Archive for November, 2006
Fulton on poetry:
I’m reading a draft of a colleague’s paper, and she quotes Alice Fulton from an interview. I thought it was pretty cool, so I’m quoting it here. Fulton is discussing her use the of the double equals sign (= =): I also think it’s a turbulent sign. To make up your own sign is probably [...]
social studies ed starts up again at alma mater
So, my undergraduate institute is starting up their social studies education program again, according to the alumni/ae newsletter I just got in the mail from the ISU History department. I was one of the last to graduate in with a certificate to teach social studies from ISU because of budget cuts (they cut the program [...]
Lunsford on “The Nature of Composition Studies”
I stumbled upon Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate’s (editors) An Introduction to Composition Studies while surfing through the shelves of the library (is surfing the right metaphor?). In “The Nature of Composition Studies,” Andrea Lunsford writes: Thus composition studies views composing not as a series of discrete skills or a package of processes to be [...]
philosophy digest #8
here is the reading digest I’ll turn in for critical social theory on Tuesday: Wednesday night, after a short week of classes before Thanksgiving, I sat in Bombs Away, one of my favorite bars to sit and chat with others in. Two other English department GTAs and I were holding a lively and hopeful discussion [...]
philosophy digest #7
here is the reading digest I turned in for philosophy class last week: Habermas, Jürgen. “The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies.“ Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Hames-GarcÃÂa, Michael. “Can Queer Theory Be Critical Theory?“ in New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation, edited by William S. Wilkerson and Jeffrey Paris, 201-222. [...]
Controlled and watered down literacies in classrooms
Clarence Fisher over at Remote Access discusses something I think is pretty important: the co-opting of cultural literacies for the classroom, without actually using them in ways they are actually used. He write about blogging, for instance, where the teacher uses it for the sole purpose of answering prompts, instead of how blogging is used [...]
LeGuin on Literature and Government
Culture Cat posted today from Ursula LeGuin’s acceptance speech for the Maxine Cushing Gray Award: There have been governments that celebrated literature, but most governments dislike it, justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down. Of course they do [...]
On Chapter 2 of Changing the Subject in English Class
Alcorn makes a strong case in this chapter that “rhetoric of discourse is libinal” (26) and that “libidinal structure is always ideological. Libidinal structures are inesapably ideological because all meanings and all feelings operate as meanings in an ideological context” (25). He critiqutes James Berlin’s pedagogy (his two modes of freedom: 1) teacher offers “social [...]
Thelin’s vision of the English Classroom
I love it when College English and CCC come in the mail. I’ve been getting better with these journals, dropping whatever I’m doing and at least looking at the table of contents. This is an improvement over when I taught middle school and just didn’t even time to flip through the English Journal that came [...]
philosophy digest #6
Here is my reading digest for Critical Social Theory that’s due tomorrow: Habermas, Jürgen. “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism“ and “Social Action and Rationality.“ Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Marcuse, Herbert. “Liberation from the Affluent Society.“ in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 276-287. New York: [...]
