Annotations & Reflections on A Place to Stand

Annotation:

I apologize for the quality.  I had to use a photo of my Kindle for this one.  I like the idea that class identity is formed and asserted partially through individuals' assertion of what they are not, of what they are against.  The Smokehousers who Lindquist interviews are for the most part opposed to her political beliefs and what she represents, so they position her as an antagonist and argue with her not to persuade her to adopt their beliefs, but in order to reaffirm and "test" their own beliefs against the "enemy" through the medium of an every-day bar room argument.  A lot of this is also about performing through rhetoric: the regulars perform and take the argumentative stance which the others expect them to take; they are sort of playing a role which is part of their public identity in the bar.


About Lindquist's favorite theorist... Bourdieu: 

Overall Reflection:
I was able to identify with Lindquist and her subject position in the environment of the bar, since I also work part-time at an environment (a grocery store) populated with mainly working-class people who are far from tentative about expressing their opinions.  Her ideas about rhetoric and argument in particular as part of a "performance" by the bar regulars strikes me as reflective of what I have privately observed...after reading A Place to Stand, I think that I will make my observation "site" for the class project the store where I work.

I like the idea of the Smokehouse Inn as a "womb-like" environment...very insular and a place where people have to reconcile their private and public selves and put on a kind of performance after work.  Lindquist's exploration of what the patrons of the bar appear to be (largely homogeneous in their political beliefs and experiences of life) versus what they actually profess about themselves in the private interviews with her (they all have very different experiences of and beliefs about class, education, and life) is particularly interesting.  What I really took away from the book is that the differences between public (constructed, performative through the means of verbal rhetoric) identity and private identity are vast, but must be reconciled somehow by the individual when they are trying to take on an associative identity (such as a regular at the bar or a conservative or an eloquent speaker).

Like Lindquist, I'm convinced that much of "class ideology", including working class ideology, is actually "mythology" in the sense that it is loosely constructed and far from homogeneous.  She writes that the people she works with and meets at the bar are both "mainstream" and "other", by which I think she means they are part of the communal working class group at the bar and share attributes with the other patrons, and yet they are also overwhelmingly individual and heterogeneous in their experiences and beliefs.  Her points about sociolinguistics-- the true objectives of persuasive rhetoric and joking and even small talk-- as "speech genres" are also interesting.  I sometimes had a difficult time following the conversations she transcribed, perhaps because of her determination to make them authentic. 

"Starting Points" for Discussion on Identity

 Having read over some of everyone's reflections on the Holland reading and their annotations, it seems like a lot of people are interested in the idea of "figured worlds" in our society and the role they play in determining (or self-determining) identity.  I think that some people, like me, are wrestling with the idea of identity as demonstrated in/by literature and writing, versus personal identity, versus cultural identity or identity by association/categories.  For me, reading over the four types of identities (like by discourse, nature, institution, and affiliation) has helped.  I think that overall, Holland just introduces a vast amount of material.  This makes her book a good introduction to the study of identity and rhetoric, but also can pose more questions than answers.  Her case stories and examples helped me to understand a little better.

Annotations & Reflection on Holland's Identity and Agency

First...Who are these two guys whose concepts Holland keeps referencing(???) 
Voilà:

 Associated terms/theories from Holland: 
"Space of authoring"-- the act by an individual of "answering" the world faced/encountered
Concerned with association between people, social interactions, subject positions and cultural studies; "Dialogic"

Associated terms/theories from Holland:
"Zone of Proximal Development"-- relates to imaginary play as developing social competency in "Imagined worlds"
Cultural-Historical or Socio-Historical Psychology school-- concerned with symbols learned through social interaction and literature; "Developmental"

Identity & Sociolinguistics:

Example of deferential speech hedges in current shampoo commercial, believe it or not...



Overall Reflection: 
While Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds cannot be called an easy read, I find it engrossing and thought-provoking in many ways.  Holland's sociolinguistic/anthropologist's type of take on identity and agency is helpful-- her illustration of concepts through her case studies helped me to better grasp them.  Holland's exploration of figured worlds such as the world of romance in US colleges and broader American culture and the figured world of Alcoholics Anonymous illustrate how culturally-constructed a lot of the "worlds" we associate ourselves with are.  Her discussions of "rules" and "labels" (Identities of Discourse?) in the world of romance, her anecdotes about the young girls growing up in Nepal-- where gender roles are traditionally very inflexible--, and all of the material about sociolinguistics were of a particular interest to me.

Above, I did a quick Google search to find out more about Bakhtin and Vygotsky and annotated a few paragraphs about sociolinguistics which I found interesting.  The video is a commercial I connected a little to the idea of women or other people of perceived lower social status or rank using deferential speech "hedges" and "disclaimers" in everyday conversations.

Who Am I Bringing To This Class? Video

Who Am I Bringing to This Class?

Dear Dr. Brannon/The Class/Whoever Randomly Stumbled Upon This Page Via Google,


Who am I bringing to this class?

A WIP, as writers say.  A living, breathing Work In Progress.  I am still figuring out who I am and who I want to become in life

I live on the same street outside of the same small town in Lincoln County where I was raised.  I'm lucky enough to have always the opportunity to enjoy lots of wide, open spaces and the beauty of being near horses and other animals.  I can walk down the street to visit my aunts and grandparents and cousins and I always have an equine shoulder to hug or cry on.  Cities and urban spaces are unfamiliar territory to me, but I am learning to try to branch out some these days.

Growing up, I was also "that quiet girl" who read a lot and kind of faded into the background.  I wrote the answers to the teachers' questions in my notebook rather than raising my hand and took online classes in the library for most of my senior year, but I was somehow still universally considered to be one of the smartest students in our year.  (Probably because I read a lot-- it doesn't matter if you read Harlequin novels or Oscar Wilde, most people assume any girl who reads in public is automatically Hermione Granger.) 

Despite how well I did in school, I always looked forward to 3:15 PM so that I could go home and continue my "real life", reading the books I wanted to read and running around outside until the fireflies came out.

Like Dr. Brannon, I grew up relatively privileged in a small Southern town where many people are far from privileged.  My great-grandfather was a Congressman and I grew up visiting the library where his watercolor portrait hangs on the reading room wall.  Some of my family drive Mercedes, have "summer cabins" bigger than my house, and go to expensive European schools, but I myself have not lived "the luxe life" by any means.  Still, in my senior year of high school, my relatives encouraged me to apply to UNC Chapel Hill, the official alma mater of our family.  I had the grades, the SAT scores, and, I thought, the ambition to leave my small town and start a charmed life at a "Public Ivy League" school.  I moved into my new dorm in Chapel Hill that next August, expecting to drink from the Old Well and graduate in four years, to one day attend alumni events at the Carolina Inn with my aunts and uncle.

But-- spoiler alert-- that isn't what happened.  I transferred to UNC Charlotte at the end of last year after a long bout of homesickness and a series of roommate altercations.  It is a very different experience, commuting to school and working (thirty hours or more a week) versus living in a campus dorm and walking everywhere.  In hindsight, I wish I had not transferred, but at the same time I don't deeply regret moving back to the area where I grew up, and where my heart still is, either.  I am sometimes ambivalent (or wishy-washy, if you like) about why I chose to transfer and exactly what I want to do next.  I often think that, at seventeen, I probably wasn't ready to leave home so suddenly and find myself thrust into an entirely different culture and the college lifestyle.  But I know that next time I leave home, I will probably be ready.

I have dreamed of becoming an English teacher since middle school, though I don't yet know where or in which grades I'll end up teaching.  Last semester I sort of "apprenticed" myself to the middle school AIG Language Arts teacher who made me want to become a teacher in the first place, and she has almost convinced me to try teaching at the middle school level. 

I like teenagers and pre-teens for the same reasons that many people dislike them: they're self-conscious and single-minded and weird and occasionally have no "filter".  Sounds like a self-portrait.  Which is why I think my future students and I will probably get along, if I can only manage to convince them that Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins are as cool as Eminem.  

I also have always wanted to be a writer, though-- a novelist.  I want to write novels like the ones I devoured and blogged about in middle and high school and, with a lot of practice and determination, I hope to one day make my dream of becoming a published author a reality. 

As of right now, though, I work in a grocery store.  The people I work with and our eccentric regulars provide me with great fodder for future characters.  In all seriousness, they could easily populate a Dickensian novel about a backwoods North Carolina town.  Their sense of humor and (readily recited) life stories have helped to "ground" me and made me somewhat less flighty and more aware of people's every-day struggles.  I do sort of love/hate my job, in another example of that characteristic wishy-washiness. 

However, I am loving studying at UNC Charlotte.  I'm an English/History double major (you guessed it, because I couldn't pick one over the other), and have a long-running infatuation with Victoriana.  The historical Victorian Era, melodramatic Victorian literature, neo-Victorian novels, Victorian architecture-- I love it all.

We English majors are definitely the greatest people in the world, even if we are generally afraid of math and spend a lot of time discussing what I think of as our prospective, collective poverty.  I'm really excited to be in this class this summer, studying English from the interesting and (to me) novel perspective of identity and rhetoric. 

Sincerely,

Hannah K. Hicks


UPDATE:
I mostly tried to polish the language and elaborate on a few things.  I also scratched the original non-beginning for one which I like better and expanded upon a few key points (ie, why I want to teach, some of my interests, and my childhood).

Class #1: Reading Reflection

Reflection: 

Of this week's readings, I definitely was able to glean the most from the Holland book.  Holland's examples, such as the story about the Hindu woman who climbed up the side of an upper-caste woman's house rather than have to pass her in the kitchen and the examples about children's play as reflective of later adult participation in "figured worlds", were illuminating and interesting.  I kept thinking that universities are excellent examples of "figured worlds"-- failing to take a required major course in the right semester can set your graduation dates (and wallets) back a long way, and there is little we can do or try to do about it thanks to the (imagined?  institutional?) rigidity of the figured world of the university system.

I found the Roswell and Paul reading on Sedimented Identities to be the most difficult and generally dry.  Maybe I have taken too many English classes focusing on the "what" literature means as opposed to "how" it means, because I'm having a somewhat difficult time understanding how texts can be seen as "durable projections" of social identity-- perhaps that different texts are written for different groups or people who share the same identity of affinity?  Or that texts should be understood as projections of the authors' identities (values, etc) and their beliefs about the identities of others?  I guess to sum up all this, I feel I am having an easier time beginning to understand what is meant by Identity, Discourse, etc (largely thanks to Holland's examples) than understanding how we can actually read literature through the lens of identity or rhetoric.