About half the class has realized this, and I saw some great energy in the way you responded to TiRP 7. The other half of the class may still be struggling to see where your own ideas have actually been changed, or even where ideas could be changed in a positive way about "writing in the university." I don't see "struggle" as a bad thing or a failure, but I think it's fair for you to assume that, if you're still repeating the same old adages or binaries you came into this course with in August (mine/theirs, us/them, private/public, grammar/content, etc.), then you're probably not building theory far enough; you're probably not allowing your own thinking to be made deeper, or to be transformed, since transformation often occurs when you can transcend a binary way of thinking just long enough to suggest other ways of thinking through it.
Changing people's minds is what I invite you to do, and in fact, it's what some of you have been equipping yourselves to do all along, slowly and incrementally throughout the semester. Keep it up for the next couple of weeks, and realize that "keeping it up" will require something different from each of you:
- For some of you, it might require you to do background research into an era, a chronology, or a term (e.g., "capitalism," "activism," "public intellectualism," etc.), so that you can be certain you are taking up the theorist's definition of the term in a knowledgeable way, and not stereotypically.
- For some of you, it might require that you reread your sources to objectively extract the writer's main claims, whether or not those main claims align with what you think, perceive, or believe.
- For some of you, it might mean spending more time contextualizing your claims by showing your reader(s) where they come from, rather than just assuming they are everyone's reality (i.e., mention full names and titles of authors/pieces that have influenced you, consider your own biases and weaknesses, point to the interpretive context you are in and whether it values or de-values theory-building, etc.).
- For some of it you, it might mean remembering that you are dealing with claims, not facts (i.e., most of the statements you have made or are planning to make are not purely objective "facts," but rather critical "claims" that rely on your weaving bits of evidence together in order to make them).
- For some of you, it might mean giving evidence for those claims from what you read, rather than assuming that everyone else will agree with them because they are good.
- For some of you, it might mean realizing that language is neither innocent nor pure, and that each time you take up or forward a term, readers are relying on you to make clear how you are using it.
For our final class together, I'll offer a review of specific terms, readings, and concepts that you want to have clarified, so please bring sources that you know are specific to the argument you are trying to make in the Final Critical Essay. We will also spend most of our class session in a guided peer workshop of those essays -- there is more for us to try to understand in terms of presentation and genre, and I suspect that most of you will feel comfortable with some aspects of essay-ing, but others may want more guidance in terms of pushing the genre more towards critical work rather than only personal work. In short, we will focus on the section titled "About the Essay" on the assignment sheet.
Come prepared with drafts and questions, and send any questions my way before then!
-Prof. Graban
