Summary & Synthesis Report #1

Tristan Heibel

ENGL – 300 Texts and Contexts

18 February 2018

SSR #1

Summary:

 Bootstraps, by Victor Villanueva, is a personal set of memoirs in which Villanueva attempts to describe how people of color and language interact in modern American society. From Villanueva’s perspective, race has a large effect on how the white majority looks down on Latin and black speech patterns. He identifies ways in which slang terminology is even more complex and just as important as academic language. Later within his memoir, he reflects on the normative societal interpretation of the slang he encountered while living “on the block.” His interpretation of academia and the way they looked upon the types of language he grew up around was used to emphasize his overall point that the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” statement is flawed by how society perceives minorities. 

Synthesis:

Within Barton’s description of linguistic discourse analysis, she begs the question, “How do speakers and writers organize language to function in texts and contexts” (Bazerman & Prior, 61). This is intriguing because it relates to the idea that Leander and Prior examine in chapter 8 of the same text. They describe in full through a certain study of talk to text communication by “mapping some of the ways that talk is transformed into, shapes, and occasions texts” (Bazerman & Prior, 201). Barton, Leander, and Prior all identify language as a tool that transforms and manipulates written text. One may see a perfect example of how spoken word may manipulate text and its context through Villanueva’s description of talk that he heard growing up. Although he identified himself as “dogmatic” at home, he refers to how people would speak “on the block.” Villanueva describes it as being able to split infinitives. He does this by using the word “fanfuckentastic” as an example (Villanueva, 8). In doing this, people put more emphasis on the word and, in all, the entire statement it belongs to. This segment, taken from Bootstraps, exemplifies how talk can shape the way in which people were choosing to communicate. In text, it allows for a far better understanding of context without further explanation of an emotion, relating back to what Leander and Prior stated about talk occasions texts. This all relates to the central idea that MacNeil puts forth in his book Do You Speak American? MacNeil acknowledges both sides of an argument that the english language is being narrowed or broadened by the growing influence of Spanish. After identifying that the United States is a place of change since the revolution, he writes, “To communicate all of this, American language adapts” (MacNeil, 4). Villanueva’s understanding of English through talk is vastly different in his opinion from academic speech patterns, MacNeil acknowledges this and believes it is the natural adaptation of spoken english to better define the contexts and texts.

Similar to this idea that language shall adapt and change depending on what influences it may encounter,  Krista Ratcliffe puts forth that there are distinct benefits towards understanding these new ways of communication. Villanueva lets the reader in on the lexicon of “the block” and allows for whomever is reading to understand his experiences through this talk. Ratcliffe explains this by stating in her book Rhetorical Listening, that through the use of rhetorical listening, differing cultures may be able to “negotiate troubled identifications in order to facilitate cross-cultural communication about any topic” (17). Villanueva identifies this in Bootstraps through his description of a study done by Basil Bernstein on the speech patterns of African American children. Bernstein identifies that African American youth in urban areas have no language capabilities. He believed that they were incapable of formulating any of what he thought was rational english. Villanueva then counters this by stating that black speech patterns are even more complex than the ones conventionally used. Were academia able to communicate within this language barrier, Ratcliffe’s ideal of negotiating troubled identifications could be put to use.

Expanding upon David M. Levy’s opinion in Scrolling Forward of how documents are perceived, the same can be said for talk. Levy states about documents, “you can’t see them if you look only at them, ignoring the surroundings in which they operate” (29). Related to Villanueva, this idea is easily applicable to talk. For instance, within Bootstraps, Villanueva counters Piaget’s stance in which Piaget was “not concerned with culturally relativistic notions of cognition” (12). Later on in the same paragraph, Villanueva counters by stating, “the whole oral -literate dichotomy is spurious in America” (12). Put generally, he’s stating that social needs are changing and that the way in which racial minorities communicate simply indicate language needs within the social structure they occupy. Language is a constantly changing field, in which it will most likely never land on anything that will stay for good. Villanueva emphasizes this point on multiple occasions to get across his point effectively. 

Questions:

1. In which ways has language changed to shape the world that we live in academically instead of culturally?
2. Should language find itself in fluidity at some point instead of trying to be pinned down as a quantifiable fact?
3. How does language in the academic arena relate to a culturally grown understanding of language like in working-class communities?

Word Count: 874

 

Bazerman, Charles, and Paul A. Prior. What writing does and how it does it: an introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 

Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical listening: identification, gender, whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
Levy, David M. Scrolling forward: making sense of documents in the digital age. Arcade Publishing, 2016.

MacNeil, R. (2008). Do you speak American? Princeton, NJ: FMG Home Video.