[My paper from the Conference on College Composition and Communication panel I put together, Composed in the Wake of Disaster: (Re)Writing the Realities of New Orleans]

Questioning the Histories of Katrina: Narrative Analysis in the Writing Classroom

In 1978, Kenneth Burke and Fredric Jameson had a brief but important exchange in the journal Critical Inquiry. Jameson first published his rereading, which he also calls a rewriting, of Burke’s dramatistic analytic as “The Symbolic Inference: or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis.” Jameson more or less applauds Burke for providing a tool we can use to conduct ideological analysis of texts, whether they be literary or other cultural artifacts or historical discourses purporting to report what “really” happened. What Jameson in this article calls ideological analysis he gives a slightly different name by the time he publishes The Political Unconscious: that is, narrative analysis. (And as an interesting side note, Jameson’s bio in this issue of Critical Inquiry describes his next project as The Political Unconscious, with the subtitle Studies in the Ideology of Form. But of course, when the work actually appears, the subtitle turns out to be Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.) In this paper, I want to offer a brief summary of the Jameson-Burke exchange by way of fleshing out a model for narrative analysis and then apply that model to two of the best and most popular histories of Hurricane Katrina.

In an article I read today (Donald C. Stewart. “Harvard’s Influence on English Studies: Perceptions from Three Universities in the Early Twentieth Century.” College Composition and Communication. 43 (1992) 455-71.) that discussed the perceived influence of Harvard's late-nineteenth-century writing program on other schools, Columbia's Brander Matthews applied this moniker to MLA. Matthews, it turns out, would become MLA's president two years later. And during these years, he and other colleagues from Columbia, such as Joel Spingarn, struggled with Harvard faculty over control of MLA. One cause of the struggle, Donald Stewart suggests, was an intense animus based on Harvard's exportation of what has come to be called current-traditional rhetoric, which these men, along with Michigan's Fred Newton Scott, considered pedantic and vapid.

Stewart more or less agrees. Of Harvard's Adams Sherman Hill, the fifth Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and a major force behind current-traditional (his Principles of Rhetoric is representative), Stewart writes: "when one considers the damage done to writing instruction in this country for so long by Hill's influence, and the tremendous difficulty of overcoming that damage, even now, one has good reason to regret the failure of more English teachers in this country to look to Ann Arbor instead of Cambridge for guidance in shaping their writing programs" (469).

I saw The Mist this weekend, and I've already had one conversation with a co-worker defending my dislike of the film. Within the first five minutes, the dialogue--and its delivery--reveals a lot of the lameness that is to come. Still, I watched the film with a lot of interest after it became clear that Marcia Gay Harden's Mrs. Carmody posed at least as great a threat to the characters' well-being as the weird shit in the mist. Carmody is a skilled rhetor, and when combined with the fact that her diagnoses of the apocalyptic meanings of events in the community strike a chord, she becomes a persuasive force. Protagonist David says of Carmody at one point, "By tomorrow night, when those things come back, she'll have a congregation. And then we can worry about who she's gonna sacrifice to make it all better." Indeed (and here we witness the filmmaker's and King's paranoia), Carmody does resort to sacrifice.

But even before danger is imminent, characters (the ones who end up resisting her "seduction") dislike Mrs. Carmody for her religious rhetoric. And not only do they dislike her; they're perfectly willing to silence her forcibly. Amanda Dumfries slaps Carmody and then tells the others, "I'm sorry everybody, but this lady's perspective is a little too Old Testament for my tastes." Irene (still looking like Bunny MacDougal) throws cans of peas at Carmody, justifying violence by saying it's just "stoning," which is "perfectly okay" to do to "people who piss you off," since "They do it in the Bible."

Now I know which dissertation chapter to write next. (Perhaps too ambitious) abstract follows:

Toward a Responsible Pedagogy: Linguistic Standardization and the Erasure of Language, 1878-2007

When it comes to speakers of different dialects, can “rhetorical pedagogies,” as this year’s CFP asks, “promote understanding and identification?” This paper suggests that the answer is yes only if we resist “the erasure of language” from the composition classroom, as Susan Peck MacDonald’s June CCC article of that title urges (though it traces the very process of erasure since the 1970s). Instead of ignoring language, our instruction in composition should provide our students with metalinguistic awareness—teaching, for instance, about grammatical choices.

In support of such a pedagogy, this paper looks back, proposing that we reinvestigate late-nineteenth-century grammar and rhetoric textbooks. The period was unusually concerned with dialect and grammatical deviance—as literature, newspapers, and the furious publication of both linguistic self-help and grammatical criticism books all attest. Scholars have traced to roughly this moment (Adams Sherman Hill’s Principles of Rhetoric appeared in 1878) the current-traditional rhetoric—which Sharon Crowley has critiqued for “its theoretical backwardness and its pedagogical limitations.” But this paper will argue that current-traditional’s pedagogical limitations, by ignoring the process of composition and remaining inattentive to language itself, effectively rewarded possessors of linguistic capital, legitimating their existing linguistic practices and hence enhancing their value on various markets (occupational, social, and economic). If the current-traditional pedagogy thus salved the linguistic anxiety expressed by the culturally refined in the nineteenth century, then its conservative thrust has remained underanalyzed.

We're studying the 1996-97 Ebonics controversy in RHE 310 right now. I asked students to read, initially, articles from the Washington Times and New York Times reporting the Oakland School Board's adoption of the Ebonics resolution and, then, the original resolution itself (as well as the amended resolution and the Linguistics Society of America's Resolution on the Oakland "Ebonics" Issue).

I asked my students to rhetorically analyze and respond to the reports in both Timeses. Many of their posts on our blog argued that, while we may justifiably concede that Ebonics is linguistically legitimate, we need to recognize that Standard English is required for success—and for circulating in middle-class America. Of course, I would suggest that this conclusion skips a step—and hence, misses the most crucial point. We should instead ask another question: should Standard English be required for success?

Of course, the other question we should ask—have asked, and answered—is what "the standard" looks like; and yet, even after concluding that we can't really say, except that it looks much like the language I use, whoever I am, students—and others—can't abandon the idea of the standard. I say others because in my dissertation writing group yesterday, readers of a conference paper I'm presenting in a few weeks asked whether my critique of a standard meant I wouldn't correct students' "mis-use." (While I wouldn't "correct" them for unconventional usage, I would make a rhetorical point about how they might expect their audiences to respond to a violation of convention.) Why is this always the reaction people have to challenges to the standard? I would suggest it has everything to do with imagining the standard as unchangeable, as too powerfully entrenched to be modified. Isn't this defeatist thinking at its worst? The equivalent to thinking one's vote in the presidential election doesn't matter? Of course, it doesn't, in either case, except that the aggregation of such attitudes does--and doing nothing effectively reproduces the status quo (in both cases).

Reading Jim Berlin’s monograph on nineteenth-century composition pedagogy (Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges), I recognized one of the struggles I’ve been having with my dissertation—with, that is, the point of it all. Berlin notes that as current-traditional rhetoric took root in the 1880s and 90s, figurative language, which had (almost) always been part of rhetorical analysis, fell less under scrutiny in rhetoric and more under the domain of literature departments—or the growing literary impulse in language departments. Rhetoricians and composition instructors were left, if they wanted to analyze language, with attending to grammar and usage. At the same time, the rise of the elective system nearly abolished the demand for classical languages, long the claim of distinction for the educated class. What replaced this mark of distinction was consistent and standard usage of the prestige dialect (72). And as the importance of prestigious usage filtered into composition textbooks, authors began to prescribe grammatical rules with the “conviction of the scientist, unconscious that they are reporting a class bias, not a physical law” (73).

It’s the degree of consciousness that’s tripping me up. As I explain my dissertation to non-specialists, the standard’s source in class bias is really news; it may even need evidence. But for my dissertation, they’re not my audience. And my audience more or less knows that grammatical standards are largely class markers. Of course, it’s not like non-specialists aren’t influential in manifesting attitudes and passing judgments that participate in exclusion, etc. It’s not even the case that such attitudes and judgments aren’t informed by what these non-specialists have learned in school. Thus, such people operate under the classical (“false conscious”) definition of ideology: “they do not know it, but they are doing it” (as Marx writes in Capital). But since it is the case that language teachers—at least those in the conversations I’d like to enter—know about their responsibilities to dismantle such attitudes and judgments, we would expect the effects of such attitudes and judgments to die out. And yet they aren’t—and if complaints about who can and can’t put a sentence together are any indication, neither is students’ grammar successfully being standardized. So what gives?

So the four most common searches this site gets correspond to the four "all time" most popular posts to the left.

Just within the last 48 hours, for instance, people have reached here by searching:
Silas Lapham,
mimetic desire
McTeague, and
Walter Benn Michaels new historicism (though I get a lot of WBMs without the "new historicism").

Now, I'm especially unhappy with what people find when they search for Silas Lapham, so forthcoming will be my paper from ALA on that novel.

But also, I suspect that people searching for Michaels often are looking for information about his newest book. Since I've reviewed it for Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Spring 2007), here's a preview and a link to the review:

Scott’s loss—though it’s now been found—had me thinking as I read through Annie Kilburn this weekend. During the pivotal delivery of Rev. Peck's sermon, he claims:

There is an evolution…in the moral as well as in the material world, and good unfolds in greater good; that which was once best ceases to be in that which is better.

This is really quite extraordinary, as is Peck’s argument moments later, “There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it.” He finds no anxiety because in contrast to the hypocritical churchgoers who profit by their relation to “monopolies...founded upon ruin” and that “prophesy the end of competition,” at least the evolutionist—the religious “sceptic”—even if his “words perhaps deny Christ” “affirm Him” with his “works.” For Peck, monopoly is just one more step to be churned in the dialectical process (though of course he doesn’t use that taxonomy). This is what separates him from the capitalist—who sees monopoly (or the elimination of competition) as a sort of telos. (Note that this also separates him from Bellamy [or Leete]—albeit in a different way—who tells us that monopoly was the solution, if we could only have seen it—it just needed to be controlled by the state. State capitalism! Too bad Bellamy didn’t live to see the Soviet version…) And this is Peck's twist on the scripture, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Evolution equals resurrection and more life.

Here's a rather long summary of Lucille M. Schultz's The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois UP, 1999).

Schultz shows us early on that 19th Century (primary, for the most part) education witnessed a number of changes: (1) many more students began attending educational institutions, (2) educators began to think in more sophisticated ways about the cognitive development of children and therefore about ways of educating children, (3) composition instruction really began to occur—whereas previously writing instruction had involved little more than handwriting, parsing, and copying sentences from memory, (4) as a result of 2 and 3, composition for primary school students moved from a focus on writing about abstract topics to thinking about practical topics, (5) which also signals that primary and secondary education were no longer intended for elite students to be trained for further education (for the ministry or law), but rather for citizenship, and (6) “regular practice” (32) became the pedagogical method of teaching composition. Of course, if 1 is a material condition that affected the process, so is the advent of stereotyping and other innovations in printing (between 1800 and 1850 [27])—which made the reproduction of textbooks far easier and cheaper, and hence, more affordable for students. And so textbooks began to proliferate.

In her second chapter, Shultz complicates the traditional history of composition instruction (as represented by Crowley and Berlin) that recognizes Richard Green Parker and George Payn Quackenbos as the important figures of 19th C. composition pedagogy. While it's true that those figures dominate the pedagogical landscape, they barely alter traditional instruction (from 18th C. British rhetoricians like Blair, Smith, and Whatley and their grammar school adaptations like John Walker’s Teacher’s Assistant), whereas pedagogues like John Frost, Charles Morley, and F. Brookfield move beyond an insistence on (1) memory of rules and grammar—emphasizing instead actual practice in writing, (2) limited estimations of children’s capacities—wherein memory and imitation was all students were thought capable of, and (3) a refusal to recognize composition other than “exposition, argument, and narrative [“classical stories rather than stories that would emerge from the writer’s life”].” As compensation, these authors taught no rules—or taught rules only after students gained practice in writing; offered assignments and prompts that asked for description of objects and scenes—a kind of demand that recognized young students’ adjusted levels of development; and began to ask for personal expressive writing.

I am a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas's Department of English, writing a dissertation on class, language-arts pedagogy, and realism in nineteenth-century America. I teach in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing.

Here's one abstract of my dissertation:
A recent unit of my Intermediate Expository Writing (RHE 310) course considered language variation. My students read extensively in scholarship about Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English, discovering, for instance, that the Linguistic Society of America regards Ebonics as “systematic and rule-governed,” “fundamentally regular,” and, linguistically speaking, not in any way inferior to what we typically call “Standard English.” The students were persuaded that popular beliefs equating Ebonics with “bad English” are misguided, and they recognized that teaching Standard English as “correct” English or even as more socially functional reproduces the unfortunate, exclusionary, and factitious distinction between the “standard” and the “bad.” Nevertheless, these students overwhelmingly concluded that the best thing to do for Ebonics speakers, if they want to succeed, is teach them Standard English.

When I observed that discovering some practice to be flawed and continuing to do it anyway is not the traditional goal of education, my students expressed a feeling of impotence to change longstanding assumptions and habits about Standard English. Not only undergraduate writing students feel this way, but that they do presents us most immediately with a dilemma in the language arts discipline: as a precondition of conventional economic and social success, Standard English must be made available to our students, and yet in fulfilling our pedagogical mission, we help sharpen the distinction and increase the distance between those with access to privilege and those without. Hence the need for our discipline not to ignore the power of language standards in our culture.