Nels suggests a new “meme”: share the epigraph(s) of your dissertation. Well, the dissertation is a few years off for me, so my master’s thesis will work. Um, keep in mind that it was four chapters, with interchapters (yeah, it was kinda long for a thesis), and I used many epigraphs. (An [un]fortunate effect of this activity: noting where I had inconsistent formatting or citing or typos as I looked back on my thesis. eek!)
Chapter 1
This is an especially difficult confession to start off with, not only because failure is painful in itself, but because most books by teachers about teaching, whatever their purpose, begin with the author establishing credibility as a longtime and successful classroom teacher. I can make no such claim; it is a sorry fact that my twenty-five years as a teacher and teacher of teachers are carried on the very weak legs of a failed high school English teacher. (Robert Tremmel, Zen and the Practice of Teaching English 1)
Interchapter 1
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory […]. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus†121, 123)
I write because I feel politically committed, because I would like to convince other people, without lying to them, that what I dream about and what I speak about and what causes me to struggle are worth writing about…. That is, when we write, we cannot ignore our condition as historical beings. We cannot ignore that we are beings inserted into the social structures in which we participate as objects and subjects. (Paulo Freire, qtd. in Robert Yagelski, Literacy Matters 89)
Chapter 2
The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors — differences that often go far deeper than differences in color — which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms. (Jane Jacobs, qtd. in Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 226).
Interchapter 2
[T]he styles or ways of practicing space flee the control of city planners. Able and ready to create a composition of places, of full and empty areas that allow or forbid passage, city planners are incapable of imposing the rationality of reinforced concrete on multiple and fluid cultural systems that organize the living space of inner areas (apartments, stairways, and the like) or public domains (streets, squares, etc.) and that innervate them with an infinite number of itineraries. […] The same holds true for ways of living time, reading texts, or seeing images. (Michel de Certeau, Cultural in the Plural 133, emphasis original)
Chapter 3
If you want students to learn to write, students who for years have been learning not to write, it is probably a good idea to recreate the circumstances under which others have turned to writing. (Linda Brodkey, Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only 140)
I had little to do except walk around the city, sneak into Widener Library, and hang around my friends’ apartment. Scattered around their apartment, piled precariously on the coffee table, buried under old pizza boxes, forgotten in the cracks of the sofa, were scruffy, homemade little pamphlets. Little publications filled with rantings of high weirdness and exploding with chaotic design. […] In zines, everyday oddballs were speaking plainly about themselves and our society with an honest sincerity, a revealing intimacy, and a healthy “fuck you†to sanctioned authority — for no money and no recognition, writing for an audience of like-minded misfits. (Stephen Duncombe, Notes from the Underground 1-2)
Interchapter 3
Thinking in terms of public rather than communal life can give us a way of describing the sort of talk that takes place across borders and constituencies. It suggests that we speak as public intellectuals when we talk with strangers rather than with the members of our communities and disciplines. (Joseph Harris, A Teaching Subject 109, emphasis original)
Chapter 4
Curriculum is a design for the future. (Gunther Kress, “Visual and Verbal†78)
To teach writing is to argue for a version of reality, and the best way of knowing and communicating it. (James Berlin, “Contemporary Composition†256)
[S]uppose, to paraphrase Elizabeth Daley, that we designed a curriculum in composition that prepared students to become members of the writing public and to negotiate life. How might that alter what we think and what we do? (Kathleen Blake Yancey, “Made Not Only in Words†306)
