English 585: Your Assigned Readings (Week One)

YOUR ASSIGNED READINGS: Each week, you should make some use of our assigned readings in your reponse(s) to the Forum. In my weekly prompts, I may or may not mention our assigned readings directly. However, those readings most definitely provide the backdrop for our conversation, so you should take them up in some way at some point in one or more of your responses. In other words, part of what you’re doing in the Forums is demonstrating you’ve read the assigned materials. :). We’re/you’re doing more than “proving” you’ve read, of course. YOUR FORUMS ARE CONVERSATIONS NOT TESTS. Still, your readings are important to our work together this term. Otherwise, why would I assign them. 

This week’s Forums are good examples of this. None of the formal prompts explicitly reference this week’s required reading. However, the ideas presented most certainly benefit from and build upon the ideas offered in these two articles. 

• COUNTERSTORY: Aja Y. Martinez’s “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory” (in Composition Studies, 2014) lays the groundwork for a semester-long project that responds to Dr. Martinez’s call. Her “Plea” provides a theoretical framework for our work together over the coming weeks AND a model for us (in FORM AND GENRE, to call back the formal title of English 585 as listed in our course catalog). 
• THE GREENVILLE SIGN: Paul Studevant’s “Black and White with Shades of Gray: The Greenville Sign” (2004) offers a detailed history on one path through which we’ll be taking up this multivalent call for counterstory across the next several weeks. Throughout, we ask who controls the narrative? To take up the framing Martinez articulates, we might ask ourselves what’s the “stock story” about what that sign means? The historian who wrote this article seems to fall into the trap set by the stock story or dominant narrative a few times, despite his regular attempts to do otherwise. See if you can spot where (hint: arguments based on what people say something means–or does NOT mean–do not form a viable basis for “truth”–again, who controls the narrative? Just because some people say (even if that SOME people ends up being a rather LOT of people) “that’s not what the sign means” and/or “just look White up in the dictionary” doesn’t mean that’s so. No individual can ever prove what something MEANS because words have meaning in their use and effect not in and of themselves. You hear that today a lot, yeah? How many times have we heard someone say they didn’t MEAN anything bad when they told a young woman they didn’t know to “smile” because “you’re such a pretty girl” (and “pretty girl’s” smile?). This clueless man will likely say something that sounds vaguely similar to what people who defend the Greenville Sign have said–“I was just being friendly when I told her to smile” (or “White” just means “friendly”). Need I say more? If interested, you might try Googling “Why men should stop telling women to smile.” The Internet has plenty to say on that front.