Academic Discourse again

This week’s articles and the last one’s give good examples of the problem of discourse they try to solve and show how intricate for specialists this problem is. The problem, in my point of view, is not discourse itself; the problem is the way we look at discourse. In the four articles that we have studied so far discourse is defined as the traditional academic language we use in our classrooms, essays, or publications. And this is a narrow meaning of discourse. In fact, discourse is a group of non-congenial things that produce a meaning. In the case of the academic discourse, the discourse will be us (instructors, scientists, and students), our culture (including language), the principles and rules of science, and the educational institutions, all of which are historically bound and all of which affect the type and quality of the discourse.
According to this definition, Royster’s statement that “ academic discourse, like all language use, is an invention of a particular social milieu, not a natural phenomenon” is not precise. This is because she excludes the nature of science in forming our language. The fact is that the type of science overdetermines the type of language we use. For example, in Physics we use a language that is scientific because we deal with a field that is concrete and rule-governed. In contrast, in philosophy or literature, our language she should be conjectural, emotional, and imaginative because our interest is in values, emotions and senses.
The other idea I find strange in the reading is that only traditional academic discourses are objective, argumentative and skeptical. What about our home discourses? What is the clause “I don’t think so”, that we use in our daily conversations, about? If I say to you this is an interesting film and you respond by saying I do not think so, this means that you want to start arguing; you want to present antithesis; you want to convince me with a different idea. Likewise, if I say to you I saw a ghost yesterday and you respond by saying are you serious?, you are posing a question; you are doubting; you are asking for facts; What I want to communicate here is that our home discourses have the same traits as academic discourses do; but what they differ in is the context and style. In home discourses, the conversation is between two or more people who speak face to face or through signals and who maintain the conversation by feedback. In academic discourses, on the other hand, the conversation is between a writer and a reader one of whom is absent. And here lies the problem. When students move to the new academic discourse, they do not realize the fact that they will maintain a conversation with a different nature in which they will be either readers or writers; a conversation in which their partners are unknown.
The other difference between the two discourses is the style. In home discourses, we use colloquial language which depends on abbreviations, reduction and informal lexicon. In contrast, academic discourses make use of standard language with formal vocabularies and structures.

Academic Discourse

The fact that we should consider when we talk about the academic discourse, and that Bizzell never formulated very well in her two articles, is that language is a social activity that can not be spoken by itself; it can not occur other than through communication between its people; any something new in the society-invention or idea- will find its way through language. As a result, language is a reflection of people’s education, thoughts, emotions and their perspectives of the world. So home discourses that our students bring to college are this language; they are a normal delivery of people’s interactions. Since they are real and spontaneous, they should be respected. Ignoring these discourses is ignoring societies and a span of time that students lived before they come to college.
Bizzell argues that intellectuals and students should not restrict their writing to traditional academic discourse. At the same time, she wrote that she never claimed that every student should have her own home discourse. For me, this is paradoxical because she changed the domain of restriction from traditional academic discourse to hybrid academic discourse for which she set certain traits. So the move is from a set of traits to other ones. What I see as best is that we should encourage our students to use their own discourse; we should also tell them that they do not live in their societies any more; they live in a new community called academe, which has its own way of life. This requires of them to adjust themselves to it (we should make them feel as if they moved to another country, say, China. Do they need to be stripped of their own culture to adjust? The answer is no, of course) They should know that this new community has certain traits which are part of its scientific nature and which they should keep while writing. I totally disagree with Bizzell’s idea that the academic discourse has characteristics that “ are most in accord with the personality traits that they [White male] are already socialized to develop”(56). By this statement she hinted at the idea that the traits of academic discourse was part of all White males’ societies, which means that they, at a historical span of time, spoke in a academic way. I do acknowledge that in the USA this type of discourse was connected with White males not because of special race traits but because of their economical privilege as she put it in an ambiguous way.
The other point on which I disagree with the author is that the text creates us and we do not create the text. My point of view is that neither we nor the text creates each other if the word “text” means the rules and principles of science. The fact is that we and the text are part of a large discourse- the universe which is created by God. To simply put it, this large discourse consists of sub-discourses, each of which consists of elements; we and the text are two of these elements. We are created separately. Our relation is a complementary one. The discourse that includes us can not occur if one of us is not there. Take the scientific discourse as an example. This discourse consists of us, the environment and the principles and rules of science(let’s narrow down this to the Physics discourse) We and physics are created separately. We are here without physics and physics is there without us. As Physicists, we do not create the rules and principles of Physics. We just discover them. We observe their behavior and record it.

Contact Zone

Anwr Adam

Rhetoric of Contact Zone

Dr. Barbara Manroe

01/18/2010

Rhetoric of Contact Zone

I am sure that no one in our cohort has been affected by Kaplan’s Contrastive Rhetoric more than I have; I am sure that no one will live the events of Contact Zone more than I will. It is my life. It has stirred my emotions and probed my short memories in the USA. I feel a strong kinship to this topic. As a foreign language learner, I know how shocking and frustrating it is when I speak and write crossculturally; how dangerous it is when I address and converse with people who they know nothing about me, about my people, about my life, about the chisel that curved my identity, about the vessel that nurtured my thought, about my culture; the culture that shaped a cosmic being called Anwar. I know how it is when an eastern graduate student studying in different schools of thought and burdened with others’ mistakes bursts into a western culture. I can guess the problem that he will face; I can see the frustration that he will live; I can feel the discrimination and degradation that he will gulp. This is his problem and the problem of a whole generation of Muslim expatriates in the US. And it is the problem that Rhetoric of Contact Zone tries to solve.

What I want to write about here is not those occasional events that we face in streets or stores, but those systematic scenes that occur in the American educational institutions. What I want to say identifies itself with Kaplan’s question “what may be discussed?”. The incident I want to tell shows how the tension between the American teacher and a foreign language learner occurs; how difficult choosing a topic it is. How appropriate or inappropriate a topic might be for two cultures. How the class might be a point of cultural clash. This incident happened to me in one of the American institutions in Pullman. And for academic honesty, I have narrated it in one paper presented to fulfill the requirements of 501 class. The story is as follows:

The other bitter scene was when she asked us to choose a topic for our research paper. She told us that the topic should be related to our field of study and that it should address a current issue; Like other students I chose mine; I told her that I would write about the racial discrimination and its effect on students; she frowned on me; then she said “racism does not exist any more”. I told her that it did exist and that hundreds of articles were being published on this topic; but she insisted that I change the topic. And because of this insistence, I had to go to the director who was a nice woman. I told her what happened. She talked to her and convinced her to accept the topic; finally she did. This was not a happy ending. When we started writing our papers, she ordered us to submit a section every week. The first section I submitted was marked “rewrite it”. The comments she made were silly; one of them was “you have never talked about Black Americans’ racism”. The second section was unsatisfactory, too; the third, the fourth. I went to the director again; I complained, but in vein. She told me that the teacher was the authority in my case. I decided to quit. I told the teacher that. She said “you are free”. I failed the course.

It goes without saying that the teacher in this scene- although I accused her of being a racist in 501 paper- lives the feeling of the “imagined community”. She thinks that the American society is homogenous. She is hoaxed by such banners as nationalism, Americanism, one anthem, one flag, which, in my point of view, are false ideologies which hide a set of relations that negate them. They hide the fact that America consists of different races, different religions, and different subcultures. And this is what the power point pictures that we studied in class hinted at. The first picture shows how families in different countries view the world cup, which, I think, represents a visual metaphor showing how families from different races lead their lives differently in the US. The second picture reinforces the idea of false ideology. It shows how intimacy hides racism; how hugging and hilarity hide racial differences; how they do not eliminate them; White is White; Black is Black; and Asian is Asian; The third picture displays how cards made of plastic differ in numbers. For me this means how the people who are American differ in character, identity and culture. The fourth picture articulates this clearly. It explains how dogs from different kinds sitting around a table (America) and holding different play cards (identities and cultures) represents a state of being in the USA.

Hi Dr. Victor,
One of the things I wish you did is to give us a schema for Contemprory Rhetoric. it should not be like the one you gave us last semester but a one which will give us an overview of the types of Con. Rhet. In other words, you break down into its types.
With regard ot the assignment, the following are the terms:
Feminism: a term used to describe a political, cultural or economical movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women.
Modernism: describes both a set of cultural tendecies and an array of associated cultural movements, arising from changes in western society in the late nineteenth century and early 20th century.
postmodernism: refers to a point of departure for desciplines in the late 20th century and early 21 century. It is in one way or another an extention to modernism.
Thatcherism: describes the idealogy, politics and political style of the British conservative politician Margret Thatcher.
Essentialism: is the view that any specific kind of entity has a set of characteristics and properties.
Noe essentialism: assumes that it is necssary for any kind of identity to have soecific traits.

Hi