New book in the former native speaker's library

Ong, Iok-tek. Taiwan: A History of Agonies. Trans. Shimamura Yasuharu. Ed. Ong Meiri. Taipei: Avanguard, 2015.

I probably won't get around to reading this until summer vacation, but it's high on my list. I found out about its English publication through a book review by Jerome Keating published in the Taipei Times, Feb. 25, 2016. Keating writes,

"Ong’s book is for those researching Taiwanese consciousness post-WWII. What makes it unusual is not just the historical content, much of which can now be found in other contemporary works, but the realization that awareness of Taiwan’s history and identity had reached a state of maturity in Japan by 1964."

Upgrade

Just found out today that as of the next academic year (2016-2017), I'll be a Senior Lecturer. As I told a colleague, this mainly means I'll have to order a whole new set of business cards....

Well, and the fact that I have a new title. One that sounds kind of cool (if I were in the UK). A couple of years ago I was chatting on Facebook with folks about the term "non-tenure track" and how it defined us in terms of what we aren't. We tossed back and forth some possible alternative titles. I suggested "reader" would be most apropos, considering that reading is most of what I do as a writing instructor...

[Update, 6/2/16: Now they've decided to change our titles from "lecturer" to "teaching professor." So I'll be an Associate Teaching Professor. (Good thing I hadn't already ordered new business cards...)]

Reminders for myself and for my students

Not sure any of my students read this blog, but anyway...

I am catching up on reading the reflective journals that my 1102 (First-Year Writing for Multilingual Students) students wrote after they finished the "English and Me" assignment. I asked them to think about the process of writing the essay--the challenges they faced, how they dealt with those challenges, and any other points that came up. Many of them mentioned the peer work as being helpful to their writing; they felt that getting responses from their classmates helped them think about how others were reading and interpreting (or misinterpreting) what they wrote. Nothing really earth-shattering here, but those comments and the comments about the value of drafting and revising are always something that I like to see. 

I mention this because I think this process worked well as I was working on the introduction to the new edition of A Pail of Oysters. I sent a rough draft to John Ross and got his feedback on it. Since I had never written an introduction to someone else's book before (and particularly the kinds of introductions you see to older novels), I wasn't sure how to write it. I got good feedback from John on how to revise it, and we went back and forth on it, also bringing in Mark Swofford (another of the co-founders of Camphor Press) later on in the process. In all, I have about 15 different drafts of the introduction from between last September and the end of January 2016. (I should probably tell my students about that!) Not all of the drafts are drastically different from previous ones, but they all reflect reworkings of ideas, sentences, etc. based on the feedback from the readers.

This process (as well as my students' reflections) has reminded me of the need to draft and revise and to get others' eyes on my writing as I'm working on it, rather than thinking that I need to give someone a "perfect" "final" product. It reminds me that while I might take pride in my work, I don't have to be so proud (or perhaps insecure!) that I won't show unfinished work to others.

Upcoming ICRT interview about Vern Sneider

I was interviewed last week for a program on ICRT (International Community Radio Taipei) called "Taiwan Talk." The subject was Vern Sneider and the new edition of A Pail of Oysters. That interview is going to be broadcast tonight at around 7:05 p.m. Eastern Time (about 8:05 a.m. Monday morning Taiwan time) and again at 5:05 a.m. Monday morning Eastern Time (about 6:05 p.m. Monday evening Taiwan time). You can listen to it live by going to ICRT's website and clicking on the link to the live stream. There'll be a longer podcast that will be available later at this link [Update: it's now available at that link.]

I'm not a great interviewee (haven't been interviewed that much, so I don't have a lot of practice), but Keith Menconi, the interviewer, did a good job trying to make me feel at ease, and I hope he'll do just as good a job at editing out my hedging, hesitations, and hemming and hawing! We'll know in a couple of hours...

Another old conference paper posted online

This paper, entitled "The Location of Chinese Culture: The Rhetoric of Chineseness in Post-World War Two Taiwan" (I really hate my titles--I should just drop them and use the subtitles), was presented in July of 2005 at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. I didn't try to publish it, but I did use most of it in a background chapter of my dissertation (which is really why I wrote it in the first place). Here's the abstract:

The vast majority of English-language resources on contemporary Chinese rhetoric locate their object of study in the geopolitical space of the People’s Republic of China. Such a perspective risks ignoring an important aspect of Chinese rhetoric--what I call “the rhetoric of Chineseness.” This term refers to the rhetorical nature of identifying as Chinese in a variety of historical, social, political, and other circumstances. It suggests that fundamental to the notion of a Chinese rhetoric is the need to understand the shifting nature of the signifier “Chinese.” Without a more complex understanding of “Chinese,” we lose the ability to see contemporary Chinese rhetorics as multifaceted discourses that are embedded in various political and social contexts.

Particular to my purposes here are the ways in which Chineseness was called upon by political and intellectual figures in Taiwan in the formation of a cultural and national identity that was used for a variety of purposes related to the making of Republic of China citizens on Taiwan after World War II. I will describe how, after the Japanese surrender, the incoming Nationalist (KMT) government positioned itself as the representative of Chinese culture and nationhood. Political discourse in martial law Taiwan (1947-1987) involved the invention of particular cultural and political understandings of “Chinese” in order to encourage the people of Taiwan to think of themselves as part of a once-and-future Republic of China, a nation which saw itself as the rightful government of China although it had lost control over the physical space of China. Through civic and language education, the government of the ROC on Taiwan attempted to indoctrinate its people into a view of themselves as Chinese citizens and “compatriots” to their suffering brethren on the mainland.

This study will, it is hoped, complicate the notions of “Chinese” that are often unexamined when scholars analyze “Chinese rhetoric.”

As with the other conference paper I posted a few days ago, there are things that I like about this paper--particularly some of the writings that I dug up in the Tunghai University library by former Minister of Education (and founder of Chinese Culture University) Zhang Qiyun (張其昀) and Liang Rongruo (梁容若), professor of Chinese and co-editor of the Guoyu Ribao (國語日報). But one thing I always found myself worrying about when working with such primary sources in Chinese was the question of how influential these writings were, or even how influential their writers were. It's not always easy to tell this when you're working with older sources in your own language, to say nothing of working with historical documents in another language. I wonder how people deal with this. I think the writers I cite here were somewhat influential at the time, but I sort of found that after the fact. (I also have to admit that I don't remember how I managed to come across these texts. I have a feeling it was serendipitous, though.)

Anyway, enjoy! (Or don't...)

Hmm...

Judging from the picture, though, I seem happy about it...

There's a certain irony to the fact that at the end of the week that I decide writing for academic audiences is no longer my main interest, Academia.edu tells me that I'm now in the top 5% of researchers on their site.

[Update, 6/3/16: Well, it was fun while it lasted...]

New edition of A Pail of Oysters out

I mentioned in a recent comment to a previous post on A Pail of Oysters that a new edition would be coming out soon. It's out now in e-book format, published by Camphor Press. I had the honor of writing the introduction, based on archival research and an interview with Vern Sneider's widow.

The Taipei Times has also published an article on the new edition. I was interviewed for that (through email), as was Mark Swofford, one of the co-founders of Camphor Press. I liked the following quote from Swofford:

“It’s a very complex novel, [written] when many people thought it was just the communists versus the KMT,” he says. “It was more of a middle way sort of thing; from the standpoint of the Taiwanese people.”

 If you don't like e-books, it'll be coming out later on in print. I'll update this at that time.

An old conference paper, "The French Invention of Chinese Rhetoric?" posted online

I uploaded to Academia.edu a copy of a paper that I presented back in February of 2004 (wow--that actually predates this blog!). The title is "The French Invention of Chinese Rhetoric?" but it probably should be "The Jesuit Invention of Chinese Rhetoric?" (But "French" sounded better because of the contrasting nationalities thing...) Here's the abstract:

In the thirty years since the publication of Robert T. Oliver’s Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, Chinese rhetoric has slowly gained recognition as a legitimate area of research in communication studies. This study has begun, however, with characterizations of Chinese discourse in terms of what it is said to lack in comparison to the West. Oliver’s book, for instance, begins by stressing India and China’s lack of political, legal, religious, or educational platforms for oratory. It famously continues that for these countries “rhetoric has been considered so important that it could not be separated from the remainder of human knowledge” (10). George Kennedy, in his 1998 book Comparative Rhetoric, even implies that Chinese rhetoric as a scholarly discipline was invented by French Jesuits.

This paper argues that if Chinese rhetoric was, as Oliver and Kennedy suggest, first theorized by the West, then it was also theorized for the West. Furthermore, European theories of rhetoric were changing even as Jesuit descriptions of Chinese rhetoric were circulating around Europe. Whether Chinese rhetoric as a discipline was invented by the Jesuits or not, contemporary Western studies of Chinese rhetoric have failed to examine the complex relations between “our” notions of Chinese rhetoric and the particular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European contexts in which those notions were rooted. Absent this examination, Chinese rhetorical theory is inevitably cast as being in some sense outside of time and “behind” that of the West.

Works Cited

Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Oliver, Robert T. Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1971.

I think the paper makes an interesting argument about cross-cultural studies of rhetoric, though similar arguments have probably been made elsewhere since then by others who are more active in comparative rhetoric than I am anymore.

Anyway, I thought I'd post the paper online after I noticed that it was cited in Li Yuxue's (李奭學) book, 中國晚明與歐洲文學. I guess Li must have come across the CD-ROM on which the papers from the conference were saved. (Everyone attending that 2004 Conference on East-West Identities at Hong Kong Baptist University got a CD-ROM with the papers on it.) I don't think I'm going to be doing any revising with it at this point; that phase of my life has pretty much passed. But I enjoyed rereading my paper (am I allowed to say that?) and I hope others will get something out of it, too.

Back to teaching first-year writing after a long break

Before this semester, the last time I taught a section of first-year writing was in the summer of 2014 (hmmm... not that long ago...). I'm doing some things this semester that are similar to the projects we did back then, but I've made some changes due to some interesting developments at Northeastern (more on that, perhaps, in another post).

I should mention that I primarily teach multilingual students (mostly international students), so the activities that we do in class are primarily focused on their experiences as multilingual (and possibly international) students. I take some of my rationale for this focus from Ilona Leki's 2007 book, Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development (I've written a brief review about this book). Leki argues that L2 writing classes "can be used to make space and time for students to explore the world into which they have stepped by, for example, examining and making a start at responding to the literacy demands across the curriculum" (284). She also recommends that L2 writing teachers give students an opportunity to address the challenges they face as L2 students, such as when their cultures are "essentialized by professors" or when they are "not selected for group work." Leki suggests that

[u]sing their developing L2 literacy skills as tools to work toward analyzing such situations, including their hidden ideological dimensions, and developing possible solutions communally not only honors their intellect and experience but also might make L2 writing classes be remembered for more than only the use of the comma. (285)

So we start off introducing ourselves to each other by writing my old standby, "English and Me," in which they describe experiences that exemplify important aspects of their relationship to English. I should mention that "English and Me" often grows into something more than just "English and Me"--for one thing, students' English learning doesn't take place in a vacuum, so often their discussions of their learning experiences encompass such things as educational cultures; family relationships; politics; first (and second and sometimes third) languages in addition to English; culture shock; and emotions like frustration, loneliness, feelings of accomplishment, and pride. I see this essay as not only a way for me to get to know them, but also as a way for them to reflect on what has ultimately brought them here as part of the flow of "transnational citizens" back and forth across borders.

In the second project, we'll be working on defining the concept "international students," which should be interesting... More on that later.

New publication (sort of...)

It's just a preface, and it's basically the same text that I posted here, but I recommend the book because it has a lot of great material in it about the George H. Kerr collection at the Taipei 228 museum.

代序：葛超智資料介紹 [Preface: Introduction to George H. Kerr materials], 一個自1947年寄來的包裹：臺北二二八紀念館 典藏文物特展專輯 [A package from from 1947: Taipei 228 Memorial Museum Special Exhibition Collection]。編者：蘇瑤崇，杜正宇。臺北市政府文化局；臺北二二八紀念館, 2015。

There's no picture of the cover on the website, but this is what the cover looks like.

Well, hello there...

It has been a while since I last checked in here. Last semester was a busy time, balancing work and parenting. Once again, I'm going to try to resurrect this blog. (Huh. Only three posts in which I proclaimed that I was resurrecting the blog. I thought there'd be more.)

What will I write about? I don't know. I'll have to see what I'm moved to write about. Send me some ideas in the comments, if you wish.

It's interesting, by the way, that 3 of the 4 posts I've written about resurrecting the blog (including this one) were written in January...

Summer activities

I spent some time in June at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum going through the records of the George H. Kerr collection there. Here's the text of a short talk I gave at the opening of a special exhibit at the Museum on June 24th. Thanks to Su Yao-tsung for inviting me to the opening, to the administrators of the Chiu Scholarly Exchange grant program that funded my trip, and to the museum staff for helping me out while I was at the museum!

大家好，我叫Jonathan Benda。首先，我要謝謝臺北文化局和二二八紀念館讓我有機會來這裡做相關的研究。我目前在美國波士頓東北大學英文系任教。去東北大學之前，我在臺灣教了16年。

像很多對臺灣產生興趣的美國人一樣，我透過了葛超智寫的 “被出賣的臺灣”（也就是Formosa Betrayed） 開始認識臺灣當代歷史。也像很多讀者一樣，我被書中有感染力的故事所感動。看完了這本書以後，我便進一步想瞭解Kerr是在什麼樣的背景之下寫了這本書。在許多美國人和臺灣人之間，對於Kerr是如何寫成這本書，一直有一些誤解，而這些誤解產生了更多的誤解，以至於後來對這本書的可靠性產生了疑慮。譬如說，有一個美國學者認為Kerr 在1958年寫 Formosa Betrayed 時，只用了一些隨手的資料。可是，在臺北二二八紀念館還有沖繩的縣立文書館的資料顯示，Kerr其實早在1947年就開始著手記錄臺灣的近代史，後來出版的 “被出賣的臺灣” 就是那本歷史的一部分。臺北二二八紀念館搜集的資料也顯示，Kerr所使用的資料其實又廣泛、又豐富。雖然Kerr自己承認Formosa Betrayed的語氣有點情緒化，可是我們也不能否認這本書的內容是根據許多客觀的官方資料所寫成的。有興趣的人，可以自己透過這些文獻資料來瞭解。

研究Kerr的資料讓我們瞭解到Formosa Betrayed其實是很多人的著作。Kerr因為搜集了許多聯合國善後救濟總署的報告、書信跟其他的檔案，所以他用了這些很多人寫的資料來撰寫這本書。因為聯合國善後救濟總署的歷史還沒有被許多人涉略，所以我覺得相關的學者可能還沒有機會發現這些豐富的史料。Kerr的檔案也包括了第二次世界大戰時，美國海軍為了預備侵略、佔領臺灣所準備的研究報告跟計畫書。

館內的文獻資料也包括Kerr跟很多人的往來書信。從這些書信我們發現，有許多看完Formosa Betrayed的讀者都深深受到感動。這些信函也顯示了這本書出版前，Kerr在美國透過他的投書及演講，四處在學術團體之間宣傳他對臺灣人權跟台美關係的看法。大部分研究者會感到興趣的是Kerr與海外支持臺灣獨立的臺灣人士，他們之間的往來。譬如說，對蔣經國刺殺案有興趣的人，可以查閱Kerr跟台獨運動人士以及黃文雄的律師團的文書往來。這些信函可以看出Kerr對臺灣人權跟獨立的熱心和關注。不同的人對Kerr的動機有不同的見解；有人說他是要以臺灣獨立的藉口讓美國控制台灣，還有人說他是因為要讓臺灣人擺脫一個當時腐敗的政府才鼓動美國支持不同的對台政策。學者可以透過紀念館裡的文獻來瞭解Kerr的動機。

前美國在台協會的處長卜睿哲曾經稱Kerr是一位二二八事件的參與者和觀察者，也是一位對二二八事件記憶的重要人物。館內收集的George H. Kerr檔案也顯示了Kerr在冷戰時代是台美關係跟台獨運動的重要角色。臺北二二八紀念館一直保存了可能會面臨消失的重要臺灣近代歷史，它可以提供重要的歷史知識給參觀者，不論他們是臺灣人或是外國人。在紀念館裡面的George H. Kerr檔案是個重要的知識寶藏，我鼓勵更多研究臺灣的學者來這裡做詳細的研究。

Conference presentation done; back to work on GHK

I finished my conference presentation on Saturday. There weren't a lot of people in the audience, but what they lacked in numbers they made up in enthusiasm. (Possibly because over half the audience was from Northeastern!) My presentation was titled "'Brain Circulation' and Writing in the Disciplines: Giving Students Opportunities for Multilingual Writing in a Business Writing Course." I already talked a bit about the topic here. In my presentation, I cited a couple of blog posts by Julie Meloni that originally got me thinking about this idea:

• "Student Use of L1 in an ESL Classroom"
• "Google Translate, and Translation Projects in the Classroom"

I think these two posts are worth a read if you're thinking about how you might work writing in other languages into a writing class for multilingual students (as "we" translingual types sometimes like to do)--in an assignment that is different from the personal essay. (Not that I have anything against personal essays.)

Anyway, now that that presentation is over, I have to get back to work on GHK. I left him hanging for a long while. He's probably wondering what happened to me. I need to put together a list, too, of the sources I want to see at the archives because evidently they're stored off-site. So I need to get going on that. (In between grading, of course...)

What I have and haven't been doing lately

Today marked the first day back to classes after spring break. Over the break I graded a couple (or three? I forget) sets of assignments, did our taxes, realized that I was mixed up about the location of the May conference and bowed out of doing a presentation there (with some regret--I would have liked to present there), played with the little guy (my son, that is), and produced a reflective teaching portfolio. I also drank way too much coffee and probably gained a few pounds (though I wouldn't know for sure because I won't go near a scale). I didn't do much anything related to my research project or end-of-March conference, but I'm hoping that with classes back in session, I might be able to get back in work mode.

I do think that I did some important things over break, though, even if I didn't get to do everything. Spring break seems to be an occasion for instructors to do two main things: catch up on grading and get sick. I'm lucky that I didn't do the latter, even if I didn't completely succeed on the former. Well, at least the weather is getting warmer now.

Recent research/writing activities

Well, besides commenting on and grading student papers, I've tried to fit in some time for working on some projects. The urgent keeps getting in the way of the important, though (sounds like something Stephen Covey would say). I've got a conference presentation at the end of the month to work on and another conference paper due in early May. I've also got to continue reading through and annotating the archival documents for this summer's trip. But right now I'm working on revising an assignment that students will be working on starting next week, and after that I have to work on the merit eportfolio that lecturers in my program have to put together every year. I guess I shouldn't complain, though; most professors seem to need to do an annual 自我批评 self-evaluation.

I did get some work done on the conference presentation for the end of the month. I'm going to be talking about an opportunity I extended to some students in my business writing class last semester to write one of their projects in their native languages rather than in English. Of course they had to supply me with a translation and a "context memo" that explained the particulars of their document, but I wanted to give them the chance to write in another language since their intended audience were government officials in their home country. I've been thinking about this kind of opportunity lately because I have been getting quite a few students recently who don't intend to stay in the US after graduation (at least not for long) and who will need to write professional or scholarly documents in their native languages--a task that is not easy to do even if they're practiced in writing those kinds of documents in English. I know I can't teach them how to write all those kinds of documents in their native languages (it's arguably not even my job), but I can give them an opportunity to try if they want to... for one project... if it makes sense in terms of their intended audience... if they provide a translation... (I have a feeling I'm going to hedge a lot in this presentation...)

Research update

I finished reading Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement last night. I took a few notes on it as well in the process. He mentions a March 10, 1931 letter sent to Washington from the American Consul at Taihoku (Charles Reed). I'll have to see if that letter is in his collection, or where he came across it.


He also mentions Bailey Willis, an 81-year-old (in 1937) Stanford geologist who visited Formosa and the Philippines and noticed some of the Japanese military preparations going on.

I need to continue reading and note-taking. No time to slow down now...

Getting into work

I've gotten started on the work to prepare for my trip to the archives this summer. I'm currently reading through GHK's Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, 1895-1945 (a book I bought quite a few years ago that evidently had been given by Kerr to his nephew "Bill Kerr the 2nd"--wonder how that ended up for sale on Alibris...).

I've been taking notes on it and reading "around" it as well, going back to some of Kerr's earlier writings about the Japanese colonial project in Taiwan (a couple of articles he wrote during WWII for the Far Eastern Survey, published by the Institute of Pacific Relations). It has been interesting so far, and it's helping me to develop some questions that I want to pursue.

First writing group meeting a success!

Although not everyone from our writing group was able to make it to our first meeting, we had three people there (plus one interested non-member who might end up becoming a member!). We talked about our projects, goals, challenges, writing habits, families, etc. We came up with some goals for the rest of the semester and made some plans. My main goal is to go through my GHK materials here (books, photocopied archival docs, etc.) and figure out specifically I have and what I need to look for when I go to Taiwan in the summer. I know that this will be a good use of my time. As will our writing group!

Snow.. snow...

It may look pretty to some people, but I'm really tired of seeing this stuff.

Writing group to meet, just in time

I've been going through some continued confusion and ennui related to my research and writing, my *cough* "scholarly" life, these this past few days weeks months years half a decade. It's not like I don't have any short-term goals. I've got plenty of 'em. But, as I was saying earlier, I've been having trouble figuring out the point of trying to write specialized scholarly articles in my discipline (well, the discipline in which I got a Ph.D.) when I don't know when or if I'll ever go on the tenure track. On the other hand, the kinds of things that I'm interested in writing about (GHK, for instance) aren't likely to put me on the best-seller list. And I'm not even sure I have a book in me. (It's much more fun to watch my baby talking to himself and learning how to blow bubbles in his mouth.)

So it was good to hear that one of the members of my semi-virtual writing group wanted to meet in person. We arranged a time when most of us could make it, and on Wednesday at lunchtime we'll get together. Maybe they'll have some suggestions for me re: my future plans. In the meantime, I'm going to try to force myself to work on that paper for the conference in May.