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December 29, 2005
Observations and Lessons
Observations:
When the snow comes, especially when it sticks to the pavement and covers the stripes that define parking spaces (what an odd concept anyway, really), drivers determine for themselves what a comfrotable distance is from the next car over. Not surprisingly, this is about half a space more than the striping allows. Isn't it stupid that cars are still getting bigger and parking spaces are getting smaller? I think there's a story in that somewhere.
Shopping, particularly holiday shopping, is a strange and bizarre social activity. Reports of traffic back-ups along major arterials because the very large parking lot is already full to the brim, check-out lines snaking through the stores (or in the case of the small little Apple store at Carousel Centre, out the door and into the mall aisle), ten check-out aisles at the liquor store in Buffalo and a cop directing traffic in the parking lot - it's madness. And then after the holiday, the crowds still come. The shopping never ends. Mind-blowing.
Toddlers are a blast at Christmas.
Lessons:
Teaching two different courses each with a new syllabus is much harder than it seems. Combine it with taking three classes, and it's just goofy nut-so. The semester is over, grades turned in but possibly not really finished, and when I take the time to reflect on it in my teaching journal, I will have many lessons to record. Mostly about being disorganized and unfocused, and about the importance of turning the "idea notes" into an actual calendar when I first think it up.
Chores:
The room I laughinly refer to as "my office" at home is a disaster, as it has been all semester. I'm working on it. Really I am.
Oh, and if anyone is still reading this blog after such long silences, I owe letters, cards, and other greetings to: my Aunt Phyllis, Dad, Elana, Nick, Rich, Colleen, Rosemarie, Bridget, Emily, and Ann. I also need to re-enter the blogosphere instead of just lurking there.
I predict writing in my future. And fortunately, I got some very cool new writing tools for Chrismas, including a Sensa fountain pen, and a great little tote filled with important items like post-it note and flags, a small magnifying glass, tiny pencil, eraser (useful indeed for all those library books full of selfish people's leftover pencil marks), and a great book weight to hold books open while I type up my notes. Very cool stuff.
More to come. Stay tuned.
Posted by cageyer at 09:46 AM | Comments (2)
December 09, 2005
White, Chapter 3, Summary
originally posted to HistoryBump 8 Feb 2005
White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact." Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 81-100.
Metahistory asks questions intended to disrupt the types of inquiry employed by practitioners in a field to discover underlying assumptions and possible alternatives ways of knowing or questioning. Although the field of history has been questioning its disciplinary success, the problem of the fictive quality of "historical narratives" has not been taken up seriously (82). These narratives have more structural similarities to literature than to documents in science. Though Northrop Frye found history and myth to be binary opposites, he also allowed that historian's narratives reflected the four categories of myth: Romantic, Comic, Tragic, and Ironic (82). The historian gathers data and assembles it toward a form, and part of the success of histories in explaining events of the past to readers in the present is due to the story-making ability of the historian, or "emplotment" (83). The success of historical narrative requires both elements of Frye's binary, the "facts" of the events, and the explanatory and associative effects of the myth.
R. G. Collingwood also viewed historians as story-tellers, but did not make the distinction between the elements of a story and the story itself. The story takes shape by "the suppression or subordination" of some events and the "highlighting" of others (84). But the form is not implicit in the events, as Collingwood suggests. Rather the form comes from the combination of the historian's choices in telling the events and the reader's familiarity with the forms of tragedy, comedy, romance, or irony. History telling is in this way a literary form. By encoding the events so as to reflect a familiar form, the historian "refamiliarizes" readers with events, in a process similar to psychotherapy (88). Historical narratives serve not only as a "reproduction" of the events but also as a "complex of symbols" assisting reader's to find an "icon" of those events. Symbols, icons, and signs are based on C.S. Peirce's philosophy of language. As sign systems, historical narratives point both to the events and the story type or mythos that serves as the "icon," thus "mediating" between the events and the "pregeneric plot structures" of the culture (88). In this system the "plot" serves the iconic function.
The coherence of a series of events is the coherence of the story, which is limited by the form. The facts must be tailored to the form, while preserving the chronology or sequence. This happens both by emphasis within the sequence and by the omission of some events. The choices of emphasis and omission come from the historian's sense of possible sets of relationships among the events. The historian begins with "ordinary educated speech" as his communication method, leaving figurative language to construct meaning. The "dominant figurative mode" available can determine the type of emplotment to be used (94).
It is necessary to recognize the fictive element of historical narratives and to reconnect history with its "literary basis" in order to allow for the incorporation of theories of language and narrative and thus a "more subtle presentation" of historical events. Such recognition and reconnection would guard against "ideological distortions" and come to a theory that would revitalize the discipline of history (99).
See also Becky Howard's comment on double conformity.
Posted by cageyer at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
Kitzhaber by Tate by Gage
entry originally posted to HistoryBump 25 Jan 2005
Kitzhaber, Albert R. Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990.
Gary Tate is the general editor for this text, but the title face page clearly states: "Because this work has become such an important historical document in the field of composition and rhetoric, it is being published here without revision."
Method? Convince the author (Kitzhaber) to finally allow formal publication of his 1953 dissertation. How this was accomplished is not recorded in the introduction. We do learn that Kitzhaber was still living at the time, that this was not his first offer to publish his dissertation, and that he had been retired for over ten years when he did agree.
Purpose? To provide access to this document for many scholars, not just the ones close enough to Oregon to get a photocopy of mimeograph of the original.
John Gage wrote a nice introduction to the text, based in part on an interview with Kitzhaber at the latter's home in Eugene, Oregon. In addition to capturing some of Kitzhaber's personal history with respect to his education and the dissertation, Gage also places Kitzhaber in his historical moment, citing other articles and talks given at 4Cs in 1963, a period Stephen North cites as the beginning of the discipline. Kitzhaber had already been chair of Cs and was incoming president of NCTE at that time. Gage provides highights of Kitzhaber's career, and lists some of the comtemporary scholars who have cited this dissertation (now book) in their work. Gage also provides a nice bibliography of Kitzhaber's works.
If I should say more here, ping me, because comparatively this seems just a bit too easy. Yet what else could Tate do but publish it without editing, given the number of copies that had already informally circulated?
I'm actually more interested in the untold story of Tate's persuasion, which Gage mentions but doesn't detail, and in Kitzhaber's work and the program at UO currently. I wonder how much of him, and Gage for that matter, is still in that institution's composition program.
Posted by cageyer at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)