Week 1 & 2 Notes:
Reading 1: American Artifact notes with attention to description and discussion of Prown’s object analysis assignment:
- One must find potential in an object to uncover significant meaning
- Culturally potent objects seem to depend on linkage between the object and some fundamental human experience
- The most persistent object metaphors expressive of belief seem embedded in polarities (such as life/death, male/female, acceptance/rejection, security/danger)
- These polarities find material expression in a language of formal oppositions (such as smooth/rough, hot/cold, light/dark, light/heavy, clean/dirty)
- In searching out an object to interpret, these are factors to consider
- Thoroughly describe the object, paying attention to all aspects (material, spatial, temporal) and small details, but keep an eye on the big picture
- Material culture begins with a world of objects but takes place in a world of worlds
- working with materials means refer to them using language
- When we explain pictures, we only explain them as far as we have considered them under some verbal description
- Description is the bridge between the realm of material and that of concepts and ideas
- Avoiding all forms of verb to be will help make visible thematically-charged spatial and functional complexities otherwise flattened or obscured
- Description tells us how an image has opened itself up to interpretation, rather than what the visual image means
- The more self-conscious one becomes, the more complex one’s relationship to an object becomes
- Recognize the ways the object has created its effect
- Interpretive hypotheses, or questions about meaning, will flow organically out of our process of deduction
- Although your annotated bibliography doesn’t need to be a large list, it should represent the range of your inquiry
- Your proposed report should go beyond synopsis of others’ ideas to offer a persuasive argument with the claim regarding your objected (supported by evidence)
- Compose an interpretive analysis that presents perceptions generated from the exercises but made as a claim with references to the object and context (sources)
In class notes:
- Material culture includes every day objects, cultural objects, artifacts
- We study material culture because
- historic cultures may not have written sources
- they are all, or mostly, ruined
- we don’t understand the language
- what was written may have only represented the classes that were educated/rich enough to write (thus history would be erased)
- Haltman describes a general process that we will be doing (a how-to)
- Reading responses
- Preliminary research
- Supplemental reading
- could explore questions
- could address the problems
- could give examples
- How could different projects in this class map onto Haltman’s excerpt?
- Annotations can include
- supplemental text’s evidence for support
- events, people, or location links (ALWAYS cite)
- images
- unfamiliar terms’ definitions
- main points of the argument (rephrased)
- response to questions
- Submitting annotations
- attaching hashtags
- first, middle, last initial, rr, (number of reading response) 1A 1B
- submit link after the 2 hashtag search
Reading 2: Early Native Literacies in New England
- Mohegan word for painting is the same word for writing
- To the Mohegan, spirit and life is expressed through designs
- Multiple perspectives can arise from this basket, particularly depicting migration
Chapter 1: Defining Rhetoric
- Rhetoric is a persuasive language act
- Rhetorical argument: carefully presentation of a viewpoint or position on a topic and the giving of ideas, thoughts and opinions along w reasons for support
- All arguments include the presentation of a line of reasoning about a topic, thesis/hypothesis/claim, and the support of that reasoning w/evidence
- Types of argument:
- Makes a point
- Aims to persuade
- Tries to find common ground
- Aristotle’s Three Appeals
- Ethos: persuasion by means of credibility
- Pathos: persuasion by playing upon the listener’s emotion
- Logos: persuasion by using reasoning and evidence (deductive/inductive)
- Kairos: opportune moment for the argument
- time
- place
- audience
- topic
- Become part of the academic conversation by reading about it until you have a good grasp of the points authorities are debating, then integrating your ideas about the subject with ideas of others
- Burkean Parlor: to do academic research, we must enter the conversation of people who already know the topic and have discussed part or all of the topic before we are aware the topic exists
- Collaborative groups help students enter the academic conversation
- students who participate in collab group work tend to learn more, retain longer, and are more satisfied than those that don’t
- informal, one time groups
- ongoing small classroom groups
- task groups
- peer editing groups
- Why study rhetoric?
- provides useful framework for looking at the world
- less likely to be swayed by logical fallacies or ill-supported research
- interplay of ideas in argument that help us discover answers, try new things, communicate, etc
- writing rhetorically helps with memorization and connecting topics