Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the “working theories,” or internal representations, people build to interpret and to carry out complex discursive phenomena such as teaching, composing, deliberating, and theory building (Flower, Construction 260–62).4 For instance, Cintron uses the metaphor of the shadow system to account for the tension between the political theories he brings to his critical ethnography and what he observes on the streets of Angelstown. Cintron calls this metaphor his interpretative scheme. It functions “heuristically” which, he says, “is how all metaphors work” (Angels’ Town 176). Because a metaphor suggests similarities between two otherwise dissimilar objects, metaphors reveal “unsuspected connectives” (Burke 90). To identify these connectives, the framework’s analysis of metaphor includes both the dominant image—the metaphor itself (such as Cintron’s shadow system)—and the metaphor’s distinctive features; for instance, that the shadow system mimics the system world and shelters difference. Likewise, Heath’s impromptu theater is dramatic and spontaneous; Brandt’s cultural womb nurtures and prepares. In connecting their guiding metaphors to such features, the researchers articulate their theories of how local public rhetoric works. For instance, Barton and Hamilton’s link between private lives and public institutions carries out its rhetorical work by connecting domains to networks for the purpose of social action.

      Metaphors preview differences in scholars’ descriptions of local public life. Four additional elements help to identify and to elaborate key distinctions: the context that frames the discourse that people use to go public in a given study, the tenor of that discourse, the literacies that constitute the discourse, and the process of rhetorical invention that generates new local public discourse. To define the first three of these elements, I draw from Brian Street’s ideological model of literacy (Cross-cultural). In the discussion below, please keep in mind that I am not devising a tool to unearth objective facts but an interpretive framework for making useful distinctions across multiple accounts of ordinary people going public.

Context

      Under “context,” the framework attends to two factors: first, the issue of location; second, the “broader features of social and cultural life” that give public discursive activity its meaning (Street, Cross-cultural 15). To replace the autonomous model that characterized literacy as a discrete entity that could be transported across contexts for similar effect, Street emphasizes that context-specific factors shape specific literacies and make them meaningful. Positioning their work in relation to the ideological model, for instance, Barton and Hamilton entitle their study of literacy in a British working-class neighborhood Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. For Street, new literacy studies should do more than amass numerous case studies of local literacies. His aim? “[U]seful generalizations” (Cross-cultural 10).

      In fact, one of the most significant generalizations to be gleaned from the study of local literacies is that community literacy’s decidedly public orientation gears its practices toward what Kirk Branch refers to as “‘the ought to be’”—not only the world as it currently is, but also some future-oriented version of the social world as it could be (18).5 I believe a rhetorically-centered framework that supports comparisons across accounts of local literacies can enhance our understanding of how different literate practices may “transform local actions into meanings bound for or relevant to other places” (Brandt and Clinton 349, emphasis added). Attention to location offers a useful vantage point for “bringing [such significant] differences to light” (Atwill 212).

      Location. The term local has captured the collective imagination of rhetorical scholars for some time (Killingsworth 111). In community-literacy studies local is something of a Burkean godterm. Yet depending on whether local modifies knowledge, literacy or attitudes, its connotation can change dramatically. Modifying knowledge, local often carries a positive connotation. For instance, Clifford Geertz’s depiction of indigenous people’s local knowledge carries over to the CLC’s strategies for eliciting the local knowledge of community residents (Flower, “Intercultural Knowledge” 258; Higgins and Brush). Modifying literacy, local suggests a rather technical distinction; local literacies are situated in domains other than work, school, or government; for instance, the home and the neighborhood (Barton and Hamilton 15). However, Barton and Hamilton chose to document how ordinary people use literacy in their daily lives, in part, because of their social commitment to complicate the “moral panic” that accompanies outcries over falling literacy rates (21). Yet when modifying attitudes, local often suggests something parochial, bigoted, backwards, even brutal. Genital mutilation is often referred to as a local tradition (e.g., Kissling and Sippel), and George Bush played to rural Ohio’s local attitudes in his speech against same-sex marriage in the summer of 2006 (Gilgoff). Similarly, local attitudes can limit the capacity of a public to invite difference into dialogue. As Cintron observes, “a public sphere cannot ‘think’ beyond what terrifies it” (Angels’ Town 194). The local public framework lets us consider implications of these and other connotations of local and its variations, locale and location, within accounts of ordinary people going public.

      Foremost, location signals the material conditions that shape how people go public; location indicates the politics of place. Without such attention to location, it would be tempting to say that local public life is primarily a rhetorical activity that circulates discourse—and to leave it at that. Yet attending to location highlights the complex interplay here between situated activity (Chaiklin and Lave) and discursive space (Hauser Vernacular). For instance, just try to transport Trackton girls’ public performances to the schoolyard in Gilmore’s study where girls engage in a similar public performance. The lewd lyrics, rhyme, rhythm, clapping and jumping—key aspects of jump roping and stepping—are the same. But the politics of place make the activities associated with the plaza and the playground quite distinct. Indulging in their lewd lyrics in the safety of their secluded community, Trackton girls cleaned up their lyrics when jumping rope at school. In contrast, the girls in Gilmore’s study performed their provocative lyrics on the school grounds in overt defiance of the school’s authority, for “doing steps” had been banned. Only in this location did their lyrics and body language assume their full rhetorical force. By attending to location, the local public framework illuminates such differences.

      Additional Contextual Factors. Location is only one of the contextual cues that imbue literacies with meaning. For Street, context attends to the ideological forces that were missing from the autonomous model of literacy, including the ways that institutions exercise control and that social hierarchies manage their power (Cross-cultural 7). In the local public framework, context refers to forces that make local publics viable discursive sites for people to go public. These forces include the cultural agency of the black-church-as-institution (Brandt, American 107), the linguistic agency of community residents (Cushman, Struggle 34), and the cultural imaginary of Angelstown’s political landscape (Cintron, Angels’ Town 141). As Street has argued, accounts of these forces say as much about the researcher’s interpretative lens as they do about external reality (Cross-cultural 7). The challenge lies in grappling with how these lenses affect our understanding of situated-public literacies.

Tenor of the Discourse

      For the New Literacy Group (NLG), register—or tenor—is a linguistic category referring to the more “typified” choices that together constitute the affective qualities of a discourse (Biber 9). Through its tenor, a discourse encodes attitudes, relational cues, and power differentials—often in highly nuanced ways (Besnier 62–65; Street, Cross-cultural 2). The tenor of a discourse is shorthand for subtle and often complex aspects of discourse typically implied through performance rather than stated explicitly in prose. Its closest correlative would be the term tone when used to describe affective qualities in a piece of writing. However, the difference is that local public discourse transpires in real time and engages people in all their thinking, feeling, reading, writing, doing, valuing complexity. The NLG got interested in describing the tenor of discourses to characterize how situated literacies differ from essayist qualities of standard academic discourse and the “literate activities and output of the intellectual elite” (Street, Cross-cultural 2).

      Characterizing the tenor of a discourse, as СКАЧАТЬ