Adaptation one is somewhere on Molly’s computer and I can’t get to it right now.
Adaptation Two:
I really hate this. I need to start over entirely. Yeah.
Adaptation Two Draft One
I liked my idea for this. Not sure about the execution.
Multi Modal Project One Draft One
This was fun.
Inquiry Blog Seven
Originally, I had intended to interview Dr. Karen Flint, my professor for Comparative Slaveries in Africa and our school’s director of Public History, but I knew from struggling to find a time to attend office hours, that our schedules are far from compatible.
After procrastinating for far too long, I struggled to think of who I could interview. I decided to interview my high school AP US History teacher, Matthew Carr. I chose to interview for more reasons than accessibility He’s taught history for years, and tries to teach alternate perspectives of the past. I also thought that my topic has its greatest impact at the level he teaches. High school history classes tend to make or break a fondness for the subject, and he was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had as far as garnering student interest is concerned.
I was also driven to interview him because I feel like historical reconstruction and reenactment doesn’t have any aspects that are hotly contested and debated, but it is often snubbed. Interviewing someone who is a reenactor wouldn’t help me in this endeavor, so I went with a history teacher.
note: I also conducted “mini-interviews” with others who are not in any way “experts”, but I thought that the conversations could bring me extra insight.
Questions:
To be frank, my questions developed in the interview, and I didn’t have time to write them down before he began talking. The answers blended many questions together, but I will try my very hardest to remember!
1) How would you define historical reenactment? What are the qualifiers for labeling something such?
2) Would you consider reenactment a … decent way of learning about and/or spreading knowledge of a particular aspect of history?
3) What makes it problematic?
4) What makes it beneficial?
Those were my main questions. Tiny ones like “Have you ever thought of videogames as reenactment?” were interspursed throughout the interview, but I don’t remember them all.
I’m sorry for my horrid note-taking skills.
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My interview went swimmingly, to say the least. Since it was conducted with a previous teacher, I already knew the interviewee and felt more comfortable in the situation. We talked for a bit about random history things for a while before actually buckling down.
I learned many things, but mostly ended up nodding my head in agreement the entire time. I hadn’t realized until then that many of my conceptions of history, historiography, and public thought and sentiment come from long-forgotten discussions in his class. He was prone to going off on tangents about the too-often-forgotten Native American history, and other ignored pasts. When I asked him about his thoughts on reenactment, one of the very first things he mentioned was how it was problematic and silencing. So many groups were and are completely absent from reenactment. I completely agree with him, it is beyond upsetting. I’ve addressed the subject in my paper briefly, but my interview made me realize that it would be helpful to expound upon that.
He also connoted reenactment with military, battles, weapons and violence, initially. That is what tends to cause people to look down on reenactment. It’s frequently seen as an outlet for men who love guns and guts. It’s sad. War is fetishized and marketed as glorious, and is presented to many as the only interesting aspect of history. He backed up the assertions I made in my paper concerning this. I should probably also add more to that part.
Something new that he presented to me was rather surprising. Well, it was surprising that my mind didn’t wander there first. He, remembering how I connected so much history with plays and musicals and the like, couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought of plays and musicals as reenactment. The thought had occurred, but only in brief flickers. I had considered films and plays written about an era historical reconstruction, but he brought up the idea that films, plays, and musicals written in an era offer just as much, offered more insight into that time, and that when they are produced now, they are reenactments of the time they were written in.
My interview largely served to back the assertions I made in my paper, but it did provide new thoughts and new perspectives about it. Most importantly, it reasserted the rhetorical situation I am writing to. Historical reenactment is not respected as a medium, though it is often appreciated in practice. People tend to take away lots of knowledge from reenactment, though they don’t believe it possible.
Reading Response Seven
I think it’s rather ironic that a novel that warns of the dangers of propaganda and controlling the mind is used in an advertisement that influences the decisions of others. And then the product sold through that influence will go on to spread even more.
Anyways, the most important thing to note about the commercial and its relation to what I’ve learned in class, would be the audience. Apple aims itself to the creative, the free thinking, the artsy. What better way to address an audience, to tell them that they need a product, than by telling them that the product will keep them from losing their creativity, their free thought, their artistic sensibilities?
That is a rhetorical decision to fit the situation, the audience, and the opportunity. A great opportunity lies in a year that a dystopian or apocalyptical future was prescribed to. It plays to an understanding of that possible future and allows the rhetor to manipulate the possibility, and to say that they know how to prevent it.
Another integral part of the rhetorical situation is the fact that it was during the Super Bowl. So many people were watching it, and so the time taken from it had to garner their attention. The advertisement also was able to use this aspect, by suddenly interrupting the game, surprising viewers.
The advertisement broke from the traditional aspects of its genre, broke the rules of advertising. That, in it of itself, was enough to get people interested, to make them yearn to know what is being advertised. The content and odd timing shocked people and drew them in. They had to know how it ended, what would happen to the girl, what the hell was even going on anyway.
The argument of the commercial is largely made with visuals. The world presented is unappealing and tinged with grey dreariness. The real language of the piece lies in the images and sounds. There are words spoken, but the meaning is carried by the voice: authoritative, ominous, foreboding. The commercial could almost be seen as threatening: This Is What Will Happen If We Continue to Allow IBM to Grow. IBM is an unnamed enemy that promotes groupthink and numerical thinking and singularity. Macintosh will save us from this doom. If you don’t buy Mac, you will only be bringing it upon yourself and others.
Giving Apple the part of the savior only serves to make IBM and others evil.
Sprangorland Blog One
~written from the perspective of my people, the Krofols!~
We have been trampled by the Krohls for centuries and our language has been treated no differently. We’ve can learn and understand their language but they stick up their aristocratic noses at ours.
Now these others have come. They too wish to step heavily upon us, our culture, and our language. Are we to sit idly by? Are we to let our very sense of being be lost to this new wave of conquerors? Shall we let the barbarians rule us as slaves? Will we let ourselves be seen no better than the Gurgs or the Transylvanians.
I, for one, will not let our people be wiped from history.
We are many and those that rule us are few. Our language is spoken and written and read by many, theirs by few. It is time that the others learned our language rather than we theirs.
~written from my own perspective!~
Adopting a national language silences a generation of voices. When one is chosen, many of those who do not speak the selected language will have difficulty learning and using the new one. They will continue to write in languages that no one will know in the future. Perhaps their stories and experiences will never be recorded because of their language.
Choosing one national language would be condemning other languages to death.
Instead, I would elect to let each language continue in practice and not select an official one. In time, the use of many languages would cause a new creole language to evolve. It would have more of some language elements than others based on the criteria we debate: number who speak it, classes that speak it, and so forth.
Take, for instance, Afrikaans. It developed in South Africa from the Dutch spoken by settler and from the various other languages spoken by slaves: Bantu dialects, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese…
One new language that all in South Africa could understand developed without having to force one language on the people. Communication always finds a way around language barriers and languages adapt to suit communication needs.
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P.S. I absolutely adore when classes are able to overlap like that…
Reading Response Six
(okay, my article with comments refuses to load onto here or onto dropbox. Not sure what’s up. Will fix asap)
As a history major, and hopefully a future professor of the subject, I tend to look at most things from an historical point of view, not excluding the concept of literacy.
I assume that this is the reasoning behind my connection with the idea of literacy as power, because in history, that is the sense of literacy that I’ve always garnered. The ability to read and write was kept from lower classes, from women, from minority races and ethnicities in order to maintain class structure, in order to keep power distribution from altering.
This is also why I have trouble connecting the word “literacy” to other subjects and practices other than reading and writing. I feel like the term itself is being stretched too far with these metaphors and is being applied to far too many ideas. This causes its historical meanings and implications to depreciate.
When people are referred to as “computer illiterate” it conveys a very different attitude and meaning. Computer illiteracy isn’t used to hold down a people. It is in no way the same as being illiterate in its original sense. The inability to read and write prevents access to knowledge. Sure, someone could always relay the information found in writing to the illiterate, but that transition provides an extra opportunity to alter information, to introduce bias and personal interest that does not belong to the writer. Priests could alter sermons to suit their own purposes because the laity could not read or interpret the Latin that the Bible was written in. Computer illiteracy only means that the individual must read a book rather than something online.
The application of “literacy” to other subjects devalues the struggle for a general ability to read and to write, which actually provides for the ability to obtain other forms of “literacy”
I don’t at all mean to say that computer, music, and cultural literacy are unimportant, or that the “literacy” metaphor cannot be used for them. The have parts that act as “letters” that are strung together to make “words” and “sentences” and so on. They have small parts that must be learned and processes of complication and putting together that make them a form of literacy.
I just find the terminology problematic and worrying.
As for my experience with literacy, I don’t find it at all special or unique. I began by learning the smallest units: letters, music notes, et cetera. I learned their appearance and then their sound. Then I learned to string them together into words and sentences, verses and choruses. Everything grows and builds upon the very simple.
Ooooooh, a ~free~ reading response.
I shall use this post to do just that.
You see, while reading the assigned reading , actually before I even began, my mind went first to the inequality of education, and often the inaccessibility of learning and literacy. I began to think of how it is so often denied, and most often to people of color.
These thoughts were pushed onward first by the idea presented of how literacy sponsorship can be withheld, then by the mention of race and social groups, then by the examples of Branch and Lopez.
And then I saw this picture.
Literacy and other knowledge is heavily sponsored by teacher, school, school system, and government. That sponsorship, in lower income communities thought of as “bad” areas involves a lot of withholding access to literacy. It likely isn’t a cogniscent decision to keep literacy from these areas and schools, but it happens. The parents and families of most students in such schools are of lower incomes and don’t have money to spare to donate to the school. The schools receive lesser funding from the system because of poor testing results on state exams. The lack of funding decreases the quality of education offered to the students of these schools, causing them to continue to do poorly on state exams, and to continually be denied the funding needed.
In this way, the national government sponsors by withholding literacy through the requirement of standardized testing, the state government does so in it’s creation of the exams, the school board does so by allotting money based on that, and the school does so by it’s inability to provide for the students.
Of course, the withholding is not blamed for the lack of literacy or knowledge or education. The people who lack it are. The are seen as lazy or stupid or not good enough. They are though to deserve lesser jobs and lesser status and lesser pay, because we simply believe that they could not achieve, that they didn’t try, that they were not good enough.
We don’t know what these individuals could achieve if their learning and literacy were actually sponsored and supported, if those of lesser socioeconomic status were granted the same opportunities as most rich white males are. It is more than likely, though, that there are hidden gems in that slighted bunch. You never know what genius might lie behind those never given a chance. What if the cure for cancer is trapped inside the mind of someone who can’t afford an education?
Draft Two!
I made most of the changes advised, but I’m having trouble thinking of how to include more examples. I have examples in mind, but I can’t figure out how to put them in the right way.
Reading Response Four
Somethings up with my adobe reader on my laptop, so I have to try and highlight &c on my phone. Which is such a pain.
I thought this reading was quite interesting. I think that since my topic is essentially a genre of history ( that is also made up of different genres) that this response will be really helpful in developing my inquiry.
For this response, since I could not really find any interesting genres speaking on my topic, I picked genres of my topic, of historical reenactment. They came to me instantly. Oh this is exciting.
Of course, none of that makes this any less confusing.
The First Genre: Youtube Satirical Webseries
First off, I love this webseries so so so much.
This series has a lot of each aspect of genre. Socially, idealogically, and rhetorically, it responds to the rhetorical situation created by the current political climate, as well as older ones. So many claim to have the founders’ interests and ideals in mind, but they have no way of really knowing the thoughts of men who died centuries ago. Their old words are applied to new situations. Historically, it builds on the genre of satire, by mocking this idea. Founding fathers are kidnapped through time by the ARFF super PAC in order to support their claims of acting as the founders would have. The kidnapped founders end up not having the same ideals of their captors.
As far as Discourse goes, the actors and writers are college students. A lot of their tools, the ideas they promote, among other things are reflective of this. The discourses and Discourses of the characters in the series are at odds most of the time. The language, tools, ideas, and clothing are… archaic, largely based on the time they were from (and their social standing). They soon discover modern tools and technologies: poptarts, laptops, foosball. Their Discourse from the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century COP frequently clashes from the modern.
The Second Genre: Historically inspired Webcomic
Founding Boys is a webcomic (by one of those History Peeps). It sets the American Revolution in an alternate universe. The founders are all students at a boarding school and are planning to overthrow their (tyrannical) headmaster. It’s a social genre because it aims to entertain, and ideological because it tries to make its readers view the world, view the past in a different way. “The revolutionaries were just silly kids who didn’t like rules” is an idea portrayed rather than ” they were fine patriots who worked for freedom and liberty from their opressors.”
Genre Three: Facebooks for Historical Figures Who Are Dead!
heres one: http://www.facebook.com/aaron.burr.9404
Let’s blame the History Peeps again. (They are a bit strange. Well, droll.)
This is a largely social genre. The people involved mainly do this to entertain each other. It isn’t a rhetorical genre at all. It has lots of ideological aspects to it, because they put historical figures in a modern setting. In doing this they focus on the personalities of the historical figures outside of a historical setting.
will probably add more later… but at least I met my word count.
coffeeshopcavalier 