Explore the Idea of the Contact Zone - Understand How Others Feel About the Way They

Rhetorical Analysis due Thursday, Sept. 30 Rough draft of paper Thursday, Oct. 12

PURPOSE

- Explore the idea of the “contact zone” - understand how others feel about the way they are represented - Work on writing that is academic and factual yet stylish - Write longer, more extended argument - Grapple in depth with another text and ideas not your own

READINGS QUIZZES VOCABULARY PARALLEL READING RHETORICAL WRITING RESPONS ANALYSIS E

2.1 Pratt: “Art of the Contact Zone” 9/21 9/21 9/21 9/21 9/30

2.2 Anzaldua: “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” 9/23 9/23 9/23 9/30

2.3 Rich: “When We Dead Awaken” 9/28 9/28 9/28 9/30

2.4 Plotnik: “The Pleasure of Surprise” 10/5

PROPOSAL

Before you spend a lot of time doing your research, you will have to run your idea by me. I want a written proposal and ideas of where, what, and how you plan to research. I also need to know if you are working alone or with someone. Keep this in mind: if you work with someone, you will have to write together, will both hav to contribute to the work, and will both be responsible for the entire project. I will NOT grade you separately, so you’ll want to choose a partner you trust. Your pair must also be approved.

RESEARCH You will be conducting your own locl inventory of writing from the contact zone. You may do this alone or in pairs. You will want to gather several similar documents, your “archive,” before you mke a final selection. Think about how to make that choice. What makes one document stand out as representative? Here are two ways you might organize your search.

1. You can look for historical documents. The local public library, our own library, and the library at CMU will all have historical archives of documents from the past. There could be documents written by any number of racial or ethnic groups—Hispanic, Jewish, Irish, Native American, Italian, Polish, Swedish, African American—trying to explain their positions to the mainstream culture. The Masonic Home may have an archive of documents or the local VFW. Ithaca has a local historical society that may have some documents you could look through.

2. Or you could look at contemporary documents in the print that is around you, texts that you otherwise might overlook. Pratt refers to one of the characteristic genres of the Hispanic community, the testimonio. You could look for songs, testimonies, manifestos, statements by groups on campus, stories, autobiographies, interviews, letters to the editor, Web pages, blogs. You could look at the writing of any marginalized group, particularly writing intended, at least in part, to represent the experience of outsiders to the dominant culture (or to be in dialogue with or respond to that culture). These documents, if we follow Pratt’s example, would encompass the writing of young people, including college students.

3. The second part of your research will be to find the most information you can about the context of the document you choose. You need to determine the rhetorical situation: audience; social, cultural and political context; what the author’s purpose was; and what the author’s voice is like. In other words, you need to know what was going on both outside the author’s life and in it.

WRITING

Once you have chosen your document and completed your research on its context, you will write an essay that will present your document carefully and in detail (perhaps in even greater detail than Pratt’s presentation of the New Chronicle). You will, in other words, set the scene, summarize, explain, and work block quotations into your essay. You will grapple with it, discuss it, and analyze it rhetorically. Your audience will be people who have never read your document and would not know how to read it, at least as a literate document of the contact zone. Your writing about this document must 6 – 8 pages (if you need more, see me). You must turn in a copy of the document with your draft, so be sure to have copies. I recommend scanning it so you have a digital copy as well (the library can help you).

It will help you to keep in mind that your readings are examples of both what you will be writing and what you will be writing about. Pratt’s article is an analysis and response to an autoethnography: Anzaldua’s and Rich’s pieces. So what you will be looking for when you research and pieces like Anzaldua’s and Rich’s: a document that talks about any particular group of people and how they react to the ways the world views them. What you will be writing will be like Pratt’s piece: an analysis and discussion of the document you find in your research. The length of the document you use for your research has no maximum or minimum, but keep in mind that you will be writing 6 – 8 page about it; this means a document that is too short will not offer enough content for you to discuss, and a document that is too long will mean you will do a shoddy job covering all that it offers. Choose wisely.