How is this Expos 101 thing supposed to work anyway?

As we begin work on the first of the five papers that will follow, it might be just the right time to think about what it is that Expos 101 is meant to teach and achieve. Here is Prof. Kurt Spellmeyer, the director of the writing program and one of the editors of The NHR, addressing exactly this issue.

WATCH VIDEO (sorry couldn't get it to embed in the post)

One thing that is clear from this video is that paper 1 (or any other paper for this class) cannot simply be a summary of the author’s argument. The paper must say something about the essay or as Kurt puts it “be able to use it”. The best bet for using it is a paper that considers the implications of the author's argument. In other words, writing the paper means asking ourselves: why is Siebert’s argument important? How does it make a conceptual change to the way we think or live? Hence the assignment question which encourages you to think in terms of the newness of Siebert’s argument.

Writing, peer reviewing and grading also brings us to the most demanding and unrelenting part of the semester. From here it will only get really tough for all of us and there is no way of escaping that. The good thing, though, is that I know, from past experience, that it gets better. The catch? It gets better only after it is over. 

Oh! and trivia: Prof. Spellmeyer is also a Zen master and has been running the Cold Mountain Sangha  at Rutgers for many years now. And where does the Sangha mainly meet? : the Livingston Tutoring Center where you are all going to sign up for tutoring pretty soon (and no they don't automatically sign you up for zen)! 

What does a microscope have to do with reading and writing?

Jack Lynch says that an English teacher’s heart will go pitter patter at the very thought of close reading. Today will be the very first day of introducing close reading to one set of my students and I am excited. Lynch calls close reading “close engagement with the language of the text” and he gives his take on how this might be accomplished.

Responding to a poetry prompt last night, I ended up writing something about close reading. The prompt was to begin and end the poem with the same word. Here is what I wrote:

Like snow under the microscope,

I say, hold the text to scrutiny and see

each flake break into shape. From a

distance, words on a page can be cold, snow like.

So my take on close reading is the equivalent of putting a text under the microscope and noticing details, patterns, structures that go into making a piece of text meaningful. Reading with a pencil in hand and annotating the text as we read is an important part of the process because in that act we begin to combine reading and writing. The ultimate goal is to be able to write out the close reading.

There is a selection of good, bad and ugly advice to be had online about how to go about this business but the most important advice in my opinion is to do it. Keep practicing till one gets the hang of it. Like driving, biking, swimming, playing an instrument (or any other matter of practical skill) close reading can only be learnt by doing it. And once learnt… what pleasure!

The politics of word making

"The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however, is far more difficult to codify. It requires nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we look at animals and, by extension ourselves. It requires what Bradshaw, somewhat whimsically, refers to as a new “trans-specie psyche”, a commitment to move beyond an anthropomorphic frame of reference and, in effect be elephants” (537)

Siebert finds that no words exist to describe the new way in which humans must re-imagine their relationship with elephants; he admits that “our newly emerging compact with elephants is difficult to codify”. There are two important ideas in this brief phrase: the word “compact” suggests that the pact between humans and elephants is mutual and the word “codify” implies that the terms of this compact are not yet clearly laid out. The difficulty of the codification lies in the fact that while humans are capable of anthropomorphism and seeing the elephants through the lens of their own humanity, they are still inadequate in gauging their humanity through the lens of elephants. Siebert points to a necessary “fundamental shift” in the “way we look at animals and, by extension ourselves”. The codification of the new compact with elephants must reflect the capacity of humans to “be elephants”. Siebert finds that anthropomorphism does not express the new compact with elephants so Bradshaw coins a new phrase to describe it: “trans-specie psyche”. Bradshaw’s “whimsical” phrase does not put humans in the center of the evaluating frame of reference which the word “anthropomorphism” does; instead, it spreads the line of reference laterally, suggesting a relationship that goes across species: trans-specie. Her choice of the word “psyche” is also interesting because the word invokes a greater soulful intellect that is capable of a deeper understanding than only the mind or only the heart can be. Siebert and Bradshaw’s momentary loss of words to describe something new shows the codifying power of words. Our politics is shaped by the kinds of words we choose to describe concepts, situations and experiences. “Anthropomorphism” would necessarily imply a politics that still sees the humans dominating the pact with elephants but an acknowledgement of a “trans-specie psyche” gives equal sense of power to the elephants in this compact, since it is they  who have brought the humans to the negotiating table.

What does it mean to be an elephant?

"The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however, is far more difficult to codify. It requires nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we look at animals and, by extension ourselves. It requires what Bradshaw, somewhat whimsically, refers to as a new “trans-specie psyche”, a commitment to move beyond an anthropomorphic frame of reference and, in effect be elephants” (537)

Charles Siebert and elephant researchers Gay Bradshaw and  Eve Abe suggest that it is not only not enough to be anthropomorphic when it comes to our understanding of elephants, they suggest quite its opposite: that we need to be elephants. Not only do we need to accord a degree of humanity to the elephants, we need to imbue our humanity with a degree of elephantness.  What Siebert is asking us to do sounds impossible to achieve. How on earth do we become elephants? Yet, it does begin to make sense when we see that anthropomorphism is a call for sympathy. As highly social creatures, if elephants socialize, hurt and heal like humans then to accord them humanness is to say that we can begin to feel sympathy for them. The word sympathy is defined in the OED as “a real or virtual affinity or similarity between things”, it highlights the difference between the subjects that nonetheless share real or virtual points of similarity. Sympathy is only possible between unlike subjects, when we feel sympathy we feel it from a place of knowing that we are not in that spot of suffering, though we feel for those that are. Sympathy provides an escape from the situation. To resolve the elephant-human crisis anthropomorphic sympathy then is clearly only the first step. To move beyond it would be not just to feel sympathy but feel empathy. Empathy is defined in the OED as “The power of projecting one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.”  Clearly, full comprehension of the object of contemplation, here the specie wide nervous breakdown of elephants, is not possible until the subject-object barrier is broken down by means of a personality projection that empathy allows. And so it is logical that Abe and Siebert think that we need to become elephants if we want to even understand the full scale of the problem. To be an elephant then is to cultivate a deep sense of empathy for creatures who, by the looks of it, look or feel nothing like us at all.