William Rodney Herring

[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.

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.

My friend Greg the other day in the forgotten context of some conversation pointed out the small irony that the city has somehow got the stereotype of being a rude place with all the busy-ness and congestion. But of course our whole notion of politeness is based (etymologically, at the very least) on the concept of the polis--or so it would seem. As I paused to look this up, I discovered that in fact polite derives from the Latin word (politus) meaning to polish (hence: to be polite is to be polished--to be well-mannered). Here's the etymological explanation from the OED, whose link is too complex to be of any use.

[<classical Latin politus, past participle of polire to smooth, to polish (see POLISH v.), also as adjective in figurative senses (of people, their manners, or their appearance, or of writings or activities) polished, elegant, accomplished, refined, cultivated, courteous. Cf. Old French, Middle French, French poli smooth, shiny (c1160), (of words) careful, well-chosen (late 12th cent.), (of words) cultured (1580), (of a people or country) civilized (1681), (of a person) courteous, well-mannered (1694), Old Occitan polit (of a word in a poem) well-chosen (c1160), smooth, shiny (13th cent.), Catalan polit (14th cent.), Spanish pulido polished (literally and figuratively), refined (late 13th cent.), Italian polito smooth, shiny, (of writing or speech) well-chosen, polished, refined (a1327).

I guess two points are worth making. (1) there's a note under the etymology for policy that suggests that the confusion of the roots has led to semantic blurring over the years. (2) we could probably make the same link between civil and civis, though of course being civil is a little less difficult for an actor (and a little less comforting for the recipient), so it doesn't really matter what the roots of polite are--there's a link between politeness and the cosmopolis.

"it is difficult to help others when we cease to need help ourselves. A man begins poor, or his father or grandfather before him—it doesn’t matter how far back he begins—and then he is in accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron, an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his help is not an impulse of love that ought to bind us all together, but a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong.”

I've added the emphasis, but really, this needs little commentary. These are the words of the minister Julius Peck in William Dean Howells's little read novel Annie Kilburn. And they say it far better than mine.

It's all ("Dinner at the Foodies’: Purslane and Anxiety") predicated on this stupid statement:

in New York, where there are fewer status indicators.

Uh...is this a willful blindness to the fact that our society is pervaded by status indicators, which find illimitable and usually complex forms of articulation or embodiment?

And while I'm at it, who thinks this is news?

And for him, serving a dish that is on the menu at several good restaurants in the city right now — a fava bean salad with shaved pecorino, for instance — would be like being caught reading “The Lovely Bones” right after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it.

Duh! Distinction was a massive study of precisely this phenomenon 30 years ago.

Of course, my dismissive tone toward the NYT article may seem a little like I'm endorsing the behavior of these foodies. Far from it. I'm just not surprised.

But perhaps my tone reveals the attitude that such people shouldn't be publicized since that in some way validates their absurd behavior. Instead, should we shun such superficiality out of existence (as though we could)? It's not like this article is an expose with the thrust of ridiculing these people. In fact, a Vassar professor ridicules himself (admitting he's a "propagator" of foodiness), but of course that doesn't stop him.

Predictably, this is not unlike the insidious, self-ironizing liberal (such as perhaps that prototype Basil March) habit of thinking that adequate embarrassment about one's sins will forgive one for continuing to commit them.

Took my Three Area Exam yesterday, and I opened with the following statement, which plays off a column my friend Greg sent me on Sunday.

I want to begin by talking about a recent event, which is relevant to my topic, and which connects my dissertation to a larger political interest.

Last Wednesday, January 31, Joseph Biden, announced his presidential candidacy and immediately hit a hurdle when he called Barack Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Now, of course he apologized when he discovered he had unintentionally offended the black community. But it’s not clear he knew what he was apologizing for: for instance, he explained to Jon Stewart later in the week that he was trying to compliment Obama.

So in last Sunday’s New York Times, Lynette Clemetson explained the offense for him and for anyone who didn’t get it in her column “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well.” One line summarizes her argument:

When whites use the word [articulate] in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment.

While I don’t know that it’s “amazement” that characterizes such remarks about articulacy—and I hope it isn’t “bewilderment”—I think it certainly signals an encounter with the unexpected. Which is to say, being articulate is only remarkable if one doesn’t expect it from a person.

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.

My dissertation concerns a moment of intense anxiety about Standard English, the late nineteenth century in the United States, when popular, scholarly, and literary writers worried over the possibility that people with social pretensions could, by manipulating their language, masquerade as something they weren’t—that is, pass for a new and better class. Many of these writers found ways to dismiss such people by judging them to have bad grammar. Commentary on grammar, however, had paradoxical consequences: on the one hand, arguments for grammatical correctness revealed the secrets of speaking well to the emerging middle-class readers from whom such secrets were meant to distinguish the elite; on the other hand, texts supporting the tolerance of linguistic pluralism eventually informed the attitude elite readers used to distinguish themselves from the intolerant middle class. I argue for seeking the grounds of this paradox—or more accurately, double paradox—in social contradictions, such as the requirement that some people have “bad grammar” if others are to possess distinguished manners of speaking.

I'm reading Dennis Baron's Grammar and Good Taste, and I've encountered two fascinating insults that maintain currency even in present-day arguments about language usage--and other controversies. The two are unrelated--occurring six years apart and reported by an American and a Brit not in dialogue with one another.

First, in 1822, Charles Henry Wilson reveals the resistance he receives when complaining about American usage of English; he's told, "It's a good country, and let those who don't like it, leave it" (qtd at 31).

Second, James Fenimore Cooper criticizes the southern drawl, noting that "In Georgia, you find a positive drawl, among what are called the 'crackers'" (qtd at 26). "Positive," here, isn't praise.

This is noteworthy, in part, because of a recent conversation about ways academics insist that you can't be offended by the epithet "cracker."

But of course I'm also attuned to the ways that the latter of these insults is obviously connected with class(ism), while the former is certainly a reaction by those made to feel that their habits are ones of inferior taste. But what else connects these two insults? Also, is it clear that "love it or leave it" is always—or presently—a class-based reaction?

Just after her marriage to Curtis Jadwin, Laura spends her days reading and waiting for Jadwin's return home from work, so they can read together in the evenings (189-90). In the afternoons before her husband's arrival, Laura "rarely—for she had not the least interest in social affairs" attends "teas or receptions" (190). What's curious about this fact is that the narrator has spent the last several pages describing Laura's less-than-satisfied attitude toward the monstrous house bought and remodeled for them by her husband. It is, of course, the remodeling that annoys Laura—and it is only after a trip abroad, in which she acquires some furnishings and art for the new home, that she finally "succeeded in fitting herself to her new surroundings" (188). In this moment, The Pit exhibits for us the class differences between Laura's new-moneyed husband and herself (though she's more petit- than established bourgeoisie). So it's no surprise that immediately after this moment we get a comparative analysis of Laura's and Curtis's tastes in novels. What's less clear is why, since Laura doesn't like to be social or to entertain, she cares what her house looks like. But this subsequent analysis is a reminder that Laura has always been a consumer of bourgeois literature and an indication that the observer for whom Laura must make her house tasteful is herself.

James Aune. Rhetoric and Marxism. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation...
* * *
It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. (Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 193)

Although there's something bizarre about opening one's writing by citing one work and immediately quoting from another, there's a strange appropriateness to doing so in this post. Jim Aune's claim in Rhetoric and Marxism is that if we try to identify Marxism's own "nuclear contradiction" (Aune takes the term from Alvin Gouldner), we can see the absence of rhetoric – its understanding of audience, appeals, and persuasion – as the fundamental cause. This isn't a surprising absence, given Marxism's emergence in an antirhetorical historical moment, but its result was "an implicit theory of language and communication that was an unstable mixture of romantic expressionism and a positivist dream of perfectly transparent communication" (143). And thus if we want to learn something about Marxism's failures (note that the book is haunted by the events of 1989), we need to take note of its lacunae, specifically its traditional refusal to adequately theorize mediation. The problem of alienation thoroughly troubles Marxist theory – consider workers' separation from the product of their labor, the human alienation from her species being, the very denial of the centrality of this "humanist" element in the division between the early and late Marx (or between Marxism and Humanism), the gap between theory and praxis, and what Aune cleverly terms the contradiction between "struggle and structure" (i.e., where's the place for agency if history is more or less determined?). Mediation is thus the need – and rhetoric just the remedy.