January 29 Assignment

 

Reading:

  1. Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”  This is one of those classic, must-read pieces. In addition, we may find it useful for conceptualizing the self in relation to media—part of our teasing out the ideologies of literacy project. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

 

  1. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Excerpts from Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (ereserves).  Kress is the guru of visual theorizing. He recycles his material frequently—so you’ll find him using the same examples and making the same points in various publications. Nonetheless—I am never disappointed in reading his work.  Decide whether you want to do more with visual literacy and let me know.  Kress and Leeuwen will talk about the “semiotic landscape.”

 

 

  1. Linda Brodkey. Excerpts from Writing in Designated Areas Only. Brodkey theorizes the autoethnography and so try to locate her definition and think about it in relation to the literacy narrative—as exemplified in Pandey’s article—and in relation to Pratt’s classic piece on the autoethnography.  *** We’ll come back to the issue of how the pieces of Pratt’s essay hang together: she uses the anecdote of her son’s baseball card hobby to define “cultural ecology of literacy”—yes? In other words, reading and writing do not take place in vacuum. Not only does she argue by this anecdote that literacy is a situated activity and that writing or visuals “mean” in relation to other phenomena, she appears to argue that cultural ecologies are always in flux, always shifting shape.  And then there’s the question of how Poma and baseball cards co-exist in the same article—we’ll return to this point.

There are a bunch of Brodkey excerpts on ereserves. Read the following:

a)     Part I Writing Permitted, which begins “Introduction to Part I: and is followed by her autoethnography “Writing on the Bias.”

b)     Tropics, Writing Permitted. In the last section on writing critical ethnographic narratives, we’ll locate how she adapts Pratt’s concept—so work on this section carefully in conjunction with “Writing on the Bias.”  ** I think the Critical Ethnography pages are also posted separately.

 

Writing:

How about a blog entry for each author (reading).  Instead of rehearsing what you read, please pose a question you’d like to discuss in class—but have several subset questions that go with it. Our practical aim is to develop a sense of what you’re going to write that counts as an “autoethnography” as we collectively come to understand the possibilities of this genre. But we can take many intellectual detours along the way to this practical goal.  

 

Other

  1. Be thinking about writing spaces that might house your autoethnography, which I’ll probably want to be multimodal; think about the RELATIONSHIP of the different modes and the different literacy features we listed on the board.
  2. Continue with myspace experiments and observations. Keep this site stress free as much as possible. We’ll create stress in other environments.