fpotw
It’s been a while since I posted one, but here’s a real corker. From J. P. Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses.
But what exactly are the consensual limits of a word’s meaning? When does sausage cease to be sausage?
That is all.
fpotw
Or, you know you’re in grad school when … sentences like this make sense:
That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, “I am ideological.”
From Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Great read, by the way — a lot of fun.
fpotw
No one has said the the Favorite Passage of the Week has to come from a theory text:
As noted recently, I’m doing this WAC/WID syllabus. In one project, students are asked to provide a rhetorical analysis of one journal in their field. In one submission, the student (who is studying to become a special education teacher) cited this excerpt from a special education student. I cite it here with great appreciation and affection, and without any condescenion (I note this especially given the Trig Palin hullabloo from earlier this year):
An excited 6th grader wrote “Today I am planning on asking Mallory over to my house for a date. I hope her parents let her come over to my house after school. When she gets there I am going to put the moves on her and make out with her. Then I will take things to the next level and ask her to my girlfriend. Then I will play video games till my eyes fly out of my head like saucers”.
I’m unclear whether the video games and flying-saucer eyes are really connected to this student’s dating scheme, but the romantic in me chooses to believe they are.
fpotw
Just to show Clay up!
From Jenkins, William A. “Will the Real English Teacher Please Stand?” College English 30.6 (March 1969): 469-75.
There really aren’t definitive, unquestionable, completely defensible answers to many of the questions facing English teachers today. There never have been, and I suspect there never will be, even when we get into the twenty-first century where learning may be stimulated by electric waves and brain transplants may be more common and more successful than heart transplants are today. (469)
fpotw . . . bonus vroom-vroom edition!
They were simply not ready to drive linguistic limousines along Composition Expressway. Either the engine barely moved because of a stultified mode of expression or the drivers accelerated and veered into the Valley of Verbosity or the Gully of Grammatical Lapses. Nevertheless, we had to try to make our academic journey covering a minimum number of miles without complete disaster; some had already completed a remedial course and not want to repeat this next section of the route?Should we transfer to smaller vehicles and use smaller, straighter roads less challenging than super-highways with their demand for greater speed and dexterity? (363)
fpotw
From Payne, Robert O. “The Boundaries of Language and Rhetoric: Some Historical Considerations.” CCC 19.2 (May 1968): 109-17.
At the turn of this century, Rhetoric was a stern-faced spinster from whose steel-rimmed spectacles flashed illuminated slogans like “It is we” and “Shall for future, will for intention.” By the 1930s, it was apparent the old girl had to go. For one thing, she too often turned out to be wrong about the language, despite her prim and pure good intentions. But worst of all, what good was a Rhetoric who couldn’t persuade her own captive audience? The last time anyone in the English Department saw her, she had painted her eyelids lavender and was making a shameful living in the Radio-TV-Journalism Department. Her old office is now shared by two very busy and slightly worried young men, one with a beard. They talk a lot about the threat of over-specialized technical education, and the archetypal myths of human experience, and how badly their students write. (116-7)
FPOtW
A secondhand fave passage, from John Simon’s Paradigms Lost (1980), quoted in Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality (1992). First Faigley’s intro, then Simon:
[The English language, according to Simon, is on a "downhill course" caused by]
the four great body blows: (1) the student rebellion of 1968, which, in essence, meant that students themselves became the arbiters of what subjects were to be taught, and grammar by jingo (or Ringo), was not one of them; (2) the notion that in a democratic society language must accommodate itself to the whims, idiosyncrasies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of underprivileged minorities, especially if these happen to be black, Hispanic, and, later on, female or homosexual; (3) the introduction by more and more incompetent English teachers, products of the new system (see items 1 and 2 above) of even fancier techniques of not teaching English … [Faigley's ellipsis]; and (4) television.
Oh my. Where to begin?
- Dadgum ig’nint students, thinkin’ they got a say in what they learn!
- BY JINGO! BY JINGO! BY JINGO!
- Noone disses Ringo on my watch.
- Oooh! Minorities! Can’t they just leave well enough alone?!?!?
- Incompetent teachers! Teaching minorities what they want to learn! What is this, Europe?!?!
- Television! Arrgh! It’s so evil!
I can’t decide whether to be pissed off or just to laugh at this.