For Saturday March 28 and Tuesday March 31
--Royster, Traces of a Stream Introduction and Chapters 1, 2, 3. (Discussion launch by March 28)
--Connors, “Textbooks and the Evolution of the Discipline” (Discussion launch by March 28)
--Project Proposals Part I (Send to me by March 30—I’ll post on the sidebar)
** You should begin with the reading most relevant to your semester project—whether Royster or Connors.
This week we launch the topic “literacy and composition instruction.” So doing, we follow the conventional wisdom that the nineteenth century witnessed a shift from oratorical culture to literate culture. Recall that Clark and Halloran plot this shift as a loss for rhetorical culture and public discourse. Nan Johnson, on the other hand, argues that rhetoric simply accommodated new technologies and practices—expanding its domain. As we will see this week, African American rhetoric scholar Jacqueline Jones Royster argues that literacy in particular empowers African American women to develop authority/ethos, to negotiate the space between present and proposed realities, and to become socially active and further, that African Americans developed a schooling tradition of their own.
We’ll continue to look at the relationship or absence of relationship between public writing (with African American women’s practices as our example) and writing instruction in mainstream colleges and universities. We’ll let Robert Connors speak for college writing instruction with “Textbooks and the Evolution of the Discipline.”
At the same time we’ll launch Part I of your semester project proposals. Royster’s reflections on her methodology—extensive—provide an unusually detailed “thinking protocol” for project development—so read her as you draft proposals.
Overview of Connors’ “Textbooks and the Evolution of the Discipline”: This is a highly readable article tracking the rise of the textbook industry and the shift from teaching the rhetorical treatise as means for theory acquisition (e.g., Campbell and Blair) to rule-governed exercises, then to more integrated rhetoric/composition pedagogies. Our discussion should be interesting, given that most of you teach comp and use textbooks to do so. This article also frames the Adopt a Textbook project (where you choose and examine a 19th c. textbook and present your findings to the class. Connors’ observations will provide one lens through which to study your textbook.
Overview of Royster’s Traces of a Stream: If Royster’s aim is to characterize the activist literacies of African American women—using elite women’s essay tradition as paradigmatic—her broader contribution is to propose a protocol for conducting a literacy study—or perhaps better put, for particularlizing a literacy study. Royster begins with fragmented evidence and allows these fragments to coalesce into a practice—hence her stream metaphor. Like Patricia Collins Hill on Sojourner Truth, Royster allows what African American women actually do to define what literacy means and to determine how best to study it. It’s a big undertaking and Royster devotes a lot of text to methodology and reflections on what she is about. I’d like you to pay particular attention to these reflections and to the analytical model she is working toward. Her project challenges standard academic protocols, e.g., the oral literate divide that has been so championed by Walter Ong and that we tend to put casual stock in. She is particularly strong on “context of production”—a good term to hang onto. You’ll see this concept worked out carefully in ensuing chapters; and you’ll see a robust treatment of ethos, first theorized and then worked out in examples.
In chapter 3, Royster launches with pre-colonial, West-African ideologies of meaning making, gender specific. She discusses sasa and zamani— African concepts of historical time, and compares these to Momaday’s discussion on imagining one’s ancestral past. An unforgettable, horrific passage marks the entrance of African women on the American scene at the Island of Goree.
Below is a very short list of points we might consider. You may certainly leave these alone and point to your own interests or take up one or more of these, as you wish:
--How does the discussion of Alice Walker function—why begin there?
--Why is breaking down the orality/literacy dichotomy important to this project?
--How does JJR set herself outside of academic business as ususal? What are the gains in doing so?
--Chapter 2 claims to develop an analytical model for literacy studies. What strikes you as worth remembering here?
--How does JJR’s work align with the Bisecker/Kohrs Campbell debate about the speaking/writing subject and discursive production?
--JJR defines rhetorical competence very specifically. Comment on how her definition intersects with or deviates from that of Blair and/or Campbell?