CCR 691:Brandt (2001) *Literacy in American Lives*

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Some claims/assumptions:

· Literacy is part of the machine: it is part of material systems and is assigned a societal value

· Literacy is a tool for denial of opportunity; it is exploited for profit;

· Social privilege is associated with literacy

· Literacy is a resource like wealth, education, or trade-skill (5)

· Three themes

o “Literacy learning principally will refer to occasions when people take on new understandings or capacities; as we will see, literacy learning is not confined to school settings or formal study” (6-7).

o “Literacy development refers to the accumulating project of literacy learning across a lifetime, the interrelated effects and potentials of learning over time. It is closely connected to the life span and to the historical events that affect literacy as a collective good” (7).

o “Literacy opportunity refers to people’s relationships to social and economic structures that condition chances for learning and development. Realistically, these three dimensions are not easy to separate and, as literacy is lived, seem to be three sides of one coin” (7).

· “Together, these studies strongly imply that literacy among the U.S. citizenry has been underestimated by standardized tests and other narrow, usually school-based measurements that miss the meanings and forms of literacy in everyday life” (7).

Method

· Interviewed 80 folks born 1895-1985 about their literacy practices, all from Wisconsin

· Volunteers recruited through social networking and public locations (nursing homes, etc.)

· Looked at how literacy evolved for generations (especially throughout their lives as children, students, workers, parents, citizens)

· Research question: “How has literacy learning changed over the last century and how have rising expectations for literacy been experienced as part of felt life?” (4).

· Considers economical and historical influences of family, region, nation (politics, war, etc.)

· “collection of open-ended autobiographical monologues, structured and less structured interviews, and biographical surveys” (10).

· Cohort analysis over their life span

· Used interview script (appendix A)

· Addresses reading and writing, but more focus is on writing

· Transcriptions were edited for slip-ups, false starts, pauses, umms (13-14)

· Analytical framework: sponsors of literacy: “older relatives, teachers, religious leaders, supervisors, military officers, librarians, friends, editors, influential authors” (19). Seems to be missing other textual aritifacts.

· There is a LACK of theory and disciplinary framing

Some assumptions about methodology:

· Literacy should be viewed in context (looking at an individual’s unique experience)

· People refashion their memories (12)

· Editing for standard English aims at equality

Chapter 1: “Literacy, Opportunity, and Economic Change”

· Case studies of two women, showing how the rise, fall, and change of literacy is closely related to the rise, fall, and change of economics in their region. Surprisingly, it is the woman from the older generation who received more opportunity since economical advancements were available in her region at the time. Similarly, both had to negotiate “conservative effects of gender” (41).

Chapter 2: “Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary”

· Case studies of two men, looking at how literacy standards change over time and depending on sites of literacy. For instance, one man’s skills for speech and debate are “eclipsed” when written language becomes the more privileged medium.

Chapter 3: “Accumulating Literacy: How Four Generations of One American Family Learned to Write”

· Case studies of four generations writing in one family (the Mays), showing that some literacy practices are passed from one generation to the next, while other practices are influenced by historical and technological change (The Depression, WWII, associations of literacy as elitism, industrialization, move from village to city to suburbia). See additional notes saved on this chapter.

Chapter 4: “The Power of It: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives”

· Case studies of African Americans who experienced literacy while being excluded from education and economic opportunity, thus literacy advanced without economic sponsorship. It appears that one major sponsor was AA churches.

Chapter 5: “The Sacred and the Profane: Reading versus Writing in Popular Memory”

· Considers how cultural context plays in when individuals learn to read vs. when individuals learn to write. Focuses on how “writing is a more ambivalently encouraged enterprise and is fraught, more than reading, with secrecy, punishment, and surveillance” (24).

Chapter 6: “The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification at the Twenty-First Century”

· Considers how literacy and social inequity are at play by comparing literacy experiences of two individuals with different socio-economic backgrounds: one white male of privileged class and one Latina female.

CCR 601: McNabb (2001) "Making the Gesture"

McNabb, Richard. “Making the Gesture: Graduate Student Submissions and Expectations of Journal Referees.” Composition Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2001, pp. 9-26.

Executive Summary:

In response to studies indicating that grad students in rhetoric and composition are not being prepared by their graduate programs to make the professoriate transition and begin publishing, McNabb investigates the textual practices of grad students that might account for their struggles to publish. He analyzes common modes of writing in graduate submissions in comparison to the modes commonly published and/or called for by journal editors and referees and argues that “writing for publication goes beyond producing a coherent, effective, well-supported argument; a writer has to be able to negotiate the publishing system by making the right gestures” (22).

Similar to how Swales defined common “moves” for scientific article writing, McNabb describes “gestures” that grad students can utilize when constructing journal articles destined for publication. The gesture that’s missing from graduate writing, according to McNabb, is the practice of assigning authority to one’s argument by situating that argument within previously published authorities. McNabb identifies six rhetorical modes commonly utilized when writing for publication in our field (description, testimony, history, theory, rhetorical analysis, and research reports) and illustrates how graduate students are prone to writing testimonies. This is problematic since very few testimonies are statistically published and referees will generally ask for manuscripts grounded in theory or history.

Later, McNabb illustrates the discipline’s practice of valuing epistemic introductions by referencing Swales’ “moves” (where an author situates him/herself within a current conversation in the field, specifically “carving a niche” out for how his/her argument is an important contribution to that topic). This is also problematic since graduate students don’t commonly practice these kinds of introduction writing, yet 3 out of 4 published articles follow this approach.

He concludes by suggesting that graduate students should receive explicit instruction in the programs regarding (a) discursive conventions to follow in writing manuscripts, (b) important disciplinary conversations occurring presently and in the past, and (c) how to incorporate and cite this epistemic knowledge.

Quotable Quotes:

· “Scholars construct arguments around other arguments already authorized by the field and institutionalized by its journals—be it rhetorical structure, canonized author, or generic convention” (11).

· “referees and the editors who uphold their decisions require authors to reinvent the conventions of the field, conventions that give an article a more theoretical or historical structure” (16).

· “the validity of an idea is not determined solely by its pertinence within a given disciplinary conceptual framework but rather by the success of its appropriation of the right conventions. What this means for us authors is that one of the merits by which our arguments are judged is on our ability to appropriate the conventions that allow us to authorize our arguments” (16-17).

· Epistemic presentation within article introductions is “a crucial gesture for authorization. When authors submit a manuscript for publication, editors and reviewers require the authors to position their argument within existing conversations. This positioning, however, is more than just showing you are a part of an ongoing conversation; it is the act of carving out an original space for one’s argument” (20).

· Writers in comp/rhet “must use epistemic presentations to introduce their arguments no matter their rhetorical mode to which the writer gestures. But this gesture requires writers to shift their authority away from their own sense of writing and to an authorized disciplinary convention. In order to authorize an interpretation, a writer must be fully cognizant of the discursive conventions of the field” (22).

Citable Citations: Bazerman, Swales, MacDonald, Goggin, Berkenkotter, Huckin, Miller, Brueggemann, Blue, Shephard

CCR 720: Inge (2001) "Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship"

Inge, M. Thomas. "Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship." PMLA 116.3 (May 2001): 623-630.

Executive Summary:

Inge begins his argument by criticizing English and composition for holding on to narrow definitions of authorship—mainly the view that the author works alone and is considered what Stillinger calls a “solitary genius”—despite our recognition that all texts are constructed based on various influences of social and political interactions, including social interactions amongst multiple individuals during composition and revision processes. After providing numerous convincing examples of how prominent literary authors (like Milton, Fitzgerald, and Dreiser) have depended on various individuals (like friends, family, acquaintances, editors, and proofreaders, among others) for writing their famous works, Inge questions why we still deny the extensive social and authorial collaboration occurring during the writing of literary works. Inge posits that our habit of viewing texts as unique works of individual authors (instead of collaborative pieces) falsely substantiates an idealistic view of how literary texts are constructed. He stresses that holding on to this view also negatively promotes the common reaction to and criticism of collaboration as producing less original—and, therefore, less valuable—texts.

Quotable Quotes:

· “there should be a change in attitude about how we discuss our literature and culture so that we do not constantly downgrade authors according to the extent to which they compromise with the pragmatic and economic forces of time and place. We might reconsider the priority we give to what authors think is best for their works, since like parens thay are too often blind to the imperfections of their children. If we allow more for a social and contextual concept of authorship, perhaps we can provide a more realistic and less romantic view of literary production” (630).

· Texts “are the result of any number of discourses that take place among the writer, the political and social environments in which the writing occurs, the aesthetic and economic pressures that encourage the process, the psychological and emotional state of the writer, and the reader who is expected to receive or consume the end product when it reaches print. Even if not intended for an audience or the publishing marketplace, a piece of writing cannot escape the numerous influences that produce it. All discourse is socially constructed” (623).

Citable Sources:

· Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.