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| Pieter Bruegel, "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent," 1559 (http://fishmarketblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/why-feast-of-fools/) |
As complex as communication may become, I have to admit that I'm thrilled by the challenges that an increasingly multilingual world offers, especially to the classroom. This coming Monday, a friend and colleague of mine, Tom Friedrich, and I will be sharing a paper that addresses these issues at the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetoric and Writing Across Language Boundaries. We will be presenting in a session titled "Rhetoric and Identity in Online Spaces," which includes other papers on iPhones and street harassment and the collapse of the private/public binary in digital discourse. Our paper is titled, "Grotesque Multilingualism: Male Literacy in a Globalized Era." Here's the abstract:
Mikhail Bakhtin suggests
that the grotesque body is perpetually "in the act of becoming." This unfinished and dynamic
corporeality characterizes male student writers, who often resist traditional
models of composition instruction that encourage them to mimic formal models
and promote a “standard” register as a shared ideal. Such a monolingual
environment limits the diverse rhetorical and linguistic corpora available to
multilingual students, whom we take to include not only L2 or marginalized
dialect speakers, but also native English speakers whose multiple literacies go
unrecognized in US English classrooms.
This presentation turns to student and teacher authored-texts to
theorize multilingual males’ "act[s] of becoming" within two
contexts: online fan fiction and an undergraduate new media course and the
compositions it assigned. Mueller documents how ELLs are increasingly
contributing to fan fiction websites, within which contributors revise and
elaborate upon fan texts, ranging from manga to Harry Potter. He
argues that these multilingual spaces have a long history that reaches back
into the medieval classroom, in which students and teachers glossed and rewrote
Aesopic fables, developing an expanding corpus that was produced in multiple
languages. Friedrich describes an undergraduate new media
course where an emphasis on cultivating an identity as an informed
consumer-producer allowed male millenials to see, value, and extend their
histories of creating digital texts. In this way, these participants came to see themselves as
multilingual speakers, a stance that allowed them to claim ownership over the
course and to create more inclusive pedagogies.
If you want to read more, see below. And I apologize for the inconsistent documentation styles - it's APA meets Chicago!
Grotesque
Multilingualism: Male Literacy in a Globalized Era
[Tom] Restrictive
definitions of what counts as college composition obscure the
consumption-production of new media texts as literate practices. These purposeful experiences broaden
the field of acceptable composing tasks and challenge masculine stereotypes. Building on Gemma Moss’s (claim that
males’ histories of being evaluated as low or high ability writers creates “gendered
literacies” for these groups, we suggest ways out of this cycle. Despite the fact that the writing
valued in school settings, ideally plain and eschewing adornment, is
characterized as “manly” male students are weaker writers than their female
peers today (Brody, 1993; Purves qtd in Hillocks, 2006, p. 57). This is a problem pedagogy can address,
but at its core is an identity: a theory of the self called “hegemonic
masculinity.” This bourgeois ideal for being a man takes the mastery of objects
and others in service of one’s self-interests to be the only form of human
freedom. As a result, diverse masculinities are rigidly ordered, particularly
in institutional settings such as the writing classroom, and the rich resources
for being and speaking that marginalized masculinities and the diverse
languages and literate practices they use are silenced.
This
view of male speech acts as dynamically constellated is reflected in Bakhtin’s
social language learning theory, dialogism—with every word being
“double-voiced,” partly tasting of a writer’s “speech will” and mostly marked
by the generic features associated with a particular type of utterance. We also find this particular tension in
Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism.
In this reality, the official world’s laws, approved gestures and uses
of language—which are accepted as an exclusive standard to be mimicked and,
therefore, maintain social stratification—are instead mocked and revised by a
collective folk acting out of shared interest. The effect is not simply destructive; rather, the “folk”
lower the high, the abstract, to the material level, engaging in a kind of
“degradation that builds a bodily grave for a new birth” (Bakhtin, 1968, p.
21).
By
reading dialogism and grotesque realism together into one literate identity,
the speaking grotesque body, we witness student writers sometimes collectively
struggling, inquiring along the limits of essayist literacy, privileged
dialects, and individual assignments.
Our presentation will theorize male authorship within two contexts: the
history of fan fiction and new media composition assignments. Alex will begin by defining the highly
gendered textuality that pervades fan fiction websites, within which
contributors revise and elaborate upon fan texts, ranging from manga to Harry Potter. He will suggest that these multilingual spaces have a long
history that reaches back into the medieval classroom, in which students and
teachers glossed and rewrote Aesopic fables, developing an expanding corpus
that was produced in multiple languages.
I will then describe an undergraduate new media course where an emphasis
on cultivating an identity as an informed consumer-producer allowed male
millenials to see, value, and extend their histories of creating digital
texts. In this way, these
participants came to see themselves as multilingual speakers, a stance that
allowed them to claim ownership over the course and to create more inclusive
pedagogies.
Aesop's
Grotesque Body: Fan Fiction and Multilingual Male Authority [Alex]
Online
fan fiction has proven to be particularly attractive to female English Language
Learners, whose multilingual participation is valued and encouraged.[i] The hotbed of activity is located at Fanfiction.net, not
only the largest digital archive of fan texts, containing approximately a
half-million Harry Potter texts
alone, but also a highly multilingual writing space, containing stories in at
least thirty languages.[ii] Despite the ubiquity of the male presence in other sectors
of the digital world, female authors have dominated the genre of fan fiction.[iii] One scholar suggests that the interpersonal nature of fan
communities particularly suits the sensibilities of female authors, even going
so far as to generalize that "men communicate for status, and women
communicate to maintain relationships."[iv]
Furthermore,
studies of female fans have demonstrated their willingness to employ multiple
languages as a means to facilitate the production of their fictions.[v] As Rebecca Black has shown, female ELLs have utilized manga
and anime fan fiction as a means to improve their English. In the case of the writer identified as
"Grace," the production of her fan text "Heart Song,"
envisioned as part of the Card Captor
Sakura manga series, required the use of multilingual and interpersonal
registers. She not only humbly
advertises herself as "the Fastest/quickest and yet Poor english Writer from the
Philippines," but also invites her audience to "R+R" [read and
review], assuming that her readers would be capable of negotiating between
English and Japanese.[vi] Here is a brief excerpt of the
beginning of her story.[vii] Her linguistic transparency and editorial flexibility led to
the creation of a fifteen-chapter text and a fifteen-chapter sequel demanded by
a fan community who offered a staggering 1569 reviews of her work over a
five-year period.[viii] Inasmuch as female multilingual participation in the
production of fan texts can be described as an example of non-authoritarian or
carnivalesque discourse, how might we explain the relative absence of male
authorship within these environments?
I believe that the
transformation of the Aesopic fable from monolingual to multilingual text in
the later Middle Ages offers us one useful context from which we can understand
the historical limits and grotesque possibilities of male textuality. In the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries throughout Europe, schoolboys and their schoolmasters paraphrased and
elaborated upon Aesopic fables in extensive commentaries, what I would call a
kind of medieval fan fiction. For
most students, however, this was a monolingual practice – Latin was the only acceptable language of
learning.[ix] It wasn't until the printing revolution in the fifteenth
century that a multilingual Aesop began to take hold. The
earliest printed book of fables, compiled by Heinrich Steinhöwel contained not
only the standard Latin fables of the medieval curriculum, but also their
German translations.[x] Within decades, this intervention of the vernacular inspired
translations of the fables into French, English, Dutch, and Spanish.[xi]
As
the Aesopic corpus became increasingly multilingual, Aesop's identity as a male
author became increasingly grotesque.
One of the texts central to this expansion was the Life of Aesop, a standard preface to the fables, which provided a
surprisingly monstrous illustration of his body. In
William Caxton's English version, Aesop is a slave "dyfformed and euylle
shapen/For he had a grete hede/ large visage/longe Iowes/sharp eyen/a short
necke/corbe backed/grete bely/grete legges/and large feet" (27).[xii] This striking description serves as the basis for the most
popular and widely disseminated frontispiece to the fables, which was first
crafted by Steinhöwel for his first edition. Furthermore,
Aesop's status as a venerated classroom authority is belied by what is
described in the text as his stuttering of a language comprehensible only to
himself, an impediment that threatens the very possibility of the production of
fables (27). As Peter Travis
suggests, "The
figure of Aesop – a disruptive anti-hero – is scarcely a model of the
humanistic male ideal the liberal arts curriculum was designed to fashion.
Rather, he is a curiously transgressive hybrid – a bricoleur, wordsmith and
trickster – whose counter-establishment words and gestures evoke a kind of
subaltern admiration in his young readers."[xiii]
Of
course, most of us would agree that this is neither the Aesop nor the model of
male authorship that has persisted in our classrooms. Just as the first bilingual Aesop eventually faded into
obscurity, the grotesque corporeal features of Aesop became increasingly
difficult to detect. For example, if we turn to the
1571 frontispiece of the Bassyndyne print of Robert Henryson's Fables, we find a more normalized figure. This more shapely Aesop likely emerges
from Henryson's own reinterpretation of the grotesque fashioning of Aesop that
appears in his "The Lion and the Mouse" fable. He describes Aesop as the most
beautiful man he had ever seen, wearing a gown of fine white cloth and a
scarlet silk-lined hood (1348-55).[xiv] It is no coincidence that a beautification of a previously
grotesque body parallels the development of the English canon and
standardization, which in later centuries spawned movements to expel foreign
nomenclature from the English vocabulary.
Such a monolingual and simplified notion of male authorship, I want to
suggest, plagues and limits male writers who want to be bricloeurs, who are
attracted to the transgressive, who resist finished prose, and who revel in the
collaborative, open-ended, and multilingual nature of digital textuality in the
21st century.
Male Student Writers as Speaking Grotesque Bodies in a New Media Classroom [Tom]
I
want to pick up on Alex’s point of how this official notion of male authorship
silences grotesque bricoleurs. Then as now, all writers speak multiple dialects
so grotesque, purposeful writing is possible for them. But teachers easily fail
to value students’ and their own grotesque multilingualism because restrictive,
manly notions of what good writing is lead them to forget that blogging, podcasting,
and other new media activities are literate practices. Teachers thereby use a
lie to secure their privileged classroom and social statuses and ensure that
less privileged students keep theirs.
I
want to describe a new media course where I sought to challenge this outcome by
addressing the curriculum to one speaking grotesque body—an informed new media
consumer-producer—and modeling that type of being myself through the readings and
assignment sequence I used. I also
trace the experience two male English/Language Arts majors had of coming to
value their past new media activities as literate histories, a platform they
used to re-accentuate class meetings and approach novel writing tools and tasks
so they became more purposeful..
Throughout
the course, I emphasized how informed new media use takes place in a tense reality, one both official
and grotesque, students could see themselves inhabiting. This meant defining
new media as what Janet Murray calls an “immersive," “interactive”
relationship between such tools and problem-solving users--a relationship that
meant having the potential to grotesquely challenge rather than officially
replicate social inequalities. Our first reading, which I co-authored with
Moosung Lee, emphasized how "[official tool use involves] consuming
objects, others, and the world itself out of self-interest—an ultimately
destructive force—and the latter [is] a means of individual and social
progress: a form of directed yet dynamic, shared being-in-the-world whereby
subjects and objects coexist in the world, with each subject and object an
irreplaceable, always unfinished accumulation of meaning." Emphasizing how students lived and
wrote within opposing, official and grotesque worlds gave them an alternative:
they could avoid the trap of needing to forever be on the pulse of the new and,
instead, learn to purposefully use a few new media tools well.
In
using select tools to complete the course’s first two projects—a new media
literacy autobiography (adapted from Selfe, 2004) that required that they
photoshop images and a collaborative podcast assessing who students were
already and sought to become as informed new media “produsers” (Knobel and
Lankshear, 2010)—students crafted multimodal, multilingual compositions
blending traditional academic tools and discourses with alternative, new media
ones and popular content. I tried to model this myself, in sharing my academic
writing and a photoshopped image of me wearing one of Napoleon's bicorne hats. In
modifying this school website photo and posting it on my public blog, I created
a grotesque, self-deprecating manly teacher image in this act of informed new
media use.
My
white male students engaged in similar work, as a manipulated image from one new
media literacy autobiography shows.
In creating this image of himself as Wario (the "D" stands for the
student's first initial) in Mario Cart, this student is not only valuing his
gaming practices as literate acts but also going for laughs. While this might
be interpreted as a display of hegemonic masculinity, given the competitive
scene, in creating the image, the student--at first unfamiliar with photoshopping--turned
to two experienced peers (one female, one male), crafted an adorned,
collaborative text, challenging the stereotype of monolingual, official male
author.
In
their final projects, which could be individual or collaborative yet needed to
be produced using a new media tool, my white male students continued to value
their traditional and new media literacies--and in doing so, they consistently
tied their own grotesque, purposeful, popular literate practices to their
anticipated work with secondary students. Let me give you an example. The
student who created the previous image, along with another male, created a
second collaborative podcast because they felt their first had failed to
display much generic competence--seeming not very "show-like," more
like a series of roughly spliced conversations. For this project, the student
shown above interviewed the other about the identity the latter had constructed
as a "novice" learning within a mostly male "community of
practice" (Lave and Wenger, 1991): the online game, Gears of War II. On the slide you see, which the students created
to accompany their podcast, they quote from Boogie
Nights, as the gamer had borrowed his online identity of Dirk Diggler from
Mark Wahlberg's character in the film--a lanky, aspiring porn actor who, in
choosing his "Razor Sharp" name, makes the audience laugh because of
the contradiction between the controlled, hegemonic masculinity a male porn
star is expected to embody and the character's appearance and inexperience. In this popular culture trope, the
students were making public their own occasional unease and sustained interest
in their new media practices and in this project--their identities as speaking
grotesque bodies. These two ELA
majors left the course more informed new media producers-consumers through
engaging in acts that degrade traditional notions of manly writing and being.
Coda:
The Unfinished Work of Grotesque Multilingualism [Alex]
I
want to conclude by suggesting that the grotesque multilingualism that we are
proposing here is more than just a call for males to participate in the radical
remixing projects that new media accommodate. It is a call for an understanding of 21st-century textuality
as "an unfinished accumulation." As Bakhtin suggests, the grotesque body, is perpetually
"in the act of becoming.
It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created,
and builds and creates another body."[xv] The work of grotesque multilingualism
will never be finished because it will spawn new modes of production, forms of
commentary, hybrid languages, and multi-gendered literate identities. As the canonization of a normalized
Aesop demonstrates, these carnivalesque discourses will always be dynamic
because they will always meet institutional resistance, which will force their
insurgent energies toward new directions and resources. Technologies that have yet to emerge
may provide useful avenues, but we also believe that pedagogies that embrace new
media remixing and multilingual composition will help students challenge the
romantic ideals of authorship that have proven especially limiting to many male
writers.
[iii] To cite just
one example, Susan Herring's study of responses to online mailing lists found
that male contributions received more responses and attention than female
contributions. See "Gender
and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication," Electronic Journal of Communciation / La Revue Electronique de
Communication 3.2 (1995).
[iv] Susan Clerc,
"Estrogen Brigades and 'Big Tits' Threads: Media Fandom On-line and
Off," in The Cybercultures Reader,
ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
216-29, at 221. See also Deborah
Tannen, You Just Don't Understand
(New York: Ballantine, 1990), 77.
A recent article by Ogi Ogas in The
Wall Street Journal supports the notion that women (and not men) seek
relationships via fan fiction. See
"The Online World of Female Desire," The Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2011),
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704463804576291181510459902.html
(accessed June 9, 2011).
[v] Sirppa
Leppänen, "Cybergirls in Trouble?
Fan Fiction as a Discursive Space for Interrogating Gender and
Sexuality," in Identity Trouble:
Critical Discourse and Contested Identities, ed. Carmen Rosa
Caldas-Coulthard and Rick Iedema (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008),
156-179, at 163-4.
[vi] Black,
"Online Fan Fiction, Global Identities, and Imagination," Research in the Teaching of English 43.4
(May 2009): 397-425, at 409.
[ix] Peter Travis,
"Aesop's Symposium of Animal Tongues," Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2.1 (2011):
33-49.
[x] Pack Carnes,
"Heinrich Steinhöwel and the Sixteenth-Century Fable Tradition," Humanistica Lovaniensia: A Journal of
Neo-Latin Studies 35 (1986): 1-29, at 4.
[xi] Léopold Hervieux,
ed., Les Fabulistes Latins depuis le
siècle d'Auguste jusqu'a la fin du moyen âge, vol. 2 (New York: Burt
Franklin, 1960), 602-19; William Caxton, Caxton's
Aesop, ed. R.T. Lenaghan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 4;
Bengt Holbek, Æsops levned og fabler:
Christiern Pedersens oversættelse af Stainhöwels Æsop, vol. 2 (Copenhagen:
J.H. Schultz, 1962), 117; Theodore S. Beardsley, Jr., Hispano-Classical Translations Printed between 1482 and 1699 (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1970), 20-1; John E. Keller and Richard P. Kincade, Iconography in Medieval Spanish Literature
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 93; Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education,
Chaucer, and His Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2000), 19.
[xv] Mikhail
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,
trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 317.
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