Reading

While I usually blow off .com emails that are really trying to pull traffic to their site, this one was just too useful to skip.

Online College has the 20 Best Blogs in the Digital Humanities.

I haven’t read all 20, but the ones I have read are very good.

Scholarly Kitchen has a post on copy editing and open-access repositories.

We should remind ourselves that all three studies investigate the changes that take place after a manuscript has passed through peer review. The purpose of copy editing is not to detect serious flaws in theory, methodology, analysis or interpretation — that is the responsibility of peer review — but simply to make a paper more consistent and readable. We should therefore not expect to find fatal errors at the copy editing stage, as implied in the Goodman study.

Still, we are left hanging on whether copy editing sufficiently improves an academic article to justify its persistence, and ultimately this question rests on whether you value its services.

I think that the Thatcher study (with which the author began the article) had something interesting to say about Harvard open-access documents:

[M]ost errors were minor, such as spelling errors, subject/verb disagreements, dangling modifiers, and others Thatcher calls “stylistic infelicities.” His editors also spotted more important problems in the author manuscript, such as quotation errors, citation errors, and errors in tables and figures. One editor came up with a more disconcerting error in an author version: The omission of author identity details, conflict of interest statement, funding information, and an acknowledgment section.

Interesting. Harvard. One of the leading universities in the world. But still there were problems.

Would this indicate to us a need for peer review? Would it indicate the same to our students?

Harry Potter and the Journey’s End: J. K. Rowling’s Use of the Monomyth in the
Harry Potter Series
Antoinette Winstead, Our Lady of the Lake University

This is a live blogging of the session.

Joseph Campbell Hero of a Thousand Faces

Hagrid as guide.

literally clashes into his life, brings greeting, takes him from the Dursleys
learns of his fame
on to Hogwarts, Gandolf equivalent Dumbledor, supernatural mentor/teacher
Dumbledor is considered by many as greatest wizard = threshold guardian
pushes Harry, prepares Harry for encounters with Voldemort
Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger are also helpers.

Harry is ready to cross into the unknown, over the threshold into the alley.

long and perilous path of initiatory trials

each book presents a series that has multiple trials, each has one trial

Sorcerer’s Stone = call to adventure
first of those who will test him – > Snapes and Malfoy
reception of celebrity is one of his many trials, keeping him isolated

belly of the whale = crucial stage in the hero’s journey
must face himself, must abandon all, must be abandoned

Harry must let go of his mourning over Cedric. Accepts his role in Sirius’ death. (Really? I don’t remember that.)

ultimate adventure: Half-Blood Prince and last one

must confront his other self: one flesh, Voldemort doubled the bond between Harry and Tom Riddle, making them “fraternal twins”
connection = achilles’ heel

allowed to return to his life

heroic journey, returns to his people
Harry reunites the community. Effects reconciliation.

Relationship of time and living and dying.

Harry’s series shows how he can shed false identities.
Epic journey—seven years’

classic form of myth

Once Upon a Time a Woman Told a New Tale: Fairy Tale Restructuring in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun
Ki Russell, University of Louisiana Lafayette –in PhD program, just began ABD

This is a live blogging of the session.

Fairy Tale, Cinderella:
a lovely girl who did everything she was expected to
perfect woman, beautiful and worked hard to become the working wife of a guy

well-written tale has strength, different aspects are emphasized

Little Red Riding Hood- chastity – > obedience to parents – > feminist telling

orate the old tales with feminist revision.

Harlem Renaissance author Jessie Redmon Fauset Plum Bun 1929
“to market, to market to buy a plum bun; home again, home again, market is done”

Ingersoll- tales rhymes article? book?

Fauset identifies the different sections of the novel with quotes from the children’s rhyme

plum bun = heroine can survive hard conflicts, not easily resolved, once her goals are met, “market is done”

fairy tale elements shape the story
“in one of these houses dwelt a father, a mother, and two daughters”

“Language and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition” book? article?

fairy tales create social norms and support those
fantastic is discomforting (Zipes, fairy tales as subversion)

Fauset “subtly and meaningfully used”

fairy tale motif is said to disappear in the last two chapters, however, she is writing a new fairy tale… tale has been redefined…. woman must rescue herself, shedding social norms

traditional format does not fit

Fauset must define the field for herself

novel still contains all the essentials of the fairy tale

hero called, herald, hero survives, protective figures, hero returns home

Little Red Riding Home Uncloaked (book or article?)

hero, warned of danger, breaks a taboo, meets villain, is complicit (knowing or unknowing), some sort of rescue OR hero dies
-Fauset goes through all these stages

multiple books/articles that would be interesting/useful to read

Angela dabbles in white society with her mother. Enveloped in white society in New York. Trials of city life. Endures humiliation. Learns to support herself. Ongoing deceptiveness about her race. Social rule is broken. This is the hero’s transgression. Various figures appear as companions and protectors.

Racial Passing Ohio State Law Journal

laws were brought forward. Blacks and whites denounced passing.
Passing encouraged white supremacy.

Miss Powell is too dark to pass, talented audience, does not have the support system that Angela has been given.

Roger is a wealthy cad. Angela embodies both heroine and villain. Truth and loyalty are lost in the white world.

Angela refuses to marry Roger. She avoids Angelay’s villainess.

Boys go on quests and are rewarded with riches. Girls are encouraged to wait for a marriage.

Fauset subverts the girl as rescued. Makes her a whole person.

Angelay is the ideal passive princess.

Must compromise her integrity.

Ideal princess is recast as the evil villain.

Textual subversion, traditional princess becomes bad guy. “Beauty pageant, youth, humiliating trials to prepare her for marriage”

Angela is like the hero. Expected to go on quest and be rewarded with riches.
Angela’s journey in NY does help her to establish her identity.
Leaves US to go to Europe. So she leaves her US identity to become European.
“false” identity = Angela can’t be white? Isn’t she white?

Are you saying that a single drop of black = white?

So expat = better than American?

Question on that is a problem.

She must find her own way to fight through the woods.

radical in its time, girl as hero is not new

20% of Grimm’s stories = passive heroines
American role model of passive heroine. Snow White in 1937 (Disney)
non-passive woman = evil, cruel
first made into movies show how popular and pervasive in the US texts
(Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty)

women are free to define their lives.

Link to Perspectives in American Literature page on Fauset.

Teaching Intertextuality and Parody through the Graphic “Supertext”: The Case of Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land (1990)
Kevin Flanagan, University of Pittsburgh

This is a live blogging of the session.

allusion approach is the whole focus of my work

film institutions, linguistic sensibilities of TSEliot
incoherence of textual

“what they call text might not have or ever have had meaning as such”

re-representations of historical work,

English caricature part of graphic novels
“brilliant and credited with lending graphic appropriateness”

How Graphic Comics Work and What They Mean
don’t run the same current of the original text, classic realist novel is good at what it does, but it isn’t what the graphic novel is doing

sequential graphics are good for kinetic narratives

TSEliot’s poem resists spatial

Christopher Marlowe detective, involved in double crosses, looks for Holy Grail
multimodal detective story, convenient medium for the search, grotesque parody

Fascinating idea:
notion of the supertext
ideal type of the genre
structure the entire course of reading around tropes and ideas and culture that is referenced in the graphic novel

2 advantages to using Rawson’s The Waste Land
integrates graphics, whiz framing
parody, contradictory modernism is as textual phenomenon
literary modernism

not useful to teach this in a version approach

If you are saying it’s a supertext, looking at the first text that it is based on is ridiculous.

A different approach.

given a preliminary amount of information, clues, students can reverse engineer Rawson—a detection of their own

Robert Stand’s

“throw away details” where introduce other points
pre-Raphaelite paintings pre-industrial

two panel page, got to London,
fantastic sections of “wandering around cities”

dramatizing the distinction between parody and pastiche

A grad student queried a colleague:

I am a first semester grad student …taking a FYC pedagogy course. Here’s the prompt for one paper I have to write: The seminar paper/project involves the sustained study of a question of interest to you (i.e. related to the theory and practice of teaching composition).

I’m not sure how to ask my question to you since I’m still learning the academic/rhetorical nomenclature, but basically I wondering if there is any work being done that seeks to make connections between teaching comp and spirituality, or religion, or the soul, or a “holistic” sense of person. . . or I don’t know what it might sound like. I’m aware that there’s a big discussion around “voice”; would that be some way in? I’m sorry to be fuzzy on this. In fact, maybe someone might be able to ask me the right questions to help me think about what I’m asking.

And the grad student got quite a few answers.

Here are the answers received (for the sake of space, I will not blockquote).

Response:
It’s not new research, and my impression is that it’s rather out of favor in Rhet/Comp circles, but you might try a book by Richard Weaver called “Language Is Sermonic.” It’s a collection of previously published articles and chapters from books rather than a coherent work of its own, but it’s a good introduction to Weaver’s thoughts about speaking and writing. Weaver seeks to defend the discipline of rhetoric from its fashionable attackers (at the time, social scientists); his biggest defense is that rhetoric recognizes that human beings are more than their logical minds:

“Humanity includes emotionality, or the capacity to feel and suffer, to know pleasure, and it includes the capacity for aesthetic satisfaction, and, what can be only suggested, a yearning to be in relation with something infinite.”

Weaver’s also a great deal of fun to read–he’s right up there with Walker Percy in terms of affable grumpiness.

Response:
I have a book on my shelf (I haven’t yet read it) that may be worth a look. It’s a collection of essays called Negotiating Religious Faith in the Composition Classroom, edited by Elizabeth Vander Lei and Bonnie Lenore Kyburz (Boynton/Cook, 2005).

Response:
Here’s an incomplete bibliography:
https://www.msu.edu/~zuidema2/Christrhetcomp.html
I’ve found Kenneth Burke to be a great starting point for working some of this out on my own, but that takes some heavy lifting.

Jim Corder is a great source, especially “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love”

Also, Elizabeth Vander Lei at Calvin is doing a lot of work in this area; here’s a bibliography:
Converted to Other Uses: Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition (co-edited with Tom Amorose, Beth Daniell, Anne Gere). In progress.

Real Texts: Reading and Writing Across the Disciplines (co-authored with Dean Ward). New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. 2nd edition, forthcoming 2011.

Negotiating Religious Faith in the Writing Classroom (co-edited with Bonny Kyburz). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 2005. — This is the one book I’d suggest in the area if you have to choose one.

Articles (2000- )
“What in God’s Name? Administering the Conflicts of Religious Belief in Writing
Programs.” (with Lauren Fitzgerald). WPA Journal 31.1/2 (2007): 185-195.

Book Review. Beth Daniell. “A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery.” In The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning 10 (2004): 98-101.

“A Comment on ‘A Radical Conversion of the Mind’: Fundamentalism, Hermeneutics, and Metanoic Classroom,” College English 64 (2002): 170-173.

Response:
Yes – quite a bit, though it’s scattered around. Here are a few sources I’m aware of:

Charles Suhor, “Contemplative Reading The Experience, The Idea, The Applications,” The English Journal 91 (2002): 28.

Priscilla Perkins, “‘A Radical Conversion of the Mind’: Fundamentalism,
Hermeneutics, and the Metanoic Classroom,” College English 63(2001): 585.

Mikita Brottman, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2008) 7.

Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 653.

Elizabeth M. Bounds, “Three-Ring Circus at a Combustible Crossroads: Teaching Religion as Core Curriculum,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65(1997): 792.

(These are in footnote format which is why they all look like they’re only one page. They’re not. The Perkins article is possibly where you should start reading. It’s quite good.)

Welcome to the academic conversation. (ed. I love that line!)

Campus Technology asks, “Is Ed Tech Accessible Enough?”, which is a good question. The article seems, just a bit, like an ad for iPad. (Complete disclosure: My husband is a Mac programmer. I own an iPad. I have owned many Apple computers, phones, etc.)

The iPad, which is growing in popularity in the higher education space, is a bright spot for Lee. The fact that the product is bundled with a voice program makes it attractive for visually impaired students. “This is the first piece of mainstream technology that’s come out in a long time that’s accessible for our students,” said Lee. “Also working in the iPad’s favor is that fact that it’s not specialized technology, which often costs four to five times the price of mainstream products.”

Well, I guess if Apple has made an accessible e-reader, that’s important news.

The Tempered Radical writes a post called Maybe Reading Isn’t Fun. It’s very articulate.

And it starts off, much as I would, insulted at the idea that reading isn’t fun.

A friend of mine who teaches in a high poverty school dropped me a really discouraging email today.

She told me that a training specialist assigned to her school had dropped in to one of their faculty’s vertical articulation meetings to offer feedback on the school’s attempts to integrate annotation into their reading instruction.

Her message was less than inspirational, though. Here’s the most disturbing quote:

“I tell kids this is not fun…This is work, and most of the reading you’ll do in life will not be for fun.”

My first reaction was to load up the digital bazooka and blaze this woman.

Interesting ideas on annotating texts, too.

Clarence Fisher on Remote Access has an interesting discussion of literacy. It starts with a quote from Bob Stein of The Future of the Book:

“We find when writing moves online, the connections between ideas and people are much more apparent than they are in the context of a printed book.”

Then he goes on in the post to say: “We like to pretend in schools that reading and writing are social actions, but we only want to go so far. We need individual grades after all.”

This whole discussion reminded me of a poem I wrote many years ago and re-read yesterday. It is about how the fiction I read changes my perception of the world and I wish that I could know the folks who are in those stories as well as I know the stories. (Yes, I know they don’t exist; I’m just saying.)

But really how is that different from wishing I had been able to know my grandmother when she was young or read the letter from Michener about her book or heard my friend give her talk in Seattle? I am not sure it is.

Did we teach that reading and writing are social actions? In my life (until that PhD in rhetoric) we didn’t talk about reading and writing as social but as individual. Yes, the author wrote a book and hoped a publisher would purchase it and an audience would read it, but the writing itself was seen as individual.

(Eric Flint’s ways of writing 1632 is the farthest from that which I have read on any regular basis. He writes with his fans and other authors about his world and follows the stories where the others think they should go.)

Reading was also individual. We had the SRA reading speed tests and the individual reading experiences. In school the only social reading I remember was A Wrinkle in Time read by my teacher, Mrs. Loomis. We all loved this reading (and I read the book to my sons at the same age because of this) but mostly our reading was individual. I certainly thought it was individual, when I was racing my way through books to compete with my brother in reading and get to go back to the library with my father.

Rhetoric teaches (correctly) that writing has an audience and a purpose. But I am not sure that this makes writing a social activity. At least not as it has been done in the past.

Perhaps now, with blogs and tweets and facebook pages, writing IS a social activity. I answer my friend’s status update and she likes. I post something on her wall. She reads it. Everyone else reads it as well. Perhaps they respond.

Fisher’s article concentrates on the difference in delivery. I don’t think ebooks versus paper books are such a big difference. I do think that writing responded to in process is a big difference.

I don’t think reading an ebook on my computer is a whole lot different socially than reading a book on paper. Both are done individually… Perhaps if we are reading it in class from the projection screen I will view it as different. (And I am going to be doing that this semester.) But if we are simply reading in a different medium, I am not sure that changes the literacy at all.

Fisher talks about concern that corporations are driving literacy. You know, corporations won’t make and sell kindles, nooks, iPads, and computers if folks are not interested in buying them. But if Amazon can sell books without having to send them through the mail (which it can and why aren’t they significantly cheaper since they don’t have that cost?), why/how does that make Amazon in charge of literacy? I still read what I want to read. Yes, some people will get on and download the free Kindle app to their computer and read all the free books and only the free books. Hey, the library does that too. Does that mean that the library is driving literacy? Not in any more nefarious way than it has since Benjamin Franklin’s day. And I don’t think that corporations are driving literacy any differently than publishers and libraries have and are.

As computing platforms diverge and seek to distinguish themselves from others, what happens to our ideas of literacy and our literacy skills when Apple offers one type of platform, Google another, Linux a third and Microsoft something completely different? Will we need a “Shakespeare by Google” class while another offers a “Shakespeare by Linux?” Will these two texts contain fundamentally different information? What happens when corporations sponsor the hardware in a school or district? Will students be illiterate when they transfer?

This is why open models are important.

Really? Apple has a platform. Folks use iPads and iPhones and Macs. Other folks use HP. Shakespeare by Google might be an interesting class, just because Google is showing so much content, but is it going to change Shakespeare? No. Not any more than any scholar, book, or publication does/will.

I don’t think that technical literacy should be conflated with reading/writing and information literacy. Those are very different skills.