Episode 005 Show Notes

Elbow

What he says:

1. “[J]ust as loving literature has gotten itself all tangled up with a noxious tradition of failing to value students and their writing and thinking, so, too, loving sophistication is all tangled up with an equally noxious tradition of condescension, snobbery, and elitism” (472).
2. “Just as rhetoric and poetic are two essential dimensions of language, so sophistication and naivete (or refusing sophistication) are two ways of being in the world: we can be complex, sophisticated, ironic, and adorn ourselves with style and artifice; or we can be naked, naive, and direct” (475).

Why it's important: 

The first statement demonstrates the reparative impulse. The second echoes Sedgwick's idea of alternating modes rather than a single mode. Taken together, they support the idea that it is not the paranoid/reparative divide that is the problem so much as the dominance of paranoia at the expense of reparation.

Schneider

What she says;

1. Current critical practices: "We...appropriate others' texts for our own ends, looking for vulnerabilities so we can use them to insert our own arguments, or mining them for ammunition for anticipated arguments" (205).
2. Rhetorical listening, on the other hand, is characterized by receptiveness, humility, and attentiveness. 
3. Even though she's contrasting rhetorical listening to narcissistic reading, she explicitly extends the discussion beyond reading practices to attitudes about knowledge.
4. The purpose of listening in this way is "so that we may receive both the gifts and challenges others' texts offer us" (206).

Why it's important:

Her discussion of empathy and rhetorical listening shifts the focus of the conversation: it is other-centered rather than self-centered.

Royster

What she says:

1. She talks about the issue of representation of African American communities and says: “Those of us who hold these communities close to our hearts, protect them, and embrace them; those who want to preserve the goodness of the minds and souls in them; those who want to preserve consciously, critically, and also lovingly the record of good work within them must take high risk and give over the exclusivity of our rights to know” (33).
2. "As community members, we must learn to have new faith in the advantage of sharing. As strangers, we must learn to treat the loved people and places of Others with care and to understand that, when we do not act respectfully and responsibly, we leave ourselves rightly open to wrath. The challenge is not to work with a fear of abuse or a fear of retaliation, however. The challenge is to teach, to engage in research, to write, and to speak with Others with the determination to operate not only with professional and personal integrity, but also with the specific knowledge that communities and their ancestors are watching. If we can set aside our rights to exclusivity in our own home cultures, if we can set aside the tendencies that we all have to think too narrowly, we actually leave open an important possibility. In our nation, we have little idea of the potential that a variety of subjectivities--operating with honor, respect, and reasonable codes of conduct--can bring to critical inquiry or critical problems. What might happen if we treated differences in subject position as critical pieces of the whole, vital to thorough understanding, and central to both problem-finding and problem-solving? This society has not, as yet, really allowed that privilege in a substantial way.” (33)

Why it's important: 

So far the question has been: how can I change my attitudes towards the way I know things? But the reality is that we live in a world full of people who know in different ways. The question is not just how do I know, but how do other people know, and how do we deal kindly and honorably with one another as we navigate those differences?

For more on Peter Elbow, see "The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?" It was published in College English (64.5) in 2002.

For more on Barbara Schneider, see "Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading And Material Racism." It was published in  Pedagogy: Critical Approaches To Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, And Culture (5.2) in 2005.

For more on Jacqueline Royster, see "When The First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own." It was published in  College Composition And Communication (47.1) in 1996.

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