Executive Summary of Ralph Cintron's Angel's Town Chapter 3 Finding Don Angel

Ralph Cintron finds Don Angel through layers of discourse. Don Angel seems splintered between identities through bureaucratic discourse as he swaps fake names, exposing the State’s dependence on paper trails for maintaining order and identification. Cintron writes most about three of Don Angel’s personal discourse communities, labeled by Cintron as viejito, mexicano, and English. Overall, Cintron analyzes Don Angel’s “layered discourses” in order to explain how he uses language to in varying ways and establish his dynamic identity.

Don Angel’s viejito discourse sets him apart from his immediate community. Attached to the “old ways,” the viejito discourse is one part performance, another part ideological. Cintron describes how Don Angel has a semiotic body that exhibits viejito discourse through dance, demonstration, and dress. The ideas of the “old ways” like witchcraft and hearth medicine come into conflict with modernizing agents like science and popular culture—the local youth find this aspect of Don Angel backwards.

However, Don Angel earns more respect in his mexicano discourse. Playing Albures, a verbal game of wit through word play and sexual innuendo where two men spar off to outperform the other putting the loser on his back so to speak, Don Angel shows of his expertise with language and syntactical change.

Cintron spends the least amount of time describing Don Angel’s relationship to English. In this discourse, he does not have the strongest command, and English would surface in his jokes. Perhaps, Don Angel used humor to make light of his social position in view of the power discourse.

Quotes

52 “I first consider the rhetoric of the "legal documents'' genre and explore some of its cultural meanings and intentions and, likewise, consider the forgings of legal documents as a profound manipulation of appearances whose goal is freedom from the forces of control. After that, I shift my analysis toward some specific oral discourse genres whose appearances, at least to the uninitiated, are also deceiving. My entire analysis is directed toward an understanding of Don Angel, a man whose life has been both banal and transgressive and, for me at least, deeply moving.”

55: “These cards and papers were parts of a genre, which itself may be part of a more complex system of rituals (including inquiries at a cocktail party, for instance) that attempt to bridge distance. Documents of identification, in particular, might be taken as contracts or signs of relationship between individuals and the institutions the individuals circulate through”

56: “These cards, then, are products of a lack of trust that plays itself out as a momentary curtailment of freedom at the moment of verification.”

57: “Perhaps we need to view the management of people and the devices used for management as cultural responses to the problems and successes of modernity: an explosive growth in population, the erosion of face-to-face interactions, an intensified concept of ownership, and so on.”

59: “In short, the unidimensionality of a law or regulation cannot help but straitjacket the multidimensionality of human need and, even more so, the almost chaotic abundance of human desire.”

63: “My point is that physical and oral representations of objects, actions, and events were very much a part of his vocabulary.”

64: “The repertoire of Don Angel, then, included at least three ways by which to animate words: gestures, sounds, and the creation of others through voice, pitch, and bodily changes.”

65: “Don Angel's viejito repertoire, it seems to me, implied a relationship to words that is distinguishable from the ideology of wording that is common in mainstream life to the extent that such life has been shaped by schooling.”

66: “Yes, I am saying that styles of power become molded to ways of holding the body and gesturing, to styles of discourse, and to ranges of thought—and all this might be called a style of being.”

68: “My sense was that his semiotic contained strands of ancient histories, cultures, and discourses, but his uprooted condition meant that following each strand would lead to a dead end, for there were no other viejitos, or matachin dancers in the neighborhood to think about, to compare, to ask questions of. In this sense, Don Angel was a powerful symbol of the fragmentation throughout these neighborhoods.”

71: “In this sense, Don Angel was part of a broadly shared identity related to contemporary Mexico. Because the term mexicano, then, was a communal marker, I have chosen it to label the discourse style through which Don Angel performed his everyday living.”

71: “To play albures, then, is to join a male game in which the participants search through phrases, words, and syllables for every possible way to suggest the penis, sperm, feces, anus, and sexual entry and exit into women, objects, animals, and particularly each other.”

76: “In other words, if the first level of meaning can be called normative, the second or albur level might be called transgressive.”

91: “But a man like Don Angel, who was inhabited by both viejito and mexicano discourses and performed them skillfully, was marginalized in both Mexico and the United States because in the eyes of others his own traces of viejito discourse acted as a kind of friction slowing the push toward modernization.”

96: “In such conditions, English potentially was a tool of exclusion and manipulation, and these were the festering sources from which the Spanish jokes and puns described earlier emerged. The motive behind the jokes and puns was the leveling of social stratification, but it was the sort of leveling that remained bound to words and bound to one's circle of intimates who understood Spanish.”

Quick Post on Duffy

Recently, I read an article on CCN warning that extremists—racist or so-called “patriotic” groups—are on the rise in the United States. As the article points to violence against minority groups, in most cast foiled by the police, I immediately thought of the Duffy’s article and civic, sometimes civil, discourse. I was impressed with Duffy’s careful reading of how the Hmong took up the rhetoric of Wausau’s dissatisfied white population and crafted strong arguments. Plus, they affirmed their position without explosive language denigrating their target audience.

While the Hmong attacked ignorance in their readers, they also built up ethos based on reasoned arguments and, I would argue, politeness. President Obama the other day said something to the effect of our nation is polarized and in desperate need of civility in political discourse, and I think the Hmong present us with a good example of civility without compromising too much ground.

In Duffy's example, literacy here created a positive outcome. The Hmong showed collective poise through appropriating the discourse used against them, and discontents were shown their frustrations were mostly baseless, for better or for worse. Turning back to the CNN article about hate groups, I wonder what would happen if the hate groups were engaged in a civil discussion with the target of their ire. Would this help inspire tolerance?

Literacy and rhetoric can be dangerous as well. Right now, I’m taking a class on Southern literature, and this was the first time I read Thomas Dixon, Jr, an outspoken racist and apologist for the KKK who wrote around the turn of the 19^th century. Dixon’s had a wide audience, and D.W. Giffith’s Birth of Nation (1915) was based off of Dixon’s books. At the time, the racist rhetoric had a firm place in the cultural imaginary. Today, if you look up reviews on Amazon of Dixon's work, you'll find some startling words praising these racist documents.

While we often study things to appreciate them and praise them, I wonder what a study about racist discourse might look like? How do people make compelling arguments for alienating an entire people based on race or sexuality? I imagine that would be a dark place to go, and I would probably rather spend time in pleasant Wausau like Duffy, but I think it’s important to understand the opposition if we are going to get a full picture of the issue.

Reading Response 5

Brandt writes, "It is interesting to note how a cultural ideal that could have derived from literary reading--the romantic writer as natural genius--plays out in parents' hands-off attitude toward children's writing development" (158).

I’ve noticed recurring the issue of identity and writing in our course readings and discussion. The quote above brings to my mind a topic that we often returned to during my first time in 7050—the lonely writer in the garret. Frankly, I’m both fascinated and stunned that people still maintain the image of a writer detached from his world, committing his genius to paper for the little to read in awe. Looking at testimonies from Brandt clearly dispels this myth.

However, it still exists in our cultural imagination and typically in a negative way. Think back to books, movies, or TV shows—basically any popular media—and bring to mind how writers or literary types are portrayed. You might recall some aloof and sensitive loner type figure, who senses deep meaning in life’s precious, fleeting moments. Often in college hijinx movies, like Animal House, these figures are usually social degenerates who waste their time smoking pot on the job and sleeping with their students. While that is an extreme example, writers as represented in popular culture seem to always be on the outside looking in, with an occasional revelation worth imparting to the average person.

Brandt shows us that idea of a writer is mostly fiction, yet the misconception that ordinary people can’t write still exists. Mostly everyone writes, but their writing isn’t “belle lettres” or literary material. And even then, a close look at the lives of most literary writers show people—with a few exceptions—deeply involved in discourses of their times. They weren’t removed but drawn to their cultures, whither by fascination, disgust, or something in between is relative to the writer.

I imagine that our students have the idea of good writing as literary writing produced by the lonely writer in the garret. As a writing teacher, I think it’s helpful to confront that fiction and tear it apart. While the lonely writer will stay in our cultural imagination, he has no real place in the classroom.

Still, as I think about Brandt’s glimpse into the literate lives of everyday people, I can’t help but think of Berlin’s Marxist agenda where composition and rhetoric are trying to take down the oppressive grip of literary studies. Although I enjoy following these testimonials and challenging the man to a certain extent, I remain somewhat suspicion of what writerly identities these theorists are trying to conceive and produce. If history holds true, the identities of writers have been too far constrained, and we have some way to go before people comfortably identify as writers.

Executive Summary 5: Chapter 5 of Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives

In this chapter, Brandt describes how reading has been culturally valued and writing disdained. Currently, we are seeing a new focus put onto writing as it has gained value in our commercial market.

Brandt indicates reading is associated with pleasant memories and social interaction. Families gather together and read texts aloud. By extension, these people were taught to revere printed materials. While relations to reading varied among families, public schools—and to some extent the church—focused on reading instruction because it was easier to monitor and control than writing.

On the other hand, Brandt’s subjects trace their writing histories with more difficulty than their reading history. Memories of writing invoked thoughts of isolation, ridicule, and hard labor. Parents were far less involved—if involved at all—in their children’s writerly education. Some subjects remarked that writing hardly ever took place at home, but their notion of writing was directly connected with “belle lettres” and not quotidian writing practices like balancing a checkbook.

People also shared a conflicted relationship with writing for school. Although a written document could bring praise from authority figures, often school writing caused anxiety brought from bad grades and noisy peers. Moreover, writing was also used to criticize or satirized those same authority figures in the subjects’ lives.

Brandt ends by addressing the “sacredness” of reading and the “profanity” of writing. Protestant churches, Brandt explains in the beginning, promoted reading so the faithful could understand the Bible, but writing was viewed with suspicion because writing was a socially stratified practice. This idea, of course, has changed. Brandt seems to suggest that today writing is valued as commercial product and output, and this idea is changing what we consider as literacy.

Quotes

148: "The new literacy is often characterized as an ability to go beyond rote skills of deciphering text into the more mentally challenging levels of interpretation and critical reasoning."

148: "Writing is the productive member of the pair, and with literacy now a key productive force in the information economy, writing not only documents work but also increasingly comprises the work that many people do."

151: "Nevertheless, reading and the teaching of reading were widely considered as a normal part of responsible care of young children in many households. The heavy hand of mothers in organizing book-based activities indicates the close association between reading and child rearing."

153: "There was a reverence expressed for books and their value and sometimes a connection between reading and refinement or good breeding."

154: "Compared to reading, writing seemed to have a less coherent status in collective family life, and much early writing was remembered as occurring in lonely, secret, or rebellious circumstances."

157: "For Ames's grandmother, writing was just a necessity for her job and not thought of as a separate activity or skill to be passed along for its own sake."

158: "It is interesting to note how a cultural ideal that could have derived from literary reading--the romantic writer as natural genius--plays out in parents' hands-off attitude toward children's writing development."

162: "[Writing as a purge or vent] tended to occur at times of crisis: death, divorce, romantic loss, incarceration, war.

166: "If writing in school was more associated than reading with emotional conflict, surveillance, and punishment, it also could be associated with sharper pride and individual accomplishment."

166: "Sub rosa writing was used to comment on school authority."

167: "Though parents do not hesitate to endorse and promote reading, their involvement with children's writing seems more restricted and circumspect."

Reading Response 4

In my reading for this week, I was struck by how Roadville residents valued reading but hardly did any actual reading. I often heard that people prefer having been read to a actual reading because it’s better to have ready use of knowledge rather than go through the process of acquiring it.

When I was an undergraduate student, I off-handedly remarked to one of my advising professors that someday we would be able to upload books to our brain. He paused to consider what I had said, and I was completely shocked that he took me seriously. After some recollection, he said that he would hate to lose the joy out of sitting down and reading. I remember that he described his job, in a manner of speaking, as a professional reader.

Someone last week in class asked why do we do what we do? Many of us were silent, and many of us were very outspoken about why we don’t like what we do. It’s an important question that many of us pursuing academic work should ask ourselves again and again. Some days, I’m more confident than others about knowing why I do what I do, but after reading the chapter about Heath, it dawned on me that I enjoy reading, especially primary texts.

What I really like doing though is reading a text and then talking about it with other people. Like the people from Trackton—although they owned very few books—they traded ideas and debated interpretations in a group setting. Of course, relaxing with a good book on my own time is well and fine, but what we do is approach texts as a group and grapple with what they might mean. I initially thought that what they did in Trackton was very strange and unusual, and then I started thinking about it more carefully. It's not that unusual at all.

Talking about texts is rewarding in of itself. Writing about texts is also rewarding in of itself. However, it’s also useful for our students. While we can debate what materials to teach—those dead white men get much grief—I think what we like about our work is the community’s ability to keep reinterpreting texts.

Executive Summary 4: Chapter 6 of Heath's Ways with Words

From Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

In chapter 6, Heath looks at the literate practices in Trackton and Roadville with emphasis on children and women. Both communities differ in reading and writing behaviors. Trackton residents generally engage with written texts socially, making interpretations within a group and integrating texts into oral performances like worship. Roadville residents generally write only when necessary, mostly writing letters and notes, and value the act of reading more than they actually read.

The children of both communities come into their literacy traditions much differently. Heath explains that children and Trackton learn how to read by interacting with literate persons, like older friends and siblings, outside of school. Heath describes how Trackville children learn how to read price tags at the local store in order to get the best deal for their parents. Everything about print revolves around speech, or “talk” as Heath indicates. On the other hand, Roadville children learn to be passive listeners, hearing others read the text and then respond to it after they’ve finished. Adults in Roadville value reading above writing, so much of their children’s education comes from print text and instruction.

Heath describes how worship differs in each community, characterizing their nuanced relations to print text and oral performance. Roadville residents fuse printed materials, primarily Bible passages and hymns, with personal stories, prayers, into a group performance. For Trackville residents, passages are read quietly, and readers do not deviate from the scripture. Few people show willingness to read in public.

Each community tries preparing children for institutional education, but Heath asserts toward the end of the chapter that this instruction does not prepare kids for writing in school.

Quotes

194-195: “Trackton children had learned before school that they could read to learn, and they had developed expectancies of print. The graphic and everyday-life contexts of writing were often critical to their interpretation of the meaning of print, for print to them was not isolated bits and pieces of lines and circles, but messages with varying internal structures, purposes, and uses. For most of these, oral communication surrounded the print.”

196: “Certain types of talk describe, repeat, reinforce, frame, expand, and even contradict written materials, and children in Trackton learn not only how to read print, but also when and how to surround print in their lives with appropriate talk.”

199: “Adults and children read what they have to read to solve practical problems of daily life: price tags, traffic signs, house numbers, bills, checks. Other uses are perhaps not as critical to problem-solving, but social-interactional uses give information relevant to social reaitons and contacts with person not in Trackton’s primary group.”

205: “Indeed, these unique combinations out of the familiar gathering of the congregation make it possible for each member of the congregation to be at once creator and performer.”

211: “Throughout these habits and the shifts from oral to written language, there is an oral performance pattern of building a text which uses themes and repetitions with variations on these themes.”

213: "[In Roadville] Letters are conversations written down."

217: “Both men and women dislike reading aloud in public or having to speak formally.”

218: “The types and uses of writing by children in Roadville are far more restricted than those of adults. Their occasion and task for writing are largely motivated by others—parents forcing them to write thank you notes, teachers giving assignments, and coaches asking them to sign pledges of good behavior.”

220: “Two features stand out in the observation of reading habits in Roadville: everyone talks about reading, but few people do it; and of those who do read, few follow through on any action which might be suggested in reading material.”

227: “In Roadville, there is a concerted effort on the part of adults to initiate their children both into pre-scripted discourse around printed material and into passive listening behavior, and they believe book-reading to be both recreational and educational for children.”

230: “In general, however, the domains of school and home are kept separate by both child and parent once the child starts to school and certainly by the end of the primary years. Adults expect the school to teach, and the child to learn.”

234: “In both communities, women write and read more than men; and there are patterns of certain types of reading and writing takes only members of one or the other sex or indivals of a certain age are expected to do.”

Reading Response 3

This week, I have a lot of meandering thoughts about our readings, so I don't expect that my ideas will make too much logical sense, but I hope you get the spirit of my message.

I’ve tired to remove political biases from my teaching and research, but this seems impossible in view of Berlin’s history. English studies are entirely politicized. Even New Criticism, which takes great lengths to divorce itself from real world urgency, shows us that being nonpolitical is in fact political. But can we leave out the politics of our time and control how much they affect what we do?

Berlin seems to take New Critics to task for stepping out of the political arena. In the 1950s, he suggests that New Critics were scared of backlash from the very present red scare marching across the country. Were these New Critics cowards for not adopting a more radical approach to literature? Maybe. Maybe not. The politics of the time had to play some part in the longevity of New Criticism even if it stunted the progression that Berlin praises.

When I think of politics influencing English Studies now, I wonder what we’re taking up as major political issues of our day. It is pretty much assumed that people in our field are liberal. In our classes, diversity is very present—our World Literature section requires a balance of Western and Non-Western texts. We no longer just teach about “dead white men,” and we’re not allowed.

One specific issue that comes to mind: what about the urgent question of Western relations to the Arabic world? While we have comparative literature courses, I haven’t seen English departments offering Arabic literature—in translation, course—as part of the curriculum. Does that step out of the bounds of English? At the risk of sounding paranoid, what’s keeping the study of Arabic literature out and keeping American and British literature in?

From what I gather, we can describe what we're doing by also describing what we're not doing. And, if we can't escape politics, I wonder how we can be aware of them and use them effectively in our work.

Executive Summary 3

From James A. Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality. Chapter 5, "The Communication Emphasis: 1940-1960."

Berlin begins this chapter highlighting the spread of general education between 1940 and 1960 leading into his argument that composition studies are indebted to the communication course and return of rhetoric from years past. Concerns of preserving American culture abound, and Berlin seems to assert that the composition course is an effective instrument for teaching action in social discourse.

It becomes evident soon that Berlin favors the holistic approach of communication instruction. Building from semantic theorists of the 1930s, Berlin lays out an educational approach that places writing and speech acts in a social context. As the communication course grows out of necessity for educating a wider public, colleges approach this challenge differently, with Iowa as Berlin’s example of a current-traditional model and Denver as an example of a left-of-center model. Communication’s integrative model of education seems like the forerunner of the future composition course.

Berlin tactfully couples the origin of the CCCC along with changes in English studies. It seems that the CCCC rises to defend the “little guy” composition teacher and build legitimacy for studying composition on its own merits. Berlin mentions advocates of literature arguing for the liberal culturist return to writing about literature as a means of moral and civic cultivation. However, this practice seems more distant from social reality as linguistics and rhetoric represent methods for approaching writing education invested in transferable skills and social immediacy.

Berlin suggests that literature is an out-dated mode of writing education while composition, rhetoric, and communication studies are structured from progressive ideas that teach writing as a social activity.

Quotes

“The push for general education requirements again emerged just before World War II in response to the Depression and the threats to democracy posed by fascism abroad. After the war, these programs increased dramatically, colleges again trying to combine the breadth of liberal learning with professional specialization. There motivation was to safeguard the American way of life—the social stability provoked by the democratic method” (92).

“The semanticists derived from cultural anthoropologists […] a notion of language as a mode of social behavior and, more important still, an awareness of the ways in which language structures and defines reality” (95).

Regarding communication course: “The important common element in these variations was the commitment to teaching writing, speaking, reading, and often listening as a unified set of activities” (96).

Writing based on Rogerian psychology / writing teacher as sort of therapist: “The clinician was supposed to go even further, however, in discovering the psychological blocks to learning how to communicate, being required ‘to collect and assemble as much biographical data as possible concering the student to find his needs and his hopes and fears’” (101).

“And with the establishment of the CCCC and its journal, College Composition and Communication, teachers of freshman composition took a giant step toward qualifying for full membership in the English department, with the attendand privileges—tenure, promotion, higher salaries, leaves—even though these were not widespread until much later” (106).

On Composition and Literature: “Literature is necessary to preserve democracy” (109).

“The child learns the system and ways of using [the language system] more effectively in a social setting. As a result, the composition teacher should duplicate the social process in the classroom so that the student can learn to manipulate the resources of the system” (113).

“Significantly, [rhetoric scholars] emphasized the primacy of invention over logic because it alone would ‘assist in the process of creation’” (115).

“Thus, [W. Nelson Francis] saw rhetoric as being concerned with the discussion of virtually all discursive prose” (118).

“[Barriss Mills of Purdue] wanted to base the writing course on a process of composing that emphasized a rhetorical prupose, a rhetorical context, writing, and revision” (119).