Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility

NOTES

PREFACE 1. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock’s study of “public homeplaces”— communities that engage in emancipatory projects—provides an indepth analysis of the creation of localized leadership programs as developed by women. CHAPTER ONE 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Greek texts are taken from Diels-Kranz, Die Fragments der Vorsokratiker, which has been translated by R.K. Sprague in his text, The Older Sophists. 2. While Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” inaugurated the discussion of contact zones in rhetoric and composition, MinZhan Lu’s “Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?,” Richard Miller’s “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone,” Joseph Harris’ “Negotiating the Contact Zone,” and Patricia Bizzell’s “The Teacher’s Authority: Negotiating Difference in the Classroom,” along with other essays too numerous to list here, have attempted to address the means by which students can be participants in negotiating their literacies within the strictures of the academy. 3. It is worth noting that Giroux makes that comment in his book, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope, which seems particularly apt, given that the rhetoric of the possible, the desire for future change, is almost always optimistic and hopeful. 4. She suggests students, (1) model different kinds of writing, (2) write for their intended audience—i.e. the teacher (“we would admit that this is school”), and (3) write as an “intentional” act, through a progression of assignments. 111 N O T E S CHAPTER TWO 1. Two other pivotal essays on this subject appeared during the same year: Joseph Harris and Jay Rosen’s “Teaching Writing as Cultural Criticism ,” which, like the Berlin essay, was in Composition and Resistance, edited by C. Mark Hulbert and Michael Blitz, and John Schlib’s essay, “Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Composition,” which appeared in Contending with Words, edited by Patricia Harkin and John Schlib. 2. A contemporary analogue to Willis’ work in working-class studies is Patrick J. Finn’s fine study, Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest. CHAPTER THREE 1. A version of this essay appeared in my edited collection, Insurrections : Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies. 2. Later, Hillary recanted her scandalous remark—perhaps a halfhearted attempt to de-bitch herself—and as proof of her domestic savvy, published her own recipe for chocolate chip cookies. 3. In the last several years, “bitch” has been reclaimed by American singer Meredith Brooks, who in her rant anthem, “Bitch,” gleefully asserts that she’s “a bitch” and proud of it, and by Elizabeth Wurtzel in her pop-feminist treatise, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. 4. This gender gap in self-esteem as it relates to academic achievement is well chronicled, becoming apparent to educators as early as pre-adolescence . For a more thorough discussion of this topic, see the American Association of University Women’s publication Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, and Peggy Orenstein’s book (also commissioned by the AAUW) SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. 5. An extensive review of argumentation literature can be found in Dominic Infante and Andrew Rancer’s article, “Argumentativeness and Verbal Aggressiveness: A Review of Recent Theory and Research.” CHAPTER FOUR 1. I am referring to the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s draft of its 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution, which attempted to respectfully acknowledge, according to Geneva Smitherman, the disparity between student literacy and academic discourse, especially among nontraditional students (see Smitherman; also see Chapter Two for further discussion). 112 Notes 2. Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race and Fred Pfeil’s White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference are good examples of the recent scholarship in this area. Of course, bell hooks and Richard Dyer have both been addressing this issue since the 1980s. CHAPTER FIVE 1. Worsham and Stuckey offer useful, contemporary discussions of the connection between violence and education. 2. In my 1998 interview with Shor, he stressed the importance of utopian thinking in constructing a critical classroom environment. He explores this idea more fully in When Students Have Power. 3. Chapter Two offers a more thorough critique of a “politics of location,” especially as applied to ethnographic research. 4. While I do not formally incorporate neosophistic rhetoric into my Expository Writing class, I use some key argumentation strategies to discuss issues of ethics, refutation, and persuasion. 5...