Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
489. many basic writers—and many other students—are "caught in a reading and writing performance where the authority of the text, as well as the authorities of current teachers and a host of past teachers, conspires with her sense of self to present an almost insurmountable obstacle to free-flowing and equal dialogue. to copy is cheating; to prove that they know, students must ferret out what of significance will please a teacher. such a rhetorical bind reduces or eliminates the possibilities that students might match the rhetorical ethos or dialogic stance of the author, or that they might absorb or imitate any of the syntax or the rhetorical strategies of the text in question"
490. "our cultural and textual production is based on a transformed notion of imitation, [but] we have as yet to apply our insights and our words to the teaching of academic writing. we have as yet to forge a postmodern pedagogy of imitation for undergraduates in school"
491. claim: "in this essay i suggest a rhetorical relationship with texts where undergraduate students may also practice imitation, 'practice' implying praxis, as james britton envisions, students who 'practice language in the sense in which a doctor "practices" medicine' (130)"
492. "attempting to replicate the situation of immersion," she designed exercises wherein "students read and respond in writing, at least a half dozen times, to certain difficult texts" so as to "interpret their negotiations within the social context of the group, without the usual school bias that these texts should be comprehended…for the 'main idea.' to do this, i found it imperative to invent meaures to subvert my own authority, an authority that i can not subvert entirely no matter what measures i am able to invent"; "their imitations are rarely motivated by a sense of reverence for or valoration of the texts. in fact, the imitations produced by my students and myself are often accompanied by a certain amount of insurgency and are always accomplished in a spirit of play to employ an ancient meaning of the word mimesis….the more students are encouraged to play, the more they become seduced into using academic prose, and the more they are caught in the academic web"
494-5. "according to bakhtin, dialogue, or 'varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of "our-own-ness"' ('problem' 89), permeates writing in all genres to greater or lesser degrees"; over time, "conventionalization…blurs the line between stylization and conscious imitation"; "at the simplest unconscious level, we are motivated to imitate in order to match the textual features of what we hear and read in order to further dialogue, dealogue that is always held within a discrete particular context and a context that itself incorporates a range of almost limitless paratextual features"; "bakhtin's theory of dialogism enables us to disengage from our usual notions of originality in self-expression to espouse a more powerful notion of the writer who interacts and intervenes in dialogues of shared and appropriate language that are nonetheless original based on their situatedness in context."
495. on authority: "if dialogue and unconsicous stylistic imitation represent a human tendency toward interaction and intervention, 'authoritative discourse,' according to bakhtin, limits and proclivity toward dialogue and appropriation. in other words, one shies away from andswering, repeating, or even uttering the words of a 'sacred' text. authoritative discourse distances itself from the hearer or the reader, and it takes its authority, not from any inherent textual features, but from its context."
496. "derrida proclaims that words cannot be controlled by conscious intentions of authors. the effect of this claim is commensurable with bakhtin's theory of dialogism, for derrida also sees that language, in its ability to be reproduced, cannot be owned by anyone."
497. "if reading does not result in essential or final meaning, it nonetheless functions as an interventive and interpretive act, as a translation that results in many meanings"; "integral to both derrida's concept of iterability and bakhtin's theory of dialogism, and relevant to a postmodern theory of imitation, is translation--a transposition of an appropriated language to a particular context, or 'transformation,' as derrida sometimes calls it—which posits that even a faithful interlingual translation of an original involves a series of interpretations along with ruptures and gaps"
498. "it is important to remember in any discussion of imitation that language is not simply poured into listeners and readers as empty vessels, but translated in a process of rhetorical negotiation with an existing internal language, becoming, in bakhtinian terms, 'internally persuasive'"; "lacan's concept of transference and resistance allow us to discuss the ways in which unconscious desires are played out in relationship to the language of others"
500. the basis for her interest = her "accidental" discovery that "all of [her] students…could spontaneously write spot commercials—often with hyperbolic parody suggesting a conscious resistance to commercials' persuasiveness" even though "none of [her] students ever claimed they admired or had studied the spot commercial. their ability to generate the rhetoric and syntax of the genre was based on their unwritten dialogues with particular spot commercials that had been repeated with subtle shifts of context," demonstrating "the irrational power of memory in the unconscious"
501. "because alienation interferes with the dialogic stance that enables imitation" when students as part of artificial school environments "answer published 'study questions,' they must participate in violations of their natural proclivities toward dialogue….they must hypothesize themselves, for study questions are made for hypothetical students"
506-7. "epithets such as 'boring'…often come from real hurt feelings in response to signals of authority within academic texts"; "texts should be questioned, challenged, deconstructed, situated, and altered. because in that process, the power of their rhetoric and syntax is free for the taking. in short, texts should be imitated."