Monday, January 11, 2016

First-Day Readings: A Reminder

Dear All,

You are likely weary of my reminders, but I'll reproduce here, our first-day discussion prompt, in the off chance that your e-mail program has been less than cooperative since December.

For our first meeting, we are reading a cluster of articles that will lay out some of the foundational theories undergirding our study of "global" rhetorical practices and methodologies. There are 3 articles in the cluster -- all of them in Canvas (CL) -- but I'm only asking you to read 2. Here's my suggestion for divvying the load:

  • LuMing Mao, "Thinking Beyond Aristotle" -- everyone reads
  • Wendy Hesford, "Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies" -- Andrew, Ashley, Meghan, Travis
  • Linda Tuhiwai Smith, "Imperialism, History, Writing, and Theory" -- Mikaela, Sean, Stephanie

This first cluster of articles will seem headier and more abstract than applied, but I think it will enable us to generate a very good list of the affordances and limitations of "doing global rhetoric," and it will help us to understand some of the key terms and some of the critical stakes involved.


Please come with your 2 articles read and annotated (or outlined) as much as you need to in order to understand the following:
  1. the aim (i.e., their main stated claim, as well as what you perceive to the outcome of what they write)
  2. the evidence (i.e., the key claims or key terms that help to organize the main claim and unfold it, or drive it forward)
  3. the context in which they write (i.e., audience/readership, book or journal, time and timeliness)
  4. the exigence (i.e., implicit or explicit intertexts pointing to other things they might be writing in response to, or debates they might be reacting to)

I will not ask you to give formal presentations of this information, but this information will help us to unpack the first set of articles together. Do the best that you can with it, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow,


-Dr. Graban