ISMLL Warren 245: The Race Game

Upon reading this essay and all its research, its quotes, its jargon and its stance on the racial issue in literary theory, all I have say is duh. What I mean by duh is that, to me, it seems obvious what he is speaking of: the idea of what role race plays in literary theory and the emphasis it should and does take. He quotes Du Bois, he quotes men and women of African American descent, but he never really comes out and argues his premise: “I seek to account for and critique the appeal of race to literary critics over the past two decades and to suggest reasons we ought to modify or resist aspects of that appeal” (Warren 245). Instead, he lists, chronologically, how the current version of the debate started with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

What he hints at, but never actually says, is that the current debate over race has to do with extremities. What I mean by this is that at one point the prevailing thought in academia was that race is a fact of biology and since facts are facts, there was no use in arguing about it. But once that view changed and race was seen as a “social construction,” the pendulum swung the other way and academia began to focus solely on the race element (Warren 245). So the pendulum swing never has centered and continues to yo-yo as the realm of academia has given race cart blanche in the realm of study. I think by negating this aspect Warren places the race debacle in a lack of social context: the pendulum swing only occurred after African American scholarship was deemed viable: i.e. the journal Modernism/Modernity first two published volumes were race themed.

Warren also does not account for how his argument fits or is a link to this debacle. As he is arguing for the modification of race in literary criticism, he is playing into the same mess he is critiquing. This irony is surprisingly left out of his argument. His argument uses page after page of evidence to support his call to modify the current state of race in literary criticism yet he fails to see how it plays right back into that same. Does his critique apply to him? Why Doesn’t he account for it? No. And so the debate continues.

TSIS. Ting together a paper

Fantastically simple and obvious as it sounds, it amazes me that writing so that there is such a thing as interconnectedness in my writing would be a given. But I keep forgetting that this book is an elementary overview of the how to’s and the why’s of a cogent argument.

I think that most of us in this class have been taught or learned these tricks from trial and error. The thing is I never a formal declaration in front me showing the step by step process which would make my writing better. It’s nice to put a proverbial face on the things I’ve been doing. I never thought about how I was accomplishing a well thought out argument, if it was that to begin with, it was just that I did it.

TSIS "So what? Who Cares?"

Graff and Birkenstein border on redundancy chapter seven’s “who cares” and the “so what” factor. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that every chapter not only has these elements somewhere imbedded within them, but they devote a whole chapter to the subject. But why does this? It can’t be a random thing.

I’ve been trying to figure out why and it occurred to me that without “who cares” and “so what” my academic papers would be, at best, verbose, esoteric, glorified newspaper articles that one would find in an encyclopedia. It seems that the premises found in chapter seven is what gives academic writing the girth and meaning akin to poetry and fiction. The difference being, I believe, that the function of poetry and fiction is to say something about the human condition, say something about life, to relay a story, allowing the reader, largely, to come up with how that is accomplished. While academic writing is more transparent and is largely grounded in how and why the analytical elements of fiction and poetry work, how they apply to this what-ever thing I’m applying it too. This is the only way I could make sense of why they keep skirting these premises.