terrorist (and that the person he wished well was President-elect Obama).   Some might argue that the greater threat to the United States in the last decade was not a weakened terroristic group, but the Bush administration’s use (or misuse) of language to promote its policies, especially the war in Iraq.   A Newsweek article entitled “Dunce-Cap Nation” suggests, however, that President Bush was not the only one to blame.    According to this piece, the results of a poll conducted in 2007, four years into the war in Iraq, indicated that forty-one percent of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, despite a lack of evidence to support this.  The article goes on to enumerate a number of subjects-geography, global affairs, religion-about which the respondents knew little if anything.  The good news was that a solid percentage could name the winner of the most recent American Idol competition; the bad news was that this was a much higher number than could name the chief justice of the Supreme Court (“Dunce-Cap”).

     What, one might ask, should be done about this?  As one of the oldest democracies in history, the United States of America faces some of the most complex issues of its time:  an economic meltdown, war on two fronts, and a crisis in healthcare.  Educating American citizens to deal with these questions appears more important now than ever.   So, to whom should this great responsibility fall?  In Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, James Berlin passionately argues that it is the role of English studies in colleges and universities to prepare a critical citizenry to participate in democracy.   He asserts:  “In short, education exists to provide intellectual, articulate and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community” (55).  It is the English professor in particular, according to Berlin, who will be the catalyst for this change.  “The teacher must thus serve as a transformative intellectual…concerned with improving economic and social conditions in the larger society” (122).  In Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, Berlin outlines a number of radical reforms which are needed to achieve this goal.

                The first of these is the resuscitation of English studies itself. In his opening sentence, Berlin declares:  “English studies is in crisis” (xi).  And indeed it is.  English studies once considered the king of the college curriculum and the kingmaker of the next generation of the country’s leaders is dying.   In the first two chapters of his book, Berlin traces the development of the English department in the United States and the internal conflicts that beset it, as Gerald Graff in Professing Literature had done.  Like his predecessor, Berlin, too, examines the economic shift in the 19^th century from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism and the resulting rise of the research university.  Unlike Graff, Berlin wisely takes this perspective one step further and uses it to springboard into a discussion of the results of the post-Fordian economy and postmodernism. In his third chapter, Berlin points out that before 1970 little criticism had been leveled at the college curriculum and the system of electives (50).  Businesses were making money, and colleges were supplying them the managers with which to do so.  With the transformation to a post-Fordian society, the decrease in the number of managerial positions meant a college degree no longer guaranteed employmentand those who were hired, according to their employers, were not considered up to par.  The greatest complaint voiced by company executives was that college graduates were unable to communicate well (51).   Obviously, this was an indictment of the university system as a whole and of English studies in particular.  At this point in the book, Berlin has led the reader to believe that the torchbearers of language, those in English studies, need to change their ways.  But how?

The Rise and Fall of English

So, I read the title and thought, “Wow! What a downer. Do I really need to read this text for my English Studies course?!” The answer of course is no. I don’t really need to read the book, but rather should and did. My own question becomes a huge question around English as a discipline, “Why should I read this book and how does it apply to my life?” I began reading with the misconception that Robert Scholes would be pointing out to his audience all of the defunct issues in regard to English as a language of study or a disciple, followed by providing the reader with all of the tools and answers; that is not quite the case. The text seems slightly dry at first, a first-hand, elitist-educated, professor’s account of all that is wrong with the system of higher education (of course through his rose-colored looking glass). However, after getting deeper into the text, great questions about the state and shape of something near and dear to my heart were raised with some pretty plausible suggestions as to how we can try to take a few steps in the right direction for the future of English, rather than demolish this educational keystone and start anew.

            After trudging through his biographical web, woven early in this five chapter commentary, the reader finds refreshing perceptions regarding college English courses. A specific account of this is on page 65, “To come back to our own situation, I think we may at present be too concerned with teaching the right ideas in the classroom and not concerned enough with teaching the most effective ways of speaking, listening, reading and writing.” (Scholes, 65) Scholes states on page 18 of his work, “As I understand it, the fall of English is partly the result of cultural shifts that are beyond the power of English departments to change-though not beyond their power of creative response.” (Scholes, 18)  Scholes cries for a reconstruction of English studies to be more appropriately geared to the current time and place. This does not imply that older texts are worthless, but rather, need to be read in a new way and applied to the shifts in one’s culture that are forever taking place. On several occasions, Scholes repeats his theory that in order for students to appreciate age old texts, they must be able to relate these works to their own time and culture and figure out exactly how that text speaks to them and their circumstances.

            Scholes also places a significant responsibility on staff and students in his text; constantly calling upon professors and teachers alike to push for the changes that he recommends later in the book. He also offers, “It means also that we teachers must employ a pedagogical rhetoric that will earn for us the respectful attention of those we are teaching.” (Scholes, 65) Scholes is not blaming any one person or group of people for allowing English to disintegrate, rather he is advising that before the state of this subject becomes anymore dire, changes need to be instituted. I tend to agree with Scholes plan for evading the entire plunge of English Studies as a whole, in an attempt to head off English becoming much like Greek or Latin.

            Scholes’ approach is very clear and concrete. He is earnest in his undertaking. On page 67 he notes, “I am suggesting that we can diminish what I call our hypocriticism by undertaking to do this job as honestly and decently as we can.” (Scholes, 67) This statement clears the air of any possible hidden political agendas as well. His examples and suggestions as to how we can overhaul the English departments seem quite prescriptive and organized, yet allow room for interpretation and adjustment. One perception of Scholes’ that should not be ignored is his adamant stance regarding social structure and its role in one’s education. “I mention our social structure because it is the key to what as become of English as well as to what is becoming of it.” (Scholes, 75)

The book is set up into five chapters, each chapter being immediately followed by an assignment that correlates to the previous chapter. These assignments were both practical and amusing. The assignments helped to shed light on the material covered in the prior chapter, as well as served to drive the point home that change is immediately needed in our system with the animation of real-life experiences. Scholes writing is easy to follow and flows nicely. He is convincing in his claims, most importantly, “…to function as a citizen of these United States one needs to be able to read, interpret, and criticize texts in a wide ranges of modes, genres, and media.” (Scholes, 84) Again in this chapter, Scholes takes on partial responsibility for himself and his peers for the current situation and encourages English instructors to avoid “inherited professionalism or personal preferences” as qualification for certain texts to be taught as literature.

Appreciation is in order for the straight-forwardness of the text and the application of assignments following each chapter, particularly Chapter 4. This assignment comes directly from tried and true practices and is perhaps not the purest test, but a good experiment for how to and where to start to make the necessary changes to the curriculum that Scholes notes has existed seemingly forever. “That English curriculum that came into being around the turn of the nineteenth century is still the English curriculum.” This definitely seems like a problem. Scholes advises, “I do not expect to solve our problems here, only to advance our discussion of them beyond the point of mutual accusations and recriminations.” (Scholes 103) Scholes makes the realization that it will require s constant dialogue from those involved in the study of English to come to some agreement as to how the current issues can be solved. However, he does contribute to this dialogue by the assignment at the end of chapter four, Pacesetter English. I believe that if this approach made it to fruition across the board, there might be more hope for the discipline as a whole. This seems plausible for a number of reasons, especially as his approach is grounded in very similar structure as the current curriculum, mainly requiring some tweaking. I can stand behind an approach that is accompanied by the disclaimer found on page 142, “…it helps to have a curriculum that both students and teachers can believe in, because they can see that it is aimed at helping students to develop better intellectual equipment for the lives they are actually living and will continue to live.” (Scholes, 142) This is perhaps the single best quote from the text to use as armor for those in opposition to a restructuring of the English discipline. Yes, it may be true that Scholes is dreaming. Maybe this change will never happen. Perhaps a better plan is out there or may come along somewhere down the line. The book isn’t a how-to, it is a start. Something that Scholes can claim is that he tried. At least he tried. Too many of us are bogged down in the current system and keep recycling the same old texts, not because they have universal meaning to us and our students alike,  but because they are those same texts that we were taught in school as holding a special place in the literary world. We can’t really explain why…why we teach them…why we love them…why they are important. So, it is time for a change. We need to be experiencing and analyzing and understanding those texts that are vital to our cultural survival and longevity. Scholes made a start.

Works Cited

Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a

     Discipline. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

Feel better, Dr. Mahoney!

I am just going to post an excerpt from my paper as well. I found this review a bit difficult to write because I have basically accepted the fact that I’m terrible at summarizing. I tried, but I”m not sure how much that counts for anything.

I will be checking out the conference proposals tonight, so I will be blogging about that in the near future.

Scholes Book Review:

In the next chapter, Scholes considers the issue of “truth” within the English discipline. Scholes supports his main claim that “we have become reluctant to make claims of truth about the matters we teach” (39) by analyzing works authored by famous philosophers/theorists such as John Ruskin, Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Acknowledging Derrida’s fact that we “ ‘feel bad about ourselves’ ” (39), Scholes highlights reasons for the decline of English and why English teachers need to believe in what they are teaching. He mentions that we need to try to answer the questions of “how we became what we are and what we do” (58). Scholes makes those involved with English think about reasons why they are so attached to the discipline. He makes readers search and analyze the purpose of the English curriculum and question whether or not they are being true to themselves.

In the second assignment titled “Theory in the Classroom,” Scholes uses an example of theoretician Louis Althusser’s experiences in composition and rhetoric to show how teachers must provide their students with instruction on rhetoric that will allow them to express their values and beliefs and gain respect by doing so. Scholes feels as if English teachers are “too concerned with teaching the right ideas in the classroom and not concerned enough with teaching the most effective ways of speaking, listening, reading, and writing” (65). To change this, teachers need to assign texts that will help improve students’ rhetoric so that they can express themselves with purpose and meaning. Yet again, Scholes is determined to change the views of present English teachers in order to improve the discipline.

Thanks alot guys… now I cant wish Mahoney to feel better either, cuz you already did it; you stole all my brown-nosing fire!

I found Scholes’s discussion of truth theory to be one of the liveliest sections of the entire book.  Aptly named “No dog would go on living like this,” in this chapter Scholes laments the demise of the concept of truth as a solid structure in the face of rising correspondence and coherence theory.  While he spends perhaps a little too much time re-hashing a literary battle between himself and fellow scholar and philosopher Richard Rorty, which sometimes borders between hurt feelings and academic discussion, his defense is, nevertheless, passionate and sincere.

            “My notion of academic truth, I must respond, is not profound, but neither is it nebulous.  I have already touched upon it.  It resides in words at lower order of abstraction: words like fair, accurate, and comprehensive.”(Scholes 57)  He persists with further implications for his concept of truth in the following passage:

The “love of truth” seems to me the first protocol of teaching, upon which any others we might devise would depend… As a habit of mind, the love of truth is one of the great things we, as teachers, have to offer, but we cannot offer it merely by talking about it; we have to enact it, to embody it in our whole practice as scholars and teachers.  This means being truthful with ourselves about how we came to be where we are, what interests we are serving, and what good we hope to accomplish. (Scholes 57)  

          Truth and the love of truth are essential to Scholes – the truth as a construct must exist if the pursuit of truth is to exist, and such is what defines most of the humanities. As we will soon see, Scholes wants to take this love of truth and seek it in a rigorous way; but before we turn to that proposal we must also examine his views on culture and rhetoric.

There is an excerpt from my paper; the rest will follow via email

Don’t be fooled, I really hope you get better Dr. Mahoney and I hope everyone else stays well. I was actually looking forward to class tonight! I’m going to include just a section of my book review since it’s about 1600 words and I don’t want to overload everyone. The personal study plan (which I haven’t written yet ) was actually pretty easy to plot out since I am realistically doing this program for myself and not for any specific specialization. I did start reading Ostergaard and I call dibs on section four! I’ve really enjoyed that so far after looking at all of them, so I would prefer to work on that section. Finally, I haven’t even begun to consider a conference proposal. Frankly, the whole thing makes me nervous. I’ll spend a little time today doing that so I might be able to have something to say later this weekend about it. Now, on to my book review!

I’m really concerned about my book review. It hovers somewhere between formal and informal and I can’t decide if I’m comfortable with that or not. I’m a little bit of both, so I guess it’s ok that my paper is a mixture as well!

I wonder how many teachers actually consider what they’re offering their students. One thing Scholes has told me I can offer “are the artifices that work, a rhetoric that will enable them to gain the respectful attention of those around them for their feelings, thoughts and values” (65). Making my students eloquent would be a fabulous thing. But how do I do this? Again, Scholes has the answer. He uses Althusser as his launching point: “[w]hat he absorbed and retained was their good rhetorical habits, even as he ultimately rejected their values” (65). In other words, it’s not what I teach, but how I teach. I can’t make my students lovers of English, but I can let them see my passion for the written word and let them know that it’s okay to not like English, but they shouldn’t be afraid of it either. We spend too much time covering material and not enough working students through the process of reading to take away the mystique, which we guard so jealously.

            Another consideration I had with Scholes was my purpose as a teacher. Why am I here? Scholes tells us that “[w]hat I mean, then, by becoming an English teacher, includes a sense of one’s own limitations, an awareness of how deep the sea of English is and how shallow and frail one’s boat” (70), The depth of the sea is one of the things I hope to diminish, at least in my mind, by obtaining my master’s degree, which will allow me to add extra support to my boat as well as my students’ boats. From there they can start to work with English in respect to their own cultures. Scholes mentions two questions to consider: “…how can we put students in touch with a usable cultural past. The other [question] is how we can help students attain an active relationship with their cultural present” (104). Finally, I have to remember that “[m]aterial ‘covered’ in classrooms and not incorporated into the communicative lives of students simply fades away” (149). With testing requirements, I often feel the pressure to cover the material, but that’s not the best way to teach my students and be a purposeful teacher.

Dr. Mahoney,

Hard to follow up the two preceding posts but get healthy (and keep your family healthy) so we can continue arguing about what English is in class. Below is an excerpt of my review on Scholes. The entirety of it is coming your way in email. Take care, all.

The basis of Scholes’ argument takes us back to the 1700’s, when backbones of university programs like Greek, Latin, and rhetoric were replaced or lost priority. These changes are evident in students’ readings on page twelve. “The concept of belles letters, as developed in the late eighteenth century, served then as a transition from an older view of literature as including all kinds of written works worthy of study, to a different view that led to a curriculum dominated by Romantic notions of genius and imagination…” In the late 1760’s we saw courses such as grammar, language, and composition spearhead English departments’ focuses. Students who were formerly required to read Socrates and Plato were putting pencils to paper on a more regular basis; however, the idea of more grammar and composition was not what we would envision now. These students were writing solely for the purpose of oral delivery, with very little emphasis on sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, etc.