Microcosms of Life and Wild -Flagstaff, Arizona

acomposing — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 02:28:26 +0000

This page is dedicated to a steady collection of photographs of the city and wilds in and near Flagstaff and Sedona Arizona. Photos by: Damian Koshnick.

Thoughts on: primitive mind, literacies, landscapes, and writing classrooms

acomposing — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:31:36 +0000

My own introduction to the notion of “information literacy,” in the broadest sense, came from my appreciation of nature writers and nature writing. When reading Roderick Nash’s (1982) Wilderness and the American Mind for the first time, I was struck by his conceptual description of human cognitive development as it corresponded to the perception of moving through changing physical environments with a primitive mind. This was, of course, a description of the broad forces that shape human history, much like the ever-popular writing of Jared Diamond. The passage that struck me and has continued to fascinate me for years:

We might begin with the anthropological axiom that until roughly twenty million years ago our prehuman ancestors dwelt in an arboreal environment … At this distant point in time, as noted above, there was no dichotomy between prehumans and wild country. But about fifteen million years ago it appears that climatic changes and fire began to reduce the area of forest in central Africa and other seedbeds of man. Prehumans gradually left the shrinking arboreal habitat and began to adapt to life on the plains and grasslands. (preface, Nash)

First, the notion that at a certain point in time “there was no dichotomy between prehumans” and the wild landscape is a key notion. Certainly, we have since changed this in radical ways. We live and work now, for example, in virtual worlds and with thousands of tools assembled great distances from our immediate environment. But in inchoate forms of the earliest human histories, we were living completely in the environment, certainly solving problems like other animals do, but solving problems only within the confines of the environment near-hand, with tools derivative primarily of the surroundings in which we lived.

Shifts in landscape, shifts in perspective -photo: Damian Koshnick

Second, we do not often think that the literal changing of a landscape directly impacts our physiology and therefore our cognitive functions. Climatic changes led to a change in our immediate landscape, pushed us from the forest to the plains and, as a result, was a primary factor in changing the kinds of thinking required for survival. As Nash continued:

In the open, spacious environments vision assumed an importance it lacked in the dense, dark wilderness. Adapting, prehumans developed remarkable visual ability. In part this compensated for the superior sense of smell and hearing and the speed, size, and strength of other animals. Good vision was early man’s competitive edge. Coupled with a developing brain, it enabled humans to plan ahead. A lion a mile away across open country, for example, was a solvable problem; one hidden in dense cover (classic wilderness) often meant death. With their eyes prehumans bought time to think. Sight, height, and openness meant security. What came to be known as wilderness was scary. … It followed that for millions of years our distant ancestors preferred open environments, where the eye and the brain could function, to the dark primeval forest. Once early man left the thickets he was loath to return to an environment that neutralized his visual advantages. Indeed, when he could he burned forests in order to convert them to open grassland. Edges of clearing and heights of land became favored living and hunting locales. (preface, Nash)

New distances to a horizon, and our changing ability to perceive it fundamentally, therefore, changed our identity as nascent humans. Presumably, the visual cortex became an even stronger component of the neural circuits that guided our thinking. Planning became possible; it was the direct result of our ability to see to a horizon. Our new environment -with distances- allowed us to scan for danger and opportunities, and to plan our routes to avoid, or find them. Beyond developmental sciences which certainly tell a more intricate and complex history of this, I am always -personally- intrigued when I can consciously recognize lived moments that incorporate the most primitive aspects of my brain. This happens frequently to me when I am hiking in the woods, and I am simultaneously startled and comforted by the sharp smell of wood smoke. I know, consciously, why this must be such an energizing and pleasing experience. Wood smoke brings the awareness that there are other humans nearby with warmth and safety. It brings the assumption that they are probably preparing to cook food. The smell of wood smoke has to be one of the most direct paths to decision-making processes that have kept us alive over centuries. The same seems true, to me, of those opportunities to stand at a vantage point, to look out over the ocean, or the valley, or a great plain. Very little, in my view, biologically satisfies a person as much as those moments when we gain critical perspectives on the environments in which we stand. Sure, the Grand Canyon is pretty, but this to me is the real, primitive reason we are drawn to it by the millions every year.

What of our current situation then? With this question, I have two scenarios in mind. What of global warming and the way it will steadily change our environments? Certainly we are very good now at adapting, but there is something about storms, large storms in particular, that still surprise us. Storms narrow down our fields’-of-vision (electricity goes out for example), push us back -despite our cognitive and technological advances- back into the immediate just like heavily forested-environments required of us. Our attention shifts perceptively from planning, and anticipating, to reacting. But, more appropriate to my professional interests in the teaching of writing, I am thinking of the other constantly encroaching environments -primarily virtual- in which we now work –and plan. What sort of visual and therefore planning advantages are we afforded with technology on a daily basis?

As a teacher, I am often most interested in this question as it corresponds directly to the classroom. Conceptually, and pedagogically, the work across “information literacies,” and particularly “literacy landscapes” are currently key, motivating concepts in the teaching and learning of writing. Between them, we try to capture and take advantage of our deepest orienting perspectives biologically and socially through technology. Biology and social orientations and habits change, but change slowly. And it is important to remember that these orientations and habits often do not convincingly correspond to the technological and virtual worlds in which we now write, plan, and organize our lives.

I am struck by the idea that we are approaching the technological-interface equation from the opposite direction that we have interactions with natural settings. With the natural setting, in prehuman history, we were intractably a part of our environment. Our steady evolutionary shift was to conceptually, and physically, separate ourselves from it. With technology and virtual worlds, it is the other way around. We went from a situation where we were not an intimate part of those “platforms” to a scenario where we are increasingly a part of them (or they are us). A great reminder of this is to watch some of Steve Jobs first -now humorously clumsy- launches of the Mac from the 1980’s. The crowd was enthralled with fonts appearing on a screen and a digital voice that was able to read it aloud [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=762035792437485705]. With his pioneering work, and others like him, we have come a long way. How much of our day is spent now, not looking to the horizon to plan, but looking to our ipads, our iphones, or laptops, our blackberries?

Certainly I am not the first here to wonder, or ask –what does this mean? But, set against Nash’s description, I think this takes on a thrilling, more intimate and immediate hue. Despite the fact that we are talking about virtual platforms, there is, inevitably a real-world impact both biologically and in the physical environment. No matter how virtual we become, it is always the immediate environment –physical and social– that determines the value of a technology. This, to me, explains why however brilliant a virtual platform, or technology, now matter how much personal, professional, or social advantage it gives us, we may never have the technological-degree of deep satisfaction that comes from looking out over a valley from above, or the Grand Canyon, or smelling wood smoke in the woods. Will we?

If –information visualization– is the, “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition” (Card, p. 7, 1999), then the visualization technology must be able to a) read the data, and b) amplify it in a manner that aids the learners’ focus and purposes. Within this human-computer interaction, there exists the “gap” –that data is lost in the “telescoping” process, between the contextualized, embodied-knowledge goals of the learner, and the data transforming work of a visualization technology.

As a teacher, even something as basic as “brainstorming” or “concept-mapping” can be surprisingly difficult (and time-consuming) to effectively and convincingly recreate on a virtual platform for a wide-variety of students. This is especially true for classrooms with 20+ students, each with varying degrees of access to and familiarity with computer systems and software.

The problem? –how can a visualization program meet and “amplify” the complex tasks and socially embedded practices of a student? From my perspective as a teacher, and based upon my frustration as a –finder of, and reviewer of free information visualization software, I have concluded that for a virtual platform to help/work in a class, (with even something as simple as “concept mapping”) this requires:

-low-end implementation requirements; there must not be too much training involved, or the program will likely seem superfluous (an added burden)

-flexibility, since all classes enact a wide-range of tasks, the program(s) utilized must be either numerous, or very flexible (this will reduce the acuity, but increase the conditions for usability and application)

-readily translatable data transfer, the program must be able to utilize data from applications that are common, accessible to students and faculty such as word, excel, etc. or they must be user-enhancing and user-friendly to produce (or reproduce) within the applications’ platform (Google Sketchup as one example)

I have had varied success introducing “concept mapping” options within Excel, in simple and familiar applications like Word, and with somewhat more advanced (and less familiar) programs like VUE. So much potential exists with far more complex software. If the goal of a course in writing is to amplify perception and understanding, we have to keep pushing these boundaries, but as a –teacher– we are often the realists that confront the inevitable obstacles. If we want to amplify our students’ thinking and learning, technology is one of the most promising ways to accomplish this, and yet it is never as easy as it should be, or as it may appear it should be to those working outside the classroom.

Too often, the software which appears ready to use from the language on the supporting website, is not easily manipulated, downloaded, or readily interactive. Most information visualization software that is currently available on the web is the stuff of engineers, or created specifically by and for scientists within specific research institutions. It is clear, as a teacher, that most “free” visualization software, and indeed, most all software requires considerable amount of time and energy to access and utilize. In the end, it may be just as useful to manually “re”present data and other resources to que students’ into the complexities of their “literacy landscapes” until these kinds of virtual technologies will be more context-responsive and individualizable.

My primary conclusion for the moment is that more grants must be made available to support teachers to buy, introduce, and adapt technology into classrooms in realistic and sustainable ways.

Some software under review:

1. Info Vis Wiki: http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

2. Google Visualization API: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery.html.

This gallery lists JavaScript visualizations built on the Google Visualization API. Some of these have been written by Google, and some have been written by third parties. Links below point to instructions for and demonstrations of each visualization. Including (potentially, though less immediately applicably) Google Sketchup: http://sketchup.google.com/ which is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. Most people get rolling with SketchUp in just a few minutes.

3. This Google Visualization also includes (bought in 2007) GapMinder, specifically, “Trendalyzer”: http://www.gapminder.org/about-gapminder/.

Within GoogleMaps exists one of the most interesting visualization options particularly with respect to teaching. This tool allows anyone to chart and mark a “journey” within or along a journey. At GoogleMaps http://maps.google.com/, click on “My Maps”. For a sample, type in “Chris Mccandless”. Google maps incorporates place markers, lines attaching locations, with the ability to post photos and notes at each location. Within this tool exists some fascinating options particularly for teaching.

4. There is also a Text Content Analysis Tool: http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php. Which is similar to: TagCloud: http://www.tagcrowd.com/ and Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/. And a free Concordance analysis website: http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/text_concord/.

5. There are other sites that function much like what can be done with Excel, such as “ManyEyes” which performs: scatterplots, bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, with the additional functionality of word trees, and what is widely known as http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/. Another problem with this site for education is that it requires that all uploaded data, results are publicly viewable.

6. This site, which is interesting, but I have not downloaded the software: http://nwb.slis.indiana.edu/index.html which is a, “Workbench for network scientists”. This software can be used to map knowledge domains and seems to have a functionality that exceeds excel, and word clouds, tags, etc. Though I have not tested its ease of use, nor its functionality (nor the data sets it accepts) –it does have many interesting samples online that are intriguing at the outset.

7. And these sites with which I am interested, but have had less luck for the moment: visualizing data as a city: http://www.inf.unisi.ch/phd/wettel/codecity.html; Moose -Analysis Technology: http://moose.unibe.ch/tools?_s=xdc6Q8T7zS07ybSe&_k=0YIUk9KD&_n&14; Leyesdorff: http://users.fmg.uva.nl/lleydesdorff/software.htm; the SSEC Visualization Project: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis.html.

8. InfoZoom: http://www.softlakesolutions.com/index.php/products-a-services/infozoom/architecture.

You can “feed” InfoZoom virtually any data, provided it is in a structured form. From ASCII, TXT, CSV and Excel files via databases up to and including complex ERP systems – as a customer once remarked, InfoZoom accesses anything that doesn‘t resist.”

9. Visualizations for Education: http://www.edcenter.sdsu.edu/visualize-education/index.html.

This site includes a considerable list of sites that incorporates “visualization for Education”. Many of these links are “galleries” and not software for producing visual displays. But it is worth some time (depending upon intention, focus and purposes). At the end of this site is a list of visualization “Software, Hardware, and Organizations”.

10. The Science/Engineering Visualization Challenge: http://www.sciencemag.org/vis2008/.

Of course the variety and number of such options are nearly limitless and depend largely on the class, the goals, etc. of a given assignment and writing course. As a teacher, I am often frustrated by the seeming potential and the gap between teaching, classroom, student access, and technological realities.

References

Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale University Press: Binghamton, N.Y., 1982.

Stuart Card, J.D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman (1999). “Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think”. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco

Under Construction, Writing Classrooms …

acomposing — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:23:03 +0000

Photo: My brilliant niece Tallulah, writing, drawing, thinking

Introduction

I recently discovered a bit of autocognographic writing (2001) by Lad Tobin. He traced the evolution of his personal beliefs and practices about teaching writing alongside, and at times against, the major trends and theorists in composition studies. It was at once both a personal narrative, but also a broader vision of the field. He split composition studies into a familiar series of –pre-process, process, and post-process. At the conclusion of this essay, for example, he was willing to appreciate the value of post-process trends in composition studies, but he wasn’t ready to believe them, nor incorporate them in meaningful ways into his practice.

This essay inspired me to start my own autocognography as a teacher and researcher in the field –one that is both personally oriented, but also critically embedded within my own expanding knowledge of practice and theory in composition (writing) studies and rhetoric. What follows is an excerpt of this larger project.

working

Under Construction, Writing Classrooms …

During my first graduate school and university-level teaching experience, while earning an M.A. in Teaching English Writing at Humboldt State University, I believed in a critical liberation pedagogy. That is not all that I believed in, but it was a critical part of the way I addressed my first year composition students. During my first two semesters teaching composition, I would start each quarter with a direct question to the class, “Why are you here?” They would often chorus, “Because this is a required class.” But I would ask again and demand a broader, more thoughtful answer during class discussion. Although I was interested in their answers, I was primarily interested in helping them to appreciate that this was a legitimate question. I wanted them to be able to ask it as first year students in college. I was a writing instructor who had read and believed in Paulo Freire. I wanted my students to recognize the political, the cultural, the historical, the economic, and the other myriad of forces that shaped their lives, and I wanted them to resist those forces in their thinking and their writing. My pedagogy, and the writing assignments that I gave reflected these goals.

The general liberation (or liberatory) frame that I was utilizing to define the subject in a course on writing proved ultimately dissatisfying. I eventually realized that my interest as an instructor was not in fostering resistance necessarily, but in helping students to pick their head up from the page, and to recognize the forces that compelled them to write, the motivations that both obscured and defined the topics that they chose. My interest was in helping students appreciate those (personal, historical, institutional, cultural, etc.) forces not just so that they might resist them, but also so that they might recognize the value and their ongoing stake in those forces (whatever they happened to be).

assessing

Even more now than at the time, I have since come to realize that a writing pedagogy designed around resistance and liberation foregrounds the assumption that the individual can –and even more so should– escape, or become liberated from the forces that he/she decided to resist. But resistance should be just one response amongst a wide array of other options. A liberatory, or a critical pedagogy (at least in the forms in which us first year TA’s were adapting at Humboldt State it for the first year composition classroom) often devalues the role of institutions and cultures unnecessarily. And I recognize now, even more than I did then, that this kind of frame can also dramatically over-simplify the integrated nature of the individual as an entity within a wide array of socio-cultural, historical, etc. forces that cannot be easily shed. And, in fact, helping students recognize and work amongst, and within, as opposed to unnecessarily against those shaping forces creates opportunities for a more balanced, open, and varied writing pedagogy. I believe that allowing them to be both appreciative and critical is what will help them evolve into more adaptable and proficient writers. A good writer must contribute, of which critique is but one option.

In the interim years, my interests and opportunities in the academic setting have steadily shifted my focus beyond the first year composition classroom, to work in professional writing at many levels and in many different institutional settings. But, in part, the kernels of this early teaching experience resonate and even drive my focus in these expanding realms. As Charles Bazerman (1994) put it, “The teacher’s role in defining the dynamic of the classroom is realized not just through intellectual commitments and conscious choices but also through the personal history that shapes the personality and competences and attitudes of the person who walks in front of the classroom” (p. 61). Over the last two years, my personal history in the academic setting has shifted from an adjunct instructor’s role who appreciated theories in rhetoric and composition, to a full-time instructor, a professional writing consultant, and an active researcher in the field. These changing personal roles in the academic setting, over time, have had a significant impact on the way that I think about identity and participation. As I write this reflection, I am in the midst of a long process, a shift, from a history of knowledge consumption, to a strengthening identity as a scholar who has dedicated himself to mastering the research and publication skills involved in knowledge creation.

appreciating

At first, I underestimated the degree of change, and the difference between being an academic who was largely bound to a role in the academic setting based on the consumption of the theory of others in the field, as opposed to taking an active role in the creation and eventual publication of findings, and knowledge. Sure, I taught in the classroom and applied theory to pedagogy (and vica versa), but my interests were largely bound either by personal gain, or by my efforts to succeed within the bounds of “my” classroom. Many of these changes between a consumer of knowledge in the field and my work to become a creator of knowledge are difficult, at this point anyway, to identify and name. There are however two ongoing, but distinct projects that have brought many unique things to my attention recently. But there is one particular aspect with which I want to focus for the remainder of this reflection. This point of interest corresponds to the succinct recognition by Dr. Bazerman when he noted:

we are always better off to be aware of the materials out of which it [the classroom] is constructed and the spaces for communication created in the design. Then we can know our options, possibilities and responsibilities, as well as the compelling forces we may be foolish to resist. (p. 59)

revising

As an instructor of a writing course, the options, possibilities and responsibilities are almost always greater than the student participants. The shape and the nature of a class must, to a certain extent, be determined before the first day of class. This typically involves the identification of reading materials, or guest speakers, of resources such as computers, and sourcebooks. This also involves, of course, the identification of assignments that can and must be graded. The materials utilized, the manner in which the course is taught, the fore-grounded pedagogy and the background theoretical foundations generally emerge through the contingencies, and the personality of the instructor. Of course, it would be a mistake to overplay this hand, to disregard the way in which each student brings a history and personality of their own that almost always changes the tone, the shape, the sequencing, the pace, and the purpose(s) for enacting specific activities, or assignments within a given course. Nevertheless, there is an inescapable responsibility that falls upon an instructor to be informed, anticipatory, and responsive. All of this is to say that a course built upon resistance represents an artificial range, it is an unnecessarily restrictive approach. And during my first years of teaching a general first year composition course, I justified this limited “range” by conflating it with critical thinking skills. As an instructor now, I am interested in –how does a writing instructor create, or enact a course in writing across the most responsive and dynamic range possible, and perhaps most importantly, one that actively reflects environments (social, academic, professional) with which students are currently, or will one day work? Any answer to this question is highly dependent, full of an amazing variety of variables. What, for example, is the title of the course? What are the goals? What is the ideal result? And what can we possibly use to reach that ideal result for the most students possible? To answer these questions, the more the instructor is (to return to Bazerman), “aware of the materials out of which it [the classroom] is constructed and the spaces for communication created in the design” the more materials, sources, and techniques can be utilized that will be acceptable to the participants.

This constant weighing of what is and what can, or should be part of the writing classroom, of also how and why, is what makes our work so damn interesting.

finished product, on display “Pinwheel Bakery” Ferndale, Detroit
for 45 minutes, March 23rd 2010

References

Bazerman, Charles. “What Written Knowledge Does: Three Examples of Academic Discourse.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 11 (1981): 361-387.

“Process Pedagogy,” A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Eds. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. New York: Oxford UP, 2001: 1-18.

On teaching writing, the brilliant and renewing varieties of experience

acomposing — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 08:23:36 +0000

By Damian C. Koshnick

Many years ago in a junior high civics course, I remember being introduced to the idea of a democrat and a republican. In the requisite textbook there was a short, bulleted list of the respective platforms. Not long after, I was frustrated. The textbook offered no connective tissue, no explanation from one statement of belief to the next; neither did my teacher who clearly valued his role as a hockey coach more than that of our civics teacher. At that time, of course, I was not familiar with the divisions, the belief systems, or the issues that defined one party from another, but I had to memorize those short lists of what was a democrat and what was a republican for a test at the end of the week. My mind raced, “But why this and not that? Why that, and not this?”

The same thing happened to me twelve years ago during my first weeks of graduate school. I was introduced to the history of composition studies in a class on theory. In those first weeks and certainly through that first year, I remember feeling what Bartholomae (1985) described. When introduced to the university, we mimic, we take on roles to gain entry. I was a ventriloquist, taking on the voices and beliefs of nearly every assigned reading. Everything, in bits and pieces made perfect sense. Everything was an equally viable contribution toward a greater understanding of an imposing discipline. Our professor, an excellent teacher, was not prone to handing out slogans, or given to simplifying matters. Looking back, I assume that he did not want to impose his perspective, or to short-circuit our messy journey of discovery between theories and their surreal authors whose names became, themselves, something to hold on to. Although I have gained critical distance in the more than decade since, my sense of the formidable nature of composition studies as a field has lessened, but not dissipated.

In those earliest, inchoate days I was only interested in the relatively carefree association of attending classes, enjoying the company of my small cohort, and occasionally demonstrating my knowledge in end of the quarter in essays written to my professors. At that time, I was primarily interested in the aesthetic gain of reading and talking about ideas-as-ideas. I wanted to make composition studies as a field “hang together” because it seemed to me a challenging, complex intellectual puzzle.

But, our relationship to knowledge and our perspectives on that knowledge within a field noticeably shift when we act in different circumstances and take on different roles. I recognize this in my own history, and it is emphasized by the fact that over the last twelve years I have played significantly different roles in five very different academic institutions. When I think about my time in and between these settings, a mash-up of William James’ title comes to mind –on “the varieties of English experience”. The degree of variety, the utter plurality of experience is inspiring. There are many ways to measure this difference –in focus, in purpose, in action, or between individuals, colleagues, departments, the universities themselves etc. For example, many good teachers care about knowledge only in as much as it can be applied to some advantage in their classrooms. Others relish the role of debating theory and pedagogy with departmental colleagues. Some, want to contribute to theory and knowledge in the field itself, publishing in national journals and attending conferences, etc. My own interests have changed at every stop, generally enlarging in ambition and scope. But a great deal has been learned through observation, and the willing adoption of local interests, which without much haste I typically came to share; I value, it seems common action. Perfectly defensible teaching-of-writing happens in many contexts; takes on many forms; and calls many guiding principles by different names. This is how, in the end I have come to this present task. My understanding of composition studies has advanced as much through my own personal growth across contexts as it has through the discovery and application of our formal literature along the way. It is the unusual nature of mixing the two that presents new difficulties even when some discovery seemed to convey resolution.

As Phelps (1988) noted, theorizing is autobiographical. And what I have come to understand about the field of composition studies neatly parallels what I have come to understand about myself as a professional within it. Upon entering the profession, I assumed that there was a center, that there was a conceptual place that I would eventually discover by which the broadest structures of the field would reveal themselves. After a bewildering introduction, I came as many peers did to take comfort in the phrase “process-approach”. But more so, I came to value it for its yin-yang relationship to “current-traditionalism,” or more abstractly stated –product versus process. In our age, even now, this easy dichotomy should not be dismissed; it played a useful part in my own development. During my first quarters teaching writing, I emphasized time for revision, multiple drafts, peer review, etc. These were things that I absorbed from somewhere. But whatever the details of my use of “process” in the classroom, my adherence to it along with colleagues afforded us a collective “in-ness,” a cache. Or at least we believed it did; we knew the “secret language” of good writing instruction; we knew what writing teachers did. That confidence, albeit temporary, was vital. The certainty of “process” however shallowly defined and imperfectly applied, was buttressed by our belief that there were teachers who did not know what we knew –they only graded final products. It was our shorthand. It offered us a reprieve from an otherwise imposing task –teaching– in an otherwise imposing field. But fashionable belief can, and does, eventually stunt discovery and curiosity. Every night doorman grows tired of the password.

And it does not take long to realize that under that thin surface, the forms that instruction takes and the institutional structures in place to support those forms regularly lead to vastly differing pedagogies. At the five institutions in which I have taught –comparing only the first year writing classes between them– I adopted the general conditions at each: Humboldt State University, critical cultural studies; Minnesota State University, literary-oriented pedagogies with a sequence of first year courses in composition taught with titles like “literature and poetry 102,”; Concordia College, a program-wide service-learning pedagogy; University of California, Santa Barbara, a writing-across-the curriculum pedagogy with an associated writing-in-the-disciplines curricular tributary; Allan Hancock Community College, a developmenal English curriculum on an Air Force base. Given this background and my sensitivity to it, it is perhaps not surprising that I am fascinated by studies of the history of English which focus on the nature of its trajectory and development within smaller, local domains. After reading Donahue and Moons’ (2007) Local Histories I have come, recently, to believe that most of us are imbued with at least two disciplinary histories –the local one in which we act effectively if colloquially, and the “meta” one in which we theorize regionally and nationally. If there is cognitive dissonance, we regularly ignore it. If we are perceptive, we recognize potential in the symmetry and in the certain discontinuities; if we are diligent as individuals, we are not constrained by either.

For those that pay attention, this local-meta dynamic could be viewed as problematic (in some instances it is), but on the whole it is a vital source of friction that can replenish our desire to consume, and even produce new theory and research. For it is that –expanding move– the theories and theorizing as thinking heuristics, that often clarifies these sources of friction; or more formally, it is the research, as it accumulates, that acts as a potential corrective. However this mix of local and “meta,” of theory and research, of experience and intuition, of context shifting and role-taking plays out, we rely on both stability and uncertainty. The trick, of course, is to get the balance right.

The nature of “English” and how we attend to it depends upon a wide-range of shifting roles and interests in the individual who moves between contexts with different purposes and responsibilities. What we want for our discipline alternates between our ever-expanding and contracting allegiances to these different realms –our students, our classrooms, our specialized knowledge domains, our department, the university, national conferences, theoretical constructs of the discipline itself. Very often we work toward common gain in many areas at once; very often a quirk, or agitation in recognition of one will cause a ripple effect through the remainder.

The Fictions that Are Our Consciousness: Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Talk-Story”

acomposing — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 08:43:49 +0000

The Fictions That Are Our Consciousness:
Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Talk-Story”

Research/Essay by: Damian C. Koshnick

Preface: This essay was written 11 years ago. It corresponds to coursework particular to earning my degree in Teaching English Writing at Humboldt State University. It is an essay which I still find interesting to read, though I will never do anything more with it to formally publish it. In the years since, amidst those occasional courses when I teach literature, I have found course-after-course this book challenges college readers in a manner that not many other books can, nor do. … Enjoy!

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Iris Murdoch stated in Existentialists and Mystics that, “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.”[1] If this is true, then Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is a sketch pad. And the narrator is a woman, eraser in hand, attempting to sketch again and again the intricate tapestry of her childhood. As Martin Heidegger said in Metaphysics and Ethics, “Being-a-self is . . . only in its process of realization.”[2] Kingston’s memoir, is the narrative of a narrator who is, before our very eyes, ‘yet-realizing’.

Kingston’s work is atypical precisely because of this ‘yet-realizing’. In most memoirs, we, as readers, expect to encounter that which the writer has already come to realize, or already knows. The state of ‘knowing’ in Kingston’s work is very different than most non-fiction. In The Woman Warrior, we witness the narrator very much amidst the events that she is attempting to relate. This lack of rhetorical distance, on the part of the narrator in relation to the material that she is presenting, is one of the most unusual aspects of this book. Typically we expect in a memoir, a narrator that has a certain distance, a relative mastery over the events that she is relating. We expect the narrator’s voice to be relatively certain, to state facts and to demonstrate, to an extent, that they understand the scope and implications of the stories that they tell. However, the narrator’s voice in Kingston’s work seems much more spontaneous, and imaginative, much more concerned with the contexts of meaning, the social possibilities of self, than with coming to artificial, or simple conclusions about the meaning of things.

Kingston’s narrator is atypical because Kingston is using her, in part, to express an authentic phenomenology. Through the literary devices that she employs in The Woman Warrior and in interviews published since, Kingston demonstrates a unique understanding of the ways in which stories come to inform and shape individuals. Her philosophical stance mandates that we reconsider traditional distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. The ‘ways of knowing’, the phenomenology expressed by the voice of the narrator, represents Kingston’s fascinating literary style, but more than that, it demonstrates Kingston’s philosophical belief that human beings come to knowledge through dialogue and through stories and not, as most perhaps believe, through any ‘pure’ perceiver, or ‘knower’ that exists beyond the contexts in which one finds oneself. Kingston’s narrator represents the struggle inherent in us all- that we learn to live gracefully with ambiguity. Or as the narrator puts it, “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”[3] Kingston’s memoir attempts to relate ambiguities, as opposed to presenting a human, removed from contexts and absorbed in overwrought ‘retrospective’ understanding.

By ‘pure’ perceiver in the last paragraph I was referring to something like the Cartesian person. In Descartes well known Meditations on First Philosophy, he opens in stating, “Today is my chance; I have banished all care from my mind, I have secured myself peace, I have retired by myself; at length I shall be at leisure to make a clean sweep, in all seriousness and with full freedom, of all my opinions.”[4] I cite this passage because one could easily imagine these being the words of a writer sitting down to begin their ‘memoir’. This passage captures the sense that many people bring to memoir writing. Kingston’s inspiration and aspirations are much different than this model. She writes not from a beginning of distance or removal, but from immersion and re-entry into the confluence of social, historical, ideological, familial, cultural –i.e. the contextual influences that come to bear upon any individual at any given moment in their lives. All of these factors do not produce in the individual a sense of certainty, but rather a sense of incongruity, disjunction and dislocation. Our struggle then, according to Kingston, is to integrate these great many influences and possibilities. Or as Debra Shostak puts it, “Clearly, her [Kingston’s] interest lies less in history per se than in events as they are remembered . . .That accounts of the past are multiple and contradictory is a testament to human invention instead of a failure of record keeping.”[5] Wendell Berry paints a similar picture of the modern dilemma when he states:

“ . . . we all suffer in modern times from the same problems of cultural discontinuity as the migrants of Rushdie (or Kingston or Naipaul), it seems to me that we might also benefit from some of the same ‘equipment for living’ as these characters, from some of the same tactics of cultural adaptation or ritual self-transformation. How do we slough off our old constrictive or inadequate selves to take on new more commodious or supple ones?”[6]

Central to both of these quotes is this notion of ‘invention’ or needing to ‘transform’ one’s self in the face of contradiction and contingency. Kingston believes that, to a large extent, the dynamic factor that makes a ‘moderate-coherence-of-self’ possible is our ability to construct, tell and recognize stories. Our ‘record keeping’ is not in facts, or certainties, but in stories full of possibilities and imagination. Kingston satisfies the identity imperative described by Berry through an exploration of the ways in which stories help us to moderate discontinuities, to be flexible, insightful, and imminently adaptable. She calls this faculty, or equipment-for-living ‘talk-story’.

The term ‘talk’ placed before ‘story’ represents Kingston’s belief that our phenomenologies-of-self are primarily based on a dialogic model of knowing. ‘Knowing’ is not dialectic, black or white, but it is a great many possibilities at any given moment and we must ‘talk’ ourselves through these possibilities-addressing the needs of the self, as well as appreciating the circumstances from which these possibilities were born.

The ‘talk in ‘talk-story’ also highlights the social nature of what it means to be a ‘self’. In ‘talking’ we are usually engaged in some sort of back and forth; we are coming to terms with things as selves attached to larger networks of interpretation. Thus in coming to know the self, one cannot simply look inward as Descartes might suggest; rather, one must also account for those networks of interpretation that have always been external and largely beyond the self. Much of The Woman Warrior is a demonstration of this very activity. The narrator is trying to reconcile many different possibilities in the midst of family members and cultures that have tendencies and intentions of their own-often these intentions conflict.

In “No Name Woman” for example, ‘talk-story’ operates on many levels. First, the narrator recounts her mother’s telling of the aunt’s death. The mother, in this instance, is using a story as a lesson. As the narrator puts it, her mother tells such stories to ‘test our abilities to establish realities’. The ‘talk-story’ in this chapter occurs mostly after the narrative reporting of the mother’s speech act. We witness ‘talk-story’ from within the mind of the narrator herself. This writing technique is particular to Kingston, especially in light of the fact that this is a memoir. A majority of this chapter is us, the readers, suddenly inside the narrator’s mind witnessing her ‘realizing’ possibilities.

The narration begins with the subjunctive, with perhap’s and could have been’s as one would expect when we are witnessing possibility as opposed to known fact. The narrator imagines for example–“Perhaps she [the aunt] had encountered him in the fields or on the mountain . . . perhaps he first noticed her in the marketplace.”[7] But very subtly these sentences change to simple declarations in past tense, for example- “Such commonplace loveliness was not enough for my aunt.”[8] On the grammatical level, this change suggests that the narrator is stating real and known events. Without the modals, we are left to assume that the narrator is speaking about facts; however, all the while we know that the narrator’s relationship to the past has not changed. We know that her mother tells ‘only what is necessary’ and that she is representing ‘truths’ where there are only uncertainties.

Kingston is performing a unique act by way of this grammatical trope. She explains this phenomenon, in part, in an interview with Paula Rabinowitz when she says that:

“The power of imagination leads us to what’s real. We don’t imagine fairylands. I’ve begun lately to realize that if I were to know you, as my friend, the best way is for me to imagine you at life so well that I sympathize with you. Well, that means that imagination is reaching toward a real person . . . To have a right imagination is very powerful, because it’s a bridge toward reality.”[9]

Typically, we associate imagination with ‘fancy’ or creativity, as a supplement to our daily lives. We think of imagination as that which is useful and fun as opposed to a crucial element in our ability to organize and make sense of the ‘reality’. This is part of Kingston’s unique phenomenology of ‘knowing’ because she is expressing the manner in which imagination and sympathy are crucial toward understanding. Returning to “No Name Woman” for example, the aunt happens to be someone lost to history and a part of a culture very much removed from the narrator. And so the narrator’s understanding requires that she not only hear the words of warning from her mother, but that she takes these words and makes them relevant to herself, no matter how removed or distant that self is from the subject of the story, or from the understandings and intent of her mother. The narrator, in this story, is trying to approximate familiarity and certainty. She is using her imagination in order to understand the story better.

The story shifts in the span of this chapter from the narrator recreating these words- something initially from her mother’s mouth, to something that is inside the narrator’s head. We, as readers, are able to witness this transformation in the text. M.M. Bakhtin writes of this phenomenon when he says:

“language . . . lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention … Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language…, but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.”[10]

This ‘appropriation’ process is very similar to Kingston’s notions of ‘talk-story’. An example of this can be witnessed in the mother’s words, “In China your father had a sister who killed herself . . . He denies her. Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us . . .The villagers are watchful.”[11] In this instance, this warning –the villagers are watchful- means something entirely different to the mother than to her daughter. The ‘us’ includes the mother, unlike her daughter. The mother knows directly what the social implications of living in China are. She is likely able to recall actual faces that correspond to this warning ‘the villagers are watchful.’ The daughter on the other hand, is entirely at one-remove from the immediate impacts of such a statement. She has to imagine what such a community of people would be like. She does not know directly what these faces, or these ‘villagers’ would look like, but has to invent them for herself. As such, we could imagine another chapter of “No Name Woman” entitled something like “Faceless Watchful Villagers” if the narrator happened to choose to document her imaginings, or ‘yet-realizing’, or coming to ‘know’ –a knowledge based on imagination through self-story, not coldly through facts alone.

Stories in Kingston’s view, even when these stories occur strictly within the mind of the narrator, are events worth documenting. Even though such documentation seems like fiction, it is but fiction that is in service of reality. Kingston says, “These are real people in my books, and I try to depict them as accurately as I can, I tell what they make up about themselves.”[12] We invent our histories. We tell fictions, to know better the shape and nature of entities that are not at all obvious, even when that entity is as intimate as us, or our mother, or the country in which we live. As such, stories are negotiations of reality. They are essentially discoursive happenings. As Kingston describes it, “In talk-story, every time you tell a story it changes, it grows. In writing it doesn’t. I hope you see that these stories live on.”[13] Kingston, in this quote, is making a distinction between oral and written stories. When stories are written they tend to be codified, made into static things that seem to represent actualities. She wants to avoid this in her writing. Kingston is trying to remind us that all texts are born of primary moments of experience and all primary moments of experience are subject to multiple interpretations. Kingston re-invents established realities about the interplay of story and the nature of ‘meaning-making’ in our lives. Her writing does not adhere to category, or convention because Kingston is concerned with writing realities; and in reality, people are much more dynamic and playful than most literatures admit.

Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin state in their introduction to a book of collected interviews with Kingston that, “In her books, one rarely encounters a finality that is not qualified, framed by doubt, enmeshed in uncertainty.”[14] Kingston writes based upon the assumption that contingency is a reality for real people. Kingston’s narrator is unorthodox not because Kingston is trying to invent new literary forms for art’s sake, or for notoriety, but because she believes that the phenomenology represented by her narrator is a way of experiencing and coming to know the world that is practiced by people in general.

Despite numerous claims otherwise, Kingston is, then, a pragmatic author. What seems like fiction, is actually Kingston’s interpretation of our realities. She is a social constructionist who believes that people’s realities are ever-changing and very dependent upon the social networks in which they find themselves. Her purposefully disjointed, disharmonious, and multi-various narrative style in The Woman Warrior is a reflection of this. Kingston is, in this memoir, consciously attempting to portray the ways in which we are always at issue with ourselves; we are constantly reassessing our relationships to our family, to our culture(s), to our interpretations of history, to ideologies, etc. As Kingston demonstrates repeatedly, stories –the ones that are told to us by others, and the ones we tell to ourselves, are our way into ‘knowing’. Stories are constantly happening all around us, within us, and they, more than facts or certainties, are what give us our senses of identity.

Mark Turner in his book The Literary Mind explores just this notion when he says that stories, “. . .are not essentially exotic, but rather represent the carefully worked products of a fundamental mode of thought that is universal and indispensable.”[15] Turner, like Kingston, has an expanded notion of what a ‘story’ is. For example, when you see something as basic as a baseball break a window, a person’s natural tendency is to look back along the trajectory of the ball to see who threw the ball; Turner says that in doing so, we are essentially constructing a story. This story begins simply through witnessing the baseball go through the window, but very quickly we are caught amidst the meaning of things whereby we wonder who threw the baseball, why and what does it mean to us.

Now imagine that someone picks up a stone and throws it at us. Turner says that we do not need to wait for the stone to hit us before we can recognize the story and respond to it. When we duck, it is because our mental capacities have allowed us to recognize a pattern whereby we are hit by the stone. Turner’s most fundamental point is that stories help us organize our experiences. Through stories, we are able to recognize patterns in a world that would otherwise be relatively chaotic. The implications of these notions can be better witnessed and are more obviously relevant to the discussion at hand when we realize that, as Turner explains:

“Even stories exceptionally specific in their setting, character, and dialogue submit to projection. Often a short story will contain no overt mark that it stands for anything but what it purports to represent, and yet we will interpret it as projecting to a much larger abstract narrative, one that applies to our own specific lives, however far our lives are removed from the detail of the story.”[16]

When, for example, we read about an important battle in World War II, or when a friend tells us a story about his long dead father, these stories are meaningful not just because they may be told well, but because we are able to project these stories alongside our own lives, with implications that the story-teller probably had no way of predicting, or intending. The Woman Warrior, for example, begins in just this manner. As mentioned previously, this is the very activity that the narrator engages in, in coming to understand her mother’s story about her aunt. The narrator is removed from her aunt -temporally, culturally, etc. Despite this, she is able to reconstruct and imagine a coherent story. Through imagination and ‘talk-story’ she is able to recognize the relevant patterns inherent in the story. Such is Kingston’s emphasis on our ability as humans to construct, tell and recognize stories both within the environments around us and within us –we being an amalgamation of our environments.

As is demonstrated by the narrator, stories actually inform us about realities. In this manner stories are not, as Turner puts it, ‘exotic’. They are in fact often times the very way we come to appreciate the world. Returning to the analogy of a stone –the mother, in this instance, throws the stone, the story about the narrator’s aunt in China- and, as Turner suggests, the narrator looks immediately back to begin to understand who threw the stone and why. In the very next paragraph she begins to appropriate the story, to make it her own by filling in the gaps through imagination.

Kingston, in an interview, explains of her style that:

“Our usual idea of biography is of time-lines, of dates and chronological events; I am certainly more imaginative than that; I play with words and form . . . I’ve decided that I am writing biography and autobiography of imaginative people. I am writing about real people, all of whom have minds that love to invent fictions. I am writing the biography of their imaginations.”[17]

The unique aspect revealed in these words from Kingston rests primarily in this idea that ‘real people’ understand and utilize ‘fictions’ in their everyday lives. She is, in this statement, using the term ‘fiction’ in a very unconventional way. She is using it to describe the consciousness of real people. Typically, fiction is strictly a literary term for what is done by a writer in the ‘writing realm’. Kingston is suggesting that fiction, more than just a writer’s tool, is also an everyday tool used by the average person; in short Kingston has, and employs in her writings, a distinct notion of what might be termed ‘real-fiction’. In other words, ‘fictions’ are not just playful, creative and the stuff of literature, but also essential, everyday and real. According to Kingston, stories, fictions, and the rich, inner, imaginative narratives of our minds are a crucial part of our everyday consciousness.

Works Cited

1. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist, ed. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1981.

2. Cook, Rufus. The Art of Uncertainty: Cultural Displacement and the Devaluation of

the World. Critique (Atlanta, Ga.) 41 no3 227-35, Spring 2000.

3. Descartes, Rene. Descartes Philosophical Writings. Trans. Anscombe, Elizabeth and

Geach, Thomas Peter. Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.,

1971.

4. Heidegger, Martin. Existence and Being. Trans. Stefan Schimanski. South Bend, Ind.:

Regnery/Gateway, Inc., 1979.

5. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.

New York: Vintage International Books, 1989.

6. Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

7. Shostak, Debra. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. “Maxine Hong Kingston’s

Fake Books” New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998.

8. Ed. Skenazy, Paul and Martin, Tera. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston.

Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

9. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

[1] Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics. New York: Penguin Books, 1997 (preface).

[2] Heidegger, Martin. Existence and Being. Trans. Stefan Schimanski. South Bend, Ind.: Regnery/Gateway, Inc., 1979.

[3] Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International Books, 1989 (page 29).

[4] Descartes, Rene. Descartes Philosophical Writings. Trans. Anscombe, Elizabeth and Geach, Thomas Peter. Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1971 (page 61).

[5] Shostak, Debra. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fake Books” New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998 (page 51).

[6] Cook, Rufus. The Art of Uncertainty: Cultural Displacement and the Devaluation of the World. Critique (Atlanta, Ga.) 41 no3 227-35, Spring 2000.

[7] Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International Books, 1989 (page 6).

[8] “” Ibid (page 10).

[9] Ed. Skenazy, Paul and Martin, Tera. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. “Eccentric Memories: A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston”. Int. Paula Rabinowitz/1986. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998 (page 71).

[10] Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981 (page 294).

[11] Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International Books, 1989 (page 5).

[12]Ed. Skenazy, Paul and Martin, Tera. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. “An Interview With Maxine Hong Kingston”. Int. Kay Bonetti/1986. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998 (page 38).

[13] Ed. Skenazy, Paul and Martin, Tera. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. “Kingston at the University”. Int. Paul Skenazy/1989. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998 (page 149).

[14] “” Ibid. (xvii).

[15] Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 (page 7).

[16] “ ”Ibid. (page 7).

[17] Ed. Skenazy, Paul and Martin, Tera. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. “Eccentric Memories: A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston”. Int. Paula Rabinowitz/1986. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998 (page 75).

Literate practices: Rediscovering the value of recitation

acomposing — Mon, 30 May 2011 20:26:49 +0000

Men on Succor Street -Photo: (c) Kate Koshnick Photography (katekoshnick@msn.com)

Our Changing Literacy Expectations:

We (as teachers and as a broader culture) critically underestimate the degree to which our expectations of literate practice change. Even more so, we fail to appreciate the extent to which what we expect of a literate person in today’s society is dramatically more ambitious than our recent past and that the these demands and expectations have changed over a very short period of time. No book makes this more apparent, nor outlines in greater detail the nature of these changing expectations than Miles Myers’ (1996) book, Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy. In it, he gives a historical account, naming, categorizing and describing precisely how our expectations have shifted. Here is his timeline and the general terminology/classifications that he uses to organize his presentation:

1600 Oracy

1776 Signature

1864 Recitation

1916 Decoding

Translation 1983

After I first read Myer’s book, I came to appreciate the evolving generational differences in the forms of literacy education. They became apparent, for example, in my own family as I grew to recognize that my grandfather was taught a form of literacy that valued different kinds of “reading” than my own. My late grandfather, Robert Koshnick, was educated in a rural Minnesota one-room schoolhouse during the early 1900′s. Throughout his childhood, he was taught printing through tracing and replication (a significant overlap between his education and my own grade school work), but he was also taught to memorize and recite long passages of both prose and poetry. This emphasis on memorization (recitation on Myer’s chronology) was no longer valued by the time I was in grade school. Whenever he would quote Tynneson, Poe, Robert Service, Yeats, etc. I envied him because I did not share his ability to recite tens of poems by heart.

1925 My grandfather (in back) and a neighbor friend during the first day of school

As Myers’ book argues, translation captures aspects of our current literate practice. The ability to translate, i.e. to summarize, re-symbolize, and transfer information from specific sources for use across shifting social, political, and professional contexts takes a great deal of training and practice to do well. Given the power and relatively availability of increasingly “hand-held” search engine devices, via Google, etc. we can find vast stores of information instantaneously -the primary skill that must be emphasized, given these trends, is to interpret and repurpose that information for shifting purposes and audiences. Where once we stressed honoring established works of poetry and literature as aesthetic and moral achievements -when we include such works now, we value instead the ability to: a) decode, and therefore learn from them; b) to summarize, and therefore symbolize for renewed intentions and purposes. These abilities do not require memorization, or recitation, largely outdated forms of literate practice.

My teaching practices in reading and writing have been utterly influenced by my understanding and appreciation of a translation literacy for modern, functional, goals and outcomes. And yet, inspired by the legacy of my grandfather’s (recitation) childhood literacy to memorize and recite poems, I have, and continue to, dedicate myself to such learning. I have done so on my own terms as an adult and often with the sneaking suspicion that -although outdated- my own childhood was intellectually malnourished by the loss of such practice. Sure, admiration of my grandfather has influenced my perspective, but for years I could sense, but could not adequately explain why the ability to recite poetry in particular felt so important and powerful.

When I was introduced to the concept and term “gignomai” however, I was suddenly able to both establish and explain just what happens when we hone the ability to memorize and recite specific passages. Ever since, when teaching those courses in writing that are explicitly grounded in the humanities, I have included the following assignment in my courses, with the following explanation of its value.

* * * * *

This is what I expect of this assignment. You are to enter into the work – populate a poem with your own identity – bring together two realms – you and a poem – until they become each something a little more familiar.

* * * * *

The Art of Poetic Memorization

* * * * *

A good poem is an introduction to the world. In medieval times, a poet was called ‘a maker’. According to this understanding, a poet makes the world. And, in a way, every story, every poem is a form of making and re-making the world. Such stories, however small, are not fanciful, complete fictions – rather, they inform us about the world. They tell us how we live, often in surprising and sobering ways.

Consider for a moment the Greek word: Gignomai –born of ‘gnosis’ or “knowing” it is commonly known as the form of knowing that is ‘to become’ -a from of knowledge whereby you become that knowledge. Gignomai, or knowing, in this sense, is a happening, a becoming.

It is to take within, and a transformation occurs. Memorizing poetry – the act allows a poem to enter fully into your self both consciously and unconsciously. It transforms your views in particular instances because you can call on the relationships inherent in a poem, to evoke a feel, or felt sense, of knowing particular words, or situations more immediately and fully.

And so poetry is a happening, a making in a very sincere sense.

Poems also entertain. When you memorize a poem, like learning to play a groovy song on the guitar, you may find yourself reciting it (to the amazement of others) around a campfire, or to yourself when you are stuck in traffic waiting patiently. Many people who memorize poetry often say it can be comforting at times, to have something familiar to recite much like a secular form of praying. The act offers an immediate connection with some part of the cosmos.

* * * * *

An Example: How Knowing a Poem
Can Make the World a Bit More Familiar

* * * * *

What follows below is the assignment and some suggestions on memorizing. But first read this entry from Karen McCosker’s book A Poem a Day.

“In the early 1970′s I was living in Athens. After a year, I was hoping that my father would find the courage to make the trip to see me. But despite the fact that he hated flying, loathed being away from his small, self-owned business and hometown where he knew everyone and everyone recognized him, my father did accompany my mother on this visit. While making the arduous ascent towards the Acropolis, I sensed a trepidation in his steps. He had a bad heart; it was suffocatingly hot and windless; the landscape was utterly foreign to him. He had become something he had rarely been: a stranger. I feared he might lose the psychological surefootedness that being on his own terrain gave him, want to turn back, go home. Pausing, he began to recite a poem, one by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

…Euclid alone

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Recalling what he knew oriented my father. The poem gave him breathing space in the crowd, and time to recover from the anxiety of feeling off balance. Hearing the words he had memorized helped him make his way because they suggested an an association between the strange place and the familiar poem, gathering up the distance between Athens and his upstate New York home.

Though my father often recited (no Thanksgiving or Christmas went unmarked by verse), I hadn’t realized until that morning in Athens how a single poem, even a few lines, learned by heart can transform the person who needs to hear those words at a particular time: how they can make what otherwise might have been abandoned possible.”

* * * * *
The Assignment

* * * * *

During the course of this term, you are expected to memorize 2 poems of at least 15 lines. You may also choose to memorize specific lines from a play of the same minimum length.

On the day of the quiz, you will clear your desks and write out the poem on a piece of paper. You will have roughly 8 minutes to write the poem out and hand it in to me. You must demonstrate a near perfect transcription for full credit.

Each quiz is worth 5% of your grade. This is an all or nothing assignment. Minimal word variations in several lines is acceptable such as articles omitted or substituted: ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘an’ and a couple (meaning 2 or 3) word variations will be allowed. Form, word, spelling and meaning must remain wholly intact in at least 14 our of your 15 lines for credit. This includes knowing the line breaks throughout your poem.

You must choose and hand in a typed copy of the poem (or lines of play) to me roughly 3 weeks before quiz day. Unless you are very talented, DO NOT try to memorize 15 lines in one night! This kind of exercise will take at least 4 concentrated sessions to learn fully.

* * * * *
Some Suggestions on Memorization
* * * * *

*begin with 2 lines and add 2 additional lines as you become moderately comfortable with each new addition

*recognize the feel and feeling that the poem evokes; tapping into the sense or feel of the poem will help you recall details you may otherwise forget

*try to imagine the poem in a specific setting

*visually imagine the words on the page, then compare your mind’s image with the printed words; repeat as necessary

*pay attention to rhythm, rhyme, the overall music of the poem

*read the poem aloud

*use a pneumonic device -the 1st letter of each line to form an acronym -then create a memorable line from the acronym; often the first letter will clue you into the words you want to remember

O -remember

In your narrowing dark hours

That more things move

Than blood in the heart.

~Louise Bogan~

O. I. T. T.

‘oil is terribly thick’

*be conscious of specific words, or line breaks that you miss on a repeated basis

*look up any words if you are not familiar with them

*choose a poem you appreciate and enjoy

*recall as many lines as you can before you go to sleep; often memorization is a good tool for overcoming insomnia

*begin memorizing early and don’t worry, with a little practice anyone can memorize far more lines than needed for this assignment; just think of all of the actors that memorize the whole of Hamlet’s character

* * * * *

A Few Poems I Have Memorized:

The Way We Live
by Kathleen Jamie

Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises
to the gods of movement and absolute
non-friction, flight, and the scary side:
death by avalanche, birth by failed contraception.

Of chicken tandoori and reggae, loud, from tenements,
commitment, driving fast and unswerving
friendship. Of tee-shirts on pulleys, giros and Bombay,
barmen, dreaming waitresses with many fake-gold
bangles. Of airports, impulse, and waking to uncertainty,
to strip-lights, motorways, or that pantheon –
the mountains. To overdrafts and grafting

and the fit slow pulse of wipers and you’re
creeping over roadways, while the God of moorland
walks abroad with his entourage of freezing fog,
his bodyguard of snow.

Of endless gloaming in the North, of Asiatic swelter,
to launderettes, anecdotes, passions and exhaustion,
Final Demands and dead men, the skeletal grip
of government. To misery and elation; mixed,
the sod and caprice of landlords.

To the way it fits, the way it is, the way it seems to be:
let me bash out praises — pass the tambourine.

* * * * *

Sitting
by Phyllis Webb

The degree of nothingness
is important:
to sit emptily
in the sun
receiving fire
that is the way
to mend
an extraordinary world,
sitting perfectly
still
and only
remotely human.

* * * * *

Thistles

Links to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Holt-t.html

A Directory of Blogs (and other resources) on Writing

acomposing — Thu, 19 May 2011 22:23:32 +0000

This directory of blogs (and other resources) corresponds to those of us that teach and study writing across English; Composition; Rhetoric; Writing Studies. This particular directory started from an aggregation of two sources:

1. KairosNews [http://kairosnews.org/node/3719];
2. Traci Gardner’s excellent and recently updated list [http://www.tengrrl.com/blog/]

I was inspired to start aggregating and editing this directory because given those blogs that I follow currently, I am convinced that there is a great deal of valuable work and thinking happening across these publishing platforms. Please note that I am intentionally casting a wide net given the resource list below and therefore relying on a very loosely defined (non-technical) notion of “blog”.

I am also working on an a list of broader resources according to an organizational schema that will continue to evolve, but here are the current categories listed via the tables below:

I. Web/Blogs Listed by Name
II. Open Publication, Institutional, & Field Resources
III. Job Search Sites
IV. Historical Figures & Research in Composition/Rhetoric
V. Language Parsing (Open-Source Research Tools)
VI. Bibliographies
VII. Longitudinal Writing Research

This directory is, at present, being actively edited and revised (last: Thursday, May 23rd 2011). Please email me with suggestions or additions [koshnick@umail.ucsb.edu]. *And finally, I cannot be held responsible for the information linked from these web/blogs.

The Directory

I. Web/Blogs Listed By Name

Name	Blog Title	Address
A
ACM Writing	Dialogues on RhetComp ESL	http://dialogueonwriting.blogspot.com/
Akassi, M.	English CompRhet Forum	http://moniqueakassi.wordpress.com/
Altbach, P.	An Anthology for My Readers	http://dilogueonanthology.blogspot.com/
Anderson, D.	Writing Pusher	http://www.thoughtpress.org/daniel/
Austin, W.	Ideawarehouse	http://ideawarehouse.typepad.com/
B
Ball State Univ.	repurposed	http://repurposed.posterous.com/
Baron, D.	The Web of Language	http://illinois.edu/db/view/25
Bedford BITs	Bits Ideas for Teaching Weblog	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/devenglish/
Bedford, Barrios	Emerging, a Blog	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/bbarrios/
Bedford, Bernhardt	Help Yourself	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/sbernhardt/
Bedford, Bernstein	Beyond the Basics	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/devenglish/
Bedford, Carbone	Tech Notes	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/ncarbone/
Bedford, Dolmage	Advice from How to Write Anything	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/jaydolmage
Bedford, Gardner	Teaching in the 21st Century	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/tgardner/
Bedford, Lunsford	Teacher to Teacher	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/alunsford/
Bedford, Pappas	FYC: Community College Style	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/hpappas/
Bedford, Pitt Instruct	Teaching with Ways of Reading	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/pinstructors/
Bedford, Reynolds	Resources for Teachers of Writing	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/nreynolds/
Bedford, Solomon	Teaching Popular Cultural Semiotics	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/solomon/
Bedford, Wardle, Downs	Write On: Notes on Teaching Writing About Writing	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/ewardle/
Bedford, Zobel	Adjunct Advice	http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/author/gzobel/
Bérubé, M.	American Airspace	http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php
Blackmon, S.	Dr. B’s Blog	http://blog.samanthablackmon.net/
Bleck, B.	bleckblog.org	http://bleckblog.org/
Brooke, C.	Collin vs. Blog	http://collinvsblog.net/
C
Cadle, L.	Techsophist	http://techsophist.net/Techsophist/Blog/Blog.html
CandC Blog	Computers & Composition Online Blog	http://candcblog.org/
Carter, S.	Shannon Carter, PhD	http://www.shannoncarter.info/
CBW	Council on Basic Writing Blog	http://cbwblog.wordpress.com/
CCC	CCC Blog	http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/
CCR	Composition & Rhetoric Graduate Circle	http://www.ccrcircle.net/
CF Blog	Composition Forum Blog	http://compositionforum.com/blog/
Chamcharatsri, P.	Composition & Multi-Lingual Writers	http://bee-l2writing.blogspot.com/
Ching, K.	Scrivel	http://scrivel.wordpress.com/
CLiC	Converging Literacies Center	http://convergingliteraciescenter.wordpress.com/about-clic/
Cline, A.	The Rhetorica Network	http://rhetorica.net/
CompRhet@KU	Composition and Rhetoric at KU	http://kucomprhet.wordpress.com/
Crane, M.	Technoliteracy	http://technoliteracy.blogspot.com/
D
Dad, D.	Confessions of a Community College Dean	http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/
Degenaro, B.	Bill Degenaro	http://bdegenaro.blogspot.com/
Dilger, B.	CBD	http://wrecking.org/cbd/
E
EC	English Companion	http://englishcompanion.ning.com/
Edwards, M.	Vitia	http://www.vitia.org/
EMAC	Emerging Media & Comm. Blog	http://emac.utdallas.edu/blog/
Emmons, K.	Information for Graduate Students	http://www.case.edu/artsci/engl/emmons/rhetcomp/
F
Faris, M.	A Collage of Citations	http://michaeljfaris.com/blog/
Fireside Learning	Fireside Learning: Conversations about Education	http://firesidelearning.ning.com/profiles/blog/list
Fish, S.	Opinionator	http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/stanley-fish/
Fitzpatrick, K.	Planned Obsolescence	http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/
G
Gardner, T.	Pedablogical	http://www.tengrrl.com/blog/
Gossett, K.	The Forgotten Canon	http://www.kathiegossett.com/forgottencanon/
H
Harris, J.	In My Idiom	http://josephdharris.wordpress.com/
Hawhee, D.	Blogos	http://dhawhee.blogs.com/d_hawhee/
Highberg, N.	Nels Highberg	http://drnelsresearch.blogspot.com/
Highberg, N.	Pennies in a Jar	http://penniesinajarblog.blogspot.com/
Hosterman, A.	Hyperreal Blogging	http://alechosterman.com/WordPress/
Howard, R.	Writing Matters	http://www.rebeccamoorehoward.com/category/blog
I
If:Book	Institute for the Future of the Book	http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/
Is There a There There?	Is There a There There?	http://isthereatherethere.wordpress.com/
J
Jacobs, A.	Text Patterns	http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/
Jean, A.	Media Praxis	http://aljean.wordpress.com/
Jenkins, H	Confessions of an Aca/Fan	http://henryjenkins.org/
Jerz, D.	Jerz’s Literacy Weblog	http://jerz.setonhill.edu/
Johnduff, M.	Working Notes	http://mikejohnduff.blogspot.com/
Johnson-Eilola, J.	Datacloud	http://people.clarkson.edu/~jjohnson//datacloud/
K
Kemp, F.	Musings about Teaching and Technology	http://fredkemp.wordpress.com/
Kirschenbaum, M.	Matthew G. Kirschenbaum	http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/
Knight, A.	Aesthetically Good	http://aimeeknight.com/
Koshnick, D.	Acomposing	http://acomposing.wordpress.com/
Krause, S.	Steven Krause’s Official Blog	http://stevendkrause.com/
Krista, K.	Arete	http://www.slimcoincidence.com/blog/
Kyburz, B.	Kind of …	http://blkyburz.blogspot.com/
L
Lafer, S.	Stephen Lafer’s Blog	http://firesidelearning.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?user=0ycabjolgrmq1
LaVecchia, C.	et. al.	http://clavatuc.blogspot.com/
LaVecchia, C.	Investigating Writing Program Assessment	http://ucwpassessment.wordpress.com/
Lessig, L.	Lessig Blog	http://www.lessig.org/blog/
Long, R.	2River	http://www.2river.org/2RView/default.html
Losh, E.	Virtualpolitik	http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/
Lowe, C.	Cyberdash	http://kairosnews.org/blog/14
Lynch, J.	Rhetorical Researcher	http://jennlynch.wordpress.com/
M
Mascle, D.	Metawriting	http://masclemetawriting.blogspot.com/
Matsuda, P.	Paul Kei Matsuda	http://dissoilogoi2.blogspot.com/
McGinnis, M.	Michael L. McGinnis	http://www.mlmcginnis.com/
McNely, B.	5000	http://5000.blogspot.com/
Meloni, J.	Academic Sandbox	http://www.academicsandbox.com/blog/
Moere, A.	Information Aesthetics	http://infosthetics.com/
Moffett, J.	James Moffett Consortium	http://jamesmoffettstudies.ning.com/
Montfort, N.	Post Position	http://nickm.com/post/
Moore, M.	Composition and Rhetoric II	http://composing.org/wrd104sq2011/
Mueller, D.	Earth Wide Moth	http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/
N
Noon, D.	Borderland	http://borderland.northernattitude.org/
O
Opipari, B.	Writers on Process	http://www.writersonprocess.com/
P
Pace, S.	Diary of a Writing Teacher	http://www.beaumontrhetorica.blogspot.com/
Parry, D.	AcademHack	http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/category/blog/
Pigg, S.	Pidoubleg	http://pidoubleg.com/blog/teaching
Priest, J.	Border Work	http://priestjesse.wordpress.com/
Q
R
Ratliff, C.	CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism	http://culturecat.net/
Ravitch & Meier	Bridging Differences	http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
Reid, A.	Digital Digs	http://alexreid.typepad.com/digital_digs/
Remirez, C.	Mestize Rhetoric	http://mextizarhetorica.blogspot.com/
Rettberg, J.	Jill/txt	http://jilltxt.net/
Rhetoric, Society	Blogora	http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/
Rice, J.	Yellow Dog	http://ydog.net/
Richards, D.	Resident Pragmatist	http://danielrichards.net/
Richardson, W.	Weblogg-ed	http://weblogg-ed.com/
Riley, B.	Digital Sextant	http://www.curragh-labs.org/blog/
River, N.	Pure Sophist Monster	http://pure-sophist-monster.blogspot.com/
Rodgers, M.	Intent/Effect	http://www.meaganrodgers.com/intenteffect.html
Rodrigo, S.	Confessions of a Committed Technofile	http://committedtechnofile.com/
Rose, M.	Mike Rose Blog	http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/
RTB	Radical Teacher Blog	http://radicalteacherblog.wordpress.com/
S
Sample, M.	Sample Reality	http://www.samplereality.com/
Santos, M.	Insignificant Wranglings	http://insignificantwrangler.blogspot.com/
Sayers, J.	Listening to Repeating	http://www.jenterysayers.com/
Schaffner, S.	Metaspencer	http://metaspencer.blogspot.com/
Schell, E.	Eastcoast-Westcoast	http://eastcoast-westcoast.blogspot.com/
Schirmer, J.	Against Multiphrenia	http://betajames.net/
Schott, B.	Schott’s Vocab	http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/
Skallerup, L.	College Ready Writing	http://collegereadywriting.blogspot.com/
Smith, K.	Weblogs in Higher Education	http://www.mchron.net/site/edublog.php
Spangenberg, L.	IT: Instructional Technology	http://www.lisaspangenberg.com/it/
Spinuzzi, C.	Spinuzzi	http://spinuzzi.blogspot.com/
Stedman, K.	Transmedia Me	http://transmediame.wordpress.com/
Strate, L.	Lance Strate’s Blog Time Passing	http://lancestrate.blogspot.com/
Sullivan, J.	Free to Write	http://freetowrite.com/
T
Taylor, K.	Fragment/Framework	http://trauthke.wordpress.com/
Trauman, R.	Digital Bibliography	http://ryantrauman.com/blog/
Tryon, C.	The Chutry Experiment	http://www.chutry.wordherders.net/wp/
Ttrettien, W.	Diapsalmata	http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/
U
V
W
Walter, J.	Machina Memorialis	http://www.jpwalter.com/machina/
Ward, J.	This Public Address 3.0	http://www.thispublicaddress.com/
Williams, G.	WorkBook	http://workbook.wordherders.net/
Wittig, & Marino	WRT: Writer Response Theory	http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/
Wolff, B.	Composing Spaces	http://williamwolff.org/
X
Y
Z

II. Open Publication, Institutional, & Field Resources

AAAL	American Association for Applied Linguists	http://www.aaal.org/
ACH Web	Association for Computers & Humanities	http://www.ach.org/
ACJ	American Communication Journal	http://www1.appstate.edu/orgs/acjournal/index.htm
AEPL	Assembly of Expanded Perspectives Learning	https://www.sworps.tennessee.edu/aepl/index.html
AERA	American Educational Research Association	http://www.aera.net/
Assessing Writing	Assessing Writing international Journal	http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/620369/description#description
ATD	Across the Disciplines	http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/archives.cfm?showatdarchives=atd
AWE	Acedemic Writing in English	http://sana.tkk.fi/awe/
BALEAP	British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes	http://www.baleap.org.uk/
Basic Composition	BasicComposition.com	http://www.basiccomposition.com/
Basic Writing E-Journal	Basic Writing E-Journal	http://orgs.tamu-commerce.edu/BWe/index.htm
Bazerman, C.	Charles Bazerman	http://education.ucsb.edu/bazerman/
BBC BC	British Council on Writing	http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/writing
Bedford Take 20	Taylor’s: 22 Writing Teachers Film	http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/catalog/static/bsm/take20/
BSU Word Works	Word Works: Short Essays on Teach Writing	http://www.boisestate.edu/wcenter/wordworks.html
BUOWL	Bogazici University Online Writing Lab	http://www.buowl.boun.edu.tr/
CAI	Center for Academic Integrity	http://www.academicintegrity.org/
CASDW	Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse & Writing	http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~casdw/
CATE	California Teachers of English	http://www.cateweb.org/
CCCC	Conference on College Composition Comm.	http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc/
CCCOA	The CCC Online Archive	http://www.inventio.us/ccc/
CCCS	Communication & Critical Cultural Studies	http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713684641
Changing English	Changing English Studies in Culture & Educ.	http://www.tandfdc.com/journals/titles/1358684X.asp
CiEL	Currents in Electronic Literacy	http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/
CIER	Contemporary Issues in Education Research	http://www.cluteinstitute-onlinejournals.com/archives/journals.cfm?Journal=Contemporary%20Issues%20in%20Education%20Research
Citation Project	The Citation Project: Preventing Plagiarism	http://citationproject.net/index.html
CITE	Contemporary Issues in Technology & Teacher Education	http://www.aace.org/pubs/cite/
CLJ	Community Literacy Journal	http://www.communityliteracy.org/index.php/clj
CMC	Computer Mediated Communication	http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/
Composition Forum	CompForum	http://compositionforum.com/
Computers & Composition	Computers & Composition Online	http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/
Computers & Writing	Computers & Writing	http://computersandwriting.org/
CTech.	Campus Technology	http://campustechnology.com/home.aspx
Currents in Electronic Literacy	Digital Writing & Research Lab	http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/
DHC	Digital Humanities Conference	https://dh2011.stanford.edu/
Diagramming Sentences	Sentence Diagrams: by Moutoux, E.	http://www.german-latin-english.com/basicdiagrams.htm
Digital Culture Books	Digital Culture Books	http://www.digitalculture.org/
Digital Ethnography	Digital Ethnography at Kansas State	http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/
Discourse & Society	Discourse & Society	http://das.sagepub.com/
Discourse Processes	Journal for the Society of Text & Discourse	http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0163853X.asp
Discourse Studies	Discourse Studies	http://dis.sagepub.com/
DOAJ	Directory of Open Access Journals	http://www.doaj.org/
Doctoral Consortium in Rhetoric and Composition	Doctoral Consortium in Rhet’Comp	http://www.cws.illinois.edu/rc_consortium/index.html
E4.Thai	English for Thai.com	http://english-for-thais-2.blogspot.com/
EATAW	European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing	http://www.eataw.eu/
ECAC	Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum	http://wordsworth2.net/projects/ecac/ecacbk1.htm
ELTeCS	English Language Teaching Contacs Scheme	http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/eltecs
EM	English Matters	http://englishmatters.gmu.edu/
Enculturation	Enculturation	http://enculturation.gmu.edu/
ESP Journal	Journal of English for Specific Purposes	http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PublicationURL&_cdi=5986&_auth=y&_acct=C000022859&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=521817&_pubType=J&md5=f2cfafa7fa21a35ef7640b956227997d
EWCA	European Writing Centers Association	http://ewca.sabanciuniv.edu/eng/
FYHC	First Year Honors Composition	http://www.fyhc.info/index.htm
GCIL	Georgia Conference on Information Literacy	http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolit.html
GMU Inventio	Inventio: Creative Thinking on Teaching	http://doit.gmu.edu//inventio/
Hacker, D.	Research and Documentation Online	http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/resdoc5e/
HDG	Humanist Discussion Group	http://www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/
IEEE	IEEE Professional Communication Society	http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/pcs/
IJOC	International Journal of Communication	http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/index
IMD	Interactive Media Division	http://interactive.usc.edu/
InkShed: CASLL	Canadian Association for the Study of Language & Learning	http://www.stthomasu.ca/inkshed/
Inside HigherEd	Inside Higher Ed.	http://www.insidehighered.com/
ITESLJ	The Internet TESL Journal	http://iteslj.org/
IWCA	International Writing Centers Association	http://writingcenters.org/
IWCA: Videos	IWCA: Videos & Podcasts	http://writingcenters.org/links/podcasts/
JAC	Journal of Advanced Composition	http://www.jacweb.org/
JACR	Journal of Applied Communication Research	http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rjac
JDC	Journal of Design Communication	http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JDC/
JEAP	Journal of English for Academic Purposes	http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622440/description#description
JoTW	Journal of Teaching Writing	http://www.iupui.edu/~jtw/
JOWR	Journal of Writing Research	http://www.jowr.org/current.html
JSLW	Journal of Second Langauge Writing	http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/620372/description#description
JTWC	Journal of Technical Writing & Communication	http://www.baywood.com/journals/previewjournals.asp?id=0047-2816
Kairos	Kairos	http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/
KB Journal	Kenneth Burke Journal	http://www.kbjournal.org/node
Language in Society	Journal of Language in Society	http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=lsy
LILAC GROUP	Learning Information Literacy Across the Curriculum	http://lilac-group.blogspot.com/2009/03/invitation-to-participate-lilac-project.html
LLC	Journal of Literary & Linguistic Computing	http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/
LORE	Journal of SD State “Practitioner Lore”	http://rhetoric.sdsu.edu/lore/lore.html
MLA	Modern Language Association	http://www.mla.org/
NCTE	National Council Teachers of English	http://www.ncte.org/
NCTE, CE	College English	http://www.ncte.org/journals/ce
NCTE, CNP	Classroom Notes Plus	http://www.ncte.org/journals/cnp
NCTE, EE	English Education	http://www.ncte.org/journals/ee
NCTE, EJ	English Journal	http://www.ncte.org/journals/ej
NCTE, ELQ	English Leadership Quarterly	http://www.ncte.org/journals/elq
NCTE, LA	Language Arts	http://www.ncte.org/journals/la
NCTE, National Gallery	NCTE National Day of Writing Gallery	http://www.galleryofwriting.org/contribute.php
NCTE, RTE	Research in the Teaching of English	http://www.ncte.org/journals/rte
NCTE, ST	School Talk	http://www.ncte.org/journals/st
NCTE, TETYC	Teaching English in the Two Year College	http://www.ncte.org/journals/tetyc
NCTE, TP	Talking Points	http://www.ncte.org/journals/tp
NCTE, VM	Voices from the Middle	http://www.ncte.org/journals/vm
NetPoetic	NetPoetic: Digital Poetry & Electronic Literature	http://netpoetic.com/about/
NewJour	NewJour: Directory of Electronic Journals	http://old.library.georgetown.edu/newjour/toc.html
NOORDSTER	University of Groningen: Communication Skills in Higher Education	http://www.rug.nl/noordster/index
NWP	National Writing Project	http://www.nwp.org/
NWP E-Voice	NWP’s: Journal E-Voice	http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources/e_voice.csp
OWJ	Open Words Journal	http://www.pearsoncomppro.com/open_words_journal/index.php
OWL	Purdue Online Writing Lab	http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
Pedagogy	Journal of Pedagogy	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ped/
Philosophy & Rhetoric	Journal of Philosophy & Rhetoric	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/par/
Plagiary	Plagiary	http://www.plagiary.org/
Pre/Text	Pre/Text: The First Decade	http://books.google.com/books?id=BbOyc31qUckC&pg=PA312&lpg=PA312&dq=vitanza+pre/text&source=bl&ots=AXQJTDPFtR&sig=_kcugC4pV6jxNY1RgPz2DaEm2Pc&hl=en&ei=z-fWTabKF8HIgQeMgLnBBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false
Present Tense	Present Tense: Journal of Rhetoric in Society	http://www.presenttensejournal.org/
Programmatic Perspectives	Programmatic Perspectives	http://www.cptsc.org/pp/index.html
Prose Studies	Journal of Prose Studies	http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/01440357.asp
Rethinking Schools	Rethinking Schools	http://www.rethinkingschools.org/index.shtml
RhetNet	RhetNet	http://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/
Rhetoric & Public Affairs	Journal of Rhetoric & Public Affairs	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rap/
Rhetoric Review	Rhetoric Review	http://www.rhetoricreview.com/
Rhetorica	Journal of the History of Rhetoric	http://ucpressjournals.com/journalSoc.asp?j=rh
RSQ	Rhetoric Society Quarterly	http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t716100769
Russell, D.	David R. Russell	http://www.public.iastate.edu/~drrussel/drresume.html
Scholars	Interviews and Workshops	http://www.basiccomposition.com/SCHOLARS.html
SCWCA	South Central Writing Centers Association	http://www.ualr.edu/scwca/
TCQ	Technical Communication Quarterly	http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/1057-2252.asp
TEI	Text Encoding Initiative	http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
TESOL	Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages	http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/index.asp
TESOL Quarterly	TESOL Quarterly	http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/seccss.asp?CID=209&DID=1679
TEXT	TEXT Journal of Writing & Writing Courses	http://www.textjournal.com.au/
TFJ	The Fibreculture Journal	http://fibreculturejournal.org/
The Chronicle	THe Chronicle of Higher Education	http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5
The Chronicle ProfHacker	ProfHacker	http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/
The Chronicle Wired	Wired Campus	http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/
The Commons	Academic Commons	http://www.academiccommons.org/
The JUMP	Journal for Undergrad. Multimedia Projects	http://jump.dwrl.utexas.edu/about
Transliteracy	TransLiteracy: Electronic Literature	http://nlabnetworks.typepad.com/transliteracy/
TWI	The Writing Instructor	http://www.writinginstructor.com/
UEfAP	Using English for Academic Purposes	http://www.uefap.com/
WAC AW Archives	Academic.Writing Archives	http://wac.colostate.edu/aw/
WAC Clearinghouse	WAC Clearinghouse Colorado State	http://wac.colostate.edu/
WLL	Journal of Written Language & Literacy	http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=WL%26L
WPA	Council of Writing Program Administrators	http://wpacouncil.org/
WPA Journal	Journal of Writing Program Administration	http://wpacouncil.org/node/1812
WRAB	Writing Research Across Borders Conference	http://www.writing.ucsb.edu/wrconf11/
Writing Centers WCRP	Writing Centers Research Project	http://casebuilder.rhet.ualr.edu/wcrp/
Writing Lab Newsletter	The Writing Lab Newsletter Archives	http://www.writinglabnewsletter.org/new/
Written Communication	Written Communication	http://wcx.sagepub.com/
WWoB	Words Without Borders	http://wordswithoutborders.org/
Xchanges	Xchanges Newsletter	http://infohost.nmt.edu/~xchanges/
Young Scholars Gallery	Young Scholars in Writing Gallery	http://www.galleryofwriting.org/galleries/50359
Young Scholars Writing	Young Scholars in Writing	http://www.bk.psu.edu/Academics/Degrees/26432.htm
Zeitschrift	Zeitschrift Schreiben	http://www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu/cgi-bin/joolma/

III. Job Search Sites

AcademicJobs	Academic Jobs Wiki	http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Academic_Jobs_Wiki
ADE	Association of Departments of English Job List	http://www.ade.org/jil/index.htm
California CC’s	California Community Colleges	http://www.cccco.edu/
Community College	Community College Jobs	http://www.communitycollegejobs.com/
HASTAC	Humanities, Arts, Science & Technology Collaboratory	http://www.hastac.org/forum/23
HigherEd	HigherEd Jobs	http://www.higheredjobs.com/
IWCA	International Writing Centers Association Jobs	http://writingcenters.org/category/positions/
The Chronicle of HigherEd	The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Jobs	http://chronicle.com/section/Jobs/61/
WPA	WPA Job Board	http://wpacouncil.org/job-board

IV. Historical Figures & Research in Composition/Rhetoric

Comppile	Composition Founders	http://compfaqs.org/CompositionFounders/HomePage
Moffett, J.	James Moffett Consortium	http://jamesmoffettstudies.ning.com/

V. Language Parsing (Open-Source Research Tools)

Concordance	Text Based Concordances	http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/text_concord/
Reed-Kellogg	Reed-Kellogg Sentence Diagrammer Online	http://1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser/
Sen-Draw	Sen-Draw Sentence Diagrams	http://www.sendraw.ucf.edu/
Thomson Rueters	HistCite	http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/histcite/
UsingEnglish	UsingEnglish.com	http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php
Wordle	Wordle	http://www.wordle.net/

VI. Bibliographies

Bedford Bibliography	The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing	http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/catalog/static/bsm/bb/contents.html
CompPile	WPA-CompPile Research Bibliographies	http://comppile.org/wpa/bibliographies/index.php
Howard, R.	Bibliographies for Composition and Rhetoric	http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/bibs.html

VII. Longitudinal Writing Research

Denver	Denver Longitudinal Study of Writing	http://www.du.edu/writing/ls.html
PAW	Professional Academic Writing in a Global Context	http://creet.open.ac.uk/projects/paw/
PIL	Project Information Literacy	http://projectinfolit.org/about/
Stanford	Stanford Study of Writing	http://ssw.stanford.edu/

The Economies of Palimpsest

acomposing — Sun, 15 May 2011 06:34:37 +0000

DATE: May 15th, 2011
RESEARCH/WRITTEN BY: Damian C. Koshnick koshnick@umail.ucsb.edu

I am in love, and have been for years, with palimpsests because -metaphorically and literally, they are all around us …

Archimedes' Palimpsest

Occasionally, you learn things that resonate for years. In 2000, during my first experience in graduate school, a mentor and professor of mine –Tom Gage, used the word palimpsest in a conversation. I nodded my head politely the first time he mentioned it, thinking, “Should I know this word?” But I knew that intelligent graduate students (the ones that survive anyway) learn to look things up. I came to know that through Latin and then Greek it means, “again, to scrape”; that it is the act of reusing a material (parchment, vellum, papyrus, etc.), by (often) imperfectly scraping away and writing over a previously extant text. Once I understood the term, as so often happens, I saw palimpsests and echoes of the concept in many places –in gang related graffiti (tagging walls as palimpsests of ownership), on wind ripped billboard signs, and even in the news.

A Famous Palimpsest: If you pay attention to the news for palimpsest, “Archimedes’ Palimpsest” makes the headlines every two or three years as scientists discover more effective ways –most recently (2006) pulsing X-rays– to pull forth Archimedes’ iron tainted ink, which rests in various decomposed conditions, obscured beneath an overlayed book of prayers.

In a new book “Is God a Mathematician” (which is fascinating for many reasons) the mathematician Mario Livio (2009) describes the original process by which -sometime before 1229- a scribe, Johannes Myrones, “unbound and washed” Archimedes’ original text, “so the parchment leaves could be reused for a Christian prayer book”. Fortunately, however, that “washing of the original text did not obliterate the writing completely”. What was left represents to us now what is Archimedes’ text, and is now one of the oldest (2,000 years) known texts.

Livio attributes the scribe’s actions to a broad cultural shift in the diminishing appreciation of mathematics after the Fourth Crusade, or as he noted, “in the years that followed, the passion for mathematics faded” (p. 54). Presumably then, Myrones attempted destruction and appropriation of Archimedes’ text was essentially an act of changing cultural values and of material necessity. Parchment, of course, was not as plentiful, nor cheap as paper has become for us; the text was valuable to the scribe for the parchment, upon which he could accomplish his prayer writing duties.

Since my first graduate school days, more than a decade ago, palimpsests have fascinated me. As I see it now, this concept represents my scholarly “gateway” into the socio-cultural perspective; it led to deep reflections on ways in which context (social, historical, technological, etc.) impacts writing practice and language use. As I searched my way through some of the details of “Archimedes’ Palimpsest,” there was, for example, a distinct moment when I came to more earnestly appreciate what economy meant –how the limits of our material and social world constantly impress circumstance upon us. Palimpsests, in many circumstances, represented a pragmatic response to the labor-intensive and limited distribution of parchment. It is a simple concept, but one that strikes deep. From this experience, I began to recognize contemporary incarnations, the ways in which our current practices are impacted by the strong undercurrents of our material, social, and cognitive realities. In turn, I started to study the literature. I began to recognize real world examples, in my own and others’ practices.

It does not take long to realize that although our ability to produce and distribute writing has dramatically improved since the scribe picked up and decided to “recycle” Archimedes’ text around 1229, we are yet ever-adapting and reinventing our communicative and writing practices based upon both natural limitations, and local circumstance. History is full of these evolutions of inscription and re-inscription (through various technologies) as pragmatic and incidental, or even aggressive and explicit acts of power. And even though we have greatly improved our ability to communicate efficiently and across great distances instantaneously, the struggle between our desire and our ability to first capture and then assert our ideas in meaningful and lasting ways remains.

Clearly a great deal has changed regarding the valuation of Archimedes’ text since 1229, because in 1998 an anonymous philanthropist paid $2 million dollars for it and deposited at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for study and conservation (see: http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/palimpsest_making1.html).

I am in love, and have been for years, with palimpsests because -metaphorically and literally, they are all around us. And, if you pay attention, examples show up every so often in the news:

A Recent Palimpsest: New York Times -2008 “Consider Nepal’s new currency. Shortly after the king gave up power in 2006, the government ordered the printing of money, starting with the 500-rupee note, free of the king’s portrait. In the new design, developed by the central bank, King Gyanendra’s image was replaced by that of the noncontroversial Mount Everest. But the paper on which the new bills are printed, having been ordered long ago, still bears a watermark of the king’s face. Unable to afford new currency paper, bank officials took creative license. They slapped a dark-pink rhododendron on top of the watermark. The king and his bird-of-paradise plumed crown can be seen only if the bill is held up to the light” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/asia/03nepal.html).

And, again and again, there is the “scraping” and “rewriting” all about in the world around us:

Point Made, Point Sal Sign -Photo: Damian C. Koshnick

“I am like one of those old books that ends up moldering for lack of having been read. There’s nothing to do but spin out the thread of memory and from time to time, wipe away the dust building up there.” –Seneca

Creating “Editing Videos for Students” with Basic Desktop Technologies

acomposing — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:14:10 +0000

About four years ago, I started looking for alternative methods to make writing and editing resources for my university students simply by using the technologies already present on my desktop. One solution was to create “animated” powerpoint slideshows. Here are several examples. To view them: 1. Download file, 2. Play powerpoint in slideshow function.

EDITING TOPICS & FILES:

1. REVISION TOPIC: “COMMENT/GLOSSING to MAKE REVISING EASIER” -by Professor Koshnick
2. REVISION TOPIC: USING THE EXPRESS KEYS to EDIT FASTER -by Professor Koshnick
3. REVISION TOPIC: USING CTRL “F” to FIND THINGS -by Professor Koshnick

These “animated slideshows” demonstrate how to use “express keys”; how to use the comment function in combination with glossing to edit more effectively; and, how to use the CTRL “F” find function to find things on your desktop and in the documents you are editing. I am generally surprised by the number of people that do not know about, or regularly use these types of short-cuts while writing and revising.

These videos convey, in a sense, a “psuedo-hipster” tone; they aren’t perfect, but intentionally display a mash-up feel that (when asked) students have mentioned they appreciate. As I have continued to produce these videos, two goals have been met: 1) I am providing functional writing/editing video resources for my students; 2) I have created a way to produce “animated” media files without needing to buy Camtasia, or CamStudio, etc.

Wild Santa Barbara, California

acomposing — Sun, 01 May 2011 20:20:31 +0000

This is wild Santa Barbara. The beautiful thing about living here, is that it is all right out your backdoor. The main locations represented throughout this album are all within 15 miles of Santa Barbara proper -including Refugio State Park, Santa Cruz Island, the Coastal Hills, Paradise Road, Los Padres National Forest, and the coastal beaches and bluffs in town.

Click to view slideshow.

Photos are taken by Damian Koshnick (with some taken by: Kate Koshnick; Will Koshnick). Photo credits are associated with each; contact me (koshnick@umail.ucsb.edu) for additional purposes. You can click on and click through a display of the larger photos below. Enjoy.

Microcosms of Life and Wild -Flagstaff, Arizona

Thoughts on: primitive mind, literacies, landscapes, and writing classrooms

Under Construction, Writing Classrooms …

On teaching writing, the brilliant and renewing varieties of experience

The Fictions that Are Our Consciousness: Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Talk-Story”

The Fictions That Are Our Consciousness: Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Talk-Story”

Literate practices: Rediscovering the value of recitation

A Directory of Blogs (and other resources) on Writing

The Economies of Palimpsest

Creating “Editing Videos for Students” with Basic Desktop Technologies

Wild Santa Barbara, California

The Fictions That Are Our Consciousness:
Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Talk-Story”