1. Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a very complex and somewhat complicated text to get through in one sitting. What was your strategy for reading this book? Did you think about each passage and their possible meanings as if we were reading poetry?

2. Cha starts off Dictee with a quote from Sappho, a Greek lyric poet, in which she says “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” The language she uses in the text was not only thought provoking and powerful. but also unique from other forms of life writings we have read in class. What do you think is the purpose of writing the text in the language and style she chose to? Also, do you think the text would have a similar effect on readers if it had not been written in this way?

3. The sections of the Cha’s book was broken down into 9 sections, each starting off with a Greek muse and what they presided over. The connection between each Muse and the text that follows should have some relevance to what they represent. Do you think that Cha made the connections between the women she chose, their story/stories, and the Greek muses?

4. Cha’s work is an example of a text that resembles a life writing piece on collective memory. Using important figures such as Joan of Arc and Yu Guan Soon, along with accounts of herself and her mother, she was able to highlight not only their personal struggles, but also a struggle as a woman in a male dominated society. What do you think was her reasoning for presenting her life writing in this way? What power does collective memory have in addressing the lives of many in past, today, and future societies?

5. On page 32, Cha writes “To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppression, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction… to the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernible features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.” What does this quote say to you and the way you would respond to conversations about personal or shared experiences in life?

I hope you are enjoying Dictee…

For those of you who would like a bit more support getting into the text, or getting the swing of it, here’s a great reading guide, by Professor Viet Nguyen of USC:

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~vnguyen/dictee/dictee1.htm

If we consider the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to actually be a biography of Gertrude Stein, how does Stein construct herself in relation to Toklas, her “proximate other”? If we consider the book as a biography of Alice B. Toklas, how is her identity constructed in relation to Stein? Can the book be understood as really being about one or the other?

To what extent do we trust that this biography is written in Alice’s voice? How is this different from autobiography “As told to…” Certainly Stein and Toklas have a closer relationship and know each other better than Alex Haley and Malcolm X, but should we similarly examine each’s agendas in the telling of their times, the way we did for the Autobiography of Malcolm X?

The narrator Alice often reports Stein’s judgements about art and artists in their salon. What is the significance of reporting one’s opinions through the voice of one’s partner? Does Alice become a translator of Stein, as if the enigmatic and challenging Stein could be understood best through the eyes of somebody who loves her? Or are Alice’s identity and voice being borrowed by Stein as a vehicle for self-praise and opinions?

Stein and Toklas arguably take on social roles of Genius (Author) and Genius’s Wife (Secretary, Editor) (and Muse?) In what ways does this dynamic undermine and/or reinforce sexist gender roles? How does the indeterminacy of the author inform our understanding or blur the boundaries of the gender dynamic of their relationship?

from Gertrude Stein to Alice B. Toklas

To give some fun illumination to tonight’s reading, I will spend this post pouring over Phoebe Stein Davis’s 1999 article “Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”¹

Davis notes Stein’s active choice to situate The Autobiography within a genre that has traditionally been identified with cis male voices and masculinized “mastery of narrative control” (19). (Of course, in this class, I’m sure we’ll have lively conversations about whether The Autobiography can be considered as such: does simply calling something an autobiography thus make it one? What does the ‘auto’ in ‘autobiography’ mean if the author is not the person the text is about? Or is this text more about Gertrude than about Alice anyway, and perhaps the genre fits but the title does not? Can a couple’s biography written by one party in the voice of another be considered ‘autobiography’? These are lots of fun questions, but ultimately, I’m not sure that I’m personally too concerned with what we call it so much as how we read it. Then again, let’s be realistic: what we call it has a profound effect on how we read it… Back to the proverbial square one!)

Alright, I’m back from my digression: Stein chose to wrote in a deliberately non-experimental form that had traditionally been dominated by “Great” White Cis Men. Yet, writing in her lover’s voice, I would posit that Stein carried some of her experimentalism over into the auto/biographical form. Similar arguments have been taken up by many feminist critics, according to Davis, who cites many feminist critiques that highlight “Stein’s displacement of the autobiographical ‘I’ onto the lesbian couple demonstrates that The Autobiography presents a distinctly feminist notion of identity that, with its resistance to the idea of a unified, coherent self, anticipates postmodern notions of subjectivity” (19). (This seems to me to be a highly academic way of giving a shout out to The L Word’s “lesbian urge to merge”: for all its horrific racism, transphobia, biphobia, ableism, body-negativity and classism [need I go on?], The L Word does sometimes come out [pun intended] with great one-liners.)

I like the idea of resisting unified visions of self – I prefer messiness in identities, myself – which lends itself nicely to Davis’s arguments regarding Stein’s (inconsistent) resistance to coherent national identities. Yet, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the bristling that I’m sure many feminists feel upon reading a work written by one person in the autobiographical voice of a non-fictitious (and feminine) someone else: is this giving the subject voice, or taking away their agency to express their own selves? Or perhaps it’s not so clear cut: can it be transforming what ‘self’ itself means? Or doing a mix of all of the above at the same time? Does Stein’s revelation at the end of the book that she has been writing in Toklas’s voice take away the ‘bristling’ factor? How much difference does transparency make to our understanding of the text, especially if that transparency comes into play at such a temporally late but structurally prominent place (the very last paragraph of the book)?

Davis, as referenced above, framed her discussions of feminist and lesbian subjectivity as a precursor to her arguments about Stein’s national identity politics. Bemoaning the ways that scholars tend to focus on Stein’s aesthetically experimental writing rather than on the content of The Autobiography as an experimental text that unsettles national identity, Davis argues, “[w]hile it is clear that Stein invokes an essentialist view of nationality, her repeated destabilization of the essentialist view of national identities demonstrates that The Autobiography, as a popular book, remains dedicated to decentralizing and destabilizing the terms we use to define our identities” (18). In The Autobiography, while Stein does make essentialist statements about national identity, she also explains that “where one is from need not determine one’s national identity” (22). Davis argues that Stein’s book claims national identity as an unstable, constructed, and mobile characteristic. This may not appear to be the case, of course, as Stein discusses or refers to national identity on every page of the book. However, upon closer examination, Davis asserts that Stein’s positioning of national identities alongside the gaps in what she and Toklas do not remember suggests that narratives of national identity are called upon “in place of what we do not remember, and in place of the continuity we cannot grasp” (23). Stein’s constant offering up of multiple versions of various stories – granting no versions narrative supremacy – establishes a destabilization of constant truth that, Davis argues, leaks into her accounts of fluid (yet also defining) national identity.

I do understand where Davis is coming from regarding the fluidity Stein assigns to national identity. Davis highlights, for example, that when Stein relates her poring over U.S. Civil War pictures with Picasso, she says that he “became very spanish” (16). This surely suggests a context-based arousal of national identities, and suggests also that national identities come in degrees, as when Stein is described as “completely and entirely american”, as opposed to simply, ‘american’ (forgive me, I can’t find where in the text this was). I do not know that I am convinced that Stein succeeds in transgressing essentialist national identities, because – as Davis herself points out – Stein deploys these essentialist categorizations so often, but I am intrigued by the examples (referenced above) that draw out context and degree of identity. I am also intrigued by Davis’s closing argument that Stein deliberately deployed a “distinctly American aesthetic” for The Autobiography, and this demonstrates an understanding of national identity as a narrative choice (39). These kinds of ideas surely destabilize what we generally think of as ‘fixed, constant’ identities, whether those identities are sexual, gender, national, or ability-based. Different identities emerge in different contexts, and to different degrees. I love that Stein highlights this glorious messiness, even if only in a limited way.

A final contemplation on identity, The Autobiography, and today’s date: what does autobiography mean in masquerade? What does identity mean on Halloween? To what extent is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas an autobiography of Gertrude in masquerade as an autobiography of Alice? Can autobiography ever be anything except masquerade? And is that such a bad thing, after all?

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Proposal

Writing is an important skill for students to hone and develop in ELA Class. Often in middle school students are reluctant writers. They are overwhelmed by the idea of filling out lines and lines of loose-leaf paper. With the focus of education in the United States turning towards the Common Core, more rigorous standards are being set for writing. Students are expected to produce quality and quantity in their writing. Many of these prompts they are given in school and on these Common Core assessments lack relevance in their lives.

I propose for my project creating a series of lesson plans, which I will use in my writing class, that bring relevance to writing for my students.  I would like to create an “Alphabiography “ project, where my students can reflect on events in their lives that have impacted them. By writing about their own experiences the writing will be relevant, cathartic, and boost their self-efficacy when it comes to writing. They will be asked to reflect on the themes of loss, rejection, friendship, family, self-concept, and success. My theme throughout the year in Reading Class and Writing Class is perception, through the lens of race, class, and gender, and my students will be asked to specifically write about these three themes. I think this will be an extremely beneficial project for most of my students. Growing up in a poor urban community, they have dealt with a lot of pain and hardship even at the age of 13, and this could prove quite therapeutic.

I have begun researching different articles to help me make this project a success. They will be working on it over the span of 4 weeks and I would like to create a meaningful writing experience for them. Below is the research I have found beneficial thus far. I will continue to explore more avenues and read more about scriptotherapy.

Annotate Bibliography (Thus Far)

 Dyer, Daniel. “When Kids Are Free to Write.” The English Journal 65.5 (May, 1976):34-41. Web.

Dyer argues that teachers don’t always assign writing by sense, rather they choose the topics by how they sound. To examine the way students approach writing, Dyer conducted an experiment where he allowed his students to write whatever they wanted on Fridays. They could write anything from a journal entry to a fictional story, the choice was theirs. Dyer found that most of his students consistently chose to focus on Life Writing, particularly the female students. The majority of female students used life writing as a way of confronting reality. They wrote letters to Dyer and journal entries, which allowed them to open up. Their writing became a way to express their concerns about what they were going through. Life Writing in Dyer’s class gave students autonomy over their work. I would like my “Alphabiography” project to have the same effect on my students. I would like them to try to write down events that have caused them concern, and reflect on them. In the same way, I want them to be able to reflect on joyous events as well.

Ellen, Kathy. “History in the Making: Writing for Real Audiences.” English Journal 79.7 (1990): 72-89. Web.

Ellen’s article focuses on creating writing assignments that are purposeful and intended for a “real” audience. The idea of a real audience is an audience that benefits from the students writing. She touches upon various formats for writing such as letters, school-wide anthologies, interviews, and diary entries. The segment that is most beneficial to my “Alphabiography” project is one that focuses on familial writing. Ellen argues that writing about events that took place with family members helps students to find value in their writing. When students are able to look back on a familial event they begin to preserve value into their event, by recounting the story they are preserving a memory and strengthening the value and the bonds of family. This article inspired me to incorporate the theme of family into the assignment

Karpiak, Irene. “Writing Our Life: Adult Learning and Teaching through Autobiography.” Canadian Journal of University Continuing  

           Education 26.1 (Spring, 2000): 31-50. Web.

Karpiak’s article focuses on autobiography as a way to inform authors of the importance of the events in their life and the lessons learned from these events. She explains that the act of the writer recollecting on an impacting event and writing about it allows them to see things from a new perspective. It helps them to digest what has happened in their lives and what is currently going on in their lives. Writers create a “self-portrait” of themselves, which they view and analyze. Her argument supports my theory that students writing a form of autobiography will function as a vehicle for helping them make sense of what is going on in their lives, at a difficult point in middle school. Karpiak views the writing of autobiography as experiential and of value. She argues that autobiography asks you to draw meaning from events in your life, which poses as beneficial for students.

King, Laura A. “The Health Benefits of Writing about Life Goals.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27.7 (2001): 798-807.

King discusses in her article that writing has three major benefits, catharsis, insight, and self-regulation. She argues that writing about specific events in a person’s life helps them to gain insight into their emotions or reactions during the event, and then think about how their own mental state. Writing can offer an emotional release, where one recalls a certain event, comes to terms with it, and releases all negative emotions through the process of writing. She continues to explain that writing can even help a person to self-regulate their emotions and their attitude. While King’s main focus is the writing of goals, her theories of catharsis, insight, and self-regulation I find inspirational for how I want my students to view this project. I think it is important to share these theories behind writing and it’s benefits with the students prior to the project.

Klassen, Rob. “Writing in Early Adolescence: A Review of the Role of Self-Efficacy Beliefs.” Educational Psychology Review 14.2 (2002) 173-203. Web.

Klassen argues that life writing is important to help build confidence in the child, being that a lack of confidence can inhibit writing abilities. Children may have the ability to write well and articulate themselves, but a lack of confidence can hold them back and provide them with a dislike of writing. Students build self-efficacy through writing about life events, they are motivated, and they feel that they can be successful. He discusses Bruning and Horn’s theory on creating valued writing projects. They need to nurture practical beliefs about writing, create engagement through writing that is authentic, provide a supportive context, and create an positive emotional environment for writing. An “Alphabiography” project can fulfill all these criteria, and promote writing that is authentic.

 Project Inspiration! 

I came across this digitized text, originally published in 1908, during our class conversation on Wollstonecraft.  My curiosity was definitely piqued…we know Wollstonecraft and Imlay had a very tumultuous relationship–the love letters, as love letters tend to be, might be more on the flowery side but can also provide insight…

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL13563403M/The_love_letters_of_Mary_Wollstonecraft_to_Gilbert_Imlay