Family + Community = Knowledge

Toni Morrison reminds us that we must connect with our ancient properties, “It has to be done; otherwise we are dead. If you kill the ancestors, you’ve just killed everything.” I am fascinated with lineage, and often contemplate my place as the connector between past and present. It is why I am proud to be a mother and, at the same time, give daily thanks to my risk-taking ancestors who sacrificed to provide opportunities for their descendents (like me). Every day I think of Bettina Trapaglia, my dad’s grandmother, who came to this country to wed a stranger, gave birth to five daughters, and carried rocks on her back at a lime quarry just south of Pueblo. While she never was allowed to become an American citizen because she couldn’t read or write in English, she gave birth to several generations of teachers. She pulled weeds in a small garden plot, so that my dad and uncle could do their homework instead of their chores. It was this act of love that taught them the value of education—my familial inheritance.

So when I personally think about my own scholarly journey, I must give homage to my great-grandmother, as well as other ancestors. I recognize that I have the opportunity to bury my nose in a book because my great-grandmother carried rocks on her back. I realize that, from this point of view, scholarly work is a privilege.

This notion of a non-academic scholarly influence is what fascinated me most about our rhetorical lineage project. Our group divided up the direct influences on Dr. Souder. After Dr. Souder told me that AnaLouise Keating was the literary executor of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work and one of her important influences, I eagerly volunteered to connect with and research Dr. Keating. I had the honor of emailing her several times to ask her questions.

When I asked Dr. Keating about her scholarly influences, she mentioned a high school English teacher, Emerson and, of course, Anzaldúa. I emailed her again to ask for any professors who impacted her during her graduate studies. She told me of her dissertation chair, Chadwick Hansen, and explained that her dissertation focused on Emerson. However, she pointedly felt that she was not greatly influenced within the walls of the academy, but instead stated that Anzaldúa was clearly the strongest influence on her scholarship. And, she didn’t meet Anzaldúa until after she had earned her Ph.D.

I think it is significant that Keating felt her greatest scholarly influence happened after her traditional schooling. This highlights the importance of lifelong learning and underscores the co-creative relationship Keating and Anzaldúa shared. While the two individually contribute to the academic discourse, their collective work reminds us of the collaborative beauty of creation and discovery. I am admittedly a fan of Kant, Marx and even Robert Frost. But, I was most excited that one of our family tree “super stars” was Anzaldúa. It reminded me that, even in the midst of our testosterone-laden tree, there is also a matrilineal source to our academic work. I’m proud to add my name to the branch that leads from me to Dr. Souder to Dr. Keating to Gloria Anzaldúa. I’m equally honored to connect my academic work to the non-scholarly sacrifices and lessons of my ancestors like Bettina Trapaglia. And, in an even more profound connection of family and the academy, it was amazing to share this scholarly journey with my recently re-acquainted cousin Marilyn Antenucci.

“If you cut yourself off from the roots, you’ll wither . . . Roots that ignore the branches turn into termite dust.” – Toni Morrison, Paradise

But damn it, listen to me . . . I have something to tell you

I've spent weeks contemplating the idea of personal writing within an academic setting, grappling with the notion that the personal can actually do some heavy rhetorical lifting. If you don't believe that the personal has the argument-based muscle for serious scholarly work, please consider this new Tiger Woods advertisement for Nike.

Nike, one of the all-time masters of marketing rhetoric, has certainly transformed the personal woes of Tiger Woods--with a little dash of intimate words from his dead father--into an amazing case for buying shoes and gear. This certainly is a great, if not slightly sleazy, use of the personal to make an argument. (Reading the comments of this ad on YouTube, the ad is successful in selling its message.)

Peter Elbow discusses why he uses the personal in his first-year composition classroom. He asks himself, "Whether I should invite my first year students to be self-absorbed and see themselves at the center of the discourse--in a sense, credulous; or whether I should invite them to be personally modest and intellectually scrupulous and to see themselves as at the periphery--in a sense, skeptical and distrustful." He opts for the more self-focused approach, shrugging off the usual complaints that personal writing is self-indulgent and overly sentimental. He encourages students to plop themselves in the center of their writing, rather than merely summarizing the wise words of published people.

Elbow is advocating for writing that is relevent to students' lives. He recognizes the irony of asking students to write "up" to teachers who possess broader knowledge of the topic than the student writer does. It creates a phony rhetorical situation and, as Elbow points out, it creates timid emerging writers. On the other hand, there are some topics that the student does know more than the teacher. Thus, when students write about their own lives, they have an intrinsic authority on the topic. Elbow writes, "Unless we can set things up so that our first year students are often telling us about things that they know better than we do, we are sabotaging the essential dynamic of writers."

Since memory is one of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric, it is interesting to consider this tension between the academic and the personal within a context of memory. Academic writing priviledges external memory--the kind that can be found in books, on library shelves and separate from the writer. Elbow-esque writing values internal memory--the kind that be can found in the fleshy, gray crinkles of each writer's brain. When you considers these rhetorical connections, it becomes easier to see the personal as more than extracurricular but as part of the classroom.

Despite these notions of memory, Bartholomae contends that Elbow desires "an open space, free from the past." While Elbow doesn't necessarily seek this, I think Tiger Woods would welcome a world free from his past . . . or at the very least, the authorial opportunity to control the story.

Several Random Things I Want to Share with My Classmates

Adolescent Thoughts on Grammar
On Spring Break, I read a great just-for-fun book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. I couldn't wait to share this great quote from the book on the teaching of grammar. After a teacher explains to her teenage students that the point of teaching grammar "is to make us speak and write well," the adolescent narrator says:

"I have never heard anything so grossly inept . . . to tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop" (157-158).

Anonymous Geo-shagging and the Future of Global Positioning
In class on Tuesday night, we talked about the next step in social networking. I mentioned that global positioning will be the next layer in how we use media to connect. About a year ago, I read a great article on this subject that I think you will enjoy. Here is the link:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-02/lp_guineapig?currentPage=all

An Update on the Rhetorical Family Tree
I am part of the group researching the scholarly influences of Dr. Souder. While the class is very aware of the significantly influential Dr. Hugh Burns, my task is to research another amazing influence on Dr. Souder--Dr. AnaLouise Keating. Dr. Keating is in the Women's Studies Department of TWU, where Dr. Souder is working on her second (!) doctorate in Women's Studies. Dr. Keating also happens to be the literary executor for the revolutionary writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who died in 2004. These two women co-wrote This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation.

Keating's academic influences seem to come from outside of the academy. She explains that Anzaldúa was by far her greatest scholarly influence, yet she met her a year after receiving her doctorate. She did, however, tell me that her dissertation advisor, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was Dr. Chadwick Hansen. Hansen, although an English professor for 20 years at UIC, is also a jazz historian. He co-authored several books on the subject, including: Hot Man, the Life of Art Hodes.

Hansen is also the author of Witchcraft at Salem. Written in 1969, Hansen's book undermines much scholarship on this topic by noting that there was actually witchcraft being practiced in Salem. Wow! Let me restate this, Hansen writes that there were actually practicing witches in Salem, plus he also talks about Freud-like female hysteria in both accusers and the accused. (There are twelve fairly recent reviews of this book on Amazon, and the book is still in print.)

Hansen, who attended Yale under the V12 program for veterans, certainly seems like an interesting connection to Dr. Keating, who is so well-regarded for her feminist writings.