I’m biased against William Dean Howells
I’ve got too little time to go on at length now, but two quick shots:
1) Brodkey’s piece was very good and there’s a lot of it I find sympathetic to my own background–I will respond at length if an opportunity arises.
2) I find myself in over my head in Walker’s piece since I have little rhetoric background to draw on. I’ll reread it after class Monday and hopefully it will make more sense then Although I do want to say that Walker has a really specific, often funny voice which is a heck of a suprise to find in academic writing–at least from my experience. This is sort of the voice I’d like to cultivate in my own academic work.
Can I lose the word academic from my vocabulary? Reading Harris, I want to sort of lose the word or repurpose it for something else, but I haven’t really discovered a word to replace it? "Critical?" But sometimes "academic" work isn’t fulfilling a "critical" mode. Analytic? Professional? I sort of like "professional," because the sort of "academic" writing I’ll be doing is what will shape and further my role in my chosen profession. Any thoughts, gang?
For Walker, think of the differences he lays out:
interpretation
production
and how rhetoric (for our purposes) is about production. A point, I think, that ties to Brodkey…
Comment by jeff — 18 September, 2006 @ 3:04 pm