CRTW 201

Dr. Fike

DAY FOUR

YOU MUST HAVE TOMPKINS'S ARTICLE WITH YOU TODAY. IF NOT, GO GET A COPY AT THE COMPUTER CENTER IN DIGS.

Announcements:

Next time: Bring Nosich, chapter 2.
How many of you have selected your global cultural event? Selecting your event is homework for next time.
You all must remember that this class has absence and tardy policies. If you do not know what they are, please familiarize yourself with them. They are in the syllabus and the first-day PowerPoint. They apply to everyone equally.
Also remember that cell phones should be switched off and put away.

STEP FOUR: Strand of FBIs

Get into your four groups and share the FBIs you identified in Tompkins's article. What words and phrases are her terminology for filters, barriers, and impediments? Pick up where we left off: share what you discovered on your assigned pages. REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR NOUNS!

718-21:
722-25:
726-29:
730-end:

See Tompkins Note.

Another Strand: Context (a first element)

Nosich 48-49: "Context is the background to the reasoning rather than being literally an element in it, and alternatives encompass the different choices that could be made in the reasoning." So when we talk about the 8+ elements, we mean the 8 in the circle + context and alternatives. For context, see also Nosich 62-63.

Synonyms for context in Tompkins's article (a strand):

circumstances (720)
historical moment (721)
experiences (721)
climate (723)
position in history (730)
venue (scene or locale) (733)

STEP FIVE: Charting information can be extremely helpful.

Point: Context colors the point of view, which in turn colors the conclusion. Context gives rise to point of view. Point of view gives rise to conclusions.

Context/Historical Period	Point of View	Conclusion/Interpretation
1950s: before civil rights movement	Miller: colonial point of view	Indians: beneath notice
1960s: social, cultural, political upheaval	Vaughan: sensitive to race and ethnicity	Puritans (dominant culture) > Indians (inferior culture)
1970s & 1980s: aftermath of Vietnam war	Jennings: racial and ethnic Martin: ethnographic; he looks at Indians' spirituality/cosmology Hudson: economic Kupperman: ethnographic; she looks at Englishmen Note: All four historians have Eurocentric assumptions.	Indians > Puritans; whites preyed on Indians Indians perceived broken contract between themselves and animals. Indians had economic motives. Indians valued social class, rank, prestige--same as Englishmen.
Colonial period	James Axtell: positive point of view Norman Heard: negative point of view Rowlandson: white woman captured by Indians; Puritan point of view Wood: person who hopes to encourage immigration Whitaker: a minister who wants to foster conversion	Indians are good neighbors. Indians are kidnappers and brutal abusers. Captivity = God's punishment; Divine Providence is at work; smoking is evil. Indians are civilized--c'mon over and live as their neighbors. Indians are of the devil and need conversion--c'mon over and help set them straight.

STEP SIX: If you can nail the concepts, you have a good chance of understanding the article.

Concepts:

imagination, 718
structuralism and poststructuralism, 719
antifoundationalist epistemology, 720
relativism, 730
epistemological quandary, 720
epistemological indeterminacy, 732
emptying and disappearing (kenosis), 733

POINT: Subjectivity (1) leads to theory (2-4), which leads to problems such as the disappearance of facts (5-7).

STEP SEVEN: Drawing a diagram can be extremely helpful. Do this in your notebook.

Put the following in the right order and then DRAW the text:

us
historical events
secondary texts
metacriticism
primary texts

Where is bias present?

What is Tompkins's FBI?

Another Way To Draw the Text

Put the following in the order that YOU think best and draw the relationships among them: draw the elements. Do this in your notebook. As you do these things, work just with the elements; return to Tompkins at the *** below.

conclusion (the answer to the Q@I)
context (the background in which something is considered)
question at issue (always a question; more specific than purpose)
point of view (not an opinion; a vantage point; Tompkins: "some particular way of seeing the world" [733])
purpose (to + verb; more general than Q@I)

At which point are FBIs present? Where are they most influential?

*** Does your order reflect Tompkins's organization or your analysis of it?

N 49: " . . . there is no required order. The order in which it is most beneficial to apply them [the elements] depends on the question being addressed."

N 75: "Context, purpose, and question at issue are often good places to start. So is point of view. . . ."

STEP EIGHT: TOMPKINS AND SEE-I

SEE-I and paragraph structure on page 724:

S: According to Martin, hunting is a spiritual quest.
E: In other words, an animal allows itself to be killed.
E: For example, he gives details of the hunting process.
I: It's like a contract: "each side must hold up its end of the bargain, or no further transactions can occur."

SEE-I provides a way to unpack a concept and to develop a paragraph or even a paper.

Key sentence on page 733: "Reasons must be given, evidence adduced, authorities cited, analogies drawn." These four things correspond roughly to the four parts of the SEE-I.

State: reasons
Elaborate: evidence
Exemplify: authorities
Illustrate: analogies

STEP NINE: SUMMING UP TOMPKINS BY THE ELEMENTS

Note: In order for the elements to be useful to you, you have to learn to use them concisely. A common mistake in CRTW papers is to devote a whole par. to each element. Do each element in 1-2 sentences. The following list is an example of how to distill a long, complicated text down to simple ideas.

Tompkins engages with the following elements:

Context influences all of these, and alternative contexts can produce alternative versions of the elements (the same goes for point of view). Note that alternatives do not stand alone; they are within the other 9 elements.

Purpose: To figure out what happened in the 17th century between the Puritans and the Native Americans.
(Problem/complication in par. 4: "The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer's frame of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened.")
Question at issue: If all seeing is perspectival, can we really know what happened in the 17th century between the European settlers and the Native Americans?
- When stating the Q @ I in your papers, please do not use a comma after the verb "to be." Instead of saying the Q @ I is (comma), say that the Q @ I is the following or is as follows: and state it after a colon. Note: It is bad style to put a comma or colon after a form of the verb "to be."
Assumptions: Various assumptions color the historians' conclusions. These are alternatives.
Information: Details about the fur trade and other trends; some details are "facts" (Nosich 66-67). There are many alternatives here. Information is the one element that may need a whole paragraph.
Concepts: See the list above.
Point of view: historical, theoretical, philosophical; Tompkins is a(n) ______________ professor. Note that point of view is her main subject and that each author discussed offers an alternative point of view. Point of view and context are closely related to each other. Context often influences point of view. See the middle column of the chart.
Conclusions & interpretations: Not all seeing is purely perspectival. "I did have some facts" (731). Answer to Q @ I: Yes, we CAN know certain things even if seeing is perspectival.
- Conclusions should answer the Q@I.
Implications & consequences: There are moral implications for how to help "Indians who were alive in the present" (719). Last sentence in the article: Tompkins is now aware of the issues; but her theoretical view that knowledge is relative makes her ill-prepared to take constructive action.

New Q @ I: "What should I do about Native Americans' problems today?" Sadly, she leaves this question unanswered.

Final Exercise on Tompkins

Exercise on the elements: page 730 (par. starts "It may well seem"). What elements do you find here?