Class (Meta)

Bar Glasses, Barr’s Classes

preterite Class (Meta)

The CSS layout for the Writing Program finally worked, so I’m kinda proud of myself. It looks OK, but still needs fine-tuning before we get it up and running in the Fall. Mostly a good learning experience: I’m happy to be moving my scant skills away from table-based layouts. I’m packing tonight, getting ready to go down to DC for the long weekend and see some friends and family. I’m still going to try to keep up my writing routine, but since my Dad doesn’t have internet access, one of my tasks tonight is to look online for 802.11b hotspots in the city. We’ll see how successful I am; if I’m not, then I might have to save up my posts ’til I get back up here Monday night.

I once again found Curtiss’s points to be useful and provocative; his argument about beer serving only as a class marker via our awareness of class difference and incongruity seems persuasive. At the same time, though, I’m not so sure.
Read more

Education, Markets, Margins

preterite Class (Meta)

I mentioned yesterday how Curtiss’s post provoked my thinking on class and the “liberal education,” but I didn’t manage to articulate everything that I found engaging. Hence this follow-up.

Curtiss quotes a long passage from Leo Strauss’s Liberalism Ancient and Modern, with which I’m not familiar, so I’m relying on the account Curtiss gives. I should point out, though, that the term “liberalism” indicates to me that we’re in problematic territory even before we start, since the term — like “class” — is a moving target, and I suspect there might be a bit of play in Strauss’ use of the term to refer either to those in Roman times who were not fettered by slaves’ chains, the ideal cultural values ascribed to such people (and this is the sense from which we get the term “liberal education”), the generosity with money (or pure overindulgence, as in Trimalchio’s case) ascribed to such people, or in contemporary culture, the degree of freedom of the market, or — in perhaps its most common use — political opposition to the right wing.

Anyway — now that I’ve spewed my Recommended Daily Allowance of pedantry — maybe I can actually get to what Curtiss was talking about. He quotes Leo Strauss at length: “The education of the potential gentlemen is the playful anticipation of the life of gentlemen. It consists above all in the formation of character and taste. . . [the gentleman] must possess the skill of administering well and nobly the affairs of his household and the affairs of his city by deed and by speech. He acquires that skill by his familiar intercourse with older or more experienced gentlemen, perferably with elder statesmen, by receiving instruction from paid teachers in the art of speaking, by reading histories and books of travel, by meditating on the works of the poets, and, of course, by taking part in political life. All this requires leisure on the part of the youths as well as on the part of their elders; it is the preserve of a certain kind of wealthy people.” While the suggestion that the patriarch should run the polis like he runs his household could be charitably characterized as feudal, the rest of the stuff on education is practically straight Cicero, right out of De Oratore. In terms of class, there are a few things worth observing.
Read more

L’Internationale

preterite Class (Meta), Economics

The photos of the Genoa anti-globalization protests several months ago made me realize something pretty basic: while the protests dealt with many worker-related concerns, I understood them in terms of nationalist and post-nationalist ideologies. I’d bet that’s an understanding common to a lot of Americans. Darla the Wal-Mart greeter and Ann the librarian and Monte the lawyer don’t watch the news and think about that working-class guy the police shot. They watch the news and think about that Italian guy the police shot. Even when students in American universities learn about the Paris Commune, I’d wager they think of it as an incident in French history, not as an incident in labor history. Despite its title, “L’Internationale” — isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t for Americans: that link back there notes the curious under-/non-reporting of the Tiannanmen Square singing of the anthem in the American press. Contrast this to the American Media’s wholesale embracing of the free-market ideologies of the New Economy. There’s an obvious reason, of course: American ideologies line up much more closely with the ideologies of neoclassical economics than they do with the ideologies of Marxian economics.

Let me shift gears for a minute. Composition, my discipline — university first-year writing instruction — got its real start at Harvard in the latter part of the 19th century, under Charles William Elliot, and got a big push toward its current form at Dartmouth in 1966. To the best of my understanding, it’s a uniquely American phenomenon.
Read more

Questions Yoked

preterite Class (Meta), Metadissertating

Perhaps somebody’s watching referrer logs: I add a link to my new favorite site, and scant hours later I’m quoted as an example of my favorite rhetorical vice. A vice (or fault or abuse) that I’ve always thought would make a fine name for a cat, I might add. If my grin gets any larger, my ears are going to split.

In other news, I met with Charlie today, who asked me some difficult questions about this project, which is still very, very far from the shaded glades and sunny meadows of Happy Prospectus Land, taking its circuitous path through the Sinkholes of Spleen that guard the approach to the dusty Plains of Overdue Library Books.
Read more

Four Perspectives on Class

preterite Class (Meta)

The current (June 18) NCTE INBOX newsletter features a link to Susan Ohanian’s May 20 Phi Delta Kappan article, “Capitalism, Calculus, and Conscience,” where she makes a number of interesting points. While I found the article to be simultaneously diffuse and bombastic, with all-over-the-place examples and an overabundance of self-answered one-sided rhetorical questions that would put Donald Rumsfeld to shame, I agree with many of the sentiments Ohanian expresses (which I think actually points to another of the article’s shortcomings: the tone is so fierce and on-the-attack that it doesn’t have a chance of engaging anyone who doesn’t already agree with Ohanian’s point of view) regarding the increasing inequalities in the American educational system.
Read more

Some Very Basic Assumptions

preterite Class (Meta), Writing

Some very basic assumptions. (And we all know what the problem with “assume” is. . . So there’s a good chance these may change. Still, they’re a starting point.)

First, class has to do with people. Computers are objects. This, at first glance, might suggest some reasons why comp folk haven’t talked much about the intersection between the two.
Read more

Where I’m Coming From

preterite Class (Meta), Class (Other), Metadissertating

My discipline, composition, has only really started to talk about socioeconomic class in the past several years. Comp folks have been doing smart, rigorous work with other aspects of identity politics, particularly race, ethnicity and gender, for a while now, and we’ve started to pay better attention to sexuality as an aspect of identity politics, but the conversations we have about class have been problematic and inconsistent. So that’s what I’m after in my dissertation, generally speaking, and what I’m going on about here.

It’s not just an issue with compositionists, though; America has its myth of how nobody is ever really poor, we’re all just pre-rich (I think that’s a Geoff Nunberg quotation, though I’m not sure). But compositionists, aside from Richard Ohmann, John Trimbur, Bruce Horner, and a few others, have either ignored class, or treated it only as an authenticity claim based on lived experience: “I’m working class because I’ve had a working-class life and I know what it’s like.” (Never mind the adjunct with the million-dollar vocabulary and seven years of graduate school who claims she’s working class because she makes <$25K). Or, well, that's not entirely true. To be a little more rigorous: as I've suggested elsewhere, we discuss class in terms of (1) relations of production, (2) wealth and vocation, (3) values and culture, and (4) lived experience and authenticity claims, often without sorting those categories out, or even acknowledging them. So I could go a number of ways: I could say, "Here's how things look, and here are the teaching implications, if we use perspective 1," and devote a chapter to it, and then another chapter to perspective 2, and so on. Could be useful. Alternatively, I could try to come up with my own, more rigorous perspective, based on what people outside of composition have had to say about class. Although it doesn't come with its own handy dissertation-chapter-ordering-scheme, it's an approach that currently appeals to me a little more, in large part because I think even the 4 perspectives I've mentioned above are way too loosey-goosey to do anything with.