Shadow |
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| back to David's homepage | This "Shadow" is a page that shadows other pages in the website, hovering around them and explicating links among the other pages. I find there are many places in essays I've written, or syllabuses I've developed, where the subject I'm exploring bears implications for the subject of some other essay or syllabus. And there are many places where the subject I'm developing could be usefully elaborated by material from some other essay or syllabus. When I find places like that I build a link from one page to the other--except that the link passes through the Shadow where there is a brief comment articulating the meaning of the link. |
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Men's and Women's Speech in College Classrooms (in "learning and Training") Puritan "Verbal Hygiene" (in "Dubious American Ideal") Paracollege
"Rhetorical Theory" (in "By Chance and By Design")
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Gender:
Speech and Silence
Repeatedly in my syllabuses and essays I turn to questions about audibility and validity in speaking: who gets to speak? Whose speech is heard? Whose speech is counted as reliable? In a series of publications, the English socio-linguist and feminist Deborah Cameron develops the idea of "verbal hygiene"—or instructions to women on proper speech. Although I learned that wonderful phrase only recently, thinking about “verbal hygiene” has motivated my writing about several subjects, including (1) the different experiences of women and men within the structures and expectations of college classrooms; (2) the function of witch trials to silence women; and (3) the commitment of the St. Olaf Paracollege to validate student voices. |
| Links:
Paracollege "Metaphysical Theory" (in "By Chance and By Design" Witches' Disruptive Powers (in "Witch Powers as Rhetorical Device") |
“Order,”
the “Other,” “Femininity”
On many occasions my essays address the propensity of social and intellectual orders to represent their own authenticity as "masculine," and to represent any perceived threat to order as "feminine." Themes of order and its authority; the other that eludes any authoritative order; and the gendered representation of these two appear in discussions of the metaphysics implied in Paracollege teaching practices, and in discussions of certain witch hunters claims that witches violated cosmic, civil, and bodily integrities. |