Writing and Identity. The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing: Roz Ivanic. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998. ISBN: 90 272 1798 X (Eur) /1-556 19-323-8 (US)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/legacy.33.2.0336

Masculinity, Criminality, and Race: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Creole Boy Stories

The title story of Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899) tells of young Manuela's romantic quest to win the heart of Theophile, who has, as the story begins, temporarily transferred his affections to Claralie. Manuela recites nouvenas for his love and the story ends happily. Manuela weds Theophile; Claralie says that she "always preferred Leon"; and the narrator, attempting to answer the question of "how it happened," concludes with this sweet admonition: "St. Rocque knows, for he is a good saint, and if you believe in him and are true and good, and make your nouvenas with a clean heart, he will grant your wish." (1) It is the kind of moment that Gloria T. Hull, the scholar who resurrected interest in Dunbar-Nelson, finds hardest to swallow: in her view Dunbar-Nelson "buttresses the traditional and romantic view of women," and readers today find that "her plots often seem predictable, her situations hackneyed or melodramatic, her narrative style unsophisticated." (2) To this day, Hull's evaluation exercises a powerful hold on approaches to Dunbar-Nelson's work--even those that are otherwise commendatory. (3) It should give us pause, however, that "The Goodness of Saint Rocque" contradicts almost every assertion of its sweet concluding paragraph. The tone of religious piety is complicated by the fact that the "Wizened One" to whom Manuela goes for help appeals to the supernatural, giving her "one lil' charm" (9) to wear round her waist before making her nouvena. Since Claralie has already "mek' nouvena in St. Rocque [the church] fo' hees [Theophile's] love," it would appear that either St. Rocque fails to grant Claralie's wish or that the tie-breaker between the pair is the charm and not the nouvena. The narrator has already forestalled the possibility that Manuela deserves to win because she, not Claralie, is "true and good, and [makes] her nouvenas with a clean heart." Her primary motivations are jealousy, possessiveness, competitiveness, and pride. The "bitterness of spirit" (5) at the party where Theophile deserts Manuela is occasioned by the fact that "Theophile was Manuela's own especial property" and sharpened by the fact that he deserts her, the girl with "dark eyes," for "Claralie, blonde and petite" (3). The phrase in apposition implies that interwoven issues of race, class, and color play a central (though unacknowledged) part in Creole culture and in the struggle between the two girls. The tensions between the two finally erupt at the church of St. Rocque--whose patron saint looks for nouvenas made with a clean heart!--where the two exchange "murderous glances" (13). From this perspective, the insouciant final paragraph seems designed to provoke reflection on the ironic discrepancies in the story between various tonal registers. This essay argues in part that in The Goodness of St. Rocque Dunbar-Nelson constantly modulates between tonal registers, creating in the process what I call narrative strategies of "rhetorical diversion." That phrase is intended to suggest what is entertaining ("diverting") about her stories--an important consideration when a reputation for hackneyed romanticism has prevented a fuller appreciation of her work. More importantly, I use the phrase to denote the way Dunbar-Nelson typically juxtaposes or shifts rhetorical modes in such a way as to make acts of diversion and negotiation a constant feature of our interpretive experience. (4) This happens within stories, as when "St. Rocque" combines romantic material with hard-edged cultural analysis. It also occurs as readers move from, or look back from, one story to another, as we shall see when "St. Rocque" modulates to "Tony's Wife"--a tonal shift repeated in varying ways throughout the collection. An important effect is to engage readers in an ever-shifting series of decisions about tone and about the significance of tone. We must adjudicate, for example, between the blithe sweetness of "if you believe in him . …

"You . . . Could Never Be Mistaken": Reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Rhetorical Diversions in The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories

The surge of learners being immersed in computer game contexts for learning has instigated dialogue about the contextually appropriate collection of reliable and valid data to inform education-based decisions. The purpose of this article is to develop educational practitioners’ understanding of preliminary research work, and to inform educational researchers about design and reporting of preliminary research work, in the context of reported preliminary studies on Digital Game-Based Learning Interventions (DGBLIs). First a checklist of processes for the reporting of preliminary studies is provided. Second, a summary is offered of the characteristics of each type of preliminary study including the description, objectives, and methodology. Third, an example from peer-reviewed literature is identified of each type of preliminary study relevant to DGBLIs and conducted within the past five years. Evident from the examples selected, educational researchers and practitioners are best advised to recognize the characteristics of preliminary studies — pilot work, feasibility study, pilot study, pilot trial, and field test — to better inform DGBLIs before embarking on a full-scale study, and to meet the need of educational practitioners for concrete evidence about DGBLIs.

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Defining Preliminary Research for Digital Game-Based Learning Evaluation: Best Practices

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"These narratives of racial passing have risen from the dead": redefining racial passing in the twentieth and twenty-first century literary imagination

In recent years, critics have celebrated Caribbean theories of creoli­zation for their creative and protean approaches to identity. E.K. Brathwaite’s version of creolization and Wilson Harris’s “creative syncretism” (his term for cross-cultural exchanges) have been hailed as powerful critical tools in dismantling destructive binaries and harmful racial hierarchies within Caribbean literature.1 Similarly, Chris Bongie deploys Edouard Glissant’s understanding of creoliza­tion as a process of cross-cultural exchange to describe the limita­tions and possibilities of postcolonial theory. Bongie’s book, Islands and Exiles, is intended, he states, “quite simply to help further Glis­sant’s argument that ‘ours is a creolizing world’” (10). Indeed, H. Adlai Murdoch affirms the potential of Glissant’s theory in articulat­ing a relational identity vitally important to the Caribbean region (157–61). Even Peter Childs and Patrick Williams’s recent Introduc­tion to Post-Colonial Theory celebrates Caribbean creolization’...

Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's New Orleans Fiction

Difficulties with academic writing tasks, such as the literature review, impact students’ timely completion of graduate degrees. A better understanding of graduate students’ perceptions of writing the literature review could enable supervisors, administrators, service providers, and graduate students themselves to overcome these difficulties. This paper presents a case study of graduate students at a secondary campus of a Canadian research university. It describes survey data and results from focus groups conducted between 2014 and 2015 by communications faculty, writing centre staff, and librarians. The focus group participants were Master’s and Doctoral students, including students situated within one discipline and those in interdisciplinary programs. The questions focused on the students’ experiences of writing the literature review as well as the supports both accessed and desired. Data analysis revealed four themes: (a) literature review as a new and fundamental genre; (b) literature review for multiple purposes, in multiple forms, and during multiple stages of a graduate program; (c) difficulties with managing large amounts of information; and (d) various approaches and tools are used for research and writing. Using an academic literacies approach, the paper addresses implications for campus program development and writing centre interventions and furthers research into graduate students’ experiences of writing literature reviews.

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Writing the Literature Review: Graduate Student Experiences.

This exploratory study researches the experiences of Canadian graduate students as they pursue writing tasks for their degree. It also explores the supports currently utilized by such students and the need for additional supports. The research uses a case study design based on qualitative focus group interviews to provide detailed information regarding graduate students' perceived experiences with their academic writing tasks and available supports. The approach is informed by academic literacy theory. Graduate students who participated in this study identified a transition in voice, increased pressure to publish and professionalize, and misalignments between their own and supervisory and institutional expectations, which resulted in some interrogation of institutional norms. They utilized Writing Centre, online and supervisory supports, but called for additional ongoing and peer support. The study has implications for the development of new, collaborative and peer-based writing supports, as well as identifying future research areas related to interdisciplinary degrees.

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Graduate transitions: Canadian master's and PhD writing experiences

This paper describes a pilot blended learning format for a first-year genre-based Canadian composition course. It measures responses to the online learning materials and hybrid class schedule by comparing student writing skill perception questionnaires, teaching evaluation questionnaires, and written assignments for control and experimental groups. Findings suggest that a blended approach can offer flexibility for a wider range of learners, address larger class size concerns, and provide additional learning materials, all of which add options for composition delivery in the as-yet sparsely researched Canadian context.

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Complementary Learning: Piloting a Blended Format for Canadian Composition Courses.

Senior's poetry collection, Gardening in the Tropics, asserts the need for identity distinctions and dynamic exchanges, deploying the garden, in its ambivalent history as a space of colonial exclusion and postcolonial hybridity, as a figure for these processes. Senior both embraces and problematizes the rhizomatic and creolizing theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Edouard Glissant. ********** Gardening and cultivation are ambivalent acts within contemporary and postcolonial literatures. As a metaphor, gardening works both in relation to postcolonial theories of hybridity, diaspora and dissemi/nation, and in relation to colonial histories of conquest and the desire for pure origins. While, on the one hand, gardening can be a means to identity for migrant writers, on the other, it is profoundly imperialistic. Gardening can encourage hybridity and propagation and yet simultaneously it seeks to weed out indigenous populations perceived to be inappropriate. This ambivalence continues: while community and organic gardens function discursively as means to identity, industrialized crops have become one of the hottest issues worldwide for critics of globalization, who observe their negative effects on identity and local economies. In this ambivalence, the concept of the garden serves as a succinct metaphor for one of the major impasses within postcolonial identity politics: how can theory preserve a space for specific forms of identity while seeking to overcome the limitations of traditional identity categories through modelling processes of hybrid, cross-cultural exchange? Both Christopher Bongie and Peter Hallward explain that while postcolonial theory has sought to eliminate oppressive hierarchies of identity, concepts of nation, race, and ethnicity, rooted in colonial history continue to be essential in delineating and preserving difference (Bongie 11, Hallward xii). The garden, as I will use it in this essay, is a figure for regional affirmations of identity, as well as for fertile and often painful cross-cultural exchanges. As in any horticultural endeavour, the balance in transnational identity politics is between nurturing the growth of distinct forms and encouraging hybrid propagation. Olive Senior's 1994 poetry collection, Gardening in the Tropics, succinctly captures this double ambivalence. Senior writes on the ways in which gardening can become a form of relating to a new place or of establishing identity through understanding the place of origin, while also recalling historical displacement bound to the land (since her speakers are frequently revealed as descendants of plantation slaves). Similarly, the collection suggests the creative identity possibilities arising out of transplantation, as well as out of shifting locations and cultures, and points toward the losses associated with that process. In Gardening in the Tropics, the garden's ambivalence functions as a space to negotiate the complex exchanges between colonial, postcolonial, and global, and to describe the contradictory impulses within current theory toward identities grounded in regional and historical particularities and toward identities that are forever deferred by movements of transnational exchange. The rhizomatic garden is also used as a metaphor for identity politics in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Edouard Glissant, but the historical discourses and practices that underlie gardening in Olive Senior's poetry construct the metaphor as a far more ambivalent and conflicted process than even Deleuze acknowledges. Unlike these critics, Senior insists on the potentially tragic losses produced by negotiations of identity and place as well as the productive possibilities. Gardening in the Tropics is one of Senior's first works to combine her family history of slavery in the Caribbean with her migration to Canada in the early 1990s. While insisting that she remains "a conscious Caribbean person" (Allen-Agostini), Senior has been embraced by Canadian cultural institutions and now divides her time between Canada and Jamaica. …

Jordan Stouck

Papers

Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's New Orleans Fiction

Writing the Literature Review: Graduate Student Experiences.

Graduate transitions: Canadian master's and PhD writing experiences

Complementary Learning: Piloting a Blended Format for Canadian Composition Courses.

Gardening in the Diaspora: Place and Identity in Olive Senior's Poetry