Silence: The Rhetorics of Class, Gender, Culture and Religion

Anne Dalke, English 228,        Bryn Mawr College, Fall 2012        TTh 2:15-3:45, English House I        Our On-Line Conversation        This class is part of a cluster of three courses in a new        360° called Women in Walled Communities:       Silence, Voice, Vision, which focuses on the        constraints and agency of individual actors in the        institutional settings of women's colleges and prisons.        “Every sentence is a prison” (Emerson).         "That silence …          It’s a meadow…          Silence is a game of dodgeball @ dusk…          Silence is the Old city of partition and quarter…"          (Robin Becker, “Against Silence”)          Notes Towards Class Discussion          Protected Reading File

“Like the zero in mathematics, silence is an absence with a function, and a rhetorical one @ that” (Cheryl Glenn, Unpoken:  A Rhetoric of Silence, 2004). This English course will consider silence as a rhetorical art and political act, an imaginative space and expressive power that can serve many functions, including that of opening new possibilities among us. We will share our own experiences of silence, re-thinking them through the lenses of how it is explained in philosophy, enacted in classrooms, and performed by various genders, cultures and religions. 

Taking as our point of departure Elizabeth Ellsworth’s query, “What kind of educational project would redefine the silence of the unknowable, freeing it from…’Absence, Lack, and Fear,’ and make of that silence ‘a language of its own that changes the nature and direction of speech itself?” we will situate ourselves on the margins of conventional discourse, on the edges of language, to explore a conceptual understanding of silence as a source of active transformation, a form of active resistance that challenges how social meaning is made. Acknowledging the recalcitrance and contingency of the medium of language, the disparity between what is experienced and what it is possible to say, we will explore silence as an alternative space to think, feel, dream and observe. Possible theoretical positions (and practices deriving therefrom) will be drawn from philosophy, linguistics, cultural studies, feminist inquiry and religious thought; concrete applications will draw on a variety of cultural expressions, including the visual language of the Deaf.

I. Experiencing, Introducing, Defining, Listening, Looking....

Day 1 (T, Sept. 4): Listening to Silence
go outside for 15 minutes: be silent. observe. write. return. share (something)
Wendell Barry, The Silence
Simon and Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence
John Cage, 4’33”

Day 2 (Th, Sept. 6): Visualizing Silence
before class, look @
Edvard Munch, "The Scream,"
The Silent Scream, The Silent Scream, The Silent Scream and The Silence Supercut
watch a silent film: Phantom of the Opera (1925), Nosferatu (1922), or ....?
by classtime: register for a Serendip account, and upload your
own "visualization (or vocalization?) of silence" on our course forum.

Please return to our group conversation on Serendip by 5 p.m. every
Wednesday and Sunday evening to make another posting: one "stand-
alone" and one in response to your classmates' reflections....

5 p.m. Sun, Sept. 9: Web event #1 (3 pp.), beginning with your own,
or a classmate's, or another visualization/vocalization of silence,
reflect on your own experiences of silencing and being silenced.
When, where and why do you think has this happened?

I. Silence In Class

One can make a strategy of taking away from [students] the authority of their marginality .... To be out is really to be in – inside the realm of the visible, the speakable, the culturally intelligible” ... engaging in ... dialogue about “personal” or “private” aspects of yourself ... can make you TOO easy to understand ... maintaining the liminal ... position ... means that you do not become “culturally intelligible”. You can’t be mainstreamed; your deviance cannot be absorbed ...“cannot be contained” (Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine)

We will begin and end each classtime with five minutes of shared silence.
Please sign up, twice, for taking your turn @ structuring this space.

Day 3 (T, Sept. 11): Writing Silence
Peter Elbow, “Silence:  A Collage.” Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 173-183.

Emily Dickinson's poems on silence: #407, 633, 932, 1473, 1681, 1700, 1750 ...

Day 4 (Th, Sept. 13): Talking Silence
Jane Tompkins, "Talking in Class" and "The Cloister and the Heart." A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. Reading, Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1996. 62-65, 207-223 (in our password protected file).

Anne Dalke, “Silence is so Windowful: Class as Antechamber.” Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach: Meditations on the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 2002 (in our password protected file).

Day 5 (T, Sept. 18): On Being Silenced
Lisa Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children." Harvard Educational Review 58, 3 (August 1988): 280-298.

Heejung S. Kim and Hazel Rose Markus. "Speech and Silence; an Analysis of the Cultural Practice of Talking," OR Greg Dimitriadis, "Popular Culture, Pedagogy and Urban Youth: Beyond Silenced Voices." In MIchelle Fine and Lois Weis, Eds. Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools. Rev. New Paltz: State University of New York Press, 2005. 181-196, 233-250.

Day 6 (Th, Sept. 20): Margaret Price, Chapter 1. "Listening to the Subject of Mental Disability: Intersections of Academic and Medical Discourses." Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 25-57 (in our password protected file).

5 p.m. Sun, Sept. 23: Web event #2 (3 pp.)-- "Talk back" to your first essay, to those of others in the class, and to our class-wide discussions: how would you now visualize-and-vocalize silence? How might you now tell the story of your own and others’ silences in the classroom?

II. Silencing Culture

… a being who could not renounce saying many things would be incapable of speaking…Each people leaves some things unsaid, to be able to say others…any given silence has its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound (Ortega y Gasset).

Day 7 (T, Sept. 25): Doris Sommer, "Advertencia/Warning" and "No Secrets for Rigoberta." Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ix-xv, 115-137 (in our password protected file).

I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Second Edition. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, ed. and Ann Wright, trans.  1983; rpt. Brooklyn: Verso, 2010. 320 pp.

Day 8 (Th, Sept. 27): I, Rigoberta Menchu, continued...

Day 9 (T, Oct. 2): John Edgar Wideman, "In Praise of Silence" and "The Silence of Thelonious Monk." Callaloo 22, 3 (Summer 1999): 547-549, 550-557.
 
Thelonious Monk 'Round Midnight (Piano Solo).

Day 10 (Th. Oct. 4):   Yves-Charles Grandjeat. "'These Strange Dizzy Pauses:' Silence as Common Ground in J.E. Wideman's Texts." Callaloo 22, 3 (Summer 1999): 685-694.

John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers. New York: Vintage, 1995. 226 pp.

Day 11 (T, Oct. 9): Brothers and Keepers, continued....

Day 12 (Th, Oct. 11): Rives Deaf Jam.

Clayton Valli, "Deaf World" and "Hands"; Ella Mae Lentz, "Eye Music"; Flying Words Project, "I am Ordered now to Talk" and "Poetry Around the World."

Brenda Jo Brueggeman, "Words Another Way: Of Presence, Vision, Silence, and Politics in Sign Language Poetry." Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002. 201-236 (in our password protected file).

FALL BREAK (Oct. 12-21)

8 p.m. Sun (Oct. 21): Mid-semester evaluation: post on-line a paragraph or two of reflections on how we're doing in learning together: what's working? What needs working on? What should we keep, of our shared practices? What might we change up? Consider form as well as content, and reflect on how "action-oriented" we are/you want us to be....

Day 13 (T, Oct. 23):  Jonathan Foer, libretto, Seven Attempted Escapes from Silence

Karim Haddad, First Attempted Escape From Silence: Tunnels

Christine Sun Kim, Is Unlearning Sound Etiquette

Day 14 (Th, Oct. 25): Joint meeting with Christine Sun Kim and
Kristin Lindgren's HC class, Portraits of Disability and Difference

6-8 p.m. Fri, Oct. 26, opening @ Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, HC including Christine’s performance/installation

Sun, Oct. 28: Web event #3 (3 pp.)--What is your understanding now of cultural variations in the understanding of silence? What performative form might best convey some of your understanding of that variation? (Make a storyboard for a film, begin a script for a theater piece, sketch out an interactive performance piece, or...?)

III. Engendering Silence

“These are not natural silences, that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; they frost comes premature. This book is about such silences. It is concerned with the relationship of circumstances—including class, color, sex; the times, climate into which one is born—to the creation of literature…. A passion and a purpose inform its pages:…hatred for all that, societally rooted…slows, impairs, silences writers (Tillie Olsen, Silences).

Day 15 (T, Oct. 30): Tillie Olsen, “Silences in Literature" and "Silences: Its Varieties." Silences. New York: Dell, 1978. 6-21, 142-151 (in our password protected file).

Day 16 (Th, Nov. 1): Michelle Balaev, "Trends in Literary Trauma Theory." Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature. June 1, 2008.

Day 17 (T, Nov. 6):   Adrienne Rich, "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying." 1975; rpt. On Lies, Secrets and Silence, 1979. 185-194 (in our password protected file).

Wendy Brown. "Chapter 5: Freedom's Silences." Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 83-97.

Day 18 (Th, Nov. 8): Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman” and (in our password protected file) “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” Woman Warrior: Memoirs of A Girlhood Among Ghosts, 1976. 3-19, 189-243.

Day 19 (T, Nov. 13): Anne Dalke, "'On Behalf of the Standard of Silence': The American Female Modernists and the Powers of Restraint." Soundings: An Interdiscipinary Journal 78, 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1995): 501-519 (in our password protected file).

Days 20-21 (Th, Nov. 15-T, Nov. 20): Gayl Jones, Eva's Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. 186 pp.

5 p.m. Wed, Nov. 21: Web event #4 (3 pp.)--Explore your current understanding now of gendered silences, by carefully and closely reading a literary text in which they are present.

Thankgiving Break (Th, Nov. 22)

V. Practicing Silence

"Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried. Whatever we have words for, that is already dead in our hearts. In all talk there is a grain of contempt" (Frederick Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols).

Day 22 (T, Nov. 27): Sister Linda-Susan Beard will join us for class (?)

Ambrose Wathen. Silence: The Meaning of Silence in the Rule of St. Benedict. Washington: Cistercian Publications, 1973.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. La Respuesta/The Response. 1690; Electra Arenal and Amanda Powell, eds. and trans. New York: Feminist Press, 1994. 39-105 (in our password protected file).

Day 23 (Th, Nov. 29): Caroline Stephen, “On Worship,” Quaker Strongholds, 1890. Rpt.

George Kalamaras. "Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension." Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence. State University of New York Press, 1994. 1-12 (in our password protected file).

Day 24 (T, Dec. 4):

Day 25 (Th, Dec. 6):

V. FINAL "TEACH-INS"

My father used to say,
"Superior people ...sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint." (Marianne Moore, "Silence")

Days 26-27 (T, Dec. 11-Th, Dec. 13): sharing with the larger community what we have been learning [drawing on the forms of Theater of the Oppressed....?]

12:30, Fri, Dec. 20: Final Web event -- What is your understanding now of silence, voice and vision? How can you represent these understandings aurally, verbally and visually?

Anne's Reading Notes

To be considered for this 360°, students must preregister and submit this questionnaire:
https://brynmawr.wufoo.com/forms/360a-women-in-walled-communities/