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Ancient Rhetorics and Language Difference. (2012) Directed by Dr RAY, BRIAN, Ph.D. Toward a Translingual Composition: Ancient Rhetorics and Language Difference. (2012) Directed by Dr. Nancy A. Myers. 226 pp. The purpose of this dissertation is to outline a pedagogy that promotes language difference in college composition classrooms. Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing instruction. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the U.S. still privilege Standard English. However, non-native speakers of English now outnumber native speakers worldwide, a fact which promises to redefine what “standard” means from a translingual perspective. It is becoming clearer that multilingual writers, versed in flexible hermeneutic strategies and able to draw on a variety of Englishes and languages to make meaning, have significant advantages over monolingual students. My dissertation anticipates the pedagogical and programmatic changes necessitated by this global language shift. To this end, I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread neglected rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential. TOWARD A TRANSLINGUAL COMPOSITION: ANCIENT RHETORICS AND LANGUAGE DIFFERENCE by Brian Ray A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2012 Approved by Nancy A. Myers Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Dr. Nancy A. Myers Committee Members Dr. Kelly Ritter Dr. Stephen Yarbrough March 2, 2012 Date of Acceptance by Committee March 2, 2012 Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. EVERYONE CAN CODE-MESH........................................................................1 Bakhtin and A Pedagogy of Difference.......................................................5 The Basics of Translingual Writing...........................................................12 One Term, Many Audiences......................................................................19 What a Theoretical Definition Can Offer ..................................................27 A Pedagogical Definition: Everyone Can Code-Mesh ..............................38 Conclusion: The Need for Heuristics.........................................................45 II. TRANSLINGUAL WRITING AS STYLE AND INVENTION .......................52 The Relevance of Style Today...................................................................60 Style and Invention Reconsidered .............................................................63 Dialogue and Speech Genres .....................................................................73 Historicizing Quintilian on Style ...............................................................78 Ornament as Difference: Rethinking the Four Virtues..............................87 Adapting the Progymnasmata to Develop Translingual Style ..................97 Maxim......................................................................................................102 Ethopoeia .................................................................................................104 Echphrasis................................................................................................105 The Remaining Progymnasmata..............................................................106 Conclusion ...............................................................................................108 III. TOWARD TRANSLINGUAL IMITATION EXERCISES.............................110 Imitation as Not Current-Traditional .......................................................118 Invention and Imitation in the Twentieth Century...................................130 Controlled Composition and Language Difference .................................138 Adapting Imitation Pedagogies for Translingual Writing .......................143 Conclusion ...............................................................................................147 IV. REMEDIATING THE PROGYMNASMATA ...................................................152 Overview: Multimodality and Language Difference...............................155 Using Transmedia to Teach Fable and Narrative ....................................158 Memes as Impersonation .........................................................................167 Lunch with Qaddafi, Cancelled: Twitter as a Proverb.............................176 From The Progymnasmata to Beyond ....................................................181 iii V. REDEFINING THE NORM.............................................................................183 Toward Student Learning Outcomes and Assessment.............................189 Training Teaching Assistants...................................................................196 Conclusion ...............................................................................................208 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................213 iv 1 CHAPTER I EVERYONE CAN CODE-MESH Three years ago I was talking about Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee’s textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students with a friend and fellow instructor. He had taught first-year writing courses but was working toward a PhD in history at Duke University. We had met up in nearby Chapel Hill for dinner with his fiancé and her friends. I was explaining the merits of the book, when he stated his own reasons for avoiding the use of Greco-Roman rhetorics when teaching writing. He said it was difficult for him to reconcile Crowley and Hawhee’s use of classical rhetorics for democratic aims without a fuller historical acknowledgement of Greek and Roman attitudes toward others. “Latinitas,” he said, “was the belief that errors in grammar were moral failings. If you didn’t know grammar, you weren’t a complete human being.” He went on to conclude, “I’m a little skeptical of the whole concept. After all, the Romans were never our friends.” This project is the culmination of much thought about this conversation as well as my own work with students over the course of several years, students who are often described in rhetoric and composition as developmental, second-language, or mainstream—students who are not addressed by the works of Aristotle, Cicero, or Quintilian. One of the first courses I taught consisted of students who spanned these categories and whose linguistic backgrounds ranged from vernaculars to other languages, 2 such as Spanish or Korean, to Standard English. During this period I was only beginning to discover the vast amount of research on each of these populations, a cacophony of often conflicting views on how to mold writing instruction to their respective needs. I was committed to finding answers for my teaching but also for a way to synthesize these areas of writing pedagogy. The more I read, the more the field seemed to boil down to one central tension: the appreciation of deviation or difference, on the one hand, and the necessity of standard discourse on the other. Two student papers from that course, nearly six years ago, have continued to illustrate this tension for me as a teacher. The first paper was a short personal narrative that I assigned in accordance with the official course guidelines, designed mainly for the acquisition of standard grammar. One student, from the Caribbean, told the story of a home invasion in her native country. The paper was approximately two pages and shot- through with deviations from Standard English. Some were arbitrary mistakes, but others were clearly influenced by the lexical and grammatical aspects of the local variety of English in which she had grown up speaking and writing. At the time I knew little about multilingualism or World Englishes, but I still actively resisted the advice from program supervisors and fellow-teachers to make such students rewrite every sentence of their papers in Standard English and not award a passing grade until they at least approximated the dominant code. The second paper was an argumentative essay, written by a monolingual native speaker whom I would also classify as a developmental writer. Like the first paper, the writer often deviated from Standard English but did so in ways that I would, even today, 3 describe as witty and sometimes charming. The writing was not that polished and it possessed mistakes, but the student was also demonstrating a clear desire to blend the academic prose promoted by the course with figurative expressions as well as phrases from vernaculars, particularly African American English. The question that I could not resolve was how to reward the student for this risk-taking while also making clear the necessity of continuing to acquire the standard codes of English in the United States. To
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