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.

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).

[Cross-posted at Long Sunday]

What's up with the title The Wire? I mean, having a wire up provides the detectives with a kind of talismanic assurance, and the capacity to surveil their "targets" is fundamental to the Major Crime Unit's operations. Still, doesn't the title reflect an almost unsupported (and unearned) privileging of the police? The series is nearly unique and certainly daring in showing the ineptitude of the police, sometimes from external forces and sometimes from individual incompetence or corruption, so it's not particularly pro-BPD. Moreover, many of the episodes involve no wire at all, and plotlines such as the atrophy of the Baltimore port, the Stringer/Avon business/gangster showdown, and the Hopkins study of Tilghman Middle School all proceed smoothly with or without a wire. And yet, the show is called The Wire. Why?

That's one of the questions that has been on my mind since I began watching the series. Another has to do with what is far and away the most common evaluation I hear: "The Wire is the best television show. Ever." A couple of friends have muttered this dispassionately and a bit wearily, as though they've come to the conclusion (which they should have all along recognized as unavoidable) only after sustaining vigorous disputation from other fans. (One friend tried to sell the show to me by saying, "It's like Deadwood, but more relevant." Hmm.) In any case, at a certain point, I began to wonder about these people's judgments. Although I can't find any reason to say they're wrong, something still bothered me.

officially, 200 years ago today. In the British Empire, of course. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 went into effect on the first day of the new year. Slavery, of course, wasn't abolished until 1833. Again in the British Empire.

Shockingly, the U.S. was many years behind on both counts. Thirteen on ending the slave trade and thirty on ending slavery (which also celebrates a birthday today, its 145th). It's a good thing the U.S. has stopped that nasty trend of being behind on progress.

So it's the time of year for "best of..." lists, and many sites have already posted "best albums" lists. I'm partly inspired by Eric, but this post will be nowhere near as elaborate as Eric's exhaustive year-end reviews. In fact, I won't even attempt to rank the albums; I guess my taste isn't that sophisticated. Rather, following the iTunes star system, I'll grade the albums, at least the ones that I feel strongly about.

Among the albums about which I don't have strong feelings are some that various sources seem to think are the tops, stuff by Panda Bear (and his steady drone), M.I.A. (I just don't think I get her--my fault, not hers), and LCD Soundsystem (although the album has grown on me). To be frank, I think all three are overrated. Among the others that make too little an impression for me to really care: Wild Mountain Nation by Blitzen Trapper (though the title track and “Country Caravan” are nice), Some Loud Thunder by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Interpol’s new one, Allright, Still by Lily Allen, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank by Modest Mouse (though it’s exciting that Johnny Marr has joined the band), Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams II, One Man Revolution by The Nightwatchman (i.e., Tom Morello, and perhaps the more moronic than oxymoronic title suggests where this goes wrong; still some of the guitar is [expectedly] nice), and Steve Earle’s Washington Square (which is okay, but just okay; there was certainly a time when I wouldn’t have imagined saying I just don’t care about a Steve Earle album, but that’s where things are).

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."

Great conversation today with Eric and Doug about the recent Times article Pushing Their Luck, Sitcoms Are Playing With Race Cards, which seems to be a disturbingly uncomplicated reading of comedy. Alessandra Stanley does a nice job of noting a trend: "Jokes about race and racial tensions are suddenly all over television, or more precisely, all over comedies that pride themselves on tweaking convention and political correctness." But her observation, I think, misdiagnoses the object of criticism. It's not "political correctness" that 30 Rock, for instance, criticizes. (We should recall, of course, that political correctness is a fictional creation of conservatives--a kind of caricature of liberal attention to the marginalized which often functions as a straw person in conservative arguments. That some liberals have taken up the epithet of political correctness and worn it as a badge is lamentable, a way of allowing the opposition to define your own position.) If anything, shows like Arrested Development and 30 Rock analyze the lame assumption that political correctness or tolerance is an effectual form of political action.

For instance, there was last season's hilarious comment by Pete: "Look, we can all agree that Liz is—generally pretty racist." It occurs in the Jack-tor episode where Liz thinks Tracy is illiterate because he won’t read the cue cards. Pete's comment is both not true and true (hence, funny and quite serious at the same time). That is, in her very effort to be nonracist she was incredibly racist. Like much of liberalism. (Earlier in the episode, Liz remarks, "Tracy took advantage of my white guilt, which is supposed to be used only for good--like over-tipping and supporting Barack Obama.") And that's the genius of it.

More evidence that standardized testing/grading is fucked up: Retired high-school English teacher Dan Verner grades SAT essays. For up to 10 hours per day, Verner grades 30 essays each hour--essays written by students within a 25 minute window. Two-minutes per essay, with music in the background. Yeah, this is clearly a formula for useful prediction of college success. (And insofar as it is, clearly the system is fucked.)

If I'd been reading Jim's blog more regularly, I'd have known about the release of the new Radiohead album a day before one of my students told me.

Still, what a cool idea: Pay what you will. I paid £4, and the download's available on the 10th. The discbox (an elaborate collection of material goods) ships in December.

Eric, who loves to pay for his music, asked me, "How did you decide that ₤4 was a fair price?" and my answer is:

It wasn't so much "fairness" that I used as a criteria. More like what I felt like paying. But my rationale was: I could get it free before long, but I think they deserve something for their work (though my £4 is but a drop in the bucket) and for their (potential) generosity (if no one were to pay) and for the sheer awesomeness of this idea (though I think someone, was it Neil Young?, has done a version of this before), which, perhaps, if rewarded will make the RIAA look like the asses that they are. On the other hand, if they sold their work on iTunes, the album would be $9.99 (a little more than £4); of course, Radiohead haven't (to use that weird British thing of thinking singular entities as plural--much like "couple" and "faculty") to this point worked with iTunes, and they may not ever, but iTunes has pretty much set the price point for digital versions of what some people call "property." Anyway, I figured £4 more or less directly to the band would be at least as much as the band would get from selling through a retailer, and it's a slight savings to me, so everybody wins. (Except the retailers.) BTW, there's like a 45 pence fee for the transaction (the "custom," those silly Brits call it--though said silliness happily enlightened me as to where our word "customer" comes from), so a retailer of sorts is clearly getting something.

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?