Grabe and Classification

When I was talking to my sister the other day she told me that the thing she hates most about the subject of English is all the classification. She said "All these categories are so ridiculous. Why are there all these genres: tragicomedy, satire, pastoral, drama, historical, etc. It makes everything so complicated. Who really cares?" I laughed when she said these things. It was pretty ironic considered we've spent an entire semester trying to classify what expository writing is.

So what exactly is expository writing? Is exposition objective or subjective? Is it used in textbooks only or in novels too? Is exposition even a real category of writing in the face of postmodernism? I don't even know what to think of it. I do find it funny that most people who don't view reading material as anything but something to read, just read and don't think or comment on the category type the writing falls under. It makes life much simpler, doesn't it? But in my case, I like to classify the types of books and articles I'm reading. That's why I'm in a writing program and that's why I want to become an English professor. It's no surprise that my favorite explanation of exposition in this class comes from William Peter Grabe's "Towards Defining Expository Prose Within a Theory of Text Construction." Why? Because he displayed it on a table with characteristics. Now that is how you classify a type of writing.

Writer's Block: Cixous' Great Advice

In Helene Cixous' article "The Laugh of the Medusa", she writes some encouraging words to would-be writers who are yet to jot down a single idea of theirs:

"And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly." Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time. Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself."

I noticed how Cixous emphasized that we have control over our bodies, yet we let outside forces prevent us from taking that control. In my editing class this semester a student gave a presentation on publishing companies and told us that most of them do not encourage submissions of manuscripts. I believe the primary reasons most people who aspire to write choose not to, or start later, is because they do not have any support. Writer's block is probably caused by the fear of our writing being ignored or rejected. If we think about all the times we wanted to write something and didn't take the time to sit down and do it, I'm pretty sure there is a direct correlation between our circumstances and the writer's block. It might be we don't have enough time because we're working often, but doesn't that mean our jobs are placed at a higher value than our personal ambitions, thus discouraging us from pursuing our dreams. Many aspects of society are structured in ways that slowly, but surely dissolve our desires or willpower to achieve our goals; writing for a living and even for fun, happens to be one of its main victims.

Do you feel discouraged from writing because it's difficult to find an audience for your work or to achieve financial and critical success for it?

Competing Realities in Nietzche

What is reality? Is reality something that can be fixed and defined or is it something that changes from person to person? Consider this passage from Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense":

"What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty!"

I am aware of my reality being different when I ride the bus to Towson. I can't explain it, but life on the bus and life at school are like parallel universes. The bus rides feel like a means of survival, while school feels like a privilege for people who are fortunate enough to attend. What I mean is that people who I usually ride the bus with  never attend college. I am a rare exception, and my stop at Towson makes me feel like I am taking the long journey alone.

 

At what point in our daily lives do we realize that our reality is not the same as others- during work, school, while we're at home watching television? Is it a conscious thought or do we accept everything we see as the real world and never have a moment where we see something from another's perspective?

Foucault and the Self: Are We Too Self-Centered?

Take a look at what Foucault wrote in the beginning of his essay "Technologies of the Self":

"Max Weber posed the question: If one wants to behave rationally and regulate one's action according to true principles, what part of one's self should one renounce? What is the ascetic price of reason? To what kind of asceticism should one submit? I posed the opposite question: How have certain kinds of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything?"

I think about how social networking has made everyone and everything available to the public. It's like a massive vanity press market with no start or finish line. When I go on Facebook I see my friend's children, I see my friends going on vacation and looking like they are having a great time. It makes me feel like I haven't really done much in my own life. I often imagine posting pictures of myself doing something exciting just to impress my small group of virtual friends, when in reality my life is pretty mundane. That's when I feel like maybe people are just keeping up with the Joneses. Why do we have to put all these pictures up and talk about our lives every single day again? What personal restraint are we showing in the 21st century?

Are we too individualistic and self-serving now because of the internet? Is there any danger of us truly losing our sense of self online or are we gaining the knowledge we need to learn by exposing our private lives regularly?

Frederick Douglass and The "Freedom" of Speech

The freedom of speech is questionable when we are not really allowed to say anything we want to in this society. It takes only one slur before political groups are crying foul, protesting, boycotting, etc. I think of it as this: You don't have to watch what you're saying as long as you don't mind that other people are going to say something in response. There are some things I don't care to discuss my views on: race, religion, sexuality, politics, and anything else that is going to get people upset. I choose to keep my preferences to myself in hopes that any audience will have to understand that I don't like drama.


Something that has caught my attention on campus since I've been at Towson is the fliers for the Secular Alliance Club. There are all these quotes on the fliers for this club that appear to promote atheism/secularism, but I think they are actually insulting the intelligence of people who believe in God. I read something like "we don't have to pretend there is someone in the sky to figure out the mysteries of the universe" and variations of this kind of condescension. I don't know what the students of this secular club have experienced at the hand of religious folks, but I find their fliers disturbing.

It's one thing to promote your beliefs or lack thereof; it's another to criticize someone else's, considering a lot of people who have faith in a Higher Power have the intellectual capacity to understand what they believe in. This is the power of free speech. You can say what you want and I don't have to like it. But I can also say I don't like what you're saying and you don't have to like what I said either.

Do you find yourself tiptoeing around your right to speak freely due to the sensitive political climate in our country, or do you speak your mind no matter what popular opinion is?

Jonah Lehrer's "The Truth Wears Off"

"Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe."

Lehrer ends his article in The New Yorker with these words and I couldn't agree with him more. Especially in the age of technology that we are in now. Every day a new product or website is competing for an audience and consumers. They'll tell us anything we want to hear for our money and attention. It's up to me to decide what I want to purchase or spend my time on. First I have to make sure what I'm committing to can withstand the "decline effect," the phenomenon where scientific results diminish over time. In the case of consumerism, I may feel good about buying something that is all the rage right now, but do I really want to keep it after the hype dies down?

For instance, will I be interested in reading this book I bought last week, next year? or even five years from now? If not, is it worth the price? Maybe I should view it as the temporary entertainment that it is. That's the whole point---it is what I think it is. Like what I think of the Kardashians. A lot of people hate them because of their overexposure. I don't. I know how the media works, and I'm not buying any of the stories about them because the media uses them for money just as much as the Kardashians make money from the media. So their presence on all the tabloids tells me they're profitable for that industry.

I'd love to believe I can read a bias-free publication, but it seems that is impossible when we think in terms of postmodernism. Everything has been constructed and we can't even process where it all started. So for me to somehow believe I can get information that doesn't have some kind of agenda, I'm wrong. Because even if the work is objective, that could be precisely what the goal of the writing is, to present objective material, and therefore there is a bias against subjectivity. Things can get complicated if we really have to think about what the purpose of information we're reading is.

So the question is what do you choose to believe in? What you see, what you feel, what you were taught, or what you think you know?