"Inventing the University" by David Bartholomae – Flashcards

“The students have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily and comfortably one with their audience, as though they were members of the academy, or historians or anthropologists or economists; they have to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language, finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline” (511)

“They must learn to speak our language. Or they must dare to speak it, or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is ‘learned'” (511-512).

The university, however, is the place where ‘common’ wisdom is only of negative value; it is something to work against. The movement toward a more specialized discourse begins (or perhaps, best begins) when a student can both define a position of privilege, a position that sets him against a ‘common’ discourse, and when he can work self-consciously, critically, against not only the ‘common’ code but his own” (521).

***GEE Mushfaking

“I am arguing…that such sentences fall apart not because the writer lacks the necessary syntax to glue the pieces together but because he lacks the full statement within which these key words are already operating. While writing, and in the thrust of his need to complete the sentence, he has the key words but not the utterance. (And to recover the utterance, I suspect, he will need to do more than revise the sentence.) The invisible conventions, the prepared phrases remain too distant for the statement to be completed. The writer must get inside of a discourse he can only partially imagine. The act of constructing a sentence, then, becomes something like an act of transcription, where the voice on the tape unexpectedly fades away and becomes inaudible” (523)

Convention of language forming a discourse

An enabling fiction that allows a student to dramatize his experience where he can speak to us as a companion (513)

Forgetting to speak through the voice of authority, specific to the discourse

“It is very hard for them to rake on the role—the voice, the person—of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. They slip, then into the more immediately available and realizable voice of authority, the voice of a teacher giving a lesson or the voice of a parent lecturing at the dinner table”(513).

“fail[ure] to address the central problem of academic writing, where students must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows Pittsburgh or “To His Coy Mistress” better than they do” whether it is truew or not (516

Special vocabulary
Special system of presentation
Interpretive scheme (or a set of commonplaces) (513)

A culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration” (514).

“provide a point of reference and a set of ‘prearticulated’ explanations that are readily available to organize and interpret experience” (514).

“‘controlling ideas’ of our composition textbooks, textbooks that not only insist upon a set form of expository writing but a set view of public life” (514).

“determines a system of interpretation that can be used to ‘place’ an example within a standard system of belief” (519).

“either speak to us in our terms—in the privileged language of university discourse—or, in default (or in defiance), he can speak to us as though we were children, offering us the wisdom of experience” (514)
***Five Dollar

The writer locates himself in a “setting” “that is finally, finally, beyond him, not his own, and not available to his immediate procedures for inventing and arranging text” (514)

“writer who has lost himself in the discourse of his readers” (514).

“Students…are not so much trapped in a private language as they are shut out from the privileged languages of public life, a language they are aware of but cannot control” (515).

“To speak with authority student writers have not only to speak in another’s voice but through another’s ‘code’; and they not only have to do this, they have to speak in the voice and through the codes of those with power and wisdom; and they not only have to do this, they have to do it before they know what they are doing, before they have a project to participate in and before, at least in terms of our disciplines, they have anything to say” (521).

“interior monologue of a writer thinking and talking to himself” (514).

Writing for “how a reader will respond to a text” (514).

that at some ‘stage’ in the process of composing an essay a writer’s ideas or motives must be tailored to the needs and expectations of his audience” (515).

A writer “has to anticipate and acknowledge his readers’ assumptions and biases. He must begin with ‘common points of departure’ before introducing new or controversial arguments” (515)

“an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity”

Role writers must imagine in order to write to established and powerful discourse (516)
***GEE Mushfaking

Assuming privilege without having any to locate oneself within the discourse of a particular community, this “becomes more a matter of imitation or parody than a matter of invention or discovery” (516).

“Our colleges and universities, by and large, have failed to involve basic writing students in scholarly projects, projects that would allow them to act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise. Much of the written work students do is test-taking, report or summary, work that places them outside the working discourse, where they can do its work and participate in a common enterprise” (517)

“I was not looking to see how the writer might represent the skills demanded by a neutral language ( a language whose key features were paragraphs, topic sentences, transitions, and the like—features of a clear and orderly mind). I was looking to see what happened when a writer entered a language to locate himself (a textual self) and his subject, and I was looking to see how, once entered, that language made or unmade the writer” (518).

Follows rule and guidelines. (518)

Locates himself and experience in relation to the commonplace regardless of whether it is true or not (518)

“Appropriation of status for himself ” (519)

“The power of a commonplace to determine the meaning of an example” (519)

The ‘I’ of this text…is located in a conventional rhetoric of the self that turns imagination into origination (I made it), that argues an ethic of production ( I made it and it is mine), and that argues a tight scheme of intention (I made it because I decided to make it. The rhetoric seems invisible because it is so common. This ‘I’ (the maker is also located in a version of history that dominates classroom accounts of history. It is an example of the ‘Great Man’ theory” (520)

“The story of appropriation becomes a narrative of courage and conquest. The writer was able to write a story when he was able to imagine himself in that discourse. Getting him out of it will be a difficult matter indeed” (520).

a 19th-century idea according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of “great men”, or heroes; highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or political skill utilized their power in a way that had a decisive historical impact.

Successful essay

“Notice the specialized vocabulary, but also the way in which the text continually refers to its own language and to the language of others” (520).

“Its style is difficult, highly qualified. It relies on quotation marks and parody to set off the language and attitudes that belong to the discourse (or discourses) it would reject, that it would not take as its own proper location” (521).

“This approach to the problems of the basic writer ignores the degree to which error is not a constant feature but a marker in the development of a writer. Students who can write reasonably correct narratives may fall to pieces when faced with more unfamiliar assignments” (522).