Faculty Profile (In Progress)
AMY BLAIR’S ANSWERS:
1. What inspired you to teach English?
I had a transformative experience learning English at a summer program at Duke
University when I was in seventh grade. My instructor there, who was a graduate
student at the time, encouraged me to think about the professoriate as a career,
and that never really left me—even after a few detours into law, history, and
publishing. I’m fascinated by the ways people can see the same text in
profoundly different ways. How could someone walk away from, for example,
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby thinking it was a celebration of the American Dream,
and a validation of what Max Weber termed the “Protestant ethic”? These were not my
interpretations of the text, after all—though I did frequently find myself
attracted to Daisy’s fashion sense, and really wanted to live in her breezy
beach house. What personal, social, and historical impulses could bring a
reader, or large groups of readers, to embrace Gatsby as a period romance,
as opposed to a mordant critique of modern superficiality and American moral bankruptcy
—if the latter novel is what F. Scott Fitzgerald seems to have thought he was writing?
And how can I simultaneously find myself wanting to be Daisy while knowing intellectually
that she’s absolutely the wrong person to identify with in that story? Understanding
the workings of response, and being aware of the completely rational vagaries of response,
helps me as a teacher empower my students to take ownership of their own interaction with
texts, and to be reflective about the ways they perceive and react to the
world.
2. What brought you to Marquette?
My partner was working in Madison at the time, and I was applying for academic jobs
within commuting distance. I was incredibly lucky that Marquette needed someone
with my specialty and that they were good enough to hire me!
3. What is your position on campus?
I am an Associate Professor.
4. What research are you doing this semester while on leave?
I am working on a couple of projects related to fandom and reception studies. Both
of these projects explore the ways readers shape and are shaped by cultures of
reception, how they attempt to connect with other readers and with authors, and
how the increasing diversity of audiences led to attempts to constrain and
control reading practices. The first one is a cultural history of fan mail and
fanfiction from the mid-nineteenth century through the present in which I argue
that fan practices are as much a way of connecting with other fans as with the authors
and actors to whom the mail is addressed, though vicarious membership in fan circles and,
in the recent milieu of cyberfandom, through direct interaction with and witnessing of other fans’
writings. The second is much more inchoate still…but I am thinking about censorship as a
response to reception practices.
5. Why were you interested in this area of research?
I’ve told this story to my classes—when I read Little Women as a young girl I always
identified with Amy, even through I knew I was “supposed” to identify with
Jo (this is kind of like my Daisy story above…I have a long history of
“misreading” books). I have always been interested in the
ways people receive and transform texts differently, because of their
individualcircumstances and desires (my name was Amy, natch) or to fit their own
needs—French theorist Michel de Certeau calls this “reading as poaching.” My
first book looked at the ways one particular reading adviser in the early
20th century encouraged his audiences to approach “difficult” texts by
ignoring or eliding some of their more critical messages. I think this was
not so much a radical departure from practice, but rather a moment when
someone was very explicit in print about validating something people just
did (and do) all the time. And I think that the adaptation of texts is
another dimension of this. I read The House of Mirth as Wharton’s Portrait
of a Lady alternate-universe fanfiction. It’s a long tradition…and fan studies is
currently working with defining the boundaries of what counts as “fanfiction.”
I’m very interested in these debates, because I think a broader definition
validates a lot of practices that have long been maligned.
6. What do you plan to do with this research? Or what do you hope comes about
because of it?
I have an article under submission, and ultimately I think this will become a
book. I’m going to fold this research into my teaching in a 2000-level course
in the fall, and certainly into my future upper-division courses. I edit a
journal called Reception, and am using this term to reach out to other scholars
who are doing similar work on fan mail for a possible future special issue of the
journal.
Jenn Fishman’s answers
1. Which classes do you teach?
I'm a rhetoric and composition scholar, and at Marquette I teach first-year
English (FYE), various WINE (or ENG-W) courses, and 6840: Rhetoric and
Composition Theory, which is a graduate course for new FYE instructors. In
everything I teach, I look for ways students can learn about the histories of
what they are studying, and I try to give everyone chances to work with
different kinds of media. Beyond Marquette, I offer seminars and workshops on a
variety of subjects. This summer, for example, I'm looking forward to
co-teaching a week-long workshop about online writing for The Kenyon Review.
2. What types of leadership roles do you hold on campus, in the Milwaukee
community, or in your professional associations?
At Marquette, I'm proud to be a co-founder of Digital Marquette,
and I look forward to directing the FYE Program in a couple of years.
Beyond Marquette, I have held a number of national professional leadership roles.
For the past three years, I have co-chaired the inaugural Committee
on Undergraduate Research for the Conference on College Composition
and Communication, and I am the President Elect of the Coalition
of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition,
which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
3. What research are you doing this semester while on leave?
Last semester, I had funding through a grant from the Mellon Foundation to be in
residence at Kenyon College, where I have been conducting a research project
called Kenyon Writes. This semester, while I am on junior leave, I am continuing
to work with the data I collected while stoking the fires of my other projects,
which included editorial work on a writing research database known as REx
and The Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing. My short-term focus is on
drafting a couple of scholarly articles about my Kenyon research, and my long-term
goal is a related academic monograph (or single-authored book) about it.
4. Why were you interested in this area of research?
I have a long-standing interest in college writing, college writing research, and
Kenyon College. Not only am I a Kenyon alumna, but I am also a rhet-comp scholar
who has been involved in two other institution-based studies of college writing,
one at Stanford University and the other at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
As a result of my experiences, I have a somewhat unique perspective on the long
history of writing at Kenyon as well as the interviews and writing portfolios
recent Kenyon students have shared with me. I hope that by sifting through all
of the materials I have amassed and sharing my conclusions, I will be able to
contribute both to my field and to writing education at Marquette.
5. What do you plan to do with this research? Or what do you hope comes about
because of it?
Please see above.
Krista Ratcliffe’s Answers
1. What inspired you to teach English?
I loved to read and to write. And I had two really great English teachers in high
school who inspired me and encouraged me to go to college, which wasn't the norm
in the rural Indiana small town where I grew up.
2. What brought you to Marquette?
Well, all academic job searches are a bit of a lottery. The Marquette job was
advertised the year I went on the market. But that said, John and Mary McCabe
were instrumental in my taking this job. When I came for my campus visit, I
really liked all the faculty, staff and students I met. I really liked the
undergraduate program of literature and writing-intensive majors. Then on my
last evening, John and Mary took me to dinner, where they regaled me with not
just department stories but also personal stories of volunteer work. I was
particularly taken with Mary's work at the Sojourner Truth House, which led to
her becoming an honorary member of Women of the Wind (a women's motorcycle
group). After they dropped me off at the airport. I called a friend before I
boarded the plane and reported that I REALLY hoped Marquette would offer me the
job because these were people I wanted to "live with" for the next few
decades.
3. What is your position on campus?
I am a Professor of English and Chair of the English Department.
4. Which classes do you teach?
I regularly teach courses in writing (3210) and rhetorical theory (4220). Once I'm
no longer chair, I look forward to teaching women's literature again, and I am
also looking forward to teaching a first-year honors course team taught with a
Theology professor.
5. What types of leadership roles do you hold on campus, in the Milwaukee
community, or in your professional associations?
Well, as I mentioned, I'm chair of the department. (Why don't you scan the first page
of my attached c-v and see what you'd like to mention about my chair
position--one thing, though: these accomplishments were done in concert with a
talented faculty; I couldn't have done any of them alone.)
Nationally, I'm currently the immediate past president of the Rhetoric Society of America. I
have either chaired or served on lots of national committees. (Again, why don't
you scan my attached c-v under committee work and see what you'd like to
mention).
6. What research are you doing this semester while on leave?
I am finishing an edited collection entitled Haunting Whitne
k on a single-authored book currently entitled _Rhetorics of the Blood
Trope_. In addition, I'm writing three presentations on rhetorical listening to
be delivered this spring: one for a visiting lecture at the U of New Mexico, one
for an invited talk at a conference at the U of Maryland, and one for a luncheon
keynote addresss at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in San Antonio.
This work n rhetorical listening extends the theory of rhetorical listening,
which I wrote about in my book _Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender,
Whiteness_. The book focuses on how we can communicate better via troubled
identifications across differences of gender and race (and I hope readers can
transfer the theory/tactics to other areas of difference too). So this semester
I am writing presentations about how cultural logics function as enthymemes (and
I received a Summer Faculty Fellowship to turn this presentation into a
scholarly journal article during July and August).
What does it mean to say cultural logics function as enthymemes? Well, cultural
logics are ways of reasoning common to groups of people; for example, while not
all Republicans reason identically, there is common ground that makes it fairly
easy to identify Republican discourses. So if you are talking politics with
someone you just met, you might say, "You sound like a Republican," and you
reach that conclusion because there are certain ways of reasoning (about taxes,
self-determination, etc.) that U.S. culture at this moment associates with
Republicans. In this situation, you are using the tactic of the enthymeme (often
unconsciously!). Aristotle says that the best communicators know how to analyze
and produce enthymemes, which are, in a sense, rhetorical syllogisms. In
philosophy, syllogisms are deductive tactics that require strict algebraic
relations between a major premise, minor premise and conclusion. In rhetoric,
enthymemes are claims made where parts of the syllogism are missing, the
assumption being that audiences will fill in the missing parts. For instance, if
it starts to rain and you say, "Please shut the window," I will be persuaded to
do so without your having to set the argument up syllogistically via "Windows
should be closed when it rains. It is now raining. Therefore, the window should
be closed." Instead you simply say, "Shut the window," and I supply the missing
parts and act accordingly (shut the window) because it seems the logical thing
to do.
Cultural logics, or ways of reasoning common to groups, seem as logical and "apparent" as
the "Please shut the window" command. But cultural logics are constructed ways
of reasoning that change over time and place. And they affect how sentence
"meanings" are produced and interpreted. For instance, if I say, "Race matters"
and a person functioning within a white supremacist cultural logic hears me,
he/she would say, "Yes, it does." Likewise, if I say, "Race matters" and a
person functioning within a critical race cultural logic hears me, he/she would
also say, "Yes, it does." Same claim, same responses BUT very different
meanings. The white supremacist would be agreeing that "yes race matters" and
then enthymemically inserting his/her own racist reasoning "because there's a
hierarchy of races, with white on top, that must be preserved socially, legally,
etc."; the critical race theorist would be agreeing that "yes race matters" and
then enthymemically inserting his/her own anti-racist reasoning "because it's a
socially constructed category that has been used to oppress people and we must
make its functions visible so that we can dismantle such oppression." I find
such play with claims and cultural logics fascinating.
7. Why were you interested in this area of research?
I am interested in rhetoric, i.e., how people are socialized by language to have
certain attitudes and perform certain actions as well as how we use language to
affect our attitudes and actions and, thus, our realities.
8. What do you plan to do with this research? Or what do you hope comes about
because of it?
Well, the edited collection will be a book (I hope by next year). The blood
trope manuscript will be a book (probably a few years off). The presentations
will be an article (by the end of the summer). I hope all this information
informs how teachers think about rhetoric and talk about it with their students
... and then informs how those students view the world and act within it.