Texts Of Writers Research Articles

"A Kind of Queer Balance": Cherrie Moraga's Aztlan

A constant in Chicana author Cherrie Moraga's critical analyses over the past twenty years has been her exploration of the maternal bond, which her first text, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Paso Por Sus Labios (1983), simultaneously constructs as the core of the nuclear family, the larger tie to Chicano community, and the place of origin for Moraga's lesbian sexuality. Following Moraga's lead, critics have primarily focused on the psychosexual connection between Moraga and her as seen in Loving in the War Years, centering much of their analysis on Moraga's revision of Malinche, a pivotal figure in Chicana literature. (1) The mother-daughter relationship in Loving in the War Years presents an origin point, however, rather than an end, for investigations into Moraga's theories of representation. By considering Loving in the War Years in conjunction with Moraga's later two texts The Last Generation (1993) and Waiting in the Wings (1997)--expanded and more complicated readings of Moraga's evolving politics become possible. Since Moraga's texts are all undoubtedly worth further (and fuller) consideration, the lack of critical attention that her later publications have received is somewhat troubling. Such silence says volumes about the expectations cultural critics place on the texts of minority writers. As Gloria Anzaldua comments: Position is point of view. And whatever position we may occupy, we are getting only one point of view: middle-class. Theory serves those that create it. White lesbians and gays are certainly not speaking for me. Inevitably we colored dykes fall into a reactive mode, counter their terms and theories [...]. We focus on the cultural abuse of colored by and thus fall into the trap of the colonized reader and writer forever reacting against the dominant. (To(o) Queer the Writer 252) This trap, which Anzaldua specifically addresses in terms of queer writers of color, is one that critics of all ethnicities often duplicate when analyzing the work of non-white or multiethnic authors. For writers of color, as Anzaldua suggests, the trap may be defined as a recurring reaction against dominant discourses, which, by its very repetition, acts to reinstate the dominant as center. I suggest that white middle-class writers also fetishize this conflict by ignoring the texts in which Moraga moves beyond white/nonwhite binaries of identity formation. Thus, by continually situating critical conversations about Moraga's autobiographical fiction entirely around Loving in the War Years, critics remain in comfortable territory. But Cherrie Moraga's theoretical project is not about comfort. With each new text, Moraga extends her investigations of identity formation, inviting readers to follow suit. Each new book also, however, moves readers progressively away from the comfort zone in which the climax of a multiethnic author's narrative lies in a return to the mother culture. (2) Instead, the body of Moraga's work presents complicated and less tidy narratives in which Moraga examines the multivalent nature of identity. As critics have shown, Loving in the War Years is the mother's story, describing Moraga's trajectory away from and then back to the Chicano community and ending with Moraga's solid identification as a Chicana lesbian. (3) But behind the figure of the in at least two of her texts, Loving in the War Years and The Last Generation, lurks the omnipresent shadow of the father, a figure as yet unexamined in the critical conversation surrounding Moraga's work. In both texts, the father's ghost is a queer presence. Figured as homosexuality, whiteness, and a silencing of history, he is always creating an absence that can be filled only by a woman: a mother's frustrated passions by a daughter's lesbian sexuality, a daughter's guera [fair-skinned] privilege by a mother's Chicana heritage, a father's Anglo past by an aunt's stories. …

Atlantic Crossing: Placing William Carlos Williams's A Voyage to Pagany

Ezra Pound said how in William Carlos Williams's novel A Voyage to Pagany (1928), based on Williams's trip to Paris, Rome and Vienna of 1924, he adopted the position a European observer would take upon the United States. Thus Pound preempted the later standard view of Williams as committed to an exclusively American national culture and ‘local’ modernism. This essay argues how Voyage to Pagany and a family of texts on Williams's European sojourn show him as neither European expatriate nor American ‘primitive’. Rather, Voyage to Pagany, Williams's Autobiography, his travel notes, Philippe Soupault's novel Last Nights of Paris, which Williams co-translated, and chapters of In the American Grain, composed in Europe, present a tension between Williams's ardent claim for the authenticity of local conditions, in both Europe and the USA, and a writerly text which renders this experience and its associated aesthetic in terms of difference and cultural diversity.

The rhetorical management of academic criticism in research article abstracts

In order to justify publication, the writers of scientific texts must create a research space that allows them to present new knowledge claims to the other members of the discourse community. This implies the use of a number of rhetorical strategies which involve the criticism of members of their own academic community. This article explores the interpersonal pragmatic phenomenon of academic criticism (AC) from a crosslinguistic perspective in research article abstracts. To this end, we have analyzed the various rhetorical options that writers may use to convey critical speech acts, in a corpus of 160 research paper abstracts written in English and Spanish in two disciplines (phonetics and psychology) of the social sciences. The results showed that the overall frequency of occurrence of instances of academic criticism is higher in the English abstracts, and that in the English texts, the writers preferred to convey criticism in an impersonal and indirect way, whereas in the Spanish texts, the writers opted more frequently for the use of personal and direct AC. The reason for this rhetorical variation is mainly explained by the influence of the sociopragmatic context of publication, that is, the relationship between the writers and the discourse community they are addressing, which is different both in terms of size and pressure.

Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era : An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading

How we can become accustomed to anything! —Harriet Beecher Stowe1 Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the interplay between Uncle Tom's Cabin and the material that surrounded it when it first appeared as a series of installments in the free-soil weekly the National Era.2 Publishing in that context, Stowe faced a formidable challenge: how to shape an account of slave culture that would have a greater impact than the antislavery discourse already typical of the abolitionist press. In representing slavery during the 1840s, writers of slave narratives, sermons, poems, and other texts often sought to elicit empathy from their readers. But it was Uncle Tom's Cabin that established sympathetic identification as a widespread reading practice for consuming the story of slavery. How did Stowe's tale accomplish that end? Stowe was well aware that neither her facts nor her arguments would be new to readers of the Era. Indeed, in a sense they were all too familiar. By 1851 every edition of the National Era included images of fugitives as well as political discussions, religious appeals, and other well-rehearsed attacks on slave culture. William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists [End Page 143] complained that this flood of print was often greeted only by the "apathy of the people."3 In designing her narrative, Stowe took up the rhetorical challenge that the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky later called "defamiliarization": how to tell a well-known tale so as to "make it new."4 As we know from recurrent scenes of violence in today's news, outrages that cannot easily be remedied can often be ignored. "The best we can do is to shut our eyes and ears and let [slavery] alone," St. Clare remarks in chapter 19 of Uncle Tom's Cabin.5 Earlier in the novel, when Haley the slave trader is unmoved by "the wild look of anguish" on the face of a slave mother whose child he has sold, Stowe's narrator adds, "You can get used to such things too my friend" (208). The numbing of sensibility required to "let [slavery] alone" is a recurrent emphasis in the novel; it was a specific obstacle to response that Stowe set out to overcome. Abolitionist discourse itself unwittingly contributed to the making familiar that allows one to "get used to" atrocities. In composing Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe was determined to break through what she saw as the defenses of readers who could hear about slavery every day and never "listen." In the novel's own words, Stowe asked herself what the point was of telling "the story, told too oft,—every day told ... the weak broken and torn for the profit and convenience of the strong! It needs not to be told" (202). Stowe may have felt that the story of slavery was "told too oft" to bear repeating, but she was still impelled to publish her own version of the tale. While composing her novel, Stowe gave careful thought to the problem of rhetoric: how could she subvert the complacency of contemporary readers, indifferent to sentimental appeals on the one hand and abolitionist arguments on the other? Discussions of Stowe's novel over the past twenty-five years have emphasized the common ground between Uncle Tom's Cabin and other sentimental forms of middle-class culture. As the common ground has become increasingly visible, some significant differences in emphasis have been lost.6 Uncle Tom's Cabin echoed, even epitomized, the ubiquitous themes and images of sentimental print culture;7 but at the same time it modified firmly established rhetorical conventions. The unprecedented success of Uncle Tom's Cabin implies that there was a great deal of pleasure for readers in finding their generic expectations not only confirmed but also upset and remade.8 Stowe wanted her readers to see slavery with "new eyes."9 We...

Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing Nancy R. Cirillo Catherine A. John. Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. xi + 241 pp. Very much in the spirit of her study of African Caribbean writing, Catherine A. John ends her introduction with a section of Bob Marley’s “Rastaman Chant.” Her invocation of Marley as she effectively commences her scholarly work—as does her “Jah bless!” at the conclusion of the acknowledgements—tells us much about where we are. Where we are is, in part, in a critique of the “linearity” of traditional western thought supplanted by Africanist linguistic, historical and critical discourse, but largely in a critical examination of certain African Caribbean writers with respect to one of the major terms in the subtitle: folk groundings. These “groundings” in the “folk” are expressed through culture, through the language, rhythms, dances, shouts and music of the historic Black experience and are the means to the reclamation and reassertion of Black consciousness in the diaspora. For Black consciousness is, as developed here, ontological, immanent in the dances, shouts and language. If this is a risky position, she defends it well. Where we are, then, is with a vigorous, almost always lucid voice and the kind of impeccable scholarship that yields a ten page bibliography for the 209 pages of text. Organized from the theoretical to the textual, the introduction explores the “alternate consciousness” from several theoretical frames, building her case for the ontological in, at times, almost prosecutorial mode by dismantling the critiques of negritude by, for instance, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy and countering with Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor. Consequently, her introduction is a natural passage indeed to her first chapter and its subject, Paris, 1956, and the groundbreaking First International Conference of Negro Artists and Writers. Her command of the issues that dominated that conference and the debates that would have far reaching ideological effects is, at times, breathtaking. She works handily in French and easily in the literary and theoretical backgrounds, both Caribbean and African, although at moments seemed hasty in her judgments and stingy with contextualizing: Jacques Alexis is dismissed at one point as “employing Western definitions” (36), and she makes no effort here to, however briefly, examine how a Haitian at mid-century might have special concerns. Historians of the Caribbean warn us—wisely—to particularize. To what degree the debates at the 1956 conference were driven by national and, yes, cultural and historical differences, is eclipsed by an undeniably well crafted account of the ideological differences only. Chapter two, as its title “Colonial Legacies, Gender Identity and Black Female Writing in the Diaspora” suggests, connects to certain of the issues of the cultural debates of the 1956 conference. Her examination of the texts of such Black female writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber focuses on their often parallel arguments and representations that gender identity must be formed by African rather than European stereotypes, that language, sexual behavior and even dress are markers determining this identity especially in the colonial situation. It is at the end of this chapter that Professor John defines the role of the “diaspora scholar and critic” which is “. . . to build on these implicit conversations across space and time, with an eye to creating an alternate canon of literacy as root and foundation for new and evolving Pan-African [End Page 288] diaspora identities” (73). What is admirable here and invigorating is the articulation of a sense of purpose that is essential to her idea of scholarship and criticism. This is also very much a piece of the earlier theoretical chapters, especially her account of the work of Diop and Ba, and their projects of linguistic and cultural restoration. The daunting phrase, however, is “across space and time” and how to theorize this without blurring it. Chapter three, “Negritude and Negativity: Alienation and ‘Voice’ in Eastern Caribbean Literature,” begins with an epigraph from an interview with the Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace. Choosing wisely the definition of negritude as a “concrete coming to consciousness,” Professor John focuses on...

How frequent are the contractions?

This paper analyses contractions in translated language, comparing the use of contracted forms by translators of fiction and biography into English with the contraction patterns of writers of similar texts in English. Significant differences are found between the English of literary translation and contemporary literary English writing, in terms of both variety of contracted forms encountered and frequency of occurrence of contractions. Qualitative analyses then focus on the functional description of some contracted and non-contracted forms, and also consider the contraction practices of different translators. The relationships between contractions and other linguistic features, explicitation in translation, translator style, discourse function and genre are touched upon, and avenues for further research of this nature are suggested.

Woman's Work—Where the Rhetoric Meets the Road: Reader Response to “Why I Want a Wife” at 30

When I sampled reader responses to Judy Syfers's (now Brady's) seminal (with huge quote marks around word) essay, Why I Want a Wife, first with 100 and then with 136 first-year college students in 1996 and 2001, respectively, I did so as a text writer and rhetoric teacher. I was seeking an example to illustrate massive and deceptive simplification that rhetoric teachers indulge in when we call a piece of writing effective, urging methods of argument (as if there were such a thing) on our students in our efforts to improve writing. The measure of effectiveness, as I approach it, is available only by some sort of market survey - and as with market surveys, question of who is surveyed is of prime importance, as is survey instrument itself. It is increasingly clear that there is no such thing as the consumer, nor is there such a thing as the general reader. One cannot (although many of us do) say, is an essay because grabs reader's attention, the writer backs up what she says with facts, or it is written in down to earth language that everyone can understand, and so on. The interface of these concepts with whomever constitutes consumers of culture led me to some interesting conclusions. As academics - and more specifically, as rhetoricians-we have considerable evidence that we agree among ourselves that Brady's piece is effective. First presented publicly in August of 1970 at San Francisco celebration of fiftieth anniversary of passage of women's suffrage, piece was picked up by Ms. magazine for its premier issue dated 1972 (but physically appearing in December of 1971). When Ms. printed Why I Want a Wife for second time in August of 1990, editor reported that essay had been reprinted over two hundred times in intervening nineteen years. That republication date is now eleven plus years in past, and still reprinting goes on. On lists dealing with most-anthologized essays, Brady's appears consistently in company of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, George Orwell's Politics and English Language and Shooting an Elephant, and Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Why I Want a Wife is undoubtedly popular among teachers of argument, and I would think that would be particularly so among those of activist feminist persuasions. As often as must have been assigned as reading, and presumably discussed, I see no evidence of any cumulative generational shift in attitude toward what seems to remain firmly in place as woman's Indeed, my student samples indicate that at twenty-five and thirty years following its initial appearance, reader resistance to essay's thesis remains strong. First-year college students surveyed overwhelmingly think that essay is effective (eighty-one [and a large fraction] percent), but nearly as overwhelmingly (eighty-one [and a smaller fraction, although not an identical population] percent) misread as saying either that Brady a wife, or that she wants wives to be appreciated for full extent of their contributions to the family. All of those tasks and attitudes unmistakably stripped of gender associations by Brady's essay remain for these students a given of women's work. This attitude is so deeply entrenched in these students that Brady's insistently gender-neutral language (there are neither gendered pronouns nor any gender-restricted activity from paragraph three onward) is ignored as completely as her creation of eventually comic, thoroughgoing, and finally, monstrous egotism of writer's ironing board reverie persona. At this point, just to make sure that all of us massively overeducated people are on same page (or, rather, are reading same page in similar ways), I am going to insert a brief rhetorical analysis of Brady essay, a copy of which has been reprinted here along with a sampling of student responses. …

Time Enough and Space: A New Expansion

E s s a y R e v i e w Faye Maxfield. LITTLE SECRETS. Materials are Japanese handmade paper, book cloth and book board, Arches text wove, gouache written with a metal pen. The book is folded and twisted and then placed in a book casing. Photograph: Martha Moss, Idaho Inkspots Calligraphy Guild. W o r k s R e v i e w e d Hasselstrom, Linda M. Between Grass and Sky: Where I Live and Work. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. 232 pages, $24-95. Knopp, Lisa. The Nature of Home. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 231 pages, $24-95. Sinor, Jennifer. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. 254 pages, $49.95/ $19.95. T i m e E n o u g h a n d S p a c e : A N e w E x p a n s i o n M a r y C l e a r m a n B l e w The decade of the 1990s has been called the decade of memoir, a genre that, with its close relation to the personal essay, has flowered during this period in western regionalist writing. It’s a genre that shows no signs of drying up, in spite of the hectoring it has taken from certain reviewers whose notions of what ought not to be written are at least as arbitrary and stringent as any since 1581, when Sir Philip Sidney scolded the Elizabethan dramatists for ignoring the unities of time, place, and action. In the western region, as elsewhere, many of the writers of memoir and personal essay are women, and at least some of the hectoring would seem to be gender-related: “After reading her book, I know more about this woman than I do my wife, and I ought not to,” wrote one university-based reviewer a few years ago, perhaps with uncon­ scious irony. Other critics apparently have aligned themselves according to the old binary of East versus West, as when a recent reviewer for Harper’s derided five collections of essays by writers who can be called westerners (or, at least, midwestemers): “The name of a loved local landscape— ‘Oregon’s Willamette Valley,’ ‘Nebraska’— appears in the first sentence of each one” (Nehring 79). The horror! one is tempted to gloss. O f course, along with other genres in western regionalist writing, personal essays and memoirs have received serious critical attention. Krista Comer considers several autobiographical texts, among others, in Landscapes of the New West, and writes that “the new female regionalists deploy representations of western lands and nature to talk about and, more, to challenge and change myriad social and political topics: [including] the qualities and compromises of women’s lives, ... the pain of racism, ... the relationships between human and nonhuman nature, ... a female-imagined ecology, ... and the list goes on” (11). The next question, however, is not whether regionalist writers, including the writers of autobiographical texts, aim to “challenge and change” social and political issues, but whether effective challenges can be raised or changes effected by writers who have positioned themselves as regionalists . In his recent essay, “Literature, Growth, and Criticism in the New West,” M att Herman says of Com er’s book that it “is highly envi­ 2 9 2 WAL 3 8 . 3 F a l l 2 0 0 3 able in that it perhaps more forcefully than any other lays the ground­ work for a western literary criticism committed to progressive social change” but “its reluctance or incapacity to break completely from cer­ tain bad habits of literary regionalism threatens to dull its radical cut­ ting edge”— that is, the “bad habit” of overlooking ways in which regionalism becomes exceptionalism or exoticism (67). Herman’s pen­ ultimate question— “Critical efforts that address these problems [social changes linked to growth] by seeing them in larger and more precise frameworks will surely benefit broader commitments to social transfor­ mation, but when a ‘literature of place’ is methodologically foregrounded [‘a loved local landscape, “Oregon’s Willamette Valley,” “Nebraska” ’], can these approaches be politically and epistemologically efficacious within...

Twentieth-century textbook budgetary discourse: formalization, normalization and rebuttal in an Anglo-Saxon environment

The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a burgeoning in the development of the management and accounting textbook literature on budgeting in corporations. This study examines this period's text writers' efforts to define the dimensions and purposes of budgeting, and their expositions of its advantages, limitations and implementation approaches. Comparison of the style and scope of their articulations with those of text writers in the final decade of the century, reveal both unique and recurring features of their discourse. A Habermasian-based reflection on these historical observations identifies the text as a mutable but potentially active budgetary system steering medium that has exhibited both rebuttal and colonizing tendencies.

"Adieu vieille forest . . .": Myth, Melancholia, and Ronsard's Family Trees

This essay explores two nature poems by the French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard, each of which articulates a symbolics of loss through ancient tales of tree-cutting and deforestation. In "Elegie XXIIII" the poet laments the selling of his native Foret de Gastine by appropriating Ovid's fable of Erysichthon, the king whose greed led him to devour his own body. In "Le Pin," Ronsard weaves into his own personal history the Ovidian tale of Attis, a mythical figure of transgression and castration who was metamorphosed into a pine tree by the goddess Cybele. This essay will argue that yet another mythological figure, Cronos, the Golden Age god who devoured his children and castrated his father, serves as the master myth behind the transformative discourse of both poems. As the allegorical Temps Devorateur, Cronos confronts the poet with his own mortality, creating a metonymic relationship between natural bodies and the body of the writer's text. In both poems, Ronsard's poetics of incorporation and transformation is fraught with contradiction, since the incorporation of rival political and literary figures at once diminishes and strengthens their power over the writing subject.

Nineteenth Century Women's Hymn Texts

Abstract This article takes up current scholarly concerns about appropriate ways in which women's religious history can be reclaimed while taking seriously the religious roots of violence against women. Specifically, the article explores three methodological approaches to the historical recovery of 19th century women's hymn texts as sources for constructive theology. In considering these three approaches, psychoanalytical, narrative/biographical, and historical/contextual, the article offers a critique of any hermeneutic which relies on and replicates patriarchal understandings of women's subordination to male religious authority and/or which permits eroticized violence against women in the guise of sexual-spiritual encounter. The article offers suggestions for the contemporary constructive use of methodological approaches which focus on women's moral agency as writers of hymn texts and theologians in their own right.

A preoccupation with object-representation: the Beckett-Bion case revisited.

Taking issue with the notion of a profound reciprocal influence of Samuel Beckett and his analyst, Wilfred Bion, based on supposition all too often passed as fact, the author refutes the idea that Bion's 'Attacks on linking' was based on his later-to-be famous patient. Choosing, rather, to apply Bion's concepts of transformation and assaults on verbal thought to Beckett's remarkably visual and highly dissociative writing, she finds in the analyst's work a means of exploring a startling preoccupation with object representation and an anxiety of remembrance constant throughout the writer's texts. Is this fixation attributable only to aesthetic strategy or does it say something about the writer's own inner representational world? Relating the writer's obsession to Bion's concepts and, moreover, its dissociative expression to the decathexis and blank mourning explored by Green, she uncovers within it a reflection of the kind of evocative memory disturbance identified with primary dyadic dysfunction. This application of Bion and Green to Beckett veers distinctly less towards psychohistory, however, than to how sublimation has rendered this object-relational failure an aesthetic success.

A preoccupation with object‐representation: The Beckett‐Bion case revisited

Taking issue with the notion of a profound reciprocal influence of Samuel Beckett and his analyst, Wilfred Bion, based on supposition all too often passed as fact, the author refutes the idea that Bion's ‘Attacks on linking’ was based on his later‐to‐be famous patient. Choosing, rather, to apply Bion's concepts of transformation and assaults on verbal thought to Beckett's remarkably visual and highly dissociative writing, she finds in the analyst's work a means of exploring a startling preoccupation with object representation and an anxiety of remembrance constant throughout the writer's texts. Is this fixation attributable only to aesthetic strategy or does it say something about the writer's own inner representational world? Relating the writer's obsession to Bion's concepts and, moreover, its dissociative expression to the decathexis and blank mourning explored by Green, she uncovers within it a reflection of the kind of evocative memory disturbance identified with primary dyadic dysfunction. This application of Bion and Green to Beckett veers distinctly less towards psychohistory, however, than to how sublimation has rendered this object‐relational failure an aesthetic success.

Writing the Other, Writing the Self: Transforming Consciousness Through Ethnographic Writing

This article examines the theoretical and methodological concerns of the new ethnographic writing, analysing writing practices of both professional anthropologists and student ethnographers who undertake ethnographic research as part of a modern languages degree course in universities in the UK. The emphasis is on qualitative writing as a heuristic process, on self-reflexivity in the text, and on self-transformation through writing. A selective discussion of some of the most salient contemporary debates is followed by a detailed exposition of student writing practices. Sub-sections of the article focus on seven issues which are seen as challenges to the writers of ethnographic texts: writing the self, ethnographic description, the question of evidence, drawing on concepts, using verbatim data, concluding and – of particular interest to teachers of language-and-culture – writing in the foreign language.

Canadian Feminist Writing and American Poetry

In her article, "Canadian Feminist Writing and American Poetry," Eugenia Sojka explores contemporary English-Canadian feminist avant-garde and language-focused writing and its intertextual linkages with American Language Poets. Texts of English-Canadian feminist writers such as Lola Lemire Tostevin, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, and Gail Scott are read with reference to ideas and hniques inscribed in the writing of Ron Silliman, Charles Berstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman. Sojka focuses first on the socio-historical dimension of the writing and proceeds to the exploration of several discourses inscribed in the texts of writers associated with both groups. Their texts return to the politics and aesthetics of the historical avant-garde and reincarnate the spirit of carnival. They re-read earlier female avant-gardes, carnivalize monologic concepts of language and writing, experiment with the "new sentence" and interartistic projects, and carnivalize the traditional concept of the genre. While Canadian writers engage in the re-reading of American feminist avant-garde, their focus is on the Canadian socio-historical and political situation. What distinguishes Canadian language writing from other international avant-gardes is their intertextual dialogue with Québécois-Canadian feminist writers and the intense work on language closely linked with the complex and problematic nature of Canadian identity in a post-national and globalized world.

Lost in Nostalgia: The Autobiographies of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez

In Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies, in which she compares N. Scott Momaday's The Names, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez concludes, Ethnic autobiography gives meanings and new possibilities to term autobiography. Using retrospection to gain a vision for future, ... autobiographers create a hybridized, double-voiced form of autobiography in which collective memory and individual memory are linked in a dialogue. (57) Although Browdy de Hernandez's argument is convincing with respect to three writers she discusses, I will demonstrate that some American autobiographies resist hybridization and double-voicedness. Hybridization, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in time and social space (429). Furthermore, Bakhtin's definition of double-voiced discourse is speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a (324) so that double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized (324). The examples of double-voiced discourse that Bakhtin cites are comic, ironic or parodic discourse, refracting discourse of a narrator, refracting discourse in language of a character and finally discourse of a whole incorporated genre (324). I would like to suggest that discourse could consequently be read as discourse of an writer who dialogizes dominant language by self-consciously resorting to form and language to express his or her intentions in a refracted way through dominant language. Since autobiography is traditionally both a western and an androcentric genre, double-voicedness in autobiography would be apparent in refraction of conventional discourse, that is, in its rewriting, or, at least, in its self-reflexive questioning of autobiographical conventions. A comparison of texts by writers of different ethnic/racial background also raises certain methodological questions. After a brief overview of current debates over methodological concerns regarding critical writing about literature, I will compare and contrast autobiographies of Eva Hoffman, a Jewish Polish immigrant to United States, and of Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, to demonstrate that neither is hybridized and double-voiced. In doing so, I will not neglect differences between respective diasporic locations of two writers. Other autobiographies by so-called visible minority writers born in United Stated lend themselves to comparison with Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, such as Maxine Hong Kinston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, not least because, like Rodriguez's autobiography, their texts have been criticized for misrepresentation by members of their own ethnic groups. However, I choose to compare a text by a non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant and that of an American-born writer whose group has experienced colonization in a way not shared by any other group in United States. The similarities and differences between these autobiographies are instructive, and a comparison of two can provide significant insight into intricacies involved in comparing two texts that are both consent oriented (1) and that share a number of narrative strategies, even though their authors and autobiographical selves represented in texts belong to different groups. The main question one needs to consider when comparing texts of writers with different backgrounds is how one can read these texts as sharing ways of conceptualizing pull of two or more cultural loyalties without losing sight of fact that their communities have experienced different degrees of dislocation, colonization, and racism. …

Synonymity and Lexical Simplification in Translations: A Corpus-Based Approach

Simplification is one of the hypothesised universals of translation. It has been investigated, firstly, through the comparison of source and target texts, and secondly, by comparing translated and non-translated texts. In this paper, the focus is on the latter type of comparison. One aspect of simplification concerns the range of lexical items used in translations as opposed to non-translations. Corpus-based investigations conducted to this day suggest that the variety of lexicon is not narrower in translated texts than in non-translated texts. One reason for this might be found in the inherent nature of synonyms. Because of several restrictions on the use of synonyms, translators might not be able to use a more restricted or narrower range of near-synonyms than writers of non-translated texts. A brief quantitative analysis is carried out to explain this issue. A comparable corpus of 2.2 million words, which consists of translated and non-translated Finnish, provides the data for this study; the source language of the translations is English and the registers are academic prose and fiction. The results support the hypothesis of an equally wide range of near-synonyms in both language variants.

Interaction in academic writing: learning to argue with the reader

The view of written texts as embodying interaction between the writer and reader is now well established, and underlies many aspects that may be focused on in the training of novice writers of academic text. In this paper, I argue that interaction can draw on both interactive and interactional resources: interactive resources help to guide the reader through the text, while interactional resources involve the reader collaboratively in the development of the text. I use the concept of the 'reader-in-the-text' (Thompson and Thetela 1995) to explore a central form of interactional resource: the inclusion in the text of a voice that is intended to be attributable to the reader. I identify a particular set of discourse contexts in which this happens - where the writer brings in the reader's view in order to contradict it - and outline the lexico-grammatical features which signal the other voice in those contexts; and I place these in a broader perspective on written text as a stage-managed form of dialogue. The impetus for the study comes from working with novice writers; and I discuss a number of examples where written drafts were improved by exploiting the interactional resources described, and argue for the value of raising students' awareness of these resources.

Baldwin ou les spores perdues de l'Amérique : Conscience de l'origine et origine de la conscience

As individual memory and history, autobiographical accounts and fiction in Baldwin's works overlap each other in order to refashion the notions of origin, identity, and diasporic consciousness. Through the blurring of traditional binarisms and the reinvention of spatiotem-porality, Baldwin debunks the illusory role assigned to the origin in the temporal continuity of the being. As the writer's texts move from a historical frame to an imaginary perspective, new displacements are unfolded. The experience of exile, the subsequent transformations of consciousness, and the interaction of black identity and homosexuality, partake in the uncovering of the origin as the very location of both desire and the fantasy of "race"

Research on Importance and Interest: Implications for Curriculum Development and Future Research

Research has found that interest is related to attention, deeper processing, the use of effortful strategies, feelings of enjoyment, and learning. However, some strategies for creating interest in text materials may interfere with the learning of important information. In this paper, I describe results of a study that used qualitative verbal report measures to identify text characteristics that are most positively and most negatively associated with interest, as well as quantitative measures to investigate how those characteristics are related to learning. Results have implications for curriculum development by contributing to our understanding of how writers of informational text can make important information interesting. The paper concludes with suggestions for pedagogical practice and for future research that may further our understanding of interest and how it might be enhanced in classrooms.