Composition: History & Theory: 1990 - 1999
College English, Volume 62, No. 2: 1999
Description
CONTENTS
Iago Lives in the Panopticon; Or, Teaching Resistance, Granting Respect (Deborah Klein): Klein uses her first hand experience teaching at a forty-year old missionary school in Nigeria called MOPIT. Here, Americans and Nigerians teach about 200 students on a “lovely campus, with trimmed grass; shade trees; green-trimmed, whitewashed colonial style buildings; and, in the middle, a football (soccer) field” (169). Klein states that most compositionists tend to fall into two camps: the expressivist or the social epistemic. However, despite the fact that “each group seeks to eradicates injustices that the other group perpetuates” each separate party “elevate[s] student voices over traditional authorities” essentially empowering student writers (170). Despite the fact that social rhetorics were popular during this time period, Klein rejects the idea that external forces always override free will. Instead, you are always responsible for your actions, but this line blurs for those that are underprivileged or non-American. Therefore, these underprivileged students are often hesitant to share their writing because it is a risk that must be assessed and their self-preservation techniques rise to the occasion. The article continues with the idea that many of the students in Nigeria are economically challenged; and, in order to get them to write honestly, teachers need to shake them out of their oppression and make them realize that their ideology needs to shift. Often this is difficult because “they struggle only with finding the means to express [their] ideas and opinions to unheeding or even hostile outsiders without further alienating themselves from avenues of power and privilege” (176). Klein then moves into some of the issues of classroom management and how students oftentimes see the teacher as a dictator that they must submit their authority to. This essay is particularly interesting because it switches between first hand narrative and into discussions of theory. Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation (Wendy S. Hesford): The essay by Hesford is particularly interesting because it focuses on feminist rhetoric when dealing with the issue of trauma and rape. Using the film Rape Stories, Hesford states that many are attempting to rewrite the traditional rape narrative. In the past, these narratives have functioned as a script for women’s passivity, helplessness, and the idea that women want to be raped. Films like Rape Stories begin to ask questions about how to “understand women’s agency in the context of sexual violence” (193). However, despite the fact that Rape Stories attempts to rewrite what has been seen as the traditional script of rape it “lacks ‘discursive doubt;’ it does not question the notion that women will be raped” (194). Therefore, the idea that women are unequal to men and men are the ever-threatening rapists is still continued and women are therefore marked “physically and psychologically” (194). Hesford uses Elaine Scarry’s argument that the idea of rape being internal must eventually become external through the telling of it. The film gives way to the trauma (which Hesford defines as “a devastating and not-worked-through experience” (195) of rape. Rape Stories offers the opportunity to study survivor discourse which can be seen as a political act against violence. The outcome of such narratives is an altering in history’s narrative for it emphasizes and exposes “oppressive material conditions, violence, and trauma” (195). Hesford asks that rhetoricians and scholars interested in such discourse “retain a materialist edge, while not dismissing the centrality of language and representation in struggles for power” (197). Hesford also states that her goal for the essay “is not to look at survivors’ representations as mirrors of historical or psychic realities but to consider how realist strategies authenticate survivors’ representations” (197). ADDITIONAL TITLES: “From Formalism to Inquiry: A Model of Argument in Antigone,” “Hiding It from the Kids (With Apologies to Simon and Garfunkel),” “Review: How to Tell a True Teaching Story,” “Review: Altruism, Ethics, Spirituality, and Suffering,” “A Comment on ‘Rhetoric as a Course of Study’,” “David Fleming Responds,” “A Comment on ‘The Essay Canon’,” “Lynn Z. Bloom Responds”
Date of Upload
3/15/09