Today’s Plan:
- Reviewing Writing
- Direct Quotation
- Writing in Class
Reviewing Writing
I’ve put together a workshop in Canvas for us to work with today.
Direct Quotation
In a previous class I (longwindedly) introduced my method for introducing sources into your writing. I framed this as a four-part process, using a signal, the quote/evidence, a summary, and a response/analysis.
Remember that I shared the magic sentence for introducing a source: [Author’s] [time period] [genre] [title] [verb] [purpose].
There’s several ways of responding to a quote. For instance, you can think of a time when something happened to you similar to what the quote describes. Or when something different happened. Another way is to flush out the standard journalistic questions: who, what, where, when, why, how?
Imagine I am writing the following paragraph:
In her 2012 article “Rhetoric’s Other, Levinas, Listening, and the Ethical Response,” Lisbeth Lipari argues that Western thought has paid scant attention to the significance of listening. While speaking is framed as empowering, listening is either degraded as vulnerability or ignored entirely. Lipari believes that it is essential to develop our ability to listen if we are to develop ethical approaches to dialogue, willing to meet others rather than dominate them. She notes that “listening connects and bridges” (233), and argues that
It might be said, then, that the ethical fulcrum sits not between visual and auditory domains but between oral and literary perspectives–ethics springs not from a literal eye that speaks but from an aural eye that listens. The voice of the other invokes listening ears and aural eyes grounded in the intersubjectivity of the relation rather than speaking eyes and deafened ears born through the subjectivity of objectification and domination. […] And just as the unimodality of vision alone cannot hinder the impulses toward mastery and domination, so the voice without a face cannot resist the lure of speech’s call for merger and unification.
For Lipari, the physical, embodied act of listening is an engaged encounter with an other person’s material form–their words literally echo in my ears, hitting me, moving my ear drum. Unlike vision, which operates without interrupting my possession of the world, speech and sound manifest as intrusions (or, if welcomed, visitations). One cannot close one’s ears like one can close one’s eyes. Of course, as D. Diane Davis has argued, one can strap on headphones and immerse oneself in another world to avoid encountering any faces in this one. But Lipari’s point is well-taken–that developing a rhetoric or philosophy from the perspective of listening, rather than speaking, means developing an approach to thought and communication that begins by making space for other people, other ideas–especially ideas that might challenge my own perspective.
One time where an idea challenged my perspective was…
Adriana Cavarero also uses Levinas’s work to connect listening and ethics.
Above is one way to think about how to respond to that direct quotation, but there’s others. Instead of turning to Davis (making a connection to another writer), I could ask the “how” question: how does one begin to cultivate listening? Something like:
For Lipari, the physical, embodied act of listening is an engaged encounter with an other person’s material form–their words literally echo in my ears, hitting me, moving my ear drum. Unlike vision, which operates without interrupting my possession of the world, speech and sound manifest as intrusions (or, if welcomed, visitations). One cannot close one’s ears like one can close one’s eyes. My challenge has been to develop assignments that exercise our ability to listen, to dwell in ambiguity and potentially discomfort, without generating excessive resistance that can lead to a Nietzschean kind of resentment.
This analysis leads to a different set of follow-up paragraph possibilities:
- Before I discuss what assignments I have developed, I first want to address what I mean by the danger of resistance and resenment. In Acts of Enjoyment, Thomas Rickert uses psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Lacan and Zizek, to expose how pedagogies that challenge student ideology can backfire.
- One such assignment is …
Homework
In your writing this weekend, I want you to use one direct quotation, giving it the kind of close attention I give to the Lipari quote above. Follow the four-part process linked to above.
Remember that the Weekly Writing Report #6 is due on Sunday.
