Hi, everyone.
If they (now) work, here are links to some of our Google Docs projects, created to help synthesize our work from Brereton to this week:
Brereton grid
Assumptions
-Tarez
03 December 2009
24 November 2009
Mary and Carina's trace
Looking at question #3, tracing Genung, Young, Manly/Rickert, Strunk.
Textbooks showed either a strong lean toward correctness, grammar, arrangement (Strunk) OR toward invention and personal/self-expression (M/R). We saw both of these tendencies as present in Genung: "The study of rhetoric contemplates presentation: in pursuing it the student's mind, though equally occupied with facts, principles, discipline, is set predominantly in the attitude of construction, creation" (BR 135).
This narrative, then, presents Genung as a bridge, both as in Brereton between German and American models of academic rhetorical instruction, and between the practical/personal rhetorical pedagogies that developed in the American model during the early twentieth century.
If Genung is a theoretical bridge between these two models, Young is a contemporary bridge based in practice. Young, as an administrator, is trying to get as many students as possible through the university. He suggests that students need more training in oratory and interdisciplinary writing, but we wonder if he was also concerned with workload in a valuation of highly structural pedagogy.
Textbooks showed either a strong lean toward correctness, grammar, arrangement (Strunk) OR toward invention and personal/self-expression (M/R). We saw both of these tendencies as present in Genung: "The study of rhetoric contemplates presentation: in pursuing it the student's mind, though equally occupied with facts, principles, discipline, is set predominantly in the attitude of construction, creation" (BR 135).
This narrative, then, presents Genung as a bridge, both as in Brereton between German and American models of academic rhetorical instruction, and between the practical/personal rhetorical pedagogies that developed in the American model during the early twentieth century.
If Genung is a theoretical bridge between these two models, Young is a contemporary bridge based in practice. Young, as an administrator, is trying to get as many students as possible through the university. He suggests that students need more training in oratory and interdisciplinary writing, but we wonder if he was also concerned with workload in a valuation of highly structural pedagogy.
Lavinia - Jeff - Q. 4
The primary focus of our texts was on the writing course content: assignments, samples and syllabi that set up the mass-production model of Freshman composition. What lacks from the picture and from Brereton's account as well is a more elaborate discussion of the following issues:
- relationship of writing to audience. Students seem to write just to accomplish a writing task, instead of envisioning a larger purpose/rationale/context
- relationship of writing to truth/knowledge/reality. Students seem to approach the tasks in a closed circle, i.e., they get through the task in a rather arbitrary way (topics seem randomly selected, e.g., sample on art, Thanksgiving, church attendance, the value of intercollegiate athletics)
The samples and course descriptions oftentimes reveal mechanical presentation.
- relationship of writing to audience. Students seem to write just to accomplish a writing task, instead of envisioning a larger purpose/rationale/context
- relationship of writing to truth/knowledge/reality. Students seem to approach the tasks in a closed circle, i.e., they get through the task in a rather arbitrary way (topics seem randomly selected, e.g., sample on art, Thanksgiving, church attendance, the value of intercollegiate athletics)
The samples and course descriptions oftentimes reveal mechanical presentation.
Harvard Tradition
Question 1: These texts, from the Harvard tradition, focus primarily on adherence to certain rules of style. Style is not something independent of the writer, but rather the writer must depend upon the set rules and traditions. One of the complications of this simple understanding is that what the Harvard tradition wants is to build off of early adherence to rules. As Wooley says, "the student, in order to progress in the art, must for a certain time treat the rules as stringent and invariable; the variations and exceptions are studied only at a later state of progress" (360).
Emphasis on valuation of student-writing: "more practice, more daily drill, and severe discipline are required" (113). This should happen in preparatory schools. Blame is clearly shifted from universities to preparatory schools, as the Harvard committee attempts to unpack the problems of the teaching of composition.
3. Rhetoric as tied to the rising-middle class. Mostly preparing for office work and other non-academic disciplines. For example, Carson puts a heavy emphasis on using the right kind of paper, ink, how to address an envelope, etc. Thus, composition in these texts is often seen as preparing and developing members of this rising middle-class.
Emphasis on valuation of student-writing: "more practice, more daily drill, and severe discipline are required" (113). This should happen in preparatory schools. Blame is clearly shifted from universities to preparatory schools, as the Harvard committee attempts to unpack the problems of the teaching of composition.
3. Rhetoric as tied to the rising-middle class. Mostly preparing for office work and other non-academic disciplines. For example, Carson puts a heavy emphasis on using the right kind of paper, ink, how to address an envelope, etc. Thus, composition in these texts is often seen as preparing and developing members of this rising middle-class.
the Brereton post
So that we can realize (together) the reason we are in class today, please compose a collaborative post on the following questions, based on your grid work with the Brereton excerpts:
1) (How) do your excerpts support and/or complicate the stories about texts of this era?
2) (How) are your excerpts useful for testing Carr, Carr, and Schultz's "watersheds" (pp. 202-203)?
3) If only your texts survived from this era, how would you view the teaching of writing in late 19th-century American colleges? What stories would you construct, or did you construct in your grid, that might get taken up?
4) What questions do your excerpts raise, complicate, or not take up according to how Brereton employs them in his book?
Good luck and have fun,
Tarez
1) (How) do your excerpts support and/or complicate the stories about texts of this era?
2) (How) are your excerpts useful for testing Carr, Carr, and Schultz's "watersheds" (pp. 202-203)?
3) If only your texts survived from this era, how would you view the teaching of writing in late 19th-century American colleges? What stories would you construct, or did you construct in your grid, that might get taken up?
4) What questions do your excerpts raise, complicate, or not take up according to how Brereton employs them in his book?
Good luck and have fun,
Tarez
05 November 2009
Ida B. Wells and Female Faculty 1888
Hi, everyone. If this works, you can link to Jeff's and Jerrell's google maps project, which starts to landscape Ida B. Wells' writing activity and concurrent geographical locations of female faculty in English or rhetoric in 1888.
-Tarez
-Tarez
22 October 2009
Wollstonecraft's Belletrism?
Laura, thank you for getting us started. I'll chime in by way of offering a few passages that inspired me to wonder about this question in the first place.
Based on class discussion today, I think we see Wollstonecraft's principal claim as the following: women's education heightens moral agency (257). Equalizing rank and educating male and female students together will provide fewer opportunities for "rancorous striving" and lead to a culture of modesty rather than of sexual distinction (238).
How can we have one without the other (cultural modesty without sexual distinction)? Here is how she seems to argue for this:
--she appeals principally for the education of middle-class women (as opposed to gentleladies) (xxxiii)
--women need this right so as to help lift themselves and each other out of poverty, which is the real source of societal degradation (207)
--without coercion, sexes will naturally fall into their places (xxix)
--"the sympathies of our nature are strengthened by pondering cogitations, and deadened by thoughtless use" (248)
--private virtue can work towards a common center of public happiness (204)
--reason helps us to avoid tyranny, which undermines civility and morality (xxviii)
--who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason? (xxviii)
--excluding one-half of the human race from all governmental participation is perplexing and illogical (xxvii)
--elegance is inferior to virtue (xxxiv)
--we say masculine women are unnatural, but where are we to actually find a woman who is too masculine? (xxxiii)
(Jon, does any of this line up with Wollstonecraft's appropriation of Blair's "masculine style" in Allen's article?)
Could we say that for Wollstonecraft, reason is meant to accommodate nature? What could be her noetic field?
-Tarez
Based on class discussion today, I think we see Wollstonecraft's principal claim as the following: women's education heightens moral agency (257). Equalizing rank and educating male and female students together will provide fewer opportunities for "rancorous striving" and lead to a culture of modesty rather than of sexual distinction (238).
How can we have one without the other (cultural modesty without sexual distinction)? Here is how she seems to argue for this:
--she appeals principally for the education of middle-class women (as opposed to gentleladies) (xxxiii)
--women need this right so as to help lift themselves and each other out of poverty, which is the real source of societal degradation (207)
--without coercion, sexes will naturally fall into their places (xxix)
--"the sympathies of our nature are strengthened by pondering cogitations, and deadened by thoughtless use" (248)
--private virtue can work towards a common center of public happiness (204)
--reason helps us to avoid tyranny, which undermines civility and morality (xxviii)
--who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason? (xxviii)
--excluding one-half of the human race from all governmental participation is perplexing and illogical (xxvii)
--elegance is inferior to virtue (xxxiv)
--we say masculine women are unnatural, but where are we to actually find a woman who is too masculine? (xxxiii)
(Jon, does any of this line up with Wollstonecraft's appropriation of Blair's "masculine style" in Allen's article?)
Could we say that for Wollstonecraft, reason is meant to accommodate nature? What could be her noetic field?
-Tarez
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