Alex Reid over at digital digs describes a writing assignment his daughter is given:

Today's 3rd grade in-class writing assignment: why I love America. Of course one must be sure to follow the format. I love America. The reason I love America is because... Add three examples; close with repetition. My daughter discovers that the answer to the question here is that she loves America because of "freedom." Huh? That's some pretty heavy irony, don't you think? You must write that you love America, you must write that you love America because of the freedom you experience, and you must follow this specific format in writing your response. I mean if it was a movie you'd be rolling your eyes that this was laying it all on pretty think, right?

(Reid writes elsewhere about the factors leading him to consider home-schooling his daughter.)

I assume the part about the dance floor is metaphorical...

Your time of day has a split personality -- sometimes it's sweat-streaked and loud, and you're on the dance floor, getting your third wind, and shouting lyrics like you'll never run out of energy. You are the time of night that carves itself into your memory forever, because you'll never forget how much you love these people and this moment and this song. It's not always about unforgettable parties, though. Sometimes your late night (err... early morning) burst of energy happens when you're home alone. Those are the times when you say, "I flat out refuse to go to sleep until I finish reading this book, or typing this page, or reorganizing my entire closet." In either case, you are the time of night when it feels sort of forbidden to be awake, but you love accomplishing something special long after everyone else went to bed. And hey -- you can always catch up on sleep tomorrow, right?

CFP: International Society for the History of Rhetoric

Almost didn't see this one in time...

The Seventeenth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR) will be held in Montreal, Canada, from Wednesday, July 22th July to Sunday, July 26 2009.

The biennial conference of ISHR brings together several hundred specialists in the history of rhetoric from around thirty countries. This will be the first meeting of the Society in Canada since 1997.

SCHOLARLY FOCUS OF THE CONFERENCE
The Society calls for papers that focus on the theory and practice of rhetoric in its historical contexts from classical period to the present.

The main theme of the conference is "Innovative Perspective in the History of Rhetoric". Over the last two decades, new fields of investigation have emerged in the research being done in the history of rhetoric – or should we say "Histories of rhetorics". New spheres of activities (religious studies, queer studies, feminist writings, etc.) as much as new geographical areas (Amerindian, Asian and African traditions, among others) have questioned the a priori of a universal and hegemonic model based on a classical and occidental definition of the history of rhetoric. Papers exploring these new trends in Western and Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas are welcomed.

Papers are also invited on every aspect of the history of rhetoric in all periods and languages and the relationship of rhetoric to poetics, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, politics, law, and other elements of the cultural context.

PROCEDURE FOR SUBMISSION
Proposals should be submitted for a 20-minute presentation delivered in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, or Spanish.

Group proposals are welcome, under the following conditions. The group must consist of 3 or 4 speakers dealing with a common theme in order to form a coherent panel. One person must be responsible for the panel. Each paper must stand on its own as an independent presentation. Each speaker submits a proposal form for his or her own paper; proposals for such papers must specify the group for which they are intended. In addition, the person who is responsible for the group must complete and submit a form explaining the purpose of the proposed panel.

Proposals for papers and for groups must be submitted on-line (http://www.ishr.mcgill.ca). Please fill out the on-line form carefully.

Proposals may also be sent by mail to the following address:
Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, McGill University, Department of French Language and Literature, 853 Sherbrooke West, Montreal (Qc), Canada H3A 2T6.

Guidelines for preparing proposals are provided at the bottom of this message. The length of the abstracts must not exceed 350 words.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS
The deadline for submitting proposals is May 15th, 2008.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in September 2008. In a few cases participants may require an earlier acceptance date in order to secure funding. We will try to accommodate such requests if they are made with appropriate documentation.

Information about the conference, including accommodation at negotiated favorable rates, will be provided during the academic year 2008-2009. The conference registration fee is still to be determined; by way of indication it was around 125 euros / 150 US dollars for the previous conferences. Graduate students and scholars from certain countries may be eligible for reduced registration fees.

Looking forward to your participation,

Diane Desrosiers-Bonin
President, International Society for the History of Rhetoric

Guidelines for the preparation of proposals :
The members of ISHR come from many countries and academic disciplines. The following guidelines are intended to make it easier for us to come together and understand one another's proposals. The Program Committee recommends that all proposals contain:

1) a definition - accessible to a non-specialist - of the field of the proposal, including chronological period, language, texts, and other sources;

2) a statement of the problem that will be treated; its place in relation to the present state of research in the field under consideration; its stakes for the history of rhetoric;

3) a summary of the stages of argumentation involved in treating the problem;

4) scientific results and gains.

Somebody help me...

I've just used "thematize", "narrativize," and "textualize" all together in one paragraph.

Does anyone have an enema for my brain?

Some interesting posts to get back to when I have time

These posts are all related to access in academic publishing--access to publications (as a writer) and open access to published resources (in other words, open access).

• Christmas –time Simultaneous Submission of Multiple Articles, on Suresh Canagarajah's blog (contains comments from Clyde Warden that I think I agree with!)
• open access publishing, on digital digs, which links to
• open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals, on apophenia

(I know, I should really figure out del.icio.us one of these days...)

CNY Vignettes

Kerim has a post illustrating more-or-less what my CNY (Chinese New Year) has been like so far. More or less because I've been trying to work in the midst of CNY festivities and have been less successful at work than Kerim seems to have been.

Last year we took off the day after CNY to go to Oberlin. So this year we're spending some time with the in-laws (who fortunately have a net connection), and I'm prepared. I've brought along a big huge book to read and some of my dissertatables. But I don't have my laptop along because I figure(d) I can use the computer in the living room when no one else is at it. I don't want to spend too much time hiding up in the third floor bedroom away from everyone. That'd be unsociable.

When we get there I find that my biggest competition for computer time, my five-year-old nephew, is coming CNY Eve--a surprise since I thought they wouldn't show until the next day at least. Oh well. I always have my book.

Reading turns out to be OK, but I have to do it in our third-floor bedroom away from all the noise going on downstairs. I have to wrap myself up in a couple of blankets, too, since the room is about 10 degrees C. (That's cold!) After a few hours of that, my very long American nose has icicles hanging from it.

***

The red envelope in the nephew's pocket keeps falling out, and finally his mom can't stand it anymore and tells him she's confiscating it. He says, "You can have it."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Does it still have money in it?"

"Yes, it does." Pause. "I love you, so I'm giving it to you."

From what I know about Hakka families, family members don't say "I love you" very much, so my sister-in-law's face registers a combination of emotions: tenderness mixed with shock mixed with embarrassment. (He's sure to make use of this the next time his dad yells at him.)

***

A couple of days later, I finally get a chance to spend some time on the diss. during a lull in the computer use. I gather up my Oolong tea and my dissertatables and set myself in front of the computer. Pop in my flash drive, open up my new chapter in Word. I decide to resave my file under a new name, just in case, but find that I can't find the "Save as..." function. (They have a really new version of Word, all crazy colors and undecipherable icons and I can't do a thing with it...) So I give up on resaving and just start working. A few minutes later I want to insert a footnote and find I can't find the insert footnote function, either. So I end up copying and pasting another footnote and changing its content. Whatever.

After about 10 minutes of this, the nephew comes over wondering what game I'm playing. We end up playing the crazy taxi driver game on the computer instead, since we agree my game wasn't as interesting as this is. The crazy taxi driver game is where you drive the wrong way down streets, through parks and lakes, into mailboxes and palm trees and up walls in order to get your fares to their destinations asap. (It's great training for future drivers here.) We play that until dinner time. After dinner visitors come by and you pretty much can't dissertate in the living room when you've got company. Lots of folks ask me how my dissertation is going and tell me I need to work harder on it.

***

It finally happens--something I've been worrying would happen for years. With an evil grin on his face, my nephew comes up to me as we're all sitting in the living room, looks at me, and announces, "Meiguo ren!" *Sigh* My own nephew... Maybe I shouldn't have insisted that he call me "Uncle" in English...

Despite that, my wife and I take him out to a coffee house/amusement park-type something or other place (undefinable this place is) the next day. He and I take a ride on a little train that runs around the park, we get him a balloon, and he runs around for a while, which worries us (especially when he runs down the 45 degree hill to the parking lot). But he's pretty well behaved and doesn't call me "Meiguo ren" anymore, so I can't complain.

So I haven't gotten a whole lot of work so far since 2/6, but I suppose when I look back on this winter break, I won't count it a total loss. And we still have a few weeks until the spring semester starts, so I'm not totally without hope.

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

We visited Chung-Yo Dept. Store last night and, as usual, spent most of the time in the Eslite Bookstore there. I picked up two interesting, picture-filled books about Taiwan:

• 台灣西方文明初體驗 (Taiwan's First Experiences of Western Civilization), by 陳柔縉 (Chen Rouxin). This has some interesting chapters in it about how aspects of "Western Civilization" like toothpaste, running water, and English first entered Taiwan. (A lot seems to have come via the Japanese.)
• 一九五0年代的臺灣 (1950s Taiwan), by 吳昆財 (Wu Kuncai). This is an illustrated history of Taiwan in the 1950s. (For some reason, LibraryThing has this book mixed up with a book of Japanese manga...?)
  

Anyway, I can look through these while the in-laws are playing mah-jong...

The socially inept interviewer, or, Things I wish we had covered in the methods course

Dear Miss Manners,

Semi-hypothetical situation: You're writing an e-mail to people you want to interview. You want to ask them about some experiences they had, say, thirty or forty years ago. At the time, they were a couple and you have no information that indicates that they are no longer together. So you write to them both: "Mr. and Mrs. X" (or something like that, depending on circumstances).

You get a response from one of them, using the first person singular throughout. S/he is willing to do the interview. But you really want to interview the other member of that couple, too. How do you ask the person who responded to you about the other person?

(Stop looking at me like that! I told you I was socially inept from the beginning!)

New mantra

Provided by the inimitable ERG:

Gonna be all done
When I'm forty-one.

We'll see...

Bill Degenaro on his tenure portfolio

Bill Degenaro at the University of Michigan Dearborn has two posts up about working on his tenure portfolio. I'm hoping he says more about the process, but perhaps there are some things he wouldn't want to go into (just like I wouldn't want to go too much into my feelings about the three-year review process that some of us are in here). He does mention one thing that I think is similar with our situation here:

The university-wide format does not always allow for easy articulation of the work of humanists. I can see how some of the categories that represent the work of scientists can cause anxiety. I have nothing to put under patents, licensures, synergistic activities (the example given in the tenure guidelines literature: "developed a methodology for modeling and analysis of system robustness"... err, I haven't done that), or technical reviews. Does that make me look weak? Conversely, I find myself relegating some work--writing entries for encyclopedias, chairing the 4Cs nominating committee--to "other" sections.

We have a three-year review form tailored (I think) to the College of Arts faculty, but there are still a few things that need to be ironed out about it. In the version that I used (given to us in Excel worksheet format, natch), you could get 100 points in research for publishing in an SSCI ranked journal, 80 for publishing in TSSCI, and 50 for other journals. No distinction was made for A&HCI or THCI. (This situation will be changed in the near future, I hope.)

Fortunately, I haven't been required to detail any synergistic activities I've been involved in (sounds mighty personal, if you ask me).

CFP: "Re-visioning English Studies in Asia"

Looks interesting...

“Re-visioning English Studies in Asia”

The English Language and Literature Association of Korea
International Conference
November 20-22, 2008
Onyang Hot Spring Hotel, Onyang, Korea

The English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK) invites papers for its 2008 international conference on “Re-visioning English Studies in Asia.” The conference aims at bringing together scholars and teachers of English language and literature to discuss academic, professional, and institutional issues particular to English studies in the wider Asian region. We are interested in examining the history of English studies in Asia—its past, present, and future—in different national and cultural contexts around Asia. How is “English” defined today in Asia? What are the particular responsibilities and challenges of this field today? We hope to foster new cross-cultural and cross-regional conversations that will lay the basis for cooperative projects and debates in the future.

Topics of discussion may include (but are not limited to):

- Teaching English Literature in English vs. Teaching English Literature in an Asian Language
- ESL/EFL Policies at the National/State Level
- Canon and Curriculum
- English Literature and Cultural Capital
- Whose Asia? Orientalism and Occidentalism
- Contemporary Asian Literature in English
- English Studies in Asia in the Age of Theory
- Nationalism/Transnationalism in Asia
- Globalization Theories and Literary Studies
- Asian-American Studies in Asia
- Diversifying “English Literature”
- The South Asian Novel in English
- Postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies in Asia
- Writing/Mapping Asia: Representing Asia in English Literature
- Effective Pedagogical Strategies to Manage the Asian Classroom
- Diaspora Studies
- (Bilingualism & Multilingualism in) Inter-Asia Studies
- Digital/Computation and English Studies in Asia

Proposals for 20-minute papers should include a 250-word abstract and a brief curriculum vitae with contact and affiliation information. Please send proposals to Dr. Eun Kyung Min (Dept. of English, Seoul National University, eunmin_at_snu.ac.kr) by March 1, 2008. Proposals for panels are also welcome. Accepted papers will be announced by April 15, 2008. Please consult www.ellak.or.kr for updates and announcements.

(via)

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

First, a Christmas gift from my brother and sister-in-law:

• The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick (1958)
  Read it before, but didn't have my own copy.

Two books that came today:

• The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2005)
• Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior by Erving Goffman (1967)

I suspect I'll dip into these two during the winter vacation (when I'm not dissertating, of course. Ahem...)

The Bridges at Toko-Ri

Picked up a collection of William Holden movies the other day, mainly to watch The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), which is based on a novel James Michener wrote a couple of years after The Voice of Asia came out. Despite my general aversion to war movies, I found myself taken in by much of the movie. I'm still trying to figure out how that happened.

One reason, I think, was the characterization of the protagonist, Lt. Harry Brubaker, as portrayed by Holden. He's an unwilling hero--he's been drafted back into the Navy after serving in WWII and he seems deeply resentful of the fact that he has to be fighting in Korea when other people don't. He wants to get back to his family and career in the States. When he complains to his commander, Admiral Tarrant, Tarrant tells him, "You fight because you're here," suggesting that an unavoidable fate has brought Brubaker (and the U.S.) to this place.

Brubaker gets a chance to visit his wife and children in Japan, but then has to return to duty. The time with his family is perhaps there to remind viewers of what Brubaker is sacrificing. Tarrant has a chance to tell Brubaker's wife Nancy about the dangerous mission her husband will be going on soon because the Admiral feels that his own son, who died in battle, should have told his wife more about what he was going through. Tarrant seems to resent the fact that, as he puts it, people in the U.S. are so comfortably separated from what is going on in the war.

When Brubaker finds out that he has to participate in the bombing of some key enemy bridges at Toko-Ri, he becomes visibly sick. Brubaker's nervousness, frustration, and (I think) fear at the prospect of losing his life is understated, but well-portrayed by Holden. There's one scene where he is trying to write a letter to Nancy, but keeps crumpling up the paper when the sound of jets overhead disturbs him. He goes up on deck and stands, staring at the sea for a while, then finally wipes the sweat (and tears?) off of his face before going back below.

After Brubaker is shot down during the climactic bombing run, and shortly before he and a comrade die in a firefight in an irrigation ditch, he repeats Tarrant's words ("You fight because you're here") to his comrade, suggesting that he has accepted his fate.

The Wikipedia article on the movie says that this isn't a propaganda film. Perhaps not in a traditional sense--I think the characterization of the protagonist is more complex than in a typical war film of that era (though people who have watched more war movies than I have can disagree). But I think there's an element of propaganda in how the film argues that Americans need to be aware of the sacrifices that the men in the military are making to fight against Communism. Even if Brubaker is an unwilling hero, chosen by fate to be there, in the end he does his duty and doesn't question the need to fight--and neither does his wife. Perhaps it's a propaganda film for a more sophisticated audience, or for an audience that was not yet convinced that the Cold War demanded sacrifices?

Yang Tianshi's talk about CKS's diaries

Prof. Yang Tianshi, who was visiting Taiwan for a conference at Tunghai that took place over the weekend, gave a talk today about Chiang Kai-shek's diaries, which are currently deposited in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Prof. Yang and the moderator of today's talk, Lu Fang-shang, discussed quite a few topics related to the use of Chiang's diaries in historical research. I'm going to try to read my hen-scratchy notes and see what I can make out of their talk. (By the way, Yang and Lu were interviewed recently for an article in Yazhou Zhoukan.)

Prof. Yang described the diaries, mentioning that CKS rather consistently kept a diary between 1915 and 1972 (3 years before his death). He said that at first, CKS's entries were brief (about 30 characters in length), but got longer around the time of the war with Japan. He noted that CKS also engaged in weekly, monthly, and yearly summaries/reflections.

A screen shot of two pages from one of Chiang's diaries.
(There's a short article about Chiang's diaries here.)

Prof. Yang argued that Chiang's diaries were written mainly for himself rather than being written with an eye to future publication. He said that two key pieces of evidence for this are how much CKS cursed (罵) people close to him, and how much private, even confessional, material is in the diaries. (CKS used to give himself demerits for looking lustily at women.) Prof. Yang argued that CKS would not have wanted this kind of material to be made public. (BTW, as Prof. Lu mentioned, the confessions and self-criticism in CKS's diaries didn't necessarily turn him into a saint...) One result of the private nature of Chiang's diaries, according to Prof. Yang, is that we can learn a lot more about what was really going on in CKS's head at certain important historical moments, such as the 1926 Zhongshan Warship Incident and the 1936 Xi'an Incident.

One thing I wondered about is the role of CKS's diaries in subject formation, and the models that CKS had for his diaries. Prof. Yang mentioned the long history of figures in China who used diaries as tools for self-cultivation. He also discussed how well-read CKS was (particularly, he said, for a military man). Evidently CKS's diaries record his readings in the Confucian classics (particularly the Yijing), Christian works, and Eastern and Western philosophy. I found myself wondering what someone in writing studies or rhetorical studies would do with these diaries--perhaps analyze how the diaries constructed CKS as a reading and writing subject.

One last thing that Prof. Yang mentioned--he said that Chiang's status has risen in China from that of a devil (鬼) to a human (人), while in Taiwan, coincidentally, it seems his status has gone from god to human. (No one commented on the immediate political conditions that might be responsible for that coincidence.)

All in all, Professor Yang's speech was quite engaging--the room was packed, too (though I had the feeling a lot of students were there because they had to be. Ahem...)

More on machine translation

I was warning my students today about the dangers of using "full-sentence translation" features on their electronic dictionaries, giving examples that I've talked about before (here and here).

Now I've got a new example: Danwei has a recent post about Google's machine translation, which says,

A Danwei reader sent in Google's translation for the English word "flippant". It comes out as "刺杀布什的凶手" or "the assassin who stabbed Bush" (see this screen shot).

(For why that happened, check out the original post.)

Upcoming speech about Chiang Kai-shek's diaries

「東海大學教學卓越計畫---人文通識訓練」通識課程學術講座

講題:「蔣介石日記」與兩岸民國史研究

講者:楊天石教授(中國社會科學院近代史研究所研究員)
呂芳上教授(東海大學歷史系教授)

時間:96年12月18日星期二14:00~16:00

地點:H122

歡迎踴躍聽講!!

Sounds interesting. I'll try to attend...

American food in Taichung, circa 1960?

Just taking a break from working on the diss.--specifically, from harassing would-be interviewees with pages of detailed questions about things that they probably don't remember writing. (I mean, I don't remember what I wrote 10 years ago--why should they remember what they wrote 30 or 50 years ago?)

Had a nice bagel and coffee for breakfast (at Bagels 'n Beans), which has got me thinking about Western food in Taichung around the time that I'm covering in my dissertation. A few mentions in letters of having Thanksgiving turkeys (or Christmas turkeys) at Tunghai. Where'd they come from? Were they locally raised? I also recall mentions of the U.S. Officer's Club where people sometimes went to eat. Anyone have an address on that? I seem to vaguely remember seeing it somewhere a long time ago, but I don't remember where.

CFP: Conference on Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse

Call for Abstracts
4th Conference on
Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse

June 3‐5, 2008

Indiana University‐Purdue University Indianapolis
Sponsored by the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication

Plenary Speakers
Dwight Atkinson, Purdue University
Julie Belz, IUPUI
Christine Feak, University of Michigan
Françoise Salager‐Meyer, Universidad de los Andes, Venezuela

Papers are invited on topics including (but not limited to):

• Theoretical and empirical investigations
• Language‐ and culture‐specific studies
• Changing methodologies for research
• Practical applications
• Teaching and classroom practices
• Writing in school and college
• Writing in business and professional settings
• Orality and literacy connections
• Critical approaches to contrastive rhetoric

Deadline for Submission: May 1, 2008

Papers should be 20 minutes long with an additional 10 minutes for discussion.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words long, typed on a single page. In the upper left‐hand corner, place the submitter's name, address, institutional affiliation, phone and fax numbers, and e‐mail address.

Send submissions to:
IR Conference Planning Committee
Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication
Indiana University‐Purdue University Indianapolis
620 Union Drive, room 407 Indianapolis, IN 46202, U.S.A.

For more information:
(317) 274‐2555
E‐mail: icic@iupui.edu
http://www.iupui.edu/~icic/IRconference.htm

Registration Fees:
$100 early registration,
$115 onsite registration
$50 student registration,
$65 onsite student registration

Inaugural issue of Taiwan in Comparative Perspective out

Just found out that the first issue of this e-journal, published by the Taiwan Culture Research Programme at the London School of Economics, came out in November. Here's its table of contents--the links go directly to the articles' pdfs (I have already asked them to set up an RSS feed):

Articles

‘Communism’ in Taiwan and the Mainland: Transmission of the Great Leap Famine and of the White Terror
Stephan Feuchtwang

Death-Scapes in Taipei and Manila: A Postmodern Necrography
Paul-François Tremlett

The Intrusive Rendering: Dictation of Stereotypes and the Extra-Ordinary
Doreen Bernath

Commentaries

The EU Two-Level Sovereignty System as Model for Taiwan and China
Bengt Johansson

Ethnicity in the Politics of the Unreal
Allen Chun

The 'Red' Tide Anti-Corruption Protest: What Does it Mean for Democracy in Taiwan?
Fang-long Shih

Reviews

Huang Zhang-jian (2007) Er-er-ba shijian zhenxiang kaozheng gao (The Truth about 2-28: Assessing the Documents)
Stefan Fleischauer

Shao-li Lu (2005) Zhanshi Taiwan: quanli, kongjian yu zhimin tongzhi de xingxiang biaoshu (Exhibiting Taiwan: Power, Space and Image Representation of Japanese Colonial Rule)
Edward Vickers

Mark Harrison, Legitimacy, Meaning, and Knowledge in the making of Taiwanese identity
Paul-François Tremlett

Response to Tremlett's Review of Legitimacy, Meaning, and Knowledge in the making of Taiwanese identity
Mark Harrison

By the way, the editors mention in their submission guidelines that academic article submissions to the journal "should contain a comparative perspective in the widest sense. This could mean comparisons between Taiwan and other parts of the world, Taiwan in the past and in the present, different regions and cultures of Taiwan, or different methodological and disciplinary approaches to the study of a theme or issue concerning Taiwan."

And I haven't even had a chance to visit it yet...

This seems to be a sign of the times, but it's still bizarre...

Much of Stanford University’s historic East Asian collection is destined for storage at a facility 38 miles from the campus as the university prepares to tear down the collection’s home, Meyer Library, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

(via)