Cultural Learnings... for Make Benefit

Although I’ve read Pratt many times before, I was especially struck with time around with the notion of heterogeneous reception—i.e., that contact-zone texts are differently understood and interpreted by readers and listeners. That idea is one that our other authors don’t acknowledge or perhaps even get—especially (oddly enough) Robert Kaplan, the granddaddy of contrastic rhetoric, who even uses the words “deviance” and “deviant” to describe “other” discourses. (Even Panetta does, once, in her intro essay.) Both too explicitly stand by the principle that all students need to write standard academic prose in order to succeed—without acknowledging that in fact academic discourse itself is variable.

Just look at this set of readings for example. Notice Pratt’s graceful introduction with its “digressive” idea about her son learning everything he ever needed to know from baseball cards—a point she never gets back to explicitly. And unlike Pratt’s essay, Kaplan’s is broken up with headings and sub-headings—I can see this as a PowerPoint presentation. Ditto Panetta. Then there’s the Holliday resource book: a UK product that I still have trouble understanding: in part lexical (I always stumble on the word “disciplines” and I still don’t get the way this book is laid out with its A Theme, B Something Else, C Whatever. [Do stand by: the next two readings from Holliday are much meatier than the one we had this week.]

But back to heterogeneous reception: Panetta gives the two examples of “the progress report” on pp. 10-11—and while she had high praise for the second version, I thought it was wildly inappropriate: way too chatty and email-ish. The other one, which Panetta diss-ed, I was came closer to the mark for the genre, although not self-promoting enough. I had some of the same issues with the vignettes in the Holliday book, especially the first one about the Iranian woman, Parisia. When her colleagues praise her work with “Well done!” she found that patronizing—and Holliday et al agreed with her. I didn’t. Heterogeneous reception.

All this got me thinking about Borat and the wildly different receptions/understandings of the movie… as well as Sacha Baron Cohen’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes the other night…which I think we’ll talk about further on Monday during class.