Matter of diction?

I’m caught up in reading for the upcoming Tepoztlán conference and, hence, falling back in working for the dissertation. Sometimes I just sit thinking what I should be reading. Should I read for the conference because it’s, um, in like five days?, or should I read for the proposal since that’s more important? The quandary so becomes me . . .

I’ve recently read Ariel Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey. I knew this when I read Eva Hoffman’s beautifully written Lost in Translation, but the thing with bilingualism is it can be so elite. Bilingual writers are usually fully proficient in two or more languages, but in order to be like that, you have to have been afforded the material base to keep up with both languages. So either your parents were diplomats or businessmen or you’re just so linguistically talented that you’ve already become one of those literati figures by the time you start writing about your bilingual childhood or adolescence or career.

And there’s nothing wrong with coming from an affluent family or being linguistically gifted. Moving between languages is still confusing no matter what and the pain of feeling a language slip by you is still acute. But I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a “middle class” in bilingualism. There’s elite bilingualism which has always received attention–best represented by writers such as Nabokov and Conrad–and there’s immigrant bilingualism-the stigma of broken English. Is there a middle ground?

I appreciated Dorfman’s honesty in fessing up to his adoration of English as a child in New York. I related to it. The thing with languages is that it becomes so closely associated with the people using the language and the environment of its acquisition. If you like the people speaking it and if you’re happy in that linguistic environment, you come to adore the language. It becomes precious. When I said to my director before the exam that “I’m not really interested in elite bilingualism,” she kind of frowned at me and said I shouldn’t cross it out like that. True. Maybe she thought my bilingualism was also a kind of elite bilingualism. It probably is.

But for the dissertation, I’m thinking about striking out the word “bilingualism” from the title and the thesis. Making it secondary. It just asks for a lot of explanation that sidetracks me from saying what I want to say. Well, at this point, my sense of what I want to say is still somewhat vague. I’m trying to see what other options I have in terms of word choice. Foreignness is something I’m thinking about now. I’m reading Bonnie Honig’s Democracy and the Foreigner–a book that, I think, closely relates to Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics–and trying to see if there’s something I can glean from her discussion of how the idea of foreignness has been and can be deployed in politics.

Language and the Body

I came across Horst Ruthrof’s The Body in Language in the book cart as I was looking for a different book. I ended up reading the whole thing, and it turned out to be more pertinent to my work than I thought it was. The author proposes a “corporeal semantics,” the argument being that language, contrary to what many other theorists of meaning and philosophers of language have argued, is parasitic on the nonverbal.

I got some good bibliography on cognitive semantics, to which Ruthrof resorts pretty frequently in illustratrating the significance of perception in meaning construal. The book also clarified for me the import of the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy. My advisor had actually mentioned the phrase a couple of times in our discussions–”It’s not enough to just “say” that language is important. We all know after the linguistic turn that language is important. You have to “show” why it’s important and in what “specific” ways it’s important.” I nodded along vigorously guessing at what the linguistic turn means. What else could I have done? Turns out, my guess is not so much off the mark. The linguistic turn refers to the trend in philosophy that views language as the base of all philosophical issues. That is, all philosophical problems are linguitic problems at the core. You can see why such a turn would be criticized as being reductive. But it produced some fascinating bodies of thought on language and its relationship to the world.

There is no way I can read all of that. So I need to focus on those philosophies that are the most relevant to my dissertation. After figuring out what my argument is. I received comments on the draft of the diss proposal about a week ago. The comments were helpful; they coincided for the most part with what I’ve noticed as the shortcoming of the draft. The biggest problem for me now is that I have this disconnect between my argument and the actual chapter contents. I think this is because I subconsciously, or maybe not so subconciously, resist saying that what I’m working on is what I have in my chapters. It’s more complicated than that . . . .

I understand that a concrete argument is not a simple argument. I understand that. Also that a focused argument is not a simple argument. I understand that too. My committee has repeatedly told me to decide what I want to do (instead of trying to do everything and trying to be everywhere). “It doesn’t mean that your argument is going to be simple.” Yeah, I understand. I’m trying to do that. I’m trying to articulate in a simple, clear, clean way what it is that I’m arguing in the dissertation. The eureka moment has  not quite hit me yet. I don’t think. I have a tendency for conceptual thinking that sometimes gets in the way of concretizing my thoughts. “You think too much” is what my present director told me (with a skeptical frown). I really am trying to rein that in.

I’m reading A Thousand Plateaus now after reading (did I really read that book? hmm, I read it in so much as I can read it) Anti-Oedipus. I just finished the chapter on “the postulates of linguistics” (which is the chapter that Ruthrof uses the most when she discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s poststrucuralist semantics) and realized once again that Deleuze and Guattari are very important for me. I’m most interested in their notion of a minor literature–written by a minority in the major language–and the work they say minor literature does–it deterritorializes the major language, but it’s impossible to understand these without having a sense of their overall philosophy.  Seriously, I want to understand D & G. I even checked out Brian Massumi’s User’s Guide from the library.

The next revision is due mid-August. I think I have a sense of where I’m headed for the next revision, which is good.

Driven Out

Jean Pfaelzer on NPR with her new book, Driven Out. So her book is out. Good for her. She seems to be a very conscientious scholar and activist.

America Is In the Heart

I’m proud of myself for having devoted four hours of Saturday morning to touching up an essay. I guess I’m still kind of jetlagged? I’ve been managing to get up at six for the past week. Today was no exception. So even after having spent a stretch of time on the essay, it was still only around half past ten (in the morning!) when I was done. I have to keep this up.

The essay is on racial homosociality in Bulosan’s America Is In the Heart. I have heard several good readers say they don’t like the book very much. Too sloppy. Too sentimental. Wrings sympathy from the readers. I actually like the book. I mean, I like it enough to write on it, right? In terms of literary constructedness, that is, the tightness that comes from literary management on the part of the author, the book doesn’t really compare to, say, something like John Irving’s massive The World According to Garp (just because I read it the day before yesterday). You see all kinds of literary techniques in Irving’s novel that you just don’t get in Bulosan’s book. But there’s a rawness to the book that makes it compelling for me. The emotions that are delivered through Bulosan’s narrative are so raw–I can’t figure out another word to describe them–they are gripping. And I like that. It’s a literary force different from the one you get from a writer like Irving.

The essay doesn’t really have much to do with the dissertation, but I wanted to revise it now that I’ve encountered a couple of references that speak to the topic and the thesis. It’s been accepted for publication in an essay collection, but that’s like, um, three years ago now. I think the editors are too busy to get down on this project. Good for me since the added references make it a better paper, or so I think. I hope it comes out in print at some point.

A critical work that I’ve read a chunk of that has been helpful for revising the paper is Daniel Kim’s Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow. It’s an interesting critical study of the intersections between homosociality and homo/heterosexuality and literary strategies of presenting male identities of color that result thereof. I found the part on “vernacular manhood” particularly interesting for the dissertation. America, I say, can be on the tongue…

FOB

I read David Henry Hwang’s FOB (again? can’t remember whether I’ve read it before or not; for some reason I knew what it was about when I checked it out). I like the way the play directly touches on a pretty sensitive and embarrassing issue: how Asians can be snubbed by Asian Americans who don’t want to be Asian and in whose minds being Asian means not being American.

It’s a result of being disciplined in mainstream ways of conceiving who a normative American is. Asianness just doesn’t fit in the picture of an all-American guy (or girl, to a lesser extent). Hwang pokes fun at Dale, who is, in his words, “making it in America (Act II)” by showing how there’s really not that much that he can “teach” Steve, the FOB.

“I don’t like being alone. You know, when Mom could finally bring me to the U.S., I was already ten. But I never studied my English very hard in Taiwan, so I got moved back to second grade. There were a few Chinese girls in the fourth grade, but they were American-born, so they wouldn’t even talk to me. They’d just stay with themselves and compare how much clothes they all had, and make fun of the way we all talked. I figured I had a better chance of getting in with the white kids than with them, so in junior high I started bleaching my hair and hanging out at the beach–you know, Chinese hair looks pretty lousy when you bleach it. After a while, I knew what beach was gonna be good on any given day, and I could tell who was coming just by his van. But the American-born Chinese, it didn’t matter to them. They just giggled and went to their own dances. Until my senior high in high school–that’s how long it took for me to get over this whole thing. One night I took Dad’s car and drove on Hollywood Boulevard, all the way from downtown to Beverly Hills, then back on Sunset. I was looking and listening–all the time with the window down, just so I’d feel like I was part of the city. And that Friday, it was–I guess–I said, “I’m lonely. And I don’t like it. I don’t like being alone.” And that was all. As soon as I said it, I felt all of the breeze–it was really cool on my face–and I heard all of the radio–and the music sounded really good, you know? So I drove home.” (Grace, Act I)

Grace’s lines around the middle of the play were the most memorable for me. It also reminds me of something a guy in Economics once asked me. He asked me if Korean Americans mistreat Koreans. The South Asian Americans in his program are snobby to the South Asians in the program. And he wanted to know if KA acted the same way toward K. Asked in a very straightforward way. Indirection is apparently not a virture in some programs. And the guy in question is America, just in case there’s any confusion.

Intraracial relations need some more attention. And in that spirit, I really want to go see Dark Matter at the Asian American International Film Festival. The population that has been long regarded transient is coming to influence the demographics of America, or Asian America, more and more, and I think that population needs a bit more representation.

Starting a Dissertating Blog!

No, I never meant to quit blogging. I just needed some excuse to write more about work and academic stuff. And to separate out my life from my work. This blog will be dedicated to chronicling my rudimentary ideas as they develop and recording bits and pieces of observation and information pertinent to the dissertation. My advisor has said to me, a couple of times by now, that “[my] dissertation is going to be MY BABY!!!” (We’re both childless women. And although it is a bit deflated, all written out like this, it was truly awe-inspiring when she said it in person.) So I guess this blog is in a way a pregnancy journal. From impregnation to childbirth. Nurture and grow the baby.

I’m in a dissertation workshop provided by the department over the summer (just 6 meetings over the summer; we’re not that gung ho). The two supervising professors want the draft of the dissertation proposal by July 10. That’s tomorrow. I’ve whipped out a rough draft, really rough, and am ready to engage in extensive revising in the remaining weeks of the summer. While it is hard to put down an argument and a conceptual frame for the dissertation, it’s also fun. It’s like designing a house. With rooms for various purposes. And the most fun part is that you get to do whatever you want to do as long as you abide by the construction rules.

I received the conference program for the Tepoztlan conference a couple of days ago. I was worried about the conference when I was thinking about the hastily-put-together paper, but now I’m more excited than anything else. My paper is on a panel aptly titled Deseo y Diaspora. I love the title of the panel. It’s exactly what the paper is about. For those of you interested in the conference program, it’s available online here. For some reason I’ve been put on two panels as a “dominatrix” (who knows what that’s supposed to mean) instead of one. All the other graduate students I’m going with each got one panel to dominate over. I think the person who wrote up the schedule must have made a mistake and put me down twice instead of once. I’m debating whether I should email the person and let him/her know–umm, I really don’t want to do double the work, you know–or whether I should just let it slide–how much more work can it be anyway?

The conference is run in the form of a workshop series. It’s meant to avoid a few celebrity academics dominating the floor and to guarantee “equal” representation of the participants. It also means that there’s more reading to do before the panels–since you have to have read all the papers on the panel and be ready to discuss what you have read–and that you have to submit a research paper well  in advance of the conference. True democracy demands civic responsibility. But think about all the cool people I’ll be able to get a glimpse of! And all the scintillating conversations that will take place! Too bad I don’t have Spanish fluency. Oh, well, I’ll have to make do with English.