Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay

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TRAVERSING THE DEMOCRATIC BORDERS OF THE ESSAY

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TRAVERSING THE DEMOCRATIC BORDERS OF THE ESSAY

Cristina Kirklighter

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

OF

NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Christine L. Hamel Marketing by Jennifer Giovani Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kirlighter, Cristina. Traversing the democratic borders of the essay / by Cristina Kirklighter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5467-3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5468-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Essay. I. Title. PN4500 .K57 2002 809.4—dc21 2002017733

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CONTENTS

Foreword Gail Y. Okawa

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Acknowledgments

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1. Introduction

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The Personal, the Political, and the Rhetorical: Montaigne’s and Bacon’s Use of the Essay Form Essaying an American Democratic Identity in Emerson and Thoreau The Essay as Political/Cultural Critique in Latin America Achieving a Place in Academia through the Personal Academic Essays of Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar 2. The Personal, the Political, and the Rhetorical: Montaigne and Bacon’s Use of the Essay Form Brief Biography of Michel de Montaigne Montaigne’s Departure from Traditional Rhetorical Writing Francis Bacon and the Essay 3. Essaying an American Democratic Identity in Emerson and Thoreau Ralph Waldo Emerson Biographical Background Montaigne, Plutarch, Emerson, and the Essay v

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12 15 17 18 34 39 43 43 45

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The Essay, Education, and the Formation of a U.S. National Identity Emerson and “The American Scholar” Henry David Thoreau Historical and Political Background of Walden Early Book Reviews of Walden and Its Significance to the Essay 4. The Essay as Political/Cultural Critique in Latin America Freire’s Place in Latin American History Freire’s Social Pedagogy and Its Tie to the Elements of the Essay Freire’s Pedagogical Ties to Self-Reflection in the Essay Accessible Writing and the Freirian Essay Freire and the Issue of Spontaneity The Essay’s Elements of Sincerity and Truthfulness in Freire’s Writings 5. Achieving a Place in Academia through the Personal Academic Essays of Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar Conversations with Victor Villanueva on Bootstraps and His Influence in Rhetoric and Composition Villanueva’s Use of Self-Reflection and Accessibility in Bootstraps The Movement from Mimicry to Spontaneity in Villanueva’s Academic Writings Sincerity and Acceptance in Villanueva’s Scholarship Ruth Behar and Her Rise to Academic Prominence Behar’s Use of Self-Reflexivity and Accessibility to Reconcile Her Ethnographic Identity in Academia Spontaneity and the Essay: Behar’s Growing Resistance to Becoming a Translated Academic Behar’s Use of Sincere Writing to Uncover Her Truth as an Ethnographer

51 52 58 62 65 71 79 81 81 86 92 96

103 106 108 114 117 122 124 128 130

6. Conclusion

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Works Cited

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Index

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FOREWORD

Gail Y. Okawa

I’ve told this story before. It was a profound moment in an already long teaching career. I had heard Paulo Freire’s name for the first time at a CCCC convention in the mid-eighties, and was tantalized by the discussion of his ideas. That summer I was fortunate enough to participate in a week-long workshop with him and scholars like Henry Giroux and Michael Apple, thinkers who restored my faith in education. Drawing participants from the west to east coasts, the workshop was wellattended and provocative, but some of us—educators of color—began to feel a familiar discomfort in relation to the dominant group. We formed a pan-ethnic People of Color Caucus and met with Freire, sitting together on the floor, in overstuffed chairs, speaking of our concerns and experiences with racial and class inequities. Inevitably the question arose: “What can we do?” His advice was for me unexpected but unforgettable: “Find the spaces,” he said, “invade the spaces.” This book from the heart and mind of Professor Cristina Kirklighter does just this. Not only does it provide a helpful overview of the work and trends in our field, an impressive and meticulous synthesis of scholarship on the essay, but it brings together a seemingly strange and eclectic lot— from Montaigne and Bacon to Emerson and Thoreau to Freire himself, Villanueva, and Behar—in a way that makes sense. In her quest to establish the personal essay as an invaluable means of individual expression and social study, the author offers a humanized view into European and North American essayists, long ago studied and perhaps forgotten by some of us: Montaigne through a contemporary lens and perspective; Emerson and Thoreau as nation-builders. Even the Latin American Freire is drawn as a

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Foreword

man in the process of discovery and change, alive, dynamic, and in flux. This portrayal made me recall Freire’s ironic reference that summer 14 years ago to himself as an “efficient dish washing machine” (or something to that effect), a man revising his role in his own family. Sometimes making gods into men is an invasion. Cristina’s work in this volume affirms my work during much of my career, especially the last 15 years or so, and reveals some chance—and some deliberate—crossed paths. In forming a multicultural cohort of writing center tutors at the University of Washington in the 1980’s, many of them undergraduate or graduate students of Alaska Native, American Indian, Asian American, African American, and Latino/a backgrounds, I began to see how personal life experience and critical reflection merged in the tutors’ developing sense of themselves as thoughtful professionals. I was hooked by the connection. In designing my dissertation study years later, I asked my participants—all teachers of color—to trace their experiences with literacy from their earliest recollections to their careers as teachers of writing at the time, a choice based on my experience with the UW tutors, an abiding interest in the persons behind the roles, my research on autobiographical narrative, and what was, by then, an internalized belief in the power of personal and critical reflection. At one point, I had the bright idea to ask Victor Villanueva if he would participate in my study and write an autobiographical narrative for it, to which he replied, “I’ve just written one; do you want to see it?,” and sent me a draft of Bootstraps. In effect, we have been doing this work “so as not to lose [ourselves] in the enormous distance between what [we] do and say,” as Freire wrote later (Letters to Cristina 3), and Professor Kirklighter points out in this volume. Like Cristina, in the early 1990’s, I combed through CCCC program books and attended the sparse offering of papers on the personal essay, the autobiographical, the narrative before they came in vogue, when Anne DiPardo and others were admonishing compositionists to see the value of students’ personal narratives in light of the politics of literacy. On one of those occasions in 1994, I happened to hear Cristina deliver her first paper “Redefining the Autobiographical Essay Through Multiculturism,” was inspired to speak to her after the panel, and invited her to join the Latino Caucus (of which I have been an honorary member since 1987). Inclusion works against the isolation; another invasion of another space. Even those of us who do this work need to be reminded of its value, to see it in the context of a broader history, a larger effort, and this book aids us in the process. In drawing together elements of democracy, in ascribing a democratic character to the personal essay

Foreword

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that crosses generations and cultures, the author illustrates the currency of the genre and the absolute necessity of our understanding and use of it not only in our scholarship, but in our classrooms. Villanueva and Behar’s stories and writing illustrate this. With the calamitous events of September 2001 loaming large, we will need more not fewer means for cross-cultural empathy and awareness, more not fewer avenues for questioning received knowledge—the deeds and words of the powerful, more not fewer demands for self-reflection, accessibility, sincerity, and authenticity. In troubled times when “democracy” is touted sometimes too casually and carelessly, it becomes all the more important to continue our vigilance in questioning the face of things, not for the sake of academic exercise, but to preserve those things we hold most dear. Cristina Kirklighter helps us to see the usefulness of the personal essay in achieving this end. Gail Y. Okawa September 2001 Youngstown, Ohio


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of the inspirations for writing about the personal essay are numerous and cannot be contained in a few pages. I can only highlight some of the more important influences that shaped this book. My loving and caring parents who taught me the meaning of humility and accessibility gave direction to my scholarly pursuits. They reminded me throughout my academic educational process that I should use my knowledge to support independent spirits. Both parents (especially my Honduran mother, Hilda Sanchéz Cain) taught me to use my education to champion the causes of Latino/a experiences and help them achieve a legitimate place to belong. I also admire my father, Marshall Cain, who left his Southern small-town mindset to expand his global horizons and respect cultures other than his own. They encouraged and inspired me to locate connections and differences between authors of varying cultures. They are the roots to the journey of my essay explorations. I also owe a dept of gratitude to my daughter Madeline, who patiently stood by me as I juggled my roles as mother and scholar. I hope this book will, in some small way, speak to her generation as they forge new perceptions and uses of the personal essay’s place in a more democratic academy. Finally, in regard to my family, I must acknowledge my late husband Matthew Kirklighter, whose integrity, leadership, and devotion to others will create lasting memories as well as inspirations for those who knew him. Within academia, I must first thank Joseph Moxley for the attention he gave to the writing aspects of this book. His suggestions for clear and accessible writing helped create what some have said is an enjoyable read. As an essay scholar, I wanted to adhere to such prose, and I appreciate his insights in helping me achieve this. I must also give a warm thank you to the CCCC/NCTE Latina/o Caucus for the support and

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encouragement they give to their members. They are inspiring in so many ways. Particularly, I would like to thank Victor Villanueva, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, Amanda Espinosa-Aguillar, Luisa Rodríguez Connal, and Gail Okawa. Hunter O’Hara, my colleague and friend, I thank you for our positive transcendent relationship as we worked together in the final stages of our books. Bill Dean, your high standards and ethics as a journalist amaze me and influence my ideals for a democratic essayist. I also want to thank the knowledgable and kind reviewers for their insightful comments, which indeed helped me in revising and updating my manuscript. I am privileged and humbled to have such wonderful people with brilliant minds in my life. Lastly, I want to thank James Peltz and Priscilla Ross for their belief in the merit of this book. I admire the selection of books they have brought forth throughout the years to educate academia about tolerance and democracy.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Both of these traditions are inherent in me. I cannot disown the white tradition, the Euro-American tradition, any more than I can disown the Mexican, the Latino or the Native, because they are all in me. —“Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition and Postcoloniality”

In the last decade, some Composition scholars like Joel Haefner, John Trimbur, Douglas Hesse, Thomas O’Donnell, and Paul Heilker have critiqued the textual and institutional practices of the essay. For example, Joel Haefner contends that essay scholarship reinforces institutional and patriarchal hierarchies by privileging essayists from elite Western European backgrounds. John Trimbur, in his study of Western European essayist literacy, finds that essays by Bacon and Locke created a literacy that encouraged, through its seemingly unproblematical plain style, the illusion of a neutral essay text. Their emphasis on empirical experience created a new locus of authority in the text that served to conceal “the social processes of producing and using texts” (“Essayist Literary” 80). Within the composition field, Douglas Hesse dissuades compositionists from dabbling in the essay by examining how it is historically used as a self-indulgent endeavor that leaves little room for studying its social and historical context. He sees some teachers use of literary nonfiction with

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay

their students as a “naive celebration of ‘the literary’” that ignores “important issues in rhetorical, genre, and cultural theory” (324). The concerns of these essay critics writing in the early 1990s revolve around the fear that researchers, teachers, and students will somehow ignore the social and historical aspects and instead indulge themselves in its aesthetic literary qualities. In Composition, it is a fear of backsliding to the expressivism of the 1970s that James Berlin and other social constructionists so ardently argued against. By the mid 1990s, however, scholars like Thomas O’Donnell and Paul Heilker begin to study the personal essay as a more radical form of writing that may indeed have social and political implications within the classroom. Thomas O’Donnell asks Compositionists to take a second look at what he sees as “attacks” on expressivism by social constructionists. O’Donnell argues that an expressivist rhetoric can enhance a student’s understanding of the “doctrines and ideologies” presented in class. Students need an outlet for “understanding and investigating” the political discourses presented in the classroom, and the personal essay is one writing method of pursuing this (427). Paul Heilker proceeds one step further by investigating the historical/theoretical aspects of the personal essay and its significance to teaching this form in first-year writing classrooms. He encourages compositionists to embrace an active form of the essay (skeptical, nonlinear, antischolastic, and anti-Ciceronian). This form contrasts with the thesis/support essay form (a linear, thesis driven, mechanically organized, positivistic, closed writing style). He contends that the thesis/support essay “is inadequate to the developmental, epistemological, ideological, and feminine (and thus more fully human) rhetorical needs of both students and instructors in the contemporary composition classroom” (11). These scholars’ studies of the essay’s historical contexts instead of exclusively exploring the essay’s aesthetic form are in keeping with a recent trend in U.S. scholarship to place more emphasis on a text’s historical, cultural, and political facets. Although they raise important issues on the essay’s contexts, their critiques of the essay have focused primarily on Western European and Anglo-American writings. In literature, numerous articles and books have critiqued Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Emerson, Addison, Arnold, and others within the traditional canon. In composition, scholars trace the historical and institutional practices of a primarily Anglo-American educational system. Although these critiques of the essay are invaluable to understanding our current literary and educational system, they do not adequately address how nontraditional scholars have productively transformed the essay to meet their personal and political needs. Until recently, there has

Introduction

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been only one book within the literature fields outside of Latin American scholarship entitled The Politics of the Essay (an essay anthology) that exclusively addresses how nontraditional writers like women and minorities use the essay’s form. In their co-edited book, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman (both from German Literature Departments) note that the nontraditional essay’s use is perhaps one of the more radical forms of writing: “It take a certain degree of radical thinking to appropriate a literary form unintended for you and to make it conform to your own wishes” (14). The anthology examines the politics behind Latin American, African American, English, French, and German female essayists. German influences for examining the essay’s social and political contexts in relation to its form derive from radical interpretations of the essay by early- and mid-twentieth-century German scholars like Lukacs, T. W. Adorno, and others from the Frankfurt school. T. W. Adorno, as a German-Jewish intellectual, condemns a German culture that thrives on positivistic systems, systems that create repressive orders through departmental specializations that leave little room for interdisciplinary discoveries. He sees the essay’s freedom from specialization and genre boundaries as one way to destabalize these hierarchical divisions. These German essayists, however, still placed significant emphasis on studying the form of the essay as can be seen from the titles of Lukac’s work The Soul and Form and Adorno’s article “The Essay as Form.” Both essay scholars grounded in Western European academic discourse perceive the essay’s spontaneous form as conducive to critiquing established and archaic German institutions. Until recently, U.S. scholars in the twentieth century, like their European counterparts, still emphasized studying the form’s relationship with the author, as we see in William Gass’s words: The mechanics of the mind must not be allowed to show; yet where else, if not here, may they reveal themselves, for the hero of the essay is its author in the act of thinking things out, feeling and finding a way; it is the mind in the marvels and mysteries of its makings, in the work of the imagination, in the search for form. (333)

Even current prominent U.S. essay scholars like Carl Klaus, Chris Anderson, E. M. Duval, William Gass, Graham Good, Philip Lopate, and G. Douglas Atkins continue to somewhat follow the Western European tradition of studying the essay form. However, the study of form among U.S. scholars is never far from the study of U.S. issues concerning democracy, citizenship, and nation building. In some respect, their scholarship follows the lead of early American essayists such as Emerson and Thoreau.

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In contrast, the most prolific Latin American essay scholar, Martin Stabb, pays little attention to the study of form in his two scholarly groundbreaking books In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890–1960 and his more recent book The Dissenting Voice: The New Essay of Spanish America, 1960–1985. As he says in the introduction to his first book, “. . . the focus of this study lies more in the area of ideas—of intellectual history set against the backdrop of the total culture—than it does in the area of literature per se” (11). Doris Meyer’s groundbreaking anthology on Latin American women essayists again emphasizes how the study of the essay in these areas must take into account their histories: “Indeed, one cannot appreciate the literary and intellectual history of this region without reading its essayists” (Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay 10). The entire collection works to establish a historical literary place for these Latin American women essayists rather than to mainly focus on the intricacies of the writers’ form or style. The leaders in Latin American essay scholarship consider the essay whether it be personal or not as paramount to understanding the historical, cultural, and political complexities of these nations. The study of form therefore becomes much less significant in Latin American scholarship. Consequently, the different emphases between essay scholarships create academic divisions of study. In one work on the personal essay, Claire de Obaldia, a Western European scholar, dismisses Latin American essay scholarship for her study because it “reflects the history of ideas and the cultural identity of their countries” rather than exploring the essay’s form (2). Although over two hundred books and articles have been written on the Latin American essay (some in English) and Latin America is globally known for its fine essayists, essay scholars in English Departments according to my research findings very seldom cite these sources or essayists in their research. Divisions such as these consequently create a gap in U.S. essay scholarship that serves to undermine a deeper understanding of the essay’s benefits to today’s scholarship. Given literature and composition’s recent interest in cross-disciplinary areas like cultural, women, and multicultural studies (areas of research that emphasize the historical, social, and political), essay scholarship in English Departments would benefit from the research on the Latin American essay. Perhaps those who come closest to putting into practice the strengths of these various essay scholarships are nontraditional essayists in academia, some of whom search for ways to problematize divisions within the academy, especially divisions that create distance from their private experiences. For them, the essay becomes a tool for transform-

Introduction

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ing the private experience into a critique of public social institutions. Consequently, the essay in its more personal form, can serve to question academic, cultural, and political issues: Far from entailing aestheticisms or isolationism, insistence on the personal has historically meant for criticism an active engagement with culture and a substantial investment in politics: no shirking of larger responsibilities, in other words but, on the contrary, an embrace of them deriving from awareness of the socially as well as constituted nature of selfhood. (Atkins 37)

Atkin’s interpretation of the personal essay’s function may help explain why many nontraditional scholars and students see these writings as a tool for connecting their home culture with academia. As Ruth Behar notes, one’s personal identification with academic studies produces an “interesting” and valuable contribution for nontraditional scholars: To assert that one is a “white middle-class woman” or a “black gay man” or a working-class Latina” within one’s study, say, of Shakespeare or Santera is interesting only if one is able to draw deeper connections between one’s personal experience and the subject under study. (“Dare We Say I” B-2)

As a biethnic academic, I too feel compelled to make connections between my mixed identities and my academic studies. At a time when I began to celebrate my mixed Latina/Anglo heritages, I noticed how difficult it became to share my multiethnic identities with academics who bought into ivory tower compartmentalization. To complicate my academic life a bit further, I found it too confining to be a specialist in a certain area of study. I wanted to be an academic interdisciplinary traveler among many English Department faculty who made clear distinctions between Literature and Composition. In politically charged academic environments that sometimes foster polarized communities, biethnic/biracial academics such as Cherrie Moraga, Elena Creef, Ruth Behar, Cecile Ann Lawrence, and Brunetta Wolfman to name just a few feel pressured to enter a monolithic cultural closet and choose one of their identities. Often, they are made to feel ashamed of their dual biological/cultural makeups. The personal essay represents one way for them to express the oppressions that people of biracial/biethnic heritages experience within society. However, the study of any groups’ use of the essay’s more personal form offers many complex challenges. In order to begin tackling these challenges, the study must examine how scholars define the essay. What is it? How does it differ from traditional academic writing? How does it benefit teachers, students, and communities?

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In Western Europe, early influential scholars like Montaigne criticized the scholarly writing conventions of their day. He, along with more contemporary essayists like Adorno and Lukacs, see much of academic writing as totalitarian in form: definitive, formal, linear, distant, quote ridden, and indecipherable to all but a privileged few. In contrast, the more personal essay offers an escape from the confines of academic prose. By using this antigenre form that in contemporary essays embodies multiple kinds of writing, many essayists in search of democracy find a freedom for expressing in their writings spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, and a rhetoric of sincerity. Although certainly this is only a partial list of the essay’s possibilities for expression, these particular elements (as the chapters will show) foster a study that takes into account the Western European/U.S. emphasis on form as well as the Latin American emphasis on the history of ideas that shape both their personal and collective identities. These particular elements of the essay may also be found in other genres (especially as postmodern writers have blurred the distinctions between various literary genres). However, essay scholars like myself who are well aware of the essay’s marginalized status in both Literature and Composition, must diligently work to create a more fair and democratic study of this genre. As Alexandra Butrym points out in his introduction to Essays on the Essay, “The essay is associated with the facetious, the trivial, and the anecdotal on the one hand and with the learned treatise and useful effective expository writing on the other” (4). By examining these particular democratic elements of the essay, it is my hope that I can help lift the essay, especially the personal essay, to its rightful place in academia. Spontaneity, as a source for inspiration in essay discourse and other literary forms, has been frequently studied throughout literary history. Wordsworth’s Romantic emphasis on “the spontaneous flow of powerful feelings” and Woolf’s Modernist perspective of a spontaneous moment’s value (“moments of being”) represent just a few of many writers’ works that see spontaneity as a wonderful and powerful vehicle for exploring larger issues. According to T. W. Adorno, the essay’s spontaneity “does not permit its domain to be prescribed. Instead of achieving something scientifically, or creating something artistically, the effort of the essay reflects a childlike freedom that catches fire, without scruple, on what others have already done” (152). Spontaneity thus allows writers to take risks that stray from conventional scholarly prose. Instead of working toward definitive conclusions, as in an article, the essay’s spontaneity allows the writer to wander, to make connections in unusual places, to emphasize discoveries instead of conclusions. Spontaneity, with its wandering, connecting, and discovering elements,

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allows some scholars to venture into their home communities, draw connections between home and academia, and make discoveries that offer hope for bridging these sometimes polarized settings. The essay’s form also allows writers to reflect on themselves. Some, like E.B. White, equate self-reflexivity with self-absorption. Others like G. Douglas Atkins find the essay’s “openendedness, skepticism, and critical spirit” conducive to some of the theoretical components of deconstruction. Postmodern theorists see self-reflection as a way to problematize the unitary self and embrace the multiplicity of selves that make up the individual. For example, Bahktin sees each word, each utterance, as open to multiple interpretations that are tied to varying social and historical forces. Our voices, our use of language, is therefore multivoiced and multilanguaged. However, according to G. Douglas Atkins and Gary Hartman, many postmodern theorists use the unitary-voiced article form to talk about deconstructive issues, such as the play of language, antisystematization, interruption, and uncertainty. They see these scholars participating in a confined writing form that negates what they profess to practice. How can deconstructionists practice “openendedness” with an article form that requires them to prove a point? How can deconstructionists openly display subjectivity in an article that encourages writers to use a nonpersonal tone? In more recent years, self-reflection has influenced teacher’s practices in the writing classroom such as Donna Qualley’s Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry, Kathleen Blake Yancey’s Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Wendy S. Hesford’s Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, and, most recently, Barbara Kamler’s Relocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy. Compositionists’ focus on process in the last decade requires a self-reflective stance that sees critical thinking and writing as a recursive process. However, those who champion academic self-reflection confront some criticism by academics. For example, Daphne Patai, in her essay “Sick and Tired of Scholars’ Nouveau Solipsism,” argues that the new trend of postmodernist self-reflexivity is to blame for scholars “spending too much effort wading in the morass of [their] own positionings” (A52). These self-indulgent writers, according to Patai, contribute little to impacting the grave societal problems of our time. Perhaps Patai has a point if an egocentric use of self-reflexivity was the only component of the personal essay. However, Patai’s argument falls apart when we consider that most essayists strive toward accessibility. An academic’s use of accessible writing transcends the personal by encouraging a collective consciousness among academic and nonacademic communities. For these scholars, the essay is inextricably intertwined

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with a political and collective purpose. For example, Ruth Behar, an anthropologist of Cuban/Jewish origins, sees the more personal form of the essay as emerging “from the struggles of those traditionally excluded from the academy, such as women and members of minority groups, to find a voice that acknowledges both their sense of difference and their belated arrival on the scholarly scene” (B2). The essay sits well with someone like Mike Rose, whose experiences as an Italian immigrant of working-class origins give personal evidence that refute those composition theories tied to developmental writing. By writing in a depersonalized jargon-laden form, nontraditional scholars relinquish the need for “plain language that will be understood by a large audience” (Behar B2). On the other hand, “Plain language” works well for traditionally excluded members of the academic community like Behar, Rose, and others who feel a responsibility to reach out and be understood by their disenfranchised home communities. For these members, there is a personal/collective stake that has less to do with self-absorption or jargon-laden language and more to do with establishing an academic place for marginalized voices. The personal essay’s accessibility also inspires both traditional and nontraditional students to feel comfortable in an academic environment that has become increasingly less familiar. Part of their estrangement comes from the excessive educational testing in elementary and secondary schools. These tests have little relevance to students’ cultures or lives and, consequently, leave students disconnected from their educational world. According to G. Douglas Atkins, the essay offers “undergraduates and graduates alike [. . .] opportunities denied them elsewhere in their collegiate and academic careers, a breath of fresh air in the sometimes fetid atmosphere of academe, a positive response to human needs” (15). By reading essayists, students can also learn about writing their own lives in a nonthreatening and sharing way. In “Students and Teachers under the Influence: Image and Idea in the Essay,” Pat Hoy sees essayists like E. B. White, Joan Didion, Loren Eisely, Annie Dillard, and others as collaborators with our students. Their accessible forms of writing “show students what they can do as writers” (291). Some nontraditional writers also strive for creating a rhetoric of sincerity or truthfulness in their texts. The self that strives toward this rhetoric of sincerity creates for their readers a more true, realistic, picture of his or her life and surroundings. There are certainly exceptions to this authentic disclosure when we look at writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maxine Hong-Kingston, and others. They feel quite comfortable mixing autobiography with fiction. However, when some people wish to offer their personal stories as testi-

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monies to the injustices that they experienced throughout their lives, the search for an authentic self becomes paramount. This is particularly significant in Latin America, as will be discussed in chapter 4, where writers strive for authenticity to set a contrast between themselves and the corrupt political systems filled with deceit. In the early part of the twentieth century in Latin America, several highly influential scholars like Jose Ortega y Gasett, Waldo David Frank, and Victoria Ocampo wrote of ways to achieve an authentic Latin American individual and society. Truth was at the heart of these discussions, and they inspired Latin American writers to bring the element of sincerity to their essays. Paulo Freire, the renowned world educator and mentor to many U.S. academics, borrowed this concept of authenticity and applied it to his theories about teaching students. Throughout his works, Freire makes frequent reference to the idea of “authenticity” as a means for the oppressed and educators to liberate themselves from their conditions and begin to connect through dialogue. Many nontraditional academics inspired by Freire, like bell hooks and Victor Villanueva, follow through with his concept of authenticity by frankly addressing in personal writings the injustices they see in academic and nonacademic environments. The element of “authenticity” in essays becomes paramount to many nontraditional teachers and students who wish to testify to the hardships experienced within their multiple societies. My focus as a Latina is to investigate how they use these elements for critiquing academic and nonacademic institutions. If, as contemporary scholarly essayists, we believe in a self-reflexive practice that acknowledges a fragmented self, then it stands to reason that the Latino(a) essay must interweave through many historical, ideological, and cultural influences. The Latino(a) personal essay as cultural critique must draw on its many academic influences from Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America Specifically, this book will address the following questions: • How have the essay elements of self-reflexivity, spontaneity, accessibility, and a rhetoric of sincerity impacted certain Western European, U.S., Latin American, and Latino(a) writers? • How has the essay been used as historical and cultural critique by certain Western European, U.S., Latin American, and Latino (a) scholars? • How are these Western European, Anglo-American, and Latin American influences intertwined in Latino(a) essayists who draw from all of these cultures?

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These are questions that do not exclusively come from a bicultural Latina/Angla scholar “wading in the morass of [her] own positionings” but from a multiplicity of academic voices that wish to, as Chris Anderson points out, “dismantle the hierarchies and fraternities of scholarship” (Hearsay Evidence 305). In the following pages, I will focus on brief abstracts about each of the subsequent chapters covered in this book. THE PERSONAL, THE POLITICAL, AND THE RHETORICAL: MONTAIGNE’S AND BACON’S USE OF THE ESSAY FORM

This chapter will trace the essay’s early influences in Western Europe with an accentuation on its form. The purpose in this section for accentuating form as a primary rather than secondary study is to demonstrate the treatment of the essay in Western European scholarship. For traditional essay scholars, the essay commences with the sixteenth-century writer Montaigne, more specifically known as the “father of the essay.” Montaigne sets the stage for the essay’s separation from traditional academic writing by ridiculing scholars of his century “who amid their nonexistent works scatter whole passages of the ancient authors to do themselves honor” (Montaigne 107). Montaigne needed a personal essay form that served to explore and question the dramatic changes in Renaissance politics, science, and religion. The scholars of his day used a Ciceronian rhetorical style that was inadequate for this process of inquiry. Montaigne emphasized the personal, self-reflective, and spontaneous nature of essayist prose. According to Carl Klaus, essayists from Montaigne, Bacon, and Addison to more contemporary essayists like Adorno, White, and Gass “define the essay, or their own essayistic practice, by setting it off against highly conventionalized and systematized forms of writing, such as rhetorical, scholarly, or journalistic discourse” (156). Montaigne sets the stage for a study of the essay’s form so prevalent among Western European essay scholars. Montaigne’s study and use of the essay form comes from the classical figures and philosophies of Seneca, Plutarch, and Pyronnian Skepticism. Although Bacon used a less personalized essay form, he remains an important figure in demonstrating the essay’s use for political action. The didactic nature of his essays moves away from the inconclusive skepticism that pervades Montaigne’s form. Bacon’s essays were meant to reach a public audience that would act on his words. The Baconian essay, according to Joel Haefner, “was objective, impersonal, concerned with great social and moral issues, rational, authoritative, methodical, balanced, and argumentative” (“Unfathering the Essay” 260). Both these Renaissance figures demonstrate two different essay forms that begin to merge together when the essay reaches the New World.

Introduction

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ESSAYING AN AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC IDENTITY IN EMERSON AND THOREAU

This chapter will focus on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s use of the essay form to create an American democratic identity. The study of form becomes less relevant to these particular essayists and those who study them in comparison to their Western European counterparts. Robert Atwan, an essayist scholar, believes Emerson pursued the essay because it met with “a form in which ‘everything is admissible, philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism” (109). This search for a free form ties into nineteenth-century American writers’ search for an American identity instead of a reliance on Western European influences. Within his essay “The American Scholar,” Emerson hopes for a new American scholar that will not timidly imitate his/her European counterparts, but will set a new course in scholarship that encompasses the ideals of American democratization. For Emerson, who abhorred systems and embraced an American Romanticism, the essay with its antisystematic qualities and form worked well to foster American democratic ideals. Thoreau, another prominent nineteenth-century American essayist, furthered the idea of democracy through his work Walden. Thoreau justifies his personal essays in Walden as an act for himself and his fellow citizens. Many of his contemporaries and more recent scholars suggest that Walden extended and critiqued the conversation of “The American Scholar” through examples of personal practices. By examining both Thoreau’s political/philosophical views and others’ reactions to his essays’ elements (spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, and a rhetoric of sincerity), this chapter will demonstrate the importance of the essay in forming a national scholarly identity for this emerging nation. With the study of Thoreau’s essays, the separation between the treatment of form and the surrounding political/cultural history becomes much more fluid and compatible. The essay’s elements and Thoreau’s characteristics for shaping an American scholar become almost one and the same. THE ESSAY AS POLITICAL/CULTURAL CRITIQUE IN LATIN AMERICA

This chapter attempts to broaden essay scholarship in English Studies by examining Latin American essayists with a primary focus on the Brazilian educator and essayist, Paulo Freire. Scholarly books and anthologies in English Studies do not address Latin America’s role in essay scholarship. Essay scholars such as Carl Klaus, Chris Anderson, Robert Atwan, William Gass, Alfred Kazin, G. Douglas Atkins, William Zeiger, and most

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recently Paul Heilker prefer to look to Western Europe (France, England, and Germany) or to the United States for their research. The problem in English studies essay scholarship is its failure to include the profound influences of Latin American essayists who significantly strengthened the interpretation of the essay as historical and cultural critique. This chapter will seek to recover this gap from English studies by examining the prominent cultural and historical role the essay plays in Latin America. I will look at how Latin Americans, especially Paulo Freire, used the essay as a political and social writing form to further democratic changes. For Latin American activists and revolutionaries, the essay was a writing form that helped them critique the ills of elitism and support democratic ideals that served the oppressed. Paulo Freire figures prominently in this chapter because English studies scholars are quite familiar with his work as an educator. Since he is already a vital part of English Department education, this chapter will expand his vital role by probing his contributions to essay scholarship. Like his predecessors in the previous chapters, Paulo Friere used the essay as a writing form to critique education and nondemocratic societal ills that served to undermine his nation. However, Freire as a Latin American activist, sought to implement the essay, especially its personal form, into personal and political democratic action. The essay and most of its elements discussed in this book takes on a much more serious nation-building role when it enters the Latin American realm. The prominence of the essay in Latin America serves as both a national and personal narrative of Latin Americans in quest of democracy through the essay’s elements of self-reflection, accessibility, and a rhetoric of sincerity. The essay element of spontaneity, however, becomes problematic for Latin Americans who equate spontaeity with their chaotic political systems. The study of the Latin American personal/political essay works to strengthen this book’s focus that the essay is a cultural/historical writing form which impacts both the individual and nation. ACHIEVING A PLACE IN ACADEMIA THROUGH THE PERSONAL ACADEMIC ESSAYS OF VICTOR VILLANUEVA AND RUTH BEHAR

My last chapter will show the interplay of Western European, AngloAmerican, and Latin American essay scholarship through close readings of Latino/a personal texts. I will demonstrate how two Latino/a academics, Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar, follow similar essay patterns as those in the previous chapters to further this democratic writing form. However, unlike their essay predecessors who came from privileged

Introduction

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backgrounds, these working-class Latinos/as felt compelled to use the personal academic essay to gain acceptance in academia. Victor Villanueva, a Puerto Rican Freirian scholar, comes from the academic field of Rhetoric and Composition. Ruth Behar, a Cuban-American Jew, comes from the field of anthropology and is an outspoken advocate in her field for using the personal essay in scholarly writing. She is an autoethnographer who uses the personal essay to establish her research as well as her identity in academia. Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar also signify two Latino/a academic scholars with strong ties to the Latin American essayists’ emphasis on historical and cultural critique. The last chapter first begins with the study of Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. This recent work encompasses a series of personal essays that might be classified as an autobiographical work. However, Villanueva’s insertion of complex rhetorical, composition, philosophical, and linguistic theoretical issues is more conducive to contemporary critical essayist prose. Villanueva’s personal evidence intermingles with scholastic evidence that either serves to validate or invalidate Villanueva’s personal experiences. Villanueva uses the personal essay’s elements of self-reflexivity, spontaneity, accessibility, and sincerity as a way to gain respect as a Latino scholar who experiences injustices in and out of academia. His quest through the personal essay is to establish not only his sense of academic belongingness but to pave an easier way for future Latino/a academics like himself. He realizes that in order to achieve this he must reach out through personal essays to a non-Latino/a audience and educate them on Latino/a culture and history. Ruth Behar’s personal essays will offer readers insight into the Latina’s academic role as an autoethnographer and essayist. Her essays break with traditional ethnography by drawing connections between her personal struggles as a Latina Jew professor in academia with the struggles of those she observes in her studies. These personal disclosures that draw readers in through the elements of the essay discussed in this book provide readers with greater insights into Behar’s subjectivities as a Latina observer of Spanish and Latin American communities. She demonstrates the challenges Latina ethnographers face as they observe communities not so distant from their own. Behar’s influences in her ethnographic work play a part in encouraging Latinos/as to see current personal trends in anthropology as a way to mend their historical fractures.


CHAPTER TWO

The Personal, the Political, and the Rhetorical: Montaigne and Bacon’s Use of the Essay Form

In recent years, academia has witnessed a push to include nontraditional works in the canon. Many critics argue that ethnic writers are underrepresented in mainstream studies and that they need a canon that reflects our cultural diversity. Autobiography, as a genre that fosters close examinations of a writer’s life, allows academics to study intimately the varying cultures of nontraditional writers. Today, works of such ethnic writers as Maya Angelou, Patricia Williams, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, Ernesto Galarza, Richard Rodriguez, and many others are widely studied by scholars. Surprisingly though while certain ethnic groups receive significant recognition in the autobiographical realm, they are rarely studied by scholars in another closely allied genre, the personal essay. Perhaps one of the few fundamental differences between these two genres is that autobiographers offer an extensive account of a good part of their lives while personal essayists, as Phillip Lopate states, spend their time “diving into the volcano of self and extracting a single hot coal to consider and shape” (xxxi). However, the two genres consistently overlap when scholars consider these writing forms’ propensity to show the writer’s quest for sincerity, spontaneity, accessibility, and self-reflexivity Yet, for all their similarities, there are only a few books that specifically analyze the essay’s use by nontraditional essayists. What is even more puzzling is that some of the most politically progressive nontraditional writers, such as James

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Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldua, frequently use an essay form that partially originated with Michel de Montaigne, a French Renaissance nobleman and writer. Why are many nontraditional writers attracted to an essay form that partially derives from Western European influences of wealth and privilege? For the editors of The Politics of the Essay, the answer lies in their belief that “It takes a certain degree of radical thinking to appropriate a literary form unintended for you and to make it conform to your own wishes” (Joeres and Mittman 14). The appropriation of the form they refer to predominantly originates in the Essays of Montaigne. Indeed, as Michel Jeanneret points out, Montaigne frequently “manipulated” and “appropriated” the great philosophers from the past as a way of making them conform to his contemporary society (575). However, the chapters in The Politics of the Essay only slightly discuss the historical implications of this appropriation. In other words, they do not thoroughly address these early Western European writers when they study the essay’s more nontraditional and radical forms. One possible reason certain progressive scholars avoid a thorough study of the essay may come from the conservatism that is associated with this genre. As mentioned in the introduction, many scholars like Joel Haefner, John Trimbur, and John Mowitt point to the Western European elitism of the essay that serves individualistic and nondemocratic interests. However, these scholars who associate these early historical contexts with conservative and capitalistic interests may inadvertently work to create gaps rather than holistically piece together the reasons why certain nontraditional writers or, for the purpose of my book, certain Latino/a writers find the essay attractive. In order to study the nontraditional appropriators, it is critical to conduct first a thorough study of that which is being appropriated. Nontraditional writers find that the essay’s qualities of spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, and truthfulness work well to meet their needs of transcending the personal and political. As previously discussed, many nontraditional writers see the essay as inextricably intertwined with a political and moral collective consciousness. Although early essay writers like Montaigne and Bacon are hardly considered nonpriviledged, their attraction to some of these essay qualities is also grounded in politics. In this chapter, I will show how ancient Greek and Roman political philosophers and movements, such as Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and Pyronnian Skepticism, along with certain Renaissance historical events, had a great impact on Montaigne and Bacon’s use of the essay form. I will illustrate that the essay began in politics and that it was used to rebel against and transform the traditional rhetorical discourse of its day. Montaigne and Bacon used different essay forms that

The Personal, the Political, and the Rhetorical

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worked well to meet with their society’s dramatic changes in politics, science, and religion. At least in Montaigne’s essay form, the personal serves as a powerful rhetorical device to explore and question the impact these dramatic changes had on his society. These studies of these early essayists will serve in later chapters to enlighten readers on the essay’s changing political role for traditional and nontraditional writers. BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Born in Bordeaux in 1533 to noble families, Michel de Montaigne grew up in the mixed cultures of his French father, Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne, and a Spanish-Jewish mother, Antoinette de Louppes (Lopez) of Toulouse. Although Montaigne was raised by wealthy parents, his father wanted his son to develop a connection with the common people and thus gave him peasant godparents. He also had Montaigne nursed by a village mother. His father’s motivation for doing this stems from his desire to give Montaigne (the future overseer of his estate) a connection with the tenants. Montaigne would later praise the home education that his father gave him. However, Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne also prepared his son to compete in a privileged education curriculum by emersing him in Latin. The great Latinist faculty of the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux felt threatened by Montaigne’s quick mastery of Latin. His educational experience at the college became an unpleasant one, filled with isolation, cruel punishment, and monotonous studies. In his essay “Of the Education of Children” and “Of Pedantry,” Montaigne later criticized a privileged educational system such as the College de Guyenne or certain kinds of tutor schooling that emphasized recitation and ignored a child’s discoveries. Hugo Friedrich notes in his analysis of these two essays that “The pedantry at which the two Essays (I, 25 and I, 26) are aimed is the epitome of the lack of intellectual freedom and of an exercise in memory which delivers man into the hands of tradition without leading him to an awakening of the soul and of being himself” (90). The free form of the essay, in some ways, represents Montaigne’s rebellion against such rigid learning and writing constraints. Montaigne’s privileged education was meant to prepare him for a position in politics as was customary for many of his status. As Donald Frame explains, he served as a counselor in the Chambre des Enquetes for thirteen years, but quickly became disillusioned with a corrupted and convoluted law system (ix). A few short years after his father died in 1568, Montaigne sold his parliamentary position and retired at thirty-eight from his counsel to the court and king. According to Frame,

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Montaigne assumed his designated responsibilities as the lord of Montaigne and retreated to a life of writing (ix). However, recent scholarship by George Hoffman refutes previous scholars’ notions of Montaigne’s “retreat” and instead contends that his place of writing (the chateau’s library) also served as a watch tower where he monitored the servants and laborers of his estate. He was a landowner and a writer who could not “retreat” to an ivory tower. In fact, very few writers at that time had the leisure to exclusively devote their time to writing. Hoffman believes that these earlier scholars’ contentions of a “pastoral retreat” skewed the reality of Montaigne’s simultaneous public and private writing space (Montaigne’s Career 37). However, Montaigne’s freedom from his former political life grounded in Ciceronian rhetoric did significantly impact his flexibility in exploring the essay’s qualities, as well as its philosophical and political underpinnings. John O’Neill notes that Montaigne could only perform a self-study by freeing himself from the “violence and treachery of political life” (11). This freedom allowed him to ground the essay’s use in a political critique that would ultimately call into question the traditional rhetorical writing form of his day. MONTAIGNE’S DEPARTURE FROM TRADITIONAL RHETORICAL WRITING

During the Renaissance period, the popular written discourse was the Latin dispositio. The oration or dispositio consists of the following sections (1) exordium: an opening that introduces the new subject by outlining the main points (2) narratio-division: an explanation of the question (3) confirmatio: a discussion of favorable arguments (4) refutatio: a dismantling of opposing arguments (5) peroratio: a neatly laid-out conclusion that summarizes the major points. As E. M. Duval notes, Renaissance students were immersed in Latin education, and, consequently, quite familiar with Cicero’s form of the dispositio: “At nearly every level of the curriculum, Cicero was presented as a model reverently to be parsed, analyzed, memorized and imitated” (285). The rise of printed material allowed university students access to Cicero’s works. In Michael Grant’s introduction to Cicero’s selected works, he states that Cicero’s ideas were the basic foundation for Renaissance upper-class schooling in fifteenth-century Italy and later spread throughout Europe during Montaigne’s time: Cicero’s ideal of the whole man, combining mastery of language (including invective) with a sense of public responsibility and a culti-


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vated employment of leisure, humanized philosophical studies and also became the basic education of the Renaissance upper class, through colleges of Guarino at Ferrar and Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua. (28)

In later years, Cicero’s ideas had a widespread impact on training men for political and diplomatic careers and highly influenced the English public-school system (28). The Renaissance was also the era of translation. Scholars believed that if they gave students more access to great works like those of Cicero, great thoughts would be generated from their contemporary politicians. Montaigne’s secondary education and his training at the College de Gueyenne as well as the Faculte des Arts at Bordeaux clearly made him well versed in Cicero’s political philosophies and rhetorical form. Unlike Francis Bacon and other writers who aspired to political careers, Montaigne’s retirement from political life made it easier for him to reject political writing forms. His retirement from political discourse ultimately freed him from conforming to a rigid style grounded in rhetorical tradition. His career choice also freed him from the academic and political rhetorical constraints that forced intellectuals and politicians to use Latin instead of the vernacular. During the mid-sixteenth century, many intellectuals made a clear distinction between what they perceived as the sophisticated Latin form and unsophisticated vernacular of Italian, French, and English. As Morris Croll points out, these purist intellectuals believed that the vernacular grounded in oral tradition were inadequate “to carry the definite meanings and logical processes of continued exposition. It was good for concrete uses alone” (183). Yet, simultaneously, as Marc Fumaroli notes, French humanists like Du Perron believed that the French monarchy needed to use a vernacular rhetorical prose (preferably of Ciceronian origins) to communicate with a public embroiled in civil wars (256). Montaigne believed that the content of Latin oratorical prose failed to capture the words and reality of their world and instead worked to manipulate and deceive the masses through political rhetoric. It [rhetoric] is a tool invented to manipulate a mob and disorderly commoners, and is a tool used only in sick states, like medicine, in those where the vulgar, the ignorant, where all were in power, as in Athens, Rhodes and Rome, and where things were in perpetual tempest, there orators thronged. (II, 12)

The monarchy’s failure to implement a rhetoric that appealed to the masses caused them to relinquish part of their power by conceding to Calvinist orators who effectively appealed to the populace through the

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vernacular. Scholarly men whose job was to advise and censor royalty hindered the monarchy’s political power through their Latin rhetoric that was incomprehensible to the public. As someone with no strong ties to political life, Montaigne could critique the deceitfulness of rhetoric and its inaccessibility to the common people. It took a while for those in positions of authority to discover that the maintenance of power does not develop through the use of a privileged Latin language, but derives from an effective accessible language with the common people. Scholars, who played a decisive role in serving and counseling the king, had the responsibility of making their oral and written language more accessible to a larger community in the interest of ensuring the monarchy’s political well-being. The scholarly world’s investment within the political arena had a direct impact in reevaluating the Latin rhetorical form and formulating a more accessible one that in appearance conveyed truth. Montaigne was also influenced by debates between the anti-Ciceronians and Ciceronians of the Middle Ages. During this time, according to Michel Jeanneret, Cicerionianism came under scrutiny by scholarly figures such as Poliziano, Gianfreancesco Pico, and Erasmus. They found this Latin rhetoric inadequate to capture the “differing cultural, religious and political conditions” of their time (566). The Ciceronian purists (Bembo, Longueil, Dolet, Scaliger), on the other hand, clung to this canonical “perfection” and placed the preservation of this rhetoric form and language at the forefront of their concerns. For them, Ciceronian rhetoric represented the ideal that transcended “time and place” (566). Montaigne’s knowledge of these past and present debates on Ciceronianism clearly shows through in some of his anti-Ciceronian essays. He admired the content of Cicero’s works, such as “On Duties,” that emphasized individual truth. However, he was unhappy with the verbosity and closure of Cicero’s dispositio’s form that worked to subvert a more openended and truthful writing form needed for discoveries: The scholars distinguish and mark off their ideas more specifically and in detail. I, who cannot see beyond what I have learned from experience, without any system, present my ideas in a general way, and tentatively. As in this: I speak my meaning in disjointed parts, as something that cannot be said all at once and in a lump. (III, 13)

Montaigne criticizes scholars (“Master of Arts”) who may be fluent in ancient rhetoric, yet offer little in substance to persuade their audiences: It seems to me that with this complication and interlacing of language with which they beset us it turns out as with sleight-of-hand performers: their dexterity attacks and overpowers our senses, but it does not


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shake our belief at all. Aside from this legerdemain, they do nothing that is not commonplace and mean. For being more learned they are none the less inept. (II, 8)

He clearly pokes fun at the oration when he cites the king of Sparta’s words after listening to a lengthy dispositio: “As for your beginning and exordium, I no longer remember it; nor consequently the middle; as for the conclusion, I do not desire to do anything about it” (I, 26). He also disdains the quote-ridden passages that consume many scholarly works: The philosopher Chyrsippus mixed in his books, not merely passages, but entire works of other authors, and in one the Medea of Euripides; and Appollodorus said that if you cut out of them all the foreign matter, the paper he used would be left blank. (I, 26)

During the Renaissance, students’ homework often consisted of selecting various classical quotes that related to “one theme or another” (Jeaneret 568). This type of instruction that became popular during the Middle Ages contributed to the quote-ridden and unpersuasive rhetoric objected to by Montaigne. In some of his essays, Montaigne shows his dissatisfaction with this form by strictly complying with the classical dispositio and then dismantling it by creating an openended form in his peroratio or conclusion. Duval argues that in Montaigne’s later essays, such as “A Consideration upon Cicero,” and “Of Friendship,” he sought to destroy the writing form of his training because it was inadequate to convey the complexities of his search for truth. For example, in “A Consideration upon Cicero,” Montaigne meticulously adheres to the classical dispositio until readers reach the peroratio or conclusion. In the peroratio, readers familiar with the dispositio form expect Montaigne to present a natural closure by condemning those like Cicero who seek fame through eloquence (Duval 273). Instead of meeting reader’s expectations, Montaigne creates an abrupt shift by conceding to the perfection of Cicero’s eloquence that he meticulously sought to destroy in his dispositio: “Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things! Unless we say that Cicero’s, being of such extreme perfection, gives itself body and substance” (I, 40). To violate the dispositio even further, Montaigne ends the chapter with a series of openended anecdotes on his own thoughts about letter writing and eloquence. I have naturally a humorous and familiar style, but of a form all my own, inept for public negotiations, as my language is in every way, being too compact, disorderly, abrupt, individual; and I have no gift for letters of ceremony that have no other substance than a fine string of courteous words.(I, 40)

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Montaigne cleverly subverts Cicero’s eloquence by misusing the dispositio. He also contrasts, through the use of classical dispositio, his generally insignificant account of Cicero’s letters with his new and original use of an open form. With his anti-Ciceronian style, “Montaigne makes his ‘forme’ speak much more ‘eloquently’ than his ‘matiere’ on the subject of Ciceronian rhetoric” (Duval 274). In a similar vein as “A Consideration upon Cicero,” the essay “Of Friendship” strictly adheres to the standard dispositio until the end. In this anti-Ciceronian piece, Montaigne works to subvert his audience’s expectations who initially believe he will extol La Boétie’s Voluntary Servitude. However, at the conclusion of the essay, they surprisingly discover that he ends the piece with a series of “innocuous sonnets by the same author” (275). Like “A Consideration upon Cicero,” this essay follows the classical dispositio form until the end when he disrupts the form through the inclusion of these sonnets. However, Duval’s theory and similar theories derived from Richard Regosin’s The Matter of My Book: Montaigne’s Essais as the Book of the Self may not tell the whole story. Montaigne’s motivation is perhaps not solely grounded, as Patrick Moser claims, in using this essay to put the spotlight on himself instead of La Boétie (381). This is not a characteristic of a man who worked so diligently throughout his essays to write, as I will discuss more fully later, with sincerity and without pretense. The initial reason Montaigne gave for not highlighting La Boétie’s work, as Donald Frame claims, is that Montaigne could not in fact publish Voluntary Servitude, since he learned of its initial publication by Protestants after he wrote most of “Of Friendship” (I, 28). At the end of the essay, Montaigne laments over the violation and misuse of his best friend’s work by those who barely knew him: Because I have found that this work has since been brought to light and with evil intent, by those who seek to disturb and change the state of our government without worrying whether they will improve it, and because they have mixed his work up with some of their own concoctions, I have changed my mind about putting it in here. (I, 28)

He most likely did not want the central focus of his Essays to be aligned with those who he disagreed with and believed misappropriated his friend’s work. Perhaps, a more plausible theory is that Montaigne found an opportunity to use the anti-Ciceronian form to help him honor his friend in a different way (through the sonnets) while simultaneously adhering to his need to bring forth his original work. Honoring his best friend through sonnets that were less likely to be violated by others kept him in the good graces of his contemporaries. At the same time, Mon-


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taigne remained in the good graces of future scholars and others who could study this work as part of his quest to subvert classical rhetoric and follow his own path of writing. Part of Montaigne’s disdain for a Ciceronian style of writing, as I will discuss later in more detail, is that it does not provide him with the means to share his journey of sincere discoveries with readers. In contrast, the anti-Ciceronian style allows readers to see the multiple circumstances and motivations that influence such major decisions as his elimination of Voluntary Servitude from the Essays. On the surface, the form may appear unbalanced and unpredictable; however, underneath it represents an intellectually challenging form of writing that forces contemporary readers to weigh the various private and public motives for his actions. Jules Brody, with his detailed philological examination of passages from Montaigne’s essays, concurs that the writing may be outrageous for that time (“its naïve redundancies, its shameless provocation, its arresting, witty, paradoxical formulations”), but it by no means is devoid of intellectual worth. The “seductively” circuitous route entices readers to look for meaning in unexpected places and follow a more spontaneous, unbalanced vertical approach to argumentation (104). Indeed, as Dorothea Heitsch claims in “Nietzche and Montaigne: Concepts of Style,” some of the most revered philosophers of our time, like Nietzche, emulated Montaigne’s anti-Ciceronian style and worked to “dismantle scholastic rhetoric” (414). Montaigne’s conversational and nonconforming rhetorical style may from first appearances be simplistic or even “silly” as some of his contemporaries claimed (Joseph Justice Scaliger 1540–1609), but below the surface it would profoundly influence future intellectuals who could decipher its rhetorical magnitude (Brody 96). The origins of this rhetorical magnitude may actually be found in a more oral tradition. George Hoffman makes an interesting claim that Montaigne’s anti-Ciceronian style partially derives from the spoken qualities that come with dictated writings (Montaigne’s Career 50–51). Hoffman makes a strong case that Montaigne dictated many of his essays to his secretary. Through this dictation, he discovered a conversational writing form that would include “accidental turns and abrupt shifts intrinsic to extemporaneous speaking” (52). Such spontaneity would be condusive to affording him the needed explorations so vital to a man of this rapidly changing Renaissance world. For readers to further understand why Montaigne became enamoured with this writing form necessitates an exploration of the historical influences that framed his time. Michael Hall offers a historical perspective on why the Renaissance period (the age of discovery and

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invention) may have influenced these writers to rebel against the dispositio and instead use a writing form that encouraged personal exploration and invention (74). Hall points out that preceding and during the sixteenth century, we see Columbus’s voyage, the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, Francis Drake’s voyages, and Galileo’s works (74). Stability within Montaigne’s public world turned into chaos as medievalism faded, the Copernican revolution developed, religious wars ensued, and education and public life stood in disarray. Montaigne’s rapidly changing and chaotic world forced him to question philosophical predecessors like Machiavelli and other Italian humanists who believed humans could somehow control their destinies. According to Dan Engster, these incessant religious and civil wars propelled Montaigne to question whether man had any control over his future (628–29). In fact, as Engster points out, Montaigne believed that followers of Machiavelli who tried to instill political order by “create[ing] laws for every sort of contingency” (634) inevitably fostered increasing chaos from their actions: “What have our legislators gained by selecting a thousand particular cases and actions, and applying a hundred thousand laws to them? This number bears no proportion to the infinite diversity of human actions” (III, 13). Montaigne’s acknowledgment of such vain attempts to establish human order applied also to those who sought to comprehend science and nature. In the world of science, Renaissance voyagers and astronomers called into question the traditional concepts of our earth and universe. As we can see in this passage, Montaigne was aware of a science in flux: “The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion” (III, 2). In his essay “Of Experience,” Montaigne states that the lexicon and traditional categorical writing form were inadequate to capture the motion-bound stability in testing science through experience: Our disputes are purely verbal. I ask what is “nature,” “pleasure,” “circle,” “substitution.” The question is one of words, and is answered in the same way. “A stone is a body.” But if you pressed on: “And what is a body?” “—substance.”—“And what is substance?” and so on, you would finally drive the respondent to the end of his lexicon. We exchange one word for another word, often more unknown. (III, 13)

In his article discussing Montaigne’s relationship with science and the essay, James Paradis notes that Montaigne distrusts verbal artifacts to convey the world of experience. Traditional academic language creates a false illusion of an order in experience (65).


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Montaigne not only distrusts language in its ability to reveal scientific truths but also to interpret philosophical or rhetorical discourse. His distrust of language to capture the meanings within each of these disciplines derives from Pyrrhonian skepticism. From these monumental changes and chaos within his political and scientific worlds, Montaigne found solace in Greek skeptics who, in their belief that they knew nothing, distrusted their ability to name and create meanings through language. According to Frederick Copleston, the ancient arguments for Pyrrhonic skepticism consist of the following: “the relativity of senseexperience, the impossibility of the intellect’s rising above this relativity to the sure attainment of absolute truth, the constant change in both object and subject, the relativity of value-judgments, and so on” (228). Montaigne, a fervent admirer of Pyrrhonic philosophy (many of their expressions and sayings were inscribed on the ceiling of his library), cites some of their thoughts: Their expressions are: “I establish nothing; it is no more thus than thus, or than neither way; I do not understand it; the appearances are equal on all sides; it is equally legitimate to speak for and against. Nothing seems true, which may not seem false.” Their sacramental word is epevcw, that is to say, “I hold back, I do not budge.”. . . Their effect is a pure, complete, and very perfect postponement and suspension of judgment. They use their reason to inquire and debate, but not to conclude and choose. Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, he has a conception of Pyrrhonism. (II, 12)

From Montaigne’s description of Pyrrhonism, we can clearly see that the dispositio form—structured around validating a series of arguments, refuting others, and ending with a closing peratio—is highly incompatible with the writing form necessary for these skeptical philosophers. Victoria Kahn discusses Pyrrhonism’s influence on his writing form: “Montaigne’s usual practice is rather that of the Pyrrhonist who argues both sides of a case in order to suspend the possibility of judgment or persuasion to action altogether” (116). Kahn asserts that Montaigne used Pyrrhonism to work toward moderation and limits. In contrast, the Machiavellians’ quest for finite answers through excessive means undermined their attempt to create order. Paradis demonstrates how Montaigne’s philosophies were a form of rebellion against the traditional scholarly knowledge: “Montaigne’s skepticism conceived a literary reticence and indefiniteness that greatly contrasted with the robust a priori thinking of the Academy and the Church” (61–62). Montaigne needed an antisystematic writing form that challenged the notion of systematic knowledge and valorized judgment and experience:

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view.[. . .] Scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise, I am not bound to make something of them or to adhere to them myself without varying when I please and giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance. (I, 50)

Montaigne desired a writing form that would meet his need for inquiry, one that would illustrate the fallibility and limitations of human knowledge. He sought a spontaneous writing form that would allow him to return at a moment’s notice to his self-reflections of judgment. As John O’Neill points out, Montaigne believed that skeptics could come closer to the truth by accepting the contradiction of experiences (14). He believed, as the Pyrrhonians, that “Ignorance that knows itself, that judges itself and condemns itself, is not complete ignorance: to be that, it must be ignorant of itself” (372). He turned to a pre-Socratic form that fostered doubts and encouraged an interrogative mode of writing: “Their way of writing [Anaxagoras, Deocritius, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and others] is doubtful in substance, and their plan is to inquire rather than to instruct, even though they sprinkle their style with dogmatic cadences. Do we not see this as well in Seneca and Plutarch?” (II, 12). Both Seneca and Plutarch’s philosophies and writing styles served as models for Montaigne’s essays as we can see from his comments: I have not had regular dealings with any solid book, except Plutarch and Seneca, from who I draw like the Danids, incessantly filling up and pouring out. (I, 26) I want them to give Plutarch a fillip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me. I have to hide my weakness under these great authorities. (II, 10)

On first reading, Montaigne’s words about Plutarch and Seneca seem to contradict his thoughts on encouraging scholars to become independent thinkers: We take the opinions and the knowledge of others into our keeping, and that is all. We must make them our own.[. . .] What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not make us bigger and stronger? (I, 25)

However, a thorough study of Plutarch and Seneca, reveals that these philosophers/writers encouraged a writing form that fostered indepen-


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dent exploration rather than a reliance on imitation. These writers freed Montaigne from the constraints of writing forms that fostered imitation and instead promoted a writing form that encouraged experimentation and spontaneity. Kenneth Hovey sees Montaigne’s “peculiarly nonpositive, nonnegative philosophy” as complementary to the writings of Plutarch (74). If Montaigne believed that human knowledge is uncertain, then he must implement a writing form that created this uncertainty, this tentativeness. He had to employ a form that would meet his role as a wandering inquirer. He found this wandering inquirer in Plutarch’s writing form that encouraged the reader to find their own discoveries: “He merely points out with his finger where we are to go, if we like, and sometimes is content to make only a stab at the hear of a subject. We must snatch these bits out of there and display them properly” (I, 26). Plutarch’s emphasis and style on biographical writing encouraged readers to inquire and question, as they wandered through these ancient Romans’s lives, to come to their own conclusions about the greatness of these men. In Plutarch’s biographies of Brutus, Mark Anthony, and other great warriors and politicians, he deviated from traditional biographies by writing about their private rather than public histories. Ian Scott-Kilvert notes that Plutarch’s interest in their private lives is grounded in Plato’s philosophies: He brought to history a Platonist’s conviction that knowledge is virtue and that cause and effect are only truly operative in the sphere of Ideas: hence he tends to describe his statesmen’s policies in terms of their personalities and to judge public conduct by the ethical standards of private life. (13)

In Plutarch’s work Brutus, we see an example of this in his description of Caesar’s future assassins’ reasonings for not allowing Cicero to be privy to the premeditated killing: They did not confine themselves to their own circle of friends, but approached all the men whom they knew to be adventurous and brave and to have no fear of death. For this reason they did not take Cicero into their confidence, even though they trusted him and knew that he was well disposed towards them. They were afraid that his natural timidity, combined with the caution that time and old age had laid upon him, and his insistence on eliminating the smallest element of risk from any plan, would blunt the edge of their resolution at a moment when speed might be essential. (232)

In his accounts of these men’s lives, Plutarch eliminated the standard Greek rhetorical and argumentative sections (dispositios) that were

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always included in biographies. Plutarch succeeded in creating biographies that left the reader with more freedom to judge these men of politics instead of relying on the author’s rhetorical arguments. Montaigne admired Plutarch’s form that placed less emphasis on the evaluation of facts and more emphasis on the portrayal of the character’s private life: But since the preachings are one thing and the preacher another, I am as glad to see Brutus in Plutarch as in a book of his own. I would rather choose to know truly the conversation he held in his tent with someone of his intimate friends on the eve of a battle than the speech he made the next day to his army; and what he was doing in his study and his chamber than what he was doing in the public square and in the Senate. (II, 10)

Montaigne also admired Plutarch’s emphasis on judgment, experience over knowledge, biographical material, and free form. In his essay “Of books” Montaigne establishes the distinctions between systematized and antisystematized forms of writing, when comparing the writing of Cicero and Plutarch: But to confess the truth boldly (for once you have crossed over the barriers of impudence there is no more curb), his [Cicero’s] way of writing, and every other similar way, seems to me boring. For his prefaces, definitions, partitions, etymologies, consume the greater part of his work; what life and marrow there is, is smothered by his long-winded preparations. (II, 10)

Montaigne’s admiration of Plutarch does not solely rest in his desire for good reading. For Montaigne, Plutarch’s form captures an authentic history that leaves the reader with the ability to make a judicial inquiry on the political history of these men. Montaigne sees the other form as a way for scholarly historians to “chew our morsels for us; they give themselves the right to judge, and consequently to slant history to their fancy; for once the judgment leans to one side, one cannot help turning and twisting the narrative to that bias” (304). Writing forms like Cicero’s set up barriers for readers to judge, to inquire, on the actual event or person. In a world where scientists and astronomers discovered the falsity of accepted truths, Renaissance writers sought to show the falsity of the accepted scholarly writing form. These rebellious writers in quest for truth through introspection needed a writing form that conveyed their sense of truthfulness to their readers. To convey truth they required, at least on the surface, simplicity. Plutarch’s Moral Essays and Seneca’s Letters and Epistles were simplistic in their brevity and allowed readers, because of their lack of continuity, to travel freely from essay to essay. The dispositio, with its stilted and jargon-laden style, “owes too


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much to artificiality” (Montaigne 736). For Montaigne, artificial systematized writing forms worked to distort and fabricate history through the biases of those who used it. The purpose behind the essay was for readers to have a direct link to historical origins: The only good histories are those that have been written by the very men who were in command in the affairs, or who were participants in the conduct of them, or who at least have had the fortune to conduct others of the same sort. (II, 10)

Montaigne, as a fervent admirer of Plutarch, was well aware of the rhetorical power these “good histories” had over the reader as interpreter/judge. As Montaigne demonstrates in his introductory remarks “To the Reader,” the essay’s direct link to historical origins and its simplicity to convey truthfulness are powerful rhetorical devices for swaying readers. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed, had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. (“To the Reader”)

A clue to why Montaigne desires to present himself in a “simple, natural, natural ordinary fashion” may come from his admiration of philosophers who felt secure in reverting to plain speech: Sometimes we must handle things superficially, sometimes go into them deeply. I well know that most people keep on that low plane, since they grasp only by that outer bark; but I also know that the greatest masters, both Xenophon and Plato, are often seen relaxing into that humble and popular way of speaking and treating things, sustaining it with the graces that never fail them. (II, 17)

Montaigne is cognizant that these “great masters” use the “popular” form of speaking to convey their humble qualities to readers. Exhibiting their humility through plain language is what inevitably contributes to their greatness. Throughout his essays, Montaigne also disarms his readers by using the essay’s elements of simplicity and truthfulness to create a “good history” about himself. Dorothea Heitsch seems to concur with such an analysis in her discussion of Montaigne and Nietzche: The characteristic trait of the genre of the essay is the author’s display of modesty; this goes hand in hand with an extreme importance placed on his personality, because the genre presents the moves or movements

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay of a person’s mind or the temperment of the author himself. The topic of the essay is the search for truth. This search is not only defined as a problem, but the method of searching is enacted in addition. Thus the essay, being the imitation of conversation or dialogue, is the ideal method of finding the truth and of extending the limits of human knowledge. (429)

Montaigne’s emphasis on creating a “good history” about the writer or himself also has its roots in Seneca’s writings. Seneca, who came from a prominent Spanish family, greatly influenced Shakespeare and the Elizabethan tragedy. His political and philosophic writings were also instrumental in fueling the French Revolution. As a Stoic philosopher and politician, Seneca was a moralist. He fervently believed that he could only properly persuade an audience by using his life as an example. Persuasion by example fell more in line with Christianity rather than with Greek tradition, which may explain his appeal to Renaissance writers. To create this “good history” of a life that exemplified Stoic philosophical principles, Seneca relied heavily on personal accounts and self-reflection. For example, in his work Consolation to Helvia, Seneca took the Stoic philosophical principle of indifference to externals and applied them to his life in exile. In this moving account of his mother’s grief concerning his exile, Seneca demonstrates that she too follows Stoic morality: Since, my dearest mother, there is nothing in my situation to drive you to endless weeping, it must follow that your impulse to tears derives from your own situation.[. . .] But you have taken the greatest joy in your sons’ advantages and exploited them the least; you have always set limits upon our generosity but none on your own. Though legally a minor, you made presents to your wealthy sons. You managed our estates as if you were working for your own, but were as abstemious as if they belonged to strangers. (127)

Seneca’s adherence to Stoic morality and his respect for his mother fostered progressive views on valuing women’s intellect: I could wish that my father, excellent man that he was, had not been so set on following the practice of his elders and had allowed you to acquire a thorough grounding in philosophic doctrine instead of only a smattering.[. . .] But thanks to your acquisitive intellect you imbibed a great deal for the time you spent; the foundations for the various disciplines have been laid. Return to them now; they will keep you safe, they will console you, they will cheer you. (131)

We see this same emphasis of equality when he speaks about slaves: “Remember, if you please, that the man you call slave sprang from the same seed, enjoys the same daylight, breathes like you, lives like you, dies


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like you. You can as easily conceive him a free man as he can conceive you a slave” (193). It is not difficult to see how Seneca’s rhetoric of morality would later find its way into the proponents of the French Revolution and the principles of democracy. For Seneca, the politician had a moral responsibility to pursue a rhetoric that encouraged respect for human beings regardless of race, class, or gender. Montaigne fervently admired Seneca’s ability to put his philosophical writings into practice: To see the trouble to which Seneca puts himself to be prepared for death, to see him sweat from the exertion of steeling and reassuring himself, and writhe about interminably on his perch, would have shaken his reputation with me if he had not very valiantly maintained it in dying. (III, 12)

For Montaigne, the true test of one’s philosophies comes after one’s death. Whether one adheres to one’s philosophies will be tried and tested by others: In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot. (I, 19)

George Hoffman, after examining multiple passages in Montaigne’s Essays, makes a convincing case that one of Montaigne’s purposes for writing the essays centered on his desire to “participate in the familial rituals of preparing to die, remembering the dead, and living again after death through the anticipation of a literary afterlife” (“Portrayal from Life, or to Life? The Essais’s Living Effigy” 150). At that time, it was an ethical practice to leave a “souvenir” of life experiences for your descendants (150). Montaigne knew that his essays created artifacts for family and others to test his earnest pursuit of truth. His quest for truthful representation served as examples of what others could learn from his attributes and faults. In fact, he perceived his self-reflective writings concerning his faults as holding the most value to his readers: “By my publishing and accusing my imperfections, someone will learn to fear them. The parts that I most esteem in myself derive more honor from self-accusation than from self-commendation” (III, 8). He hoped others (especially his descendants) would apply his lessons of mistakes to their lives. Gregory Sims, in his essay “Stoic Virtues/Stoic Vices: Montaigne’s Pyrrhic Rhetoric,” makes an interesting case for claiming that Montaigne sought to undermine Senecan Stoicism through essays like “Of Husbanding Your Will.” Sims believes that Montaigne used Seneca’s

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works to demonstrate through Pyrrhic rhetorical maneuvers the weaknesses in a Stoic’s quest for virtue (256–57). Montaigne, in this essay, addresses those who accuse him of apathy and inaction during his time as mayor of Bordeaux. He responds that his inaction was partially in keeping with Stoic principles of repudiating those who followed the crowd and sought glory. Yet, as Sims argues, such “virtuous self-cultivation” came at the expense of neglecting more pressing issues of a country’s welfare (257). He concludes that the guilty party for “political indifference” is not so much Montaigne but those who ascribe to Stoic apathy: Thus, whereas Montaigne would seem to stand accused of a certain nonchalance in the exercise of mayoral duties, in fact the real defendant on trial in the essay is Stoic apathy itself. Montaigne simply dons the mask of accepting the mask. (258)

However, by examining the previous discussion about Montaigne’s desire to reveal his mistakes, Sim’s mask theory becomes problematic. Perhaps, the lesson Montaigne tries to impart on his descendents stems from his own political weaknesses in adhering too rigidly to Stoic principles in his reign as mayor. As past mayor, he now can reflect and instruct others by pleading guilty to his own tendency toward self-cultivating humbleness, sincerity, and an independent spirit. These “honorable” traits that are certainly indicative of Montaigne’s personality leave him susceptible to the political trappings of Stoic morality. He reveals through such sincerity that it is both he and Stoicism that are found guilty in this trial. He does not hide behind a mask, as Sims argues, but instead lays his life bare in his essays so others might analyze his personality traits and philosophical underpinnings that influenced his political reign as mayor. He reminds his future readers of what in today’s society is perhaps common knowledge: “good” people do not necessarily always make “good” politicians. Both Plutarch and Seneca helped provide him with the philosophical and rhetorical tools necessary to create a writing style conducive to self-application and experimentation by others. As seen in essay after essay, Montaigne uses great politician’s works combined with their biographies and memoirs to test the validity of their life experiences. Plutarch and Seneca’s prose lay the groundwork for Montaigne’s essay form, a form that elevated the plain and simple language of the personal to a level that could be integrated with some of the most challenging philosophical and rhetorical issues of his day. For Montaigne, the essay, like science and the individual, are constantly changing and contradicting, but it is a form that allows the writer to pursue truth:


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I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention. This is a record of various and changeable occurences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects. So, all in all, I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict. (III, 2)

Montaigne believed that one drew closer to truth in writing through an essay form that allowed for contradictions and suspension of judgment. His adaptation of Pyrronian Skepticism, Seneca’s Stoic moral principles, and Plutarch’s introspection of politician’s lives and writings led him to a writing form that would meet his needs to draw closer to a truth of the self embodied in contraries. He could not pursue the truth of his life experiences by using the traditional writing form of his day because it left little room for personal disclosure. It worked against his motive to disclose the truth behind the words of the scholarly writer. Montaigne is quite aware that he is the first in the Renaissance scholarly world to employ this personal writing form: Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian or a poet or a jurist. If the world complains that I speak too much of myself, I complain that it does not even think of itself. (III, 2)

Unfortunately, Montaigne’s reinvention of writing in his Essais was never taken very seriously by many late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century scholars. They claimed his writings were too private, intimate, and feminine for their scholarly environment. Men like Francis Bacon believed that scholars should not reveal themselves too much in writing: “Besides (to say truth) nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body” (398). Montaigne may have been too progressive in his writing style for his time. For example, in contemporary scholarship, we see certain uncanny parallels between his adaptation of the essay and the essay’s use by current deconstructionists: Wary of the closure and totality connoted by the idea of the book, deconstructionists might, in principle, be drawn, like Hartman to the open-endedness, skepticisms, and critical spirit that characterizes the essay: it resists easy definition (of itself, its subject matter, its “conclusions”), avoids coming to rest in some positive truth or absolute knowledge, remains wary of systems and systematizing, and not only acknowledges but also embraces and even celebrates the uncertainty and ambiguity that deconstruction tirelessly reveals all about us. (Atkins 10)

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Although Montaigne may have had some progressive views on the essay’s form and was quite critical of the violence, treachery, and corruption that permeated throughout political institutions, he was quite conservative in his views of maintaining authority: He believed that society best rests upon an authority that is not open to changes of fashion and opinion, since the political realm is not a means to self-interest but is the very matrix from which all human interests take enduring shape. (O’Neill 147)

As Frederick Copleston points out, Montaigne’s advocation of Pyrrhonian ignorance worked in favor of sometimes not thoroughly questioning certain established and traditional views (228). Copelston argues that Montaigne’s interest in Pyrrhonian skepticism derives from his interest in maintaining and stabilizing religious and social structures. Yet, simultaneously, in his essay “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” he offers the most damning testimony against religious faith for his time. Through his writings, Montaigne succeeds in showing us the contradictory skeptical nature of the essay form, and the political contradictions that leads readers closer to truth. However, as we will see, some of those who came after Montaigne wanted to employ the essay as a less contradictory and skeptical form, those who sought to use their political saviness to counsel society. For men like Francis Bacon, the essay became a means not for wandering but for action. FRANCIS BACON AND THE ESSAY

Although Francis Bacon’s essays are usually classified as formal or impersonal, his work further demonstrates the political forces that significantly shaped this genre. Bacon’s political treatment of the essay form clearly deserves some attention in understanding the essay’s tie to fulfilling individualistic interests. There is clear evidence that Bacon was well aware of Montaigne’s works. His brother, Anthony Bacon, was a friend and correspondent to Montaigne during Montaigne’s last two years of life (Frame 303–304; DuMaurier 59,78). After Montaigne’s death, Bacon invited a son of Montaigne’s colleague to spend several months with him in England (8: 303–304, 315–16; Frame 231). Bacon makes several references to Montaigne in his works. For example in The Advancement of Learning he comments on Montaigne’s failure to put his political aspirations at the forefront of his work: Wherefore those who are so intent and absorbed in the matter which they have in hand, that they have not even a thought to spare for any-


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thing that may turn up by the way (which Montaigne confesses to have been his weakness), are indeed the best servants of kings and commonwealths, but fail in advancing their own fortunes. (V 64)

Eugene Garver, in her analysis of Bacon’s Essays, demonstrates how Bacon placed “husbandry, negotiation, and fortune” at the center of his instructional motives while neglecting “the practical, the moral, and the ethical” (216) The moral thing to do is right regardless of consequences, but only people who possess sufficient wealth and power can afford to act without regard for consequences; the rest of us have to worry about success, and when Bacon’s Essays present an art of husbanding one’s fortune, he legitimizes the unseemly concerns of outsiders. (216)

Graves believes Bacon avoided Montaigne’s personal analysis of his and others’ actions so that readers could use knowledge “for any purpose, good or bad” (217). Readers can see that in his first essay of 1625 entitled “Of Truth,” Bacon pokes fun at Montaigne’s personal disclosures: “And therefore Mountaigny saith prettily, when he enquired the reason, why the word of the Lie, should be such a Disgrace, and such an Odious Charge”? (Kiernan 8). Although Bacon may have had knowledge and even adapted part of Montaigne’s essay form, his purpose for using it differed considerably from his predecessor. When many scholars speak of Bacon’s contributions to the essay, they usually describe his purpose as one that instills practicality, instruction, and call to action. Also, his essays are known to foster opportunism for one’s own fortune. For Bacon, writings that foster practical wisdom “are no less worthy than the heroic descriptions of virtue, duty, and felicity” (3:419). The competitive political climate during the English Renaissance played a decisive role in Bacon’s interest to pursue a less personal form of the essay. During the latter part of the sixteenth century, those seeking political office were encouraged by Queen Elizabeth to serve their country while balancing their career interests. Many in the upper class believed they had a duty to fulfill their obligation to their queen by venturing into politics. Unfortunately, Queen Elizabeth’s call for duty created more bodies than positions. In contrast, during Cicero’s time of large Roman senates and assemblies, there was little competition in obtaining office. In Ciceronian rhetoric, orators were obligated to combine both moral virtue and prudence. A prudent man not only had to describe the standards of good conduct but inscribe them into every act of judgment. Because of small competition for political offices, the Ciceronian and Stoic ideals of virtue and prudence could be readily achieved with little personal loss during

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this time period. However, in Renaissance England, many young upperclass men groomed for political life were left without jobs and thus unfulfilled their service to the queen. The competitive spirit was keen and many who sought to become courtiers felt it necessary to compromise their Ciceronian education and principles in order to achieve office. Also, an aspiring politician needed to make expedient decisions, which left little room for Pyrrhonian suspensions of judgment or an eloquent style with little substance. Instead of a rhetoric of labyrinths, they needed a rhetoric of action to secure their positions. This was the English political audience that Bacon kept in mind while writing his essays. Bacon, who was trained in the classical tradition of virtue and rhetoric within this competitive political world, discovered that the practice of his Ciceronian education left his career in shambles. Unfortunately, Bacon, in quest of truth and fairness, questioned the legalities of the queen’s process of debt collection. After he promptly lost favor with her majesty and, consequently, with his political career in ruin, Bacon began to realize that virtue and politics were incompatible for an individual who desired a fruitful political career in Renaissance England. With these political experiences behind him, Bacon revisited Cicero’s work to locate passages that might be more condusive to his contemporary poltical world. In his work, The Advancement of Learning, Bacon discovers and justifies another interpretation of Cicero’s rhetoric that meets with Elizabethan politics. But as Cicero, when he setteth down an idea of a perfect orator, doth not mean that every pleader should be such; and so likewise, when a prince or a courtier hath ben described by such as have handled those subjects, the mould hath used to be made according to the perfections of the art, and not according to common practice: so I understand it, that it ought to be done in the description of a politic man, I mean politic for his own fortune. (Kitchen 203)

As F. J. Levy points out, a Christian orator with Ciceronian values would not make it in this competitive political climate (103). Montaigne, who chose to retire from politics, was relatively free to choose philosophers that privileged truth, introspection, and skepticism. However, Bacon’s emersion in Elizabethan politics left him in a predicament where he had to learn to achieve a balance between truth and his political aspirations. As we see here, Bacon’s quest for truth had limits—especially when the author desires a good history of himself: “But the covering of defects is of no less importance than the valuing of good parts; which may be done likewise in there manner, by caution, by colour, and by confidence” (Kitchen 196). In later years as Viscount of St. Albans,


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some claim that Bacon lost this balance when he was accused and convicted of accepting bribes. Bacon did show some agreement with Montaigne on the superficiality and imitation of the Ciceronian form by their contemporaries. He analyzes the reasons why these scholarly orators and writers placed more attention on the style than to its content during the reformation movement: Four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then beagan to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than mater; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundnes of argument, life of invention or depth of judgment.[. . .] In sum the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight. (24)

Like Montaigne, Bacon looked to the ancients not for purposes of imitation but as a springboard for understanding and developing philosophies that applied to his contemporary world. Although Bacon and Montaigne agreed in their criticism of the Renaissance men’s preoccupation with imitation, they disagreed on the applications of Pyrrhonian Skepticism. In Bacon’s eyes, for him to embrace the principles of skepticism would be an act of political suicide. His commitment to politics as well as his desire to succeed in this career clearly left him no choice but to argue against some of these philosophies. Kenneth Hovey’s groundbreaking article that refutes earlier scholars’ claims that Bacon was inattentive to Montaigne’s Essais makes sense if we consider Bacon’s political differences with Montaigne. Hovey claims that Bacon’s departure from Montaigne was a deliberate act to argue against some of Montaigne’s philosophical principles for using this form (73). According to Hovey, Bacon criticized the Pyrrhonian philosophers who emphasized suspending judgment rather than formulating conclusions. In this passage, we see Bacon criticizing Pyrrhonists as well as his contemporaries like Montaigne who advocated this skepticism: Certainly there be, that delight in Giddinesse; An count it a Bondage, to fix a Beleefe; Affecting Free-will in Thinking, as well as in Acting. And though the Sects of Philosophers of that Kinde be gone, yet there remaine certaine discoursing Wits, which are of the same veines, thoughthere be not so much Bloud in them, as was in those of the Ancients. (Kiernan 7)

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In his work Novum Organum, Bacon foresees that those who take up Pyrrhonian skepticism will eventually despair due to their inability to arrive at truth. Pyrrhonianists quickly lose interest in all things and become content to wander from subject to subject without “severe inquisition” (Anderson 69). Bacon argues that we must take control of our judgment and understanding: “But in reality that which I meditate and propound is not Acatalepsia, but Eucatalepsia; not denial of the capacity to understand, but supply them with helps; I do not slight understanding, but govern it” (Anderson 69). As Hovey discusses, Bacon was in search of a middle ground whereby the questioning of judgment would eventually lead to useful conclusions (74). Unlike Montaigne, Bacon could not adapt to Pyrronian skepticism or adhere to Ciceronian moral principles. Bacon is interested not only in governing his understanding but also in governing his place in history. He is quite aware that his political saviness in using the essays will play a more significant role than other writing forms when reaching an audience and securing his place in history: As for my Essays, and some other particulars of that nature, I count them but as the recreations of my other studies, and in that sort purpose to continue them; though I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less pains and embracement (perhaps), yield more luster and reputation to my name, than those other which I have in hand. (374)

For Bacon, the essay represents a powerful rhetorical device for furthering his political career. The essays serve as politically strategic “recreations” that would entice his readers to take a closer look at Bacon, the savy politician that prioritized, according to Garver, “knowledge over character” (224). Consequently, Bacon believed that the nonpersonal form of the essay served his political audience well. His essays allowed them to avoid confronting the personal moral aspects of their actions and instead focus on the knowledge they would need to be politically successful.

CHAPTER THREE

Essaying an American Democratic Identity in Emerson and Thoreau

As Renaissance essayists, Montaigne and Bacon used an essay form that addressed the political, religious, and scientific upheavals of their day. These essayists sought an antisystematic form that served to explore previously held accepted truths. Through his personal form of writing, Montaigne realized the potential of the essay’s elements of spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, and rhetoric of sincerity. He used these elements as a Renaissance inquirer to help him reform the rhetorical, religious, and scientific practices of his day. As another aid in his reformation goals, Montaigne looked to the New World in helping him not only critique the maladies of his own culture but the cultures of the American continent. In “To the Reader,” his audience can clearly see the important influence the New World had on Montaigne as a personal essayist: My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. (2)

At some points in his Essays, the New World and its inhabitants represented the pure and natural simplicity that Montaigne craved as he anguished over his convoluted and corrupt European world:

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay These nations, then, seem to be barbarous in this sense, that they have been fashioned very little by the human mind, and are still very close to their original naturalness. The laws of nature still rule them, very little corrupted by ours; and they are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes vexed that they were unknown earlier, in the days when there were men able to judge them better than we. (I, 31)

From these types of passages, some scholars (R. S. Khare, Tzevetan Todorov, and Deborah Losse to name just a few) label Montaigne as one of the perpetrators in forming the noble savage in the Americas. Their claim is grounded in the idea that Montaigne only used these privileged accounts of the New World as a way of improving his own. They claim that these accounts represented an outlet for Montaigne’s nostalgic view of a more primitive time in Europe. However, such interpretations of Montaigne do not seem to be in sync with his skeptical eye for critiquing multiple societies and individuals. In fact, he criticizes those cultures in the Americas who blindly look to the Portuguese ways of barbarity as more sophisticated than their own and too readily adopt these methods into their practices of vengeance: They thought that these people from the other world, being men who had sown the knowledge of many vices among their neighbors and were much greater masters than themselves in every sort of wickedness, did not adopt this sort of vengeance without some reason, and that it must be more painful than their own; so they began to give up their old method to follow this one. (I, 31)

Through this passage, Montaigne seeks to criticize societies that too readily adopted European cultural ways. This indeed was a valid concern that many twentieth-century writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others addressed in their novels about colonization. In the next passage, Montaigne seeks to condemn his European society for not noticing its own barbaric acts. He then compares the methods of barbarism that both societies inflict on their victims. William Hamlin, in his extensive research of Renaissance ethnographies of the New World, seems to have a more accurate portrayal of Montaigne’s motives as he studied these cultures: “His constant readiness to point to the limitations and follies not only of human customs but of the human traits that give rise to these customs thoroughly undermines any illusion that he is convinced of the innate nobility of human beings” (53). If Montaigne is guilty of anything, it would be, as Hamlin asserts, his essentialist belief (as a faltering skeptic) that human beings possess the same innate human strengths and weaknesses despite their different cultural and religious backgrounds (55).

Essaying an American Democratic Identity

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Unlike other accounts of Native Americans who visited Europe, Montaigne took great care in presenting their observations of his country. When Native Americans visited King Charles IX, Montaigne recorded their observations of France’s social injustices grounded in extreme classicism. He gives them, as Hamlin explains, their own identity (45). Further evidence of how Montaigne might be viewed as a culturally attentive ethnographer for his day can be seen through the descriptions in his travel journals. Although Montaigne never visited the New World and received most of his information second hand, his travel journals throughout Europe do provide insight into the care he took in respecting other cultures and displaying his humility as a visitor. In his travels throughout the towns in Germany, Montaigne tried to be as unobtrusive as possible as he studied their cultures. One example of this was when he tried to avoid any honor the Germans might bestow on his visit to various towns: Monsieur de Montaigne, for some reason, wanted our party to dissemble and not tell their ranks; and he walked unattended all day long through the town; he thinks that this served to have them even more highly honored. This was an honor that was paid them in all the towns in Germany. (Montaigne 900)

There are many other examples like this one in his journals that indicate the care he took when observing cultures other than his own. As a careful observer and appropriator for his time, he would succeed, hundreds of years after his death, in gaining the admiration and respect of prominent essayists. Some ethnographers, such as James Clifford, claim that Montaigne, through his self-reflections, brought about a modern ethnography, which focuses on the subjectivities of the researcher. Two hundred and fifty years after Montaigne’s death, U.S. essayists like Emerson and Thoreau began searching for ways to appropriate European and other cultural influences in forming their democratic society. As attentive observers of European cultures, both essayists took lessons from the mistakes of the old world to aid them in examining the new. When emerging-nation citizens like Emerson and Thoreau used the essay form, the essay’s elements become inextricably intertwined with the formation of American individualism and a national identity. These essayists, perhaps following Montaigne’s independent spirit, did not try to imitate more established cultures and representative figures but instead set forth in appropriating their strengths and critiquing their weaknesses. In their eyes, America

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needed to shape their own destiny and rely less on Europe. However, unlike old world figures like Montaigne and Bacon who used the essay to articulate reformations of their society’s established and often convoluted beliefs and systems, these essayists, in a newly formed country, saw the essay’s elements as conducive to their own formation of who they were as Americans. This chapter will examine how the essay’s elements of spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, as well as a rhetoric of sincerity met with Emerson and Thoreau’s need to critically shape the individual and the American democratic system. The discussion will focus on how for Emerson the key to shaping the American individual comes through a democratic educational movement that is directly tied to the elements of the essay. By using the essay form, Emerson creates his desired qualities of an American leader and scholar. However, as an essayist influenced by philosophical theories of skepticism, Emerson failed to provide concrete ways of implementing his ideas in current educational and political systems. His belief as a skeptic that one arrives closer to the truth by exploring contradictions of experiences leaves little room for conceiving constructive ways to implement educational and political changes. In contrast, Thoreau succeeds in converting this form that had previously been slated for the skeptical elite into one that is adaptable for action by the common “man,” for empowering the disenfranchised, and for rebelling against political and religious institutions. It is no coincidence that Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” inspired men like Tolstoy, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and dissenters of the Vietnam War. Although Emerson and Thoreau were both interested in shaping a national identity, they differed markedly on whether the elite or the common man should have the power to shape their country. Emerson and Thoreau’s use of the essay’s form in shaping a national identity draws the focus away from close examinations of rhetorical discourse (as seen in Montaigne and Bacon) and more toward an examination of the essay as a political and democratic tool to transform the individual and society. When scholars study the essays of Emerson and Thoreau, the focus becomes less centered on a search for the essay’s form or methodology and more concentrated in disclosing what is done with this form to change and mold the American citizen and society. The personal form of the essay (especially as used by Thoreau) became increasingly significant as a political form for critiquing individuals and institutions. Thoreau demonstrated the rhetorical value of using the personal essay to convey to others his philosophical and political beliefs.


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RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Although Emerson produced hundreds of lectures as well as essays and was highly influenced by Montaigne and Plutarch’s philosophies and writings, he received until recently little attention as an essayist. Unlike Montaigne whose name is synonymous with the essay, scholars study Emerson as a philosopher, preacher, poet, and lecturer. Perhaps, Emerson’s place as one of the first great U.S. essayists became more prominent with William H. Gass’s highly influential work “Emerson and the Essay.” Gass focused not only on Emerson’s place among the great essayists, but sought to define the essay through Emerson’s multiple uses of this form. Gass’s definitions are now widely quoted by essay scholars. In the late eighties another well-known scholar, Robert Atwan, also recognized Emerson’s place as an essayist by closely exploring Emerson’s rejection of traditional eloquence or rhetoric in place of an essay form that allowed him to take creative risks. Atwan points to Emerson’s 1839 journal entry where he called upon a writing form that would encompass his eclectic disciplinary interests and permit a range of literary elements, such as poetry, humor, anecdotes, jokes, and ventriloquism (109). With the rising interest in the essay, more current scholars included Emerson in the list of canonical essayists that previously consisted of European writers like Montaigne, Bacon, Pope, Swift, Arnold, Hazlitt, Woolf, and others. Biographical Background Emerson was born in 1803 into a family with deep roots in America and who could trace their ancestors back to the New England settlement. His father, a prominent minister in Boston’s First Church, came from a long lineage of ministers. Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821 and took up theological study in preparation for the ministry. He became highly influenced by a liberal theologian, William Ellery Channing, who emphasized that God was found in nature instead of within formal theological studies. At this time, he also began studying the skeptic Montaigne and Platonism. During these early years, Emerson preached throughout several states and while touring met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, who became his young bride at age sixteen. Her early death from tuberculosis at age nineteen made Emerson question religious issues of mortality. Finally, his rejection of formal religion and his subsequent departure from his parish in 1832 ended his career as a minister. After stepping down from the pulpit, Emerson immediately went to Europe and while there attended a Paris science exhibition (Jardin des

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Plantes). He became highly influenced by natural scientists like George Cuvier and Antoine Lamarck. Cuvier insisted that natural scientists needed to examine the internal organs of animals to better understand how nature operates. He called upon scientists to take a subservient role to nature and let nature instruct them. Emerson brought home the merging of scientific romanticism with the literary romantic movement in figures like Wordsworth and Coleridge. After his return to the United States from Europe, he gave several lectures concerning nature (“The Uses of Natural History” and “The Naturalist”), which helped launch his carreer as an American lecturist and intellectual (Bosco 17–18). Emerson’s early work “Nature” is an indictment on men who depend too much on the past and on institutionalized beliefs rather than looking to nature as a guide for the future. Men needed to become reunited with nature in order to adhere to their responsibilities as citizens of action. He pioneered, along with others, a U.S romantic movement that is commonly referred to as Transcendentalism. The Transcendental movement is not easily defined nor would the members want to be defined, but certainly one of this movement’s tenets was to rebel against the religious orthodoxy of the Unitarian Church. Transcendentalists also sought to combine their intellectual life with commonplace activities, and some attempted to turn their philosophy into a reality through communal and social reformation projects like Brooke Farm. As Nathaniel Hawthorn alludes to in The Blithedale Romance (which many see as a critique of Brooke Farm), commonplace activities like farming leave little time for intellectual pursuits. The demands and fatigue of farming will tire any would-be scholar. Emerson, as a skeptic, warily eyed projects such as Brooke Farm. He foresaw how eventually they would lead to a system of rules and regulations that would work against the basic tenets of Transcendentalism. George Ripley, the leader at Brooke Farm, did indeed develop an autocratic system that resembled fascism rather than social democracy. Emerson’s skepticism of Brooke Farm demonstrates his reluctance to place into collective practice his philosophical ideals. Yet, as he points out in his essay “The American Scholar,” Emerson believed that academic institutions would thrive if they encouraged young scholars to fuse their studies with their home and workplace communities. He called upon these young scholars to look to Europe only as a springboard for intellectual development in this country. However, just as he showed reluctance in implementing Transcendentalism, Emerson, in his essays about education, never proposed clear plans on how to implement these educational reformations. His reluctance to commit himself to enacting his philosophies for movements in education or abo-


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lition can be partially attributable to the antisystematic nature of skepticism. He, however, inspired many famous educators like Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, and John Dewey who placed their philosophies into educational action. In the 1840s, Emerson’s earlier idealism on Transcendentalism considerably diminished. His essay “Experience” questions man’s ability to ever arrive at truth and acknowledges man’s limitations in his use of nature. In his later years, he lost much of his earlier rebelliousness and seemed to devote more attention to exploring Europe, as can be seen in his later work English Traits. However, during the 1850s, his rebelliousness resurfaced when he became a leader of the abolitionist movement and supported the radical abolitionist, John Brown. Emerson’s commitment to the abolitionist movement and his fervent belief that his critique of representative men (select men of genius) could politically transform his country for the better demonstrate the idealism of those in emerging nations, even for someone like Emerson who, in the essayist tradition of Montaigne, abhorred systematic forms. Although in his latter years he conformed more to conventional society, a conformance that his friend Thoreau repudiated, Emerson did inspire the younger generation to foster a democratic identity that they could call their own. Montaigne, Plutarch, Emerson, and the Essay Only a handful of books and articles explore in depth Emerson’s admiration (and some say qualified admiration) of Montaigne. Emerson himself said in his essay “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” the following about Montaigne’s influence on his early education: “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience” (92). Not only do we see his admiration for Montaigne’s ability to speak so sincerely in his Essays, but also in the essayist Plutarch: “Plutarch always delights me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me; for he has been long time the instructor of my youth” (295). Montaigne and his high admiration for Plutarch’s writing style certainly could be another contributing factor to Emerson’s interest in these two writers as shown in another passage from Emerson’s “Plutarch.” It is one of the felicities of literary history, the tie which inseparably couples these two names [Montaigne and Plutarch] Montaigne, whilst he grasps Etienne de la Boétie with one hand, reaches back the other to Plutarch. These distant friendships charm us, and honor all the parties, and make the best example of the universal citizenship and fraternity of the human mind. (Lectures and BiographicalSketches 300)

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Like Montaigne, Emerson also searched for someone he could form a strong intellectual friendship with. His large circle of friends consisted of famous intellectual figures such as Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, and Ellery Channing to name just a few. Yet, Emerson sought a deep friendship similar to the one Montaigne had with Etienne de Boétie. He initially found such a friendship in Henry Thoreau. However, prior to and after the publication of Walden, their friendship began to wane. Thoreau’s insistence on using essays to reject the status quo rather than adopting Emerson’s increasing conformance eventually weakened their friendship. Richard O’Keefe believes Emerson comes to realize in his essay “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” that he is less like Montaigne than Thoreau (208). Emerson’s rather sarcastic description of Montaigne reminds readers more of the rebellious spirit in Thoreau who abhorred the growing elitism and corruption within his own country and looked to the common man for guidance: He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious disgust at appearances, he will indulge himself with a little cursing and swearing, he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and streetballads: he stayed indoors, till he is deadly sick; he will to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of Gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so nervous by factitious life, that he thinks the more barbarous man is, the better he is. (94)

Yet, in another passage, readers see in Emerson’s words a deep regard for Montaigne’s conversational essay form and the confidence that such a natural style creates in the writer: It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to their dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamster do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets; it is the Cambridge men who correct themselves, and begin again at every half sentence, and moreover will pun and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. (95)

Emerson prefers to confer with more elitist intellectual circles, yet he admires and envies those writers, like Montaigne and Thoreau, who take on a conversational essay style grounded in more common everyday speech. He, like the skeptic, is a man of contradictions. Emerson’s admiration and criticism of Montaigne along with his failed attempt to essay a lasting friendship with Thoreau create ideal circumstances for examining the differences between the essay’s use by Western European


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and U.S. essayists. Montaigne and his desire to emulate his essay form allow readers to see how the essay’s elements of spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, and rhetoric of sincerity take on numerous purposes in different political, historical, and cultural contexts. He sets the stage for a U.S. essay form that is inextricably intertwined with a search for an identity that is still somewhat dependent on Europe, but that makes strident efforts through the essay form to use Europe as a springboard instead of a crutch for identity. In “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” Emerson found that skepticism met with his philosophical preferences in critiquing the Old World. As Elizabeth Tebeaux explains, Emerson, like the skeptics, believed “custom rather than truth, necessarily controls human action” (26). In other words, custom and habit shape the opinions of men and both are always in flux. Skepticism allows human beings to go beyond the reliance of one perception and instead accept that perception is fragmentary and dependent on multiple human perceptions (29). For Emerson and Montaigne, skepticism is in direct conflict with would-be dogmatizers. As Emerson points out “Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account” (102). For a skeptic to compare his perceptions with others, he must become self-reflexive. “Great believers” blindly follow the dogmas of others while skeptics must question not only others but their own beliefs as well. The perceptions of the essayist and that which he assays is always in flux. Skeptics must therefore weigh their perceptions of these customs through a self-reflexive process that suspends individual truths and encourages a dialectic reflexivity of truths held by many. Although Emerson and Montaigne were highly influenced by skepticism, Emerson wanted to see the wise skeptic take a more active role in shaping society. His skeptic was one who used speculation for action: [. . .] a certain solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played with skill and success that he has evinced the temper, stoutness and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust [. . .] some stark and sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a vigorous and original thinker, who cities can not overawe, but who uses the ______ is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation. (161)

His attraction to Plutarch’s biographies of great Greek and Roman leaders related less to Montaigne’s emphasis in uncovering truthful biographical histories and had more to do with critiquing the lives of these

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men to instruct future American nationbuilders. Emerson’s series of essays entitled Representative Men included such figures as Plato, Swendenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. For Emerson, people should uncover the best and worst in these representative men to help them form their own paths as responsible American citizens. Although Montaigne had a circle of scholars that he admired, his adherence to Pyronnian skepticism prevented him from venturing too far into the realm of hero worship (except, as Emerson points out, in Montaigne’s reverence for Socrates). Montaigne was more comfortable with his identity and the identity of his country, so the incentive and drive for finding representative men to shape France’s identity was not so pressing. Certainly, he admired ancient philosophers like Plutarch and Seneca, but those he admired played a secondary role to supporting his experiences and beliefs. As an Old World figure, Montaigne’s purpose for studying ancient Romans and Greeks was to apply these “men’s” words to the scientific, religious, and philosophical scholarship of his day. As a New World figure without the comfort of established scientific, religious, and philosophical scholars in his own country, Emerson saw it as his duty to find representative men who would serve as models for his newly formed countrymen to critique. Charles Lowell Young points out in his book Emerson’s Montaigne that “Emerson was quite incapable, none the less, of maintaining the sceptical attitude to life as anything permanent or final; or even of entertaining a doubt except to particulars” (18). As Young discusses, Emerson, unlike the skeptics, saw skepticism as more than just a skill in controversy (21). Emerson viewed skepticism in the essay as a search for truth that requires one to suspend judgment on occasion for the weighing of contraries (22). When searching for an American identity, he came closer to Francis Bacon’s perceptions of the essay form and the quest for truth. Emerson, like Bacon, believed that the questioning of judgment would draw one closer to useful conclusions that would benefit his countrymen. Yet, Emerson refused to use Bacon’s rigid and conclusive essay form that left little room for speculation. For the skeptics, useful conclusions were not to be made from this weighing of contraries. They believed that truth as well as the search for conclusions were elusive. He therefore limited his application of Pyrronian Skepticism and could not carry it to the extent that Montaigne did. However, as William Gass notes, Emerson did circle his subject: “Emerson’s ability to ‘circle’ his subject; it is the saving grace of his skepticism, that I admire; and his genuine enthusiasm for the thought he will in a moment see the other, shabby, self-serving side of” (335).


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Emerson’s purpose for this collection of essays was to locate what he perceived as what many believed to be the finest European men and to make these figures accessible to an American audience. The essay thus served as a means of access to “great” leaders and scholars in Europe— men who could serve Americans in their quest for democracy. His qualified hero worship is taken primarily from Plutarch’s work Lives and Moralia more than from the writings of the nineteenth-century English writer Thomas Carlyle. These literary figures met on Emerson’s first trip to Europe, and their friendship and frequent correspondences lasted for many years. Carlyle represented a valuable source for Emerson to probe the “voice and vision of Anglo Saxon culture” (Bosco 15). The distinctions between Carlyle and Emerson’s concept of hero worship are important when considering the different philosophical and political applications of British and American essayists. As a Victorian essayist engrained in a monarchical political system, Carlyle, along with many British scholars, feared that the democratic influences fueled by the French and American Revolution would impact the British political system. Democracy and its associated elements presented a threat to those Europeans like Carlyle immersed in Old World ways embedded in monarchal rule. While Emerson embraced democratic ideals, Carlyle feared them. Carlyle’s work The French Revolution served as a warning to the monarchy that they needed to feed, clothe, and educate the poor. Although Carlyle and Emerson were close friends, Carlyle emphasized a hero worship that, as Edmund Berry points out, required “blind obedience rather than imitation [. . .]” from the hero worshiper. Carlyle’s hero worship was very nondemocratic and had little “interest in the human traits of individuals” (28). As John Bowyer and John Brooks discuss, “Carlyle, trying to devise a plan for recognizing the hero or dictator to whom men owe allegiance, had made military success the criterion of the hero”(151). His elements of hero worship would be more conducive to a monarchical or even a fascist society than to a society like the United States that searched for democratic forms of government. Unlike Emerson and his emerging nation in search of a democratic foundation, Carlyle represented an inhabitant of an Old World system unable to relinquish the entrenched traditions that severed ties to democracy. Carlyle also ridiculed the idealism that he saw in Plutarch’s stoic morality, metaphysics and ethics, an idealism more closely associated with democratic principles. Yet for Emerson, Stoicism’s relationship to Christianity without the cumbersome Christian qualities of dogma and ritual, was very attractive. Emerson also admired Plutarch’s readable style that used the experiences of great historical figures to illuminate on

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moral and ethical principles that coincided with democracy. However, Plutarch’s popularity within Europe had begun to considerably diminish during Emerson’s time. Historians in the nineteenth century began to uncover inaccuracies in Plutarch’s account of Greek history and historical figures. Many also began to criticize Plutarch’s attention to great figures and inattention to the common people. Emerson was the last wellknown literary figure of his time to devote an essay (around 1870) to Plutarch (Berry 33). His interest in hero worship and Plutarch’s accounts of ancient historical figures coincides with an American’s need to locate mentors for the leaders of his nation. An American skeptic like Emerson interested in promoting democratic ideals viewed heroes (with their strengths and weaknesses) not as monarchical rulers but as inspirations and examples for America’s future leaders and educators. Ronald Bosco notes the changes in Emerson’s perception of a hero from his 1835 lectures on “Biography” to his later biographies in Representative Men: But in a radical departure from his practice in 1835, when in his “Biography” lecture series he developed Michelangelo, Martin Luther, Milton, and others as exemplary, unblemished heroes, in Representative Men Emerson did not portray heroes as such, but as men of uncommon ability whose lives also revelaed a host of common flaws inherent in human character and behavior: intellectual conceit, pettiness, and avarice, to name just a few. (37)

The more mature Emerson lost some of his idealism for these intellectual icons, yet like Montaigne’s critical analysis of his heroes and inevitably himself, he discovered this practice would help in improving his countrymen. Emerson was an American essayist and skeptic in search of an American democratic identity that encompassed what was good in these heroes while simultaneously learning from their mistakes. Some scholars such as William Gass believed that Emerson wanted to transform himself through the essay into the American hero status that equaled his heroes in Representative Men: Emerson had a sacred fear of the superfluous. He wished to become a Hero as his own heroes had (just as Plato, with his works, or Napolean, through action, had become uniquely universal, or the way Shakespeare and Swendenborg were, he though, spokesmen for the human spirit, like Goethe and Montaigne). He wished to be, more democratically than the superior word “great” suggested, a representative man (an honor, now, Porte’s book confers on him). (329–30)

He could attain this superiority only by dismounting these heroes from their pedestals. Representative Men, as O’Keefe alludes to, moves from


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the biographies of these men to Emerson’s autobiographical reflections of his perceptions of the flawed hero (210). Emerson’s form of skepticism played an integral part in forming American leaders. In one of Gass’s definitions of the essay, he says the following about skepticism and the essay: “The essay induces skepticism. It is not altogether the fault of Montaigne. The Essay is simply a watchful form. Halfway between a sermon and story, the essay interests itself in the narration of ideas—in their unfolding” (336). However, Emerson as the writer of “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” does not eye the art of skepticism as a heroic quality. As he points out in the following passage, the skeptic is far superior to the abstractionist or materialist: The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labours to plant his feet, to be the beam of being in extremes.[. . .] He sees the onesidedness of these men of the street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool: no unadvised industry, no unrewarded self- devotion, no loss of brains in the toil. (88)

For Emerson, skepticism and the essay represent tools for locating what would be the best qualities in a leader for his newly formed country grounded in democratic ideals. The Essay, Education, and the Formation of a U.S. National Identity In essays like “The Divinity School Address,” “The Scholar,” “Education,” and “Universities,” Emerson looks to scholars, theologians, and teachers as the hope for shaping the minds of these future U.S. representative men. Teaching and education were also important subject matters for Old World figures like Plutarch and Montaigne. Plutarch’s “A Discourse Concerning the Training of Children” and his moral apothegms were found in children’s textbooks for hundreds of years. Segments from Plutarch’s Lives were used to instruct children about the heroes of the world. Some of Montaigne’s best essays, such as “On the Education of Children” and “Of Books” were devoted to instructing others about how to teach schoolchildren and university students. As discussed here, in chapter 2, part of Montaigne’s purpose for introducing the essay to the scholarly world was to make them see that the old ways of writing didn’t work in a skeptical world where scholars overturned accepted truths in science, religion, and politics.

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However, for Emerson, the implications of education took on a larger significance that encompassed not only the scholarly world but the heart of his nation. From his perspective, the success of the nation depended not on the leadership from the masses but on a group of genius men who had an unconventional education in both the scholarly and the commonplace world. Emerson was searching for a distinct U.S. educational experience for these men that would transcend the learning of great works with a U.S. identity grounded in the community life experiences from their home environments. He called upon scholars, teachers, and ministers to bring their life experiences into their scholarship and encourage their audience to do the same. As he outlines in “The American Scholar,” Emerson wanted a form of education that closely resembled the qualities of the essay—one that fostered in these young men spontaneity, accessibility, self-reflexivity, and a search and rhetoric for truth. Emerson’s impact in inspiring the younger generation to rebel against traditional educational and religious practices in search of their identities as U.S. citizens had a great impact. He fused the essay’s qualities with his interest in shaping leaders for this emerging national identity. Unlike his European counterparts, Emerson, as an instrumental essayist in this country, played a significant role in essaying a U.S. educational identity that is still with us today. Emerson and “The American Scholar” In 1837, Emerson was asked to give a Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard University. Scholars and writers since that time have come to regard Emerson’s oration as a call for U.S. scholars to declare their independence from Europe. Certainly, this interpretation might be easy to come by, given the following passages: We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, and complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. (69)

In Emerson’s view, the remedy for American scholars is to look to home for inspiration, especially to a natural environment within their own soil that would guide their instincts. He calls for scholars to maintain a distinct individuality that would eventually transcend into a universality of all. The individual trusting in his own instincts and spontaneity will bridge together with the “we” to form a distinct scholarly national identity: “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;


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we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence” (70). Clearly, Emerson works to bridge the individual “I” with the “we” to form an American community in search of independence from the Old World. In this sense, this essay is both personal in speaking to the individual and beyond the personal when it reaches out to the elite American community of “we.” Indeed, he succeeds in reaching out and influencing other individuals within the community that work for common personal and community goals of education. As Martin Bickman points out, Emerson’s treatment of education has had a significant impact in inspiring educational leaders such as Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, and John Dewey. Bickman contends that “The American Scholar” is not so much about forming a U.S. identity as it is in radically reconceptualizing education. However, Robert Burkholder refutes earlier biographers, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, who proclaimed the shock within the scholarly community after his address. Buckholder points out that Emerson’s lofty and elusive style in “The American Scholar” was above the heads of most who attended (40). His reliance on such romantic European scholars like Swendenborg, Coleridge, and Carlyle created a metaphysical and unintelligible text that infuriated many Jacksonian Democrats who claimed that it had little to do with the common people, but instead served to maintain the status quo (40). For Burkholder, “The American Scholar” partially expresses Emerson’s romantic and personal ideology. However, to assume that “The American Scholar” fits neatly into one of the categories of national identity, education, or romantic ideology is to negate Emerson’s interests in merging his philosophical ideas with a personal U.S. identity. It negates his interests in using representative men of the past to be an inspiration to future representative men in this country. These polarized explanations negate his commitment to the skeptical nature that he desires to instill in the “American scholar.” “The American Scholar” can instead be seen as Emerson’s attempt to encourage scholars to, as William Gass coins the term, “essay to be.” As Gass sees it, Emerson wants scholars to follow the patterns of the essay’s elements as a way to inspire and teach others as well as to become less dependent on Western European works. “Essay [ing] to be” is thus firmly grounded in the formation of a national and personal identity. Part of this “Essay [ing] to be” is intertwined with Emerson’s ideas for reforming education. Although Emerson never held a position as a professor or teacher, many nineteenth-century men and women saw him as their teacher “through his published writings or by his appearance on local lecture platforms” (Sealts 180). He often questioned why he was never asked to teach at a university—sometimes lamented over this.

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Although he was a frequent lecturer at many universities, none offered him a position. However, he probably understood why a university of his time would not possibly house a man who could not be occupationally categorized as just a poet or lecturer or essayist or philosopher. He was, as Sealts points out, “Teufelscrockh in his friend Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Emerson was a ‘Professor of Things in General’—Allerley Wissenschaft—and was rightly suspicious of all compartmentalizing and departmentalizing” (181). Those like Emerson who strive to “essay to be” would inevitably work against rigid departmental barriers that constrict their democratic movements to freely assay in a variety of areas. He would probably find it amusing and flattering if he was alive today to see the overwhelming attention given to him by today’s scholars who still remain confined to departmental restrictions. According to Emerson, a scholar must be flexible in his intellectual pursuits—one who must spontaneously travel from one department to another. He must be a traveler between the workplace, the home, and the scholarly community as well. Just as the essay calls for a spontaneous and wandering writer, so too must the scholar “essay to be” these qualities in himself. Emerson uses an essay form that serves as an example of the qualities he wants to instill in the American Scholar. A close look at “The American Scholar” reveals his utopic vision for a university he could fit into—a university of scholars that patterned themselves as teachers that actively engaged with a community of occupations: “You must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all” (53). He sees the parceling of these occupations that prevents interoccupational interactions as an obstacle to the formation of what he calls “Man Thinking.” The role of the “Man Thinking” or American Scholar is instrumental in bringing interdisciplinary and interoccupational minds together for the sake of forming a U.S. identity. Some scholars, like Martin Bickman, believe that Emerson’s essay called out for an educational process that was directly tied to cultural issues rather than a call for forming a national identity: “It is less about American literary nationalism, a subject which is trumpeted only at the beginning and the end, than about reconceptualizing the educational process and its relation to culture as a whole” (387). Bickman creates polarities of Emerson’s intentions by emphasizing the essay’s weight on education rather than on scholastic national identity. However, despite Bickman’s construction of these polarities, his discussions on Emerson’s impact on famous educational reformers like John Dewey to more contemporary education writers are important. Too often, great essayists like Montaigne, Plutarch, and Emerson, who devoted much attention to


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education and writing practices, are associated with literary studies rather than composition and education. Howard Mumford Jones provides a clue as to why this neglect has occurred within education: The neglect is not so difficult to understand. Defining education in institutional terms, they have seen their task as one of tracing the development of formal agencies of instruction, particularly the public schools; and they have tended naturally to celebrate those men who actively facilitated that development. Not surprisingly they have paid little heed to Emerson, assuming that his anti-institutional bias minimized his contribution to the American educational experience. (vii)

Because of these essayists’ skeptical nature, their distrust of systems and institutions that stifle the spontaneity, accessibility, and other qualities of their writing, the scholarly community has, until recently, undervalued and ignored the contributions of these radical educational/essay reformers. David Mead discusses in his essay “Emerson’s Scholar and the Scholars” how academics in Emerson’s day ignored his call for a new national culture and instead “made the grand trek to Europe, where they became products of German Universities” (651). Nineteenth-century American historians like Motley and Bancroft along with the poet Longfellow embraced German methodology (651). One hundred years later in the 1930s some scholars lamented over the neglect of Emerson’s educational ideals. They became increasingly alarmed that Emerson’s vision of the American Scholar would never be realized: “Not Emerson’s prophetic and independent “Man Thinking,” but organized, cooperative groups of project workers—supported by government, industry, and foundations—were becoming the fact of our national life” (652). College presidents in the depression of the 1930s, like William Allan Neilson of Smith College and Charles F. Thwing of Western Reserve University, found Emerson’s words a source of hope during that economically devastating time period (652). Emerson himself wrote “The American Scholar” during a time of economic problems in this country. In the 1960s, Leo Marx of Amherst and Edwin R. Clapp of Western Washington State College criticized universities for eroding Emerson’s dreams of the scholar (653). In Marx’s view, the American scholars of his day were efficient machines that examined the American past in detached ways. Edwin Clapp saw the institutionalism of academia as the major obstacle to Emerson’s “Man Thinking” (654–55). Today some scholars, like Bickman and Jones, are now beginning to salvage the lost ground that came with this neglect of Emerson’s educational ideas. Emerson begins “The American Scholar” by showing the necessity of venturing outside of academia for the betterment of the country and

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then proceeds to examine three qualities that make up the American scholar’s education. These three qualities in many ways resemble some of the essay’s elements discussed in this book. (1) The scholar can attain an interdisciplinary reflexivity by studying the interconnectedness of the natural world. He must accept that the human mind and nature are one. (2) Succeeding generations must develop their own books to meet with current issues in contemporary society. The scholar must not attach too much credence to the sacredness of old books or “great” writers. These books should only be used to inspire others to go forward. He must therefore be an inventor rather than an imitator. (3) The scholar must be a man of action rather than a recluse. A “cowardly” scholar is a scholar of inaction—one who refuses to convey to others his lived experiences in his writings and speeches. Scholarship and lived experiences must be one and the same. Emerson’s first emphasis is on the interconnectedness of man and nature in achieving intellect. His concept of nature and education has ties to Thomas Jefferson’s dreams of building an American identity. Merrill Peterson makes a strong case for their ties when he examines Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia: “Primarily a work of natural history, the book discloses this young American studying out the land, its flora and fauna, its resources and beauties, its human inhabitants, all with the purpose of taking intellectual possession of the country” (24). Both Jefferson and Emerson perceived the study of American nature as the way to American nationalism. However, Jefferson placed more emphasis on nature as a means for scientific reason and rational intelligence while Emerson saw nature as “spiritual, or poetical, or psychological rather than scientific” (26). Emerson shows how the interconnectedness of man and nature works to support the idea that “man’s” ideas are not his own or permanent but part of the interactions he has with God, the natural environment and the social interactions with others: “Our globe seen by God, is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions” (“Circles” 179). In his eyes, facts spontaneously fluctuate as they become known from person to person: Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. (180)


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Emerson’s argument in “Circles” is that one can only realize this fluidity of facts and recognize these changing perceptions if one chooses to break with fixed positions and embrace others’ perceptions of facts. When this concept is applied to education, Emerson believes that we must “fill ourselves with ancient learning” only as a way to understand his day’s “French, English, and American houses and modes of living” (185). He believes that scholars gain insight into their field when studying it from another: “The field cannot be well seen from within the field” (185). In Emerson’s view, education is a process of a moving from one circle outward to another, circles of learning that are like the interconnectedness of nature. Emerson advocated an interdisciplinary self-reflexivity for the American scholar. He also wished that the scholar see himself as an endless experimenter, one who never settles because he embraces a spontaneous skeptical nature: But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head, and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, and endless seeker, with no Past at my back. (188)

His second emphasis in “The American Scholar” calls for scholars to use great books as inspiration instead of merely admiring them. In Emerson’s eyes, great scholars go beyond an infatuation with great works: Books are written on it by thinkers, not by “Man thinking;” by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing in their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. (56)

Scholars must therefore become active critics rather than worshipers of great books. Emerson sees this “Man Thinking” as one who draws closer to another element of the essay, the search for truth: The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius always looks forward. (57)

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Emerson’s “soul active” is ingrained in his perception of the American skeptic, one who arrives at truth through the weighing of contraries. The “progressive” scholar will only periodically stand still to read books, and then marches forward with “his” own ideas. Like the essay, the “progressive” reader is an active form: “One must be an inventor to read well” (58). His idea of the American reader is one who reads books as a way to move forward and reflect on issues in his American contemporary society. He also believed that a scholar must develop a heroic mind by taking in his lived experiences: “Only so much do I know, as I have lived” (59). The scholar must not only be an observer of books but an observer of life as well. The scholar must therefore use another element of the essay, accessibility, as a means of interconnecting the knowledge of books and lived experiences. According to Emerson, scholars must see that academic and nonacademic communities are intertwined—one feeding on the other: “Colleges and Books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made” (61). The scholar must be a man who actively pursues a dialectic of books and lived experiences. Through this dialectic, Emerson hopes to make the scholar more accessible to a public community. He hopes to bridge what he sees as unproductive polarities and stereotypes between academic and nonacademic communities: “The so-called practical men sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing” (59). “The American Scholar” is one good example that demonstrates Emerson’s dreams for an American leader, one that can help build his concept of a democratic nation. The essay form has often been heralded as a democratic writing form by many of today’s essay scholars, such as T. W. Adorno, William Gass, Chris Anderson, and others. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, Emerson could also see the essay’s elements as instrumental in fostering his perception of democracy and an American identity. Yet, in Emerson’s eyes, the essay was not a form that needed to be studied as a text but was meant to inspire the future leaders of this nation. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

When Thoreau wrote Walden in 1854, Emerson had changed considerably from when he wrote “The American Scholar” in 1837. According to Harmon Smith, Thoreau, at the tender age of twenty, felt so inspired after reading Emerson’s “Nature” and “The American Scholar” (139–40). Emerson’s essay “Experience,” which was written a few years


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before Thoreau’s visit to Walden Pond, in some ways contrasts with his earlier assertion in “The American Scholar” that scholars should be men of action. In “Experience” he says “we live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them” (35–36). As an essayist who skated on philosophical surfaces without specifically implementing their applications, Emerson ran the danger of having readers interpret a practice of their own that markedly differed from his views. Although he clearly demonstrated his interest in promoting democratic ideals, he often has been blamed for fostering a corrupt individualism that inspired industrialists and robber barons like Henry Ford: “He might have been appalled had he lived to see it, but half a century later Henry Ford could, with equal consistency, declare that Emerson had always been his favorite writer, and that “Self Reliance” had been his guide through life” (Rubinstein 204). Clearly, Emerson would have abhorred the robber baron’s version of individualism that exploited American labor, polluted and ravaged the American landscape, and pursued individual monetary gain at the expense of young scholars’ educations and pursuits of happiness. How could Emerson’s essays have inspired such corrupt men who clearly did not emulate Emerson’s “representative man” or “Man Thinking”? Where did he go wrong in “The American Scholar” or in his other inspirational essays? Edward Rose, in his influential essay “The American Scholar Incarnate,” claims that Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond was a response to Emerson’s descriptions of the American scholar. As he sees it, Thoreau decided to place into personal practice Emerson’s criteria for an American scholar: “Both as a human being and as a writer, Thoreau has proven in the minds of later generations to be very much the man of nature, books, and action that Emerson describes in ‘The American Scholar’” (171). Yet others like Charles Child Walcutt claimed that when Thoreau wrote Walden fifteen years later, he worked to refute rather than enact Emerson’s ideals of the scholar (6). A conversation between Thoreau and Emerson recorded in an account by John Albee, a student of Phillips Academy in Andover, seems to confirm their growing differences on American scholars, especially those at Harvard: “The conversation turning to the general subject of education, Emerson commented that all branches were taught at Harvard. Thoreau’s response was, ‘Yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots’” (qtd. in Smith 141). Perhaps one way to determine whether Walden was a reaction for or against Emerson’s scholarly ideals must come from historical, philosophical, and biographaphical analyses of these works. These analyses will demonstrate why Thoreau chose to use a much more personal form of the essay embedded in a philosophical practice that helped shape his

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ideals for an American citizen and scholar. Oftentimes a personal form of writing that demonstrates practice is equated with public reform or political activism. However, according to Walcutt, Thoreau did not advocate in his early works the reformation of government or institutions, but in the reformation of the self (8). He lived by example. As Len Gougeon discusses in his essay “Thoreau and Reform,” Thoreau warily eyed self-proclaimed reformers as those who were in most need of reformation themselves (195). Thoreau’s personal essays in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” moved beyond the skepticism and elitism that seemed to arrest Emerson’s ability to demonstrate the practice of his philosophical beliefs and instead worked toward individual activism. Henry David Thoreau as a scholar and essayist sought to put “The American Scholar” into practice. By enacting his version of the American scholar in personal essays like Walden or “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau succeeded in inspiring great social reformers for the underprivileged, such as Martin Luther King and Ghandi. Henry Ford would certainly have never become who he was if he chose these words from Walden as his model of inspiration: However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.[. . .] Love your life, poor as it is.[. . .] The town’s poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of all. (376)

As Richard J. Schneider points out, Thoreau chose to “seek spiritual rather than monetary potential” (100). Instead of writing essays about great Western European “Representative Men” as Emerson did with Shakespeare, Napoleon, and others, Thoreau discovered his “Shakespeare” in a French Canadian wood chopper and post maker, and his “Napoleon” in a destitute Irish soldier at Walden Pond who was purported to have fought at Waterloo. In Thoreau’s view, old countries like England were not offerers of inspiration, but countries imprisoned by their long history: “I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox and bundle” (110). He also believed that when Americans looked to European nations like Germany for inspiration, they would only find chaotic bureaucracies that served to corrupt the simplicity of the American individual: Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and


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superficial, is just such an unwieldly and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. (136)

He sees these Old World nations as bureaucratic, materialistic, and embedded in an old institutional framework that hinders those who pursue the simple life. He, like Montaigne, perceived European civilization as too estranged from nature. Thoreau’s fear is that America’s emulation of Europe would serve to corrupt an American identity and individuality. His fear is, in some ways, the manifestation of predictions that Montaigne made in “Of Cannibals” and “Of Coaches” concerning how certain European influences would negatively impact the New World. Americans, through such elite influences, would eventually lose the very characteristics that insured their democratic principles. As Michael Meyer points out in his introduction to Walden, Thoreau, as an avid follower of the abolitionist movement and slave narrators like Fredrick Douglass, began to see the industrial movement with its emphasis on material wealth as a form of white enslavement (29). Thoreau does not equate the lives of blacks and whites, but instead is inspired by black narratives to see in his own race a form of white voluntary enslavement that prevents them from making individual spiritual and moral democratic choices. His choice to free himself from capitalistic enslavement came through his decision to live a simple life at Walden Pond for two years. When he wrote Walden a few years later, Thoreau needed a form that would capture his personal freedom and his adherence to individualistic democratic principles, which he found in the personal essay. On first glance, Walden seems to be a work that falls into the genre of autobiography. However, Linck Johnson, in his article “Revolution and Renewal: The Genres of Walden” makes a strong case for saying that Walden does not fit into any one particular genre. He says that Walden is a mixture of many genres: In developing that lecture into a book, Thoreau in later chapters adapted and combined elements of numerous other minor or nonliterary genres, including agricultural reports, house pattern books, travel guides, natural history writings, and the sketch, organizing his chapters in a way that also reveals a debt to Emerson’s Essays and The Conduct of Life. (216)

Johnston goes on to point out that Emerson chose the essay form to free himself from generic restrictions while “Thoreau’s cultural nationalism

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and literary nonconformity was revealed in other ways, for he sought to exploit the full generic repertoire without accomomodating his narrative to the demands of any single literary kind” (216). He demonstrates how Walden fits into the genre of autobiography, the epic, the pastoral poem, and the travel narrative. Johnson’s distinctions between Emerson and Thoreau’s form seems well founded, but he doesn’t consider that Thoreau’s exploitation of this “generic repertoire” has its roots in an antigenre form (or a resistance to the use of a singular generic form). The very act of exploiting genre boundaries is what the essay is all about and thus explains why it feeds into a democracy of writing forms. The essay’s relationship to the skeptic’s questions of settled boundaries fosters this exploitation of genres. Walden is thus Thoreau’s interpretation of the essay, one that differs from Emerson’s form, but one that still falls into its “anything goes” definition. Thoreau is also not the first to do this with the essay form. Montaigne in his Essais mixed genre writing forms. The essay “On Cicero” that was discussed in the previous chapter is one example where Montaigne combined Ciceronian rhetoric with his personal essay form. Walden can thus be seen as a series of topical personal essays that ruptures genre boundaries and allows for the democratic interplay of many forms. It also represents a writing form that allows Thoreau to show the democratic interconnected nature of an American scholar. Today, it is quite acceptable to see many personal essayists bringing in multiple genres to their essays as a way to express the full magnitude of their experiences. Figures like Montaigne and Thoreau represented just a few of the predecessors for furthering this democratic multiple genre form. Historical and Political Background of Walden Thoreau’s interest in using this democratic writing form derives partially from a reaction against certain political movements of his day. Unlike most Americans who were caught up in the accelerated territorial growth and industrialism of their time, Thoreau chose to retreat into the woods. One popular political movement—especially among the working class—was Jacksonian democracy. Rubinstein points out that many Transcendentalists came from working-class origins as well (201). Jacksonian democracy with its ties to Jeffersonian agrarianism is antiaristocratic and proscribes to an informal government structure, but its members were not nostalgic for a simple life (201). The agrarian movement was very much attuned to issues of expansion and increased material wealth. Walter Harding points out in his essay that one of the facets of Walden “is its satirical criticism of modern life and living” (89). Most of


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Thoreau’s humor “is directed at the foibles of contemporary society” (90). These foibles were directed at those of the working class who pursued agrarianism. Michael T. Gilmore discusses how Thoreau went beyond Jeffersonian democracy—one who condemned the material pursuits of farmers and their Jeffersonian laissez-faire ideology (179). Thoreau, in his February 16, 1851 journal entry, claims that we are not a free democratic nation but one consumed by others’ material standards: “We are provincial because we do not find at home our standards—because we do not worship truth but the reflection of truth. Because we are absorbed in & narrowed by trade & commerce & agriculture which are means & not the end” (194). Thoreau also shows how this weight of commercialism places more emphasis on the art of selling the product rather than with our individual pursuits of making our craft. He demonstrates how an American Indian becomes puzzled with the Anglo’s concept of trade: Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing I can do.[. . .] He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. (61)

Thoreau says that he went to Walden so as not to sell baskets but instead pursue another life of success that sharply contrasted with the popular political movements of his time. In his version of success, Thoreau also found room to ridicule agricultural reformers that sought to rationalize and systematize farming techniques so as to come up with the highest yield on the smallest piece of land. Robert A. Gross contends in his article “The Great Bean Field Hoax: Thoreau and the Agricultural Reformers” that Thoreau’s cultivation of his bean field went against all the agricultural improvers’ recommendations. According to Gross, Thoreau abhorred their emphasis on intensive cultivation that left little room for the farmer’s individuality and ingenuity: “It carefully cropped the independent, heroic spirit, fencing him in a solid wall of respectable institutions and good manners” (198). Gross believes that Thoreau chose a bean crop because it was not associated with England but with the American Indian (200). He also ignored the advice of these New England farmers: “He planted late, He did nothing to improve the thin soil. No foul manures, no commercial, chemical fertilizers for this field” (200). In doing this, Thoreau ridiculed the “material pretensions of his countrymen” and furthered his “radical individualistic” purposes (202).

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Michael Gilmore argues that Thoreau’s radical critique of these political movements is closely aligned to Georg Lukac’s Marxist critique of capitalism. Lukacs, a well-known essay scholar and Marxist philosopher of the early twentieth century, developed a theory of “reification” that is closely aligned with Thoreau’s critique of American capitalism. Through the process of reification, men become consumed with maintaining capitalistic standards and jeopardize their freedom: Reification refers to the phenomenon whereby a social relation between men assumes the characteristics of a relation between things. Because they interact through the commodities they exchange, including the commodity of labor, individuals in the capitalist market confront each other not as human beings, but as objectified, nonhuman entities. They lose sight altogether of the subjective element in their activity.[. . .] By mystifying or obscuring man’s involvement in the production of his social reality, reification leads him to apprehend that reality as a “second nature.” He perceives the social realm as an immutable and universal order over which he exerts no control. The result is greatly to diminish the possibility of human freedom. (181)

Thoreau sees this consumption with the material as not only a detriment to an individual’s freedom, but also as a neglect to fostering a democratic identity for the future of this country: “Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? [. . .] Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy plodding about their beans” (210). Thoreau’s essay “The Bean-Field” in Walden transforms, as Robert Gross points out, “the frontiersman’s tall story into a Transcendental small story, replacing the gradiose with the diminutive and, in the process, deflating the exaggerated pretensions of his countrymen” (202). Thoreau’s art of “deflating” those with “exaggerated pretensions” through the personal essay form is more closely aligned with Montaigne’s use of the essay rather than Emerson’s. The essayist, as a small storyteller, appears deceptively simplistic on the surface yet rhetorically powerful in preying on others’ unsuspected “pretensions.” As seen in the previous chapter, Montaigne’s arrows were usually directed at pretentious scholars, politicians, and royalty. He used this unpretentious and skeptical writing form to unveil the fallibility of certain philosophical, religious, political, and rhetorical issues that many of his contemporary scholars still theorized and practiced. The essay’s elements of spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, and rhetoric of truthfulness served him well in disclosing nations deeply embedded in old bureaucratic traditional ways—traditional ways that Thoreau would later reject for his emerging nation.


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Early Book Reviews of Walden and Its Significance to the Essay One way to discover the relationship between the essay’s elements and Thoreau’s practice of becoming an American scholar is to examine how others describe Walden in early book reviews. The study of these early book reviews provides scholars with historical insight on Thoreau’s abilities to persuade his contemporaries through this essay form. With these book reviews, readers will hear the reviewers describe the essay’s elements of spontaneity, self-reflexivity, accessibility, and the rhetoric of truthfulness in their descriptions of Thoreau’s writing. Thoreau’s personal essay form, in the majority of cases, strategically maneuvers many readers to either more fully explore or buy into Thoreau’s philosophy and politics. His personal form intermixed with practice leaves less room for his contemporaries to misconstrue his interpretation of an “American scholar” than Emerson’s less personal and less practical form. The personal form, when tied to the practice of philosophical and political issues, becomes a much more active form that requires readers to analyze and self-reflect on their own practices as residents and leaders of this emerging nation. Many of these early reviews of Walden were anonymous, which perhaps allowed for more candid opinions. The reviews came from Joel Myerson’s edited book Critical Essays on Henry David Thoreaus’s “Walden” where he compiled many of the early reviews into one chapter. Spontaneity seems to be one characteristic that is attributable to Thoreau and his writing. One early anonymous reviewer describes Thoreau as a free spirit: “By this course Mr. Thoreau lives free from pecuniary obligation or dependence on others, except that he borrows some books, which is an equal pleasure to lender and borrower” (15). This same freedom to pursue a more spontaneous life in many ways mirrors the essayist who may borrow sources but always seeks to reshape these sources to make it “his” own. With this element of spontaneity, readers hear Montaigne or even Emerson’s echoes to replace the quoteridden passages that consume scholarly works with a more spontaneous active form. Thoreau, in his quest for self-sufficiency as a transcendentalist and as an essayist, frees himself from an obligatory life and writing form that relies too much on others. The reviewer’s knowledge of both the “lender and borrower” of these books produces “an equal pleasure” in that he or she can watch as the borrower reshapes the borrowed for a contemporary audience. George Eliot, as a prolific English novelist, also admires Thoreau’s spontaneity as well as his intolerance of those who seek an ordered life:

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay People—very wise in their own eyes—who would have every man’s life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may poohpooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in history as unpractical and dreamy. (46)

Again, a spontaneous writing form that does not adhere to a particular order or pattern works nicely for a writer like Thoreau who wishes to go against the ordered grain of certain political and social structures. This form of the personal essay, with its spontaneous element, becomes a rebellious form that is quite conducive for rebellious writers like Thoreau who desire to break with established orders and patterns created by those in power. A spontaneous form of writing also creates a mixture of writings that keeps the reader interested through its variety. As one anonymous reviewer put it: “Whatever may be thought or said of this curious volume, nobody can deny its claim to individuality of opinion, sentiment, and expressions. Sometimes strikingly original, sometimes merely eccentric and odd, it is always racy and stimulating” (22). The personification of the book here is interesting in that the description of the writing form and the description of Thoreau seem to be one and the same. The reviewer, in this sentence, does not seem to draw a distinction. If the reader can perceive the spontaneous writer and writing form as inseparable, then the power to convince the audience of readers must increase. By infusing his practice of “The American Scholar” with the practice of the essay, Thoreau used a clever rhetorical strategy that swayed many readers. For such a radical scholar of his day and many would argue even today, Thoreau received, for the most part, very positive reviews on Walden. He needed powerful rhetorical strategies like these to get this mainstream audience to listen. Horace Greeley, in his review “The Bases of Character,” sees in the radical Thoreau a model for what should be encouraged in academic institutions. For Greeley, a noted scholar and critic of his time as well as publisher of the New York Tribune, colleges and universities must be responsible for not just training men for occupations, but training “many sided, complete Men” (50): Our Colleges and miscalled Universities do not educate much, but too little. We object to our prevailing system of collegiate education, not that it is not practical in Its ends, for such it certainly endeavors to be— but that it is not catholic—universal. It addresses itself to a few intellectual faculties, instead of dealing with the whole and spiritual human being. (50)


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Greeley alludes to the self-reflectiveness (another element of the essay) that is evident in Thoreau’s writing and spiritual being. Greeley believes Thoreau takes his knowledge of Greek as well as what he considers the “best” of scholarship and self-reflects on these works in his own life. Through self-reflection, the “best” becomes a springboard for Thoreau’s experiences as a New England scholar. Greeley criticizes colleges and universities for not encouraging this reflection, but merely training men to fulfill tasks for their future occupations. Lydia Maria Child concurs with Greeley’s perception that self-reflection does have a place among our nation’s busy lives: He yet manifestly feels, through and through, that the loftiest dreams of the imagination are the solidest of realities, and so the only foundation for us to build upon, while the affairs in which men are everywhere busying themselves so intensely are comparatively the merest froth and foam. (39)

Time must be given for these scholars to reflect, to ponder on issues that will form and improve upon the emerging nation. Unfortunately, during this period of rapid expansion and growth, little attention and care were given to this country’s early stages of scholarly development. Thoreau’s essays signified one protest against this inattention. Perhaps one way that Thoreau believed he could reach the attention of his audience was to make this work practical or accessible. The word “practical” frequently shows up in the reviews. As previously discussed, many define the essay as an accessible form of writing. However, accessibility or practicality does not necessarily mean that the essay is devoid of theoretical implications. The reviewers are quite aware of the rigor that comes with Thoreau’s accessible writing form. One reviewer comments: “Through all the audacities of his eccentric protests, a careful eye can easily discern the movement of a powerful and accomplished mind. He has evidently read the best books, and talked with the best people” (22). The accessible writing form is indeed taken seriously as a scholarly work by this reviewer. Another anonymous reviewer admires Thoreau’s ability to interweave theory into practice: “It can not be complained against the book that it is not practical in its theories” (21). One purpose in Thoreau’s use of this accessible form was to reach his fellow citizens. Instead of merely quoting the “greats” from Europe and Ancient Greece, Thoreau wanted to bring them to New England to demonstrate that the “greats” were in his own country as well. Charles Frederick Briggs seems to sense Thoreau’s purpose when he writes, “Many a man will find pleasure in reading it, and many a one, we hope, will be profited by its counsels. A tour in Europe would have cost a good

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deal more, and not have produced half as much” (27). Thoreau must foster in his readers a “pleasure” for his writing through an accessible form as well as through accessible native rather than foreign examples of experience. Again, both the form of writing and the experiences he wishes to convey to his readers work together side by side. By using an accessible form, Thoreau can more easily persuade readers through the final element to be examined—the rhetoric of truthfulness or sincerity. If a writer emphasizes a commitment to putting theory into practice, then the writer must bring an element of sincerity to his or her writing. If a writer fails in this endeavor, the practice becomes a sham and the writer not only jeopardizes the rhetoric of the practice but the rhetoric of the theories. For the most part, Thoreau passes this test for the reviewers. One anonymous reviewer comments on Thoreau’s sincerity: Every chapter in the book is stamped with sincerity. It is genuine and genial throughout. Even its freaks of thought are full of suggestions. When the author turns his eye seriously on an object, no matter how remote from the sphere of ordinary observation, he commonly sees into it and through it. (23)

The reviewer understands how powerful this element of sincerity or truthfulness is for Thoreau in connecting with his audience. The “sincerity” element encourages the reader to participate in Thoreau’s “sphere of ordinary observation.” This participatory quality of the essay serves to break down the barriers between reader and writer. The anonymous reviewer also understands how this sincerity connects with Thoreau’s involvement with nature: “But if he has the wildness of the woods about him, he has their sweetness also” (22). The innocence of this sincere element brings about a trust between reader and writer that works well for the art of persuasion. In another anonymous review, the reviewer also notes this sincerity: “We may differ from its theology and sociology, but we cannot too heartily commend its philosophy, working so sincerely toward a high, spiritual life, its close and loving adhesion to nature, and its hatred of the conventional and trivial” (52). Another anonymous reviewer notes the power in Thoreau’s innocence: “The writer, in relating his own experience, which he does with naiveté, shows much power of reflection, and a philosophic knowledge of men and things” (30). Here, a writing form perceived as naive is also perceived as powerful. Thoreau, with his use of sincerity, is able to get those who may oppose his “theology and sociology” to listen and admire his practices. Ironically, Thoreau became one of the most prolific writers and scholars in the United States by using elements of a writing form that is


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still marginalized by academic scholars today. He values the spontaneity of mixing many genres instead of relying on one. He relies on selfreflection to guide his knowledge of scholarship. He treats theory and practice as equals. He values accessible writing. And finally, he humbles himself by writing sincerely or naively for readers. According to many of his contemporary reviewers, Thoreau, as both scholar and essayist, succeeds in fulfilling their dreams of “The American Scholar” for their emerging nation.


CHAPTER FOUR

The Essay as Political/Cultural Critique in Latin America

Like Emerson and Thoreau, many Latin American essayists viewed the essay as a means for communicating their thoughts on nation building. Both Latin Americans and U.S. writers, as nation builders in search of improving their countries’ societal conditions, became less consumed with the aesthetic qualities of the essay form and more concerned with how this form could help shape a national and individual identity. Martin S. Stabb, one of the definitive scholars on the Latin American essay, began his first book, In Quest of Identity, by saying that his inspiration for his work lies more “in the area of ideas—of intellectual history set against the backdrop of the total culture than it does in the area of literature per se” (11). Through his studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American essayists, Stabb demonstrated how these intellectual writers searched for ways to improve their nations’ identities. His emphasis on the essay as intellectual and cultural history continued in his second book, written twenty years later, The Dissenting Voice: The New Essay of Spanish America, 1960–1985. In the latter book, Stabb focused on contemporary Latin American essayists who encompass a “collage, testimonials, diaries, poetic prose, and other hybrid forms” within their essays that are in keeping with the contemporary perceptions of genre mixing in literary works (1). However, both of his books demonstrated that the emphasis on studying the style of the essay and other more traditional forms of exploring literature seem to

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play a secondary role to the primary focus of probing the essay’s tie to Latin American history. Peter G. Earle, another prominent essay scholar of Latin American essayists, supports this argument by pointing out that to be studied for one’s “literary craftsmanship is relatively unimportant” for many Latin American essayists like Marti, Rodo, Vasconcelos, and Martinez Estrada (334). What is important for these famous “historically committed thinkers” is the furthering of their “combative ideological missions” in the name of nation building (334). According to Earle, the essay is tied to “the obsessive theme and persistent enigma of Hispanic American destiny, of historical self-definition” (335). Doris Meyer, editor of Reinterpreting the Spanish-American Essay: Women Writers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, further lends credence to the idea of Latin American writers’ reliance on the essay for defining their collective identities: “The evolution of the Spanish American essay since the days of Andres Bello and Simon Bolivar has been customarily associated with an obsessive search for cultural and national identity” (2). Instead of writing in an “intellectual vacuum,” Latin American essayists wrote in response to the ever-changing nation-building perceptions in their respective countries (2). Lourdes Rojas and Nancy Saporta Sternbach found a direct correlation between the beginnings of Latin American literary history and the movement for political independence (174). They contend that both Latin American women and men “have generally viewed the essay as the most appropriate discourse for social and political reform” (174). Rojas and Sternbach found that, like many European and U.S. scholars, Latin American essayists also trace the essay’s roots back to Montaigne. Latin American writers have a long history of French literary influences that surface in their writings and scholarship. Montaigne, as the most renown French essayist, repeatedly comes up in Latin American essay scholarship. However, unlike Montaigne’s essays, many twentieth-century Latin American essays became a means to address a national audience (the masses) rather than exclusively an audience of aristocracy and scholars. This shift in audience transformed the essay into a social and political form of writing that played an instrumental role in shaping both a national and personal identity. In fact, for many Latin American essayists, the national and the personal aspects of the essay are one and the same in the nation-building process. The distinction between the “I” and the “we” in this nationbuilding process of the essay seem less important than the merging of these identities to better society. The Latin American essay, like the U.S. essay, originally came about from the genteel aristocracy of Montaigne’s world, but, according to Martin Stabb, when it moved to the New World (especially Latin Amer-

The Essay as Political/Cultural Critique

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ica) it became an increasingly political and social writing form that influenced both a personal and national identity for their countries. For example, as early as the seventeenth century, the world-renown Mexican essayist Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz advocated a place for women in the educational and religious institutions of her country. Her infamous essay “Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz” is well known throughout the world as one of the most eloquent and convincing personal essay arguments for acknowledging the intellectual worth and contributions that Latin American women have to offer. Early on, marginalized groups such as Latin American women used the essay to further their place in society. However, the essay most often served Latin American men of privileged backgrounds during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, South American essayists influenced by scientific postivism, like Carlos Octavio Bunge, Alcides Arguedas, and Garcia Calderon, sought to improve their nations by rooting the social and political problems of their respective countries in what they deemed to be inferior races. For them, the mixture of Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans in Latin American countries all contributed to their interpretation of the “sick continent.” For these essayists, positive nation building could only occur when Latin America imported more European blood and influences into their society. Unfortunately, the reliance on European influences and search for a Latin American aristocracy continued into the early twentieth century through essayists like Jose Rodo and Justo Sierra who encouraged a noblesse oblige and intellectual elitism. For these essayists, the nation builders resided in the privileged classes. They, like Emerson, believed that only a few representative men of the elite should dictate the path of nation building. Jose Ingenieros, an essayist highly influenced by Emerson, wrote an essay entitled “El hombre mediocre” that furthered Emerson’s beliefs in superior men forging this national identity and mandating that the masses should study these individuals. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Latin American essayists tended to look to writers like Emerson, Whitman, and other prominent intellectual leaders as inspirational nation builders rather than the corrupt U.S. politicians, robber barons, and bankers who fed off consumerism and greed. During the early to midtwentieth century, another group of Latin American essayists emerged who, like Thoreau, valorized American intellectualism and respected the common man. Alfonso Reyes, a leading Mexican writer, devoted essays that used Western literature as a way to better understand Latin American culture. Western literature only served as an aid in comprehending the new Americas and, subsequently, played a secondary rather than a primary role in the nation building process. Later on in the twentieth

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century, more radical essayists like Gonzalez Prada and others that followed after him began to associate their writing more as a revolutionary instrument to promote activist issues. Like Thoreau, they saw the essay as a writing form to rebel against a distant European intellectualism that threatened the natural vibrancy of the new continent. Instead of perceiving the New World as a “sick continent,” these essayists, like their U.S. counterparts such as Emerson and Thoreau, valued the youth and energy of their developing countries. Throughout the twentieth century, Latin Americans struggled to locate a democratic nation in an often tumultuous environment of dictatorships, militarism, and other repressive regimes. They found sanctity in an essay writing form with a long history of Old and New World democratic elements. The Latin American essay’s purpose in history evolved from serving essayists consumed with preserving European cultural traditions to essayists committed to forging an American national identity that embodied their continent’s new vitality. Many twentieth-century Latin American essayists became activists and revolutionaries determined to critique the ills of elitism and support democratic ideals that served the masses. One mid- to late-twentieth-century world-renown Latin American essayist and educator who exemplified this change in the essay’s purpose is Paulo Freire. Like the Western European and U.S. essayists discussed in previous chapters, Freire used the essay’s elements of self-reflexivity, accessibility, spontaneity, and a rhetoric of sincerity to persuade audiences to incorporate some of these elements as a means of critiquing their immediate and global society. However, Freire, as a Latin American highly influenced by the twentieth-century emphasis on activism and revolution in essay writing, became much more focused on using the essay for transforming the conditions of the poor and illiterate global communities. Through the study of Freire’s writings, this chapter will show how his essays worked to speak to those who for centuries had no voice in politics, education, and nation building. Furthermore, this chapter will show that unlike essayists in previous chapters, Paulo Freire, as an academic educator, must not only contend with the risks of critiquing nonacademic systems but also academic systems. Montaigne, Emerson, and Thoreau could conduct essay critiques of their respective educational systems without the risks of going against colleagues or losing their jobs. They were independent scholars who critiqued institutions as outsiders. Montaigne chose to retire at thirty-eight and devote his life to running his father’s vast estate and writing personal essays that critiqued the religious, political, and academic institutions of Europe. He was a wealthy European landowner of privilege who had the luxury of critiquing those in prominent positions. Emerson,


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as a master speaker and essayist in both Europe and the United States, made his living this way and thus he remained detached from any particular institutional dictates. He had the freedom to essay “The American Scholar” without fearing repercussions from the U.S. professors he chose to criticize for their dependence on Europe. Thoreau, as a man who required little economically and who refused to affiliate with any institution, spent his life writing essays criticizing U.S. and European educational systems while simultaneously advancing his own form of noninstitutional education grounded in individual freedom. These essayists were all independent educators without institutional constraints. They had the freedom to use the elements of the essay as a way to critique their generation’s educational scholars and institutions. In contrast, Freire’s acts of pedagogical resistance that, according to Peter McLaren, “operates outside of mainstream pedagogy’s founding binarisms” present real risks for his followers within the academy who are searching for job security or tenure (Paulo Freire and the Academy 163). One of his ardent followers, bell hooks, describes the difficulties she experiences in the academy when she tries to forward some of his theories through writing. For hooks, Freire’s “generous spirit” and “quality of open-mindedness” are not conducive to “intellectual and academic arenas” (152). Freire represents an academic insider who uses the essay’s elements as a way to critique the academic institution and middle-class society that he belongs to. For his democratic and open-minded positions within and outside academia, Freire paid the price through his fifteen-year exile from his native country of Brazil and seventy-day imprisonment. Consequently, his risks and challenges become greater within this domain. The essay of academic and nonacademic interrogation is therefore a writing form of risks for those who use it. As Freire and other academics who follow his writings discovered, this writing form calls into question the democratic elements professed in words such as “academic freedom.” Through his theory and practice, Freire attempted to make the democratic essay work for him in critiquing the nondemocratic elements in both academic and other institutions. Just as Montaigne is deemed by many around the world as the “father of the essay,” Freire is globally deemed the “father of liberatory education.” With his death in the spring of 1997, I witnessed an outpouring of grief and dedications on listservs, at conferences, and with future book projects in honor of his teachings. However, academics were not the only ones mourning his loss. Freire was an academic who worked side by side with the dispossessed in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and other third-world countries. He was an accessible academic who worked with the common people and wrote challenging liberatory essays for them. His

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works were read and taught not only to academics, but to nonacademics as well. His infamous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, sold more than 500,000 copies and was translated into many languages. These copies were not just read by academics but many nonacademic educators who came from peasant backgrounds. He also not only influenced academics attuned to issues of literacy and education, but, as Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard have found, disciplines such as “social work education, economics, sociology, liberation theology, participatory research, and critical pedagogy” (2). Cornel West says that Pedagogy of the Oppressed “was a world-historical event for counterhegemonic theorists and activists in search of new ways of linking social theory to narratives of human freedom” (xiii). Carlos Alberto Torres, an education professor at UCLA, proclaims Freire as “the best known educationalist of the Third World” (119). For Ann Berthoff, a professor of Composition, Paulo Freire “is one of the great teachers of our century” (“Reading the World” 120). She claims that Paulo Freire is so important for the third world because they have not had “their John Dewey” (“Paulo Freire’s Liberation Pedagogy” 364). Freire brought to the third world “progressive education” (364). Peter Mayo contends that he not only was highly regarded in the third world but within Western society as well: “He is cited freely in the literature on education and social thought emerging not only from the ‘Third World,’ which provided the context for most of his practice and ideas, but also from Western industrialized centres” (4). Here in the U.S., Freire served to mentor and influence the writings of top scholars such as bell hooks, Cornel West, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Carlos Torres, Stanley Aronowitz, Donald Macedo, and Peter McLaren to name just a few. He is indisputably the most influential educator that has come from Latin America. For all his notoriety as an educator, a theorist, and a scholar, scant attention is given by academics to Freire, the essayist. This next section will show possible reasons for this academic neglect and then pursue a course of essay study that will rightfully treat Freire as an influential Latin American essayist. Unfortunately, part of this scant attention stems from North American academics who have only read his less personal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which he wrote thirty years ago. Freire criticizes Gerald Graff and other academics like him who have read a fragment of his works: “The problem with some of these individuals is that they have read my work fragmentally. That is, they continually refer to my book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I published over twenty years ago, without making any reference to my later works” (“A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race” 386). In another interview, he points out that many North American feminists accused


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him of sexist language in Pedagogy of the Oppressed without reading subsequent books in which he made strident efforts to eliminate this language and address their issues of oppression (Freire and Macedo, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter 171). If these academics would conduct more comprehensive research on Freire, especially his later more personal essay works like Pedagogy of Hope, Letters to Cristina, Pedagogy of the Heart, and Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, they would clearly witness revisions of Freire’s life and works. In contrast, Montaigne who rewrote and added to his only book, Essais, from 1580 to 1588 had the historical advantage of having academics comprehensibly examine the evolution of his ideas and writings throughout his career as an author. As George Hoffman uncovers in his historical examination of Montaigne’s relationship with publishers, Montaigne continued to make authorized revisions of his original book. He did this so his publisher could legally retain the privileges of his work and prevent others from profiting on his former editions (“The Montaigne Monopoly” 313). At that time, writers coveted good publishers who would take great care in creating a polished printing. Loyalty to a good publisher during this period was therefore quite critical for one’s reputation as a writer (313). Some of the most successful works (such as Montaigne’s Essais) also became quite lengthy because of these publishing restrictions and loyalties. However, the advantage of these revisions and additions to one work are evident when we see how Freire fell victim to those who neglected to read the revisions to Pedagogy of the Oppressed that came with his subsequent works. With each of Montaigne’s revisions to new editions, he became more personal just as Freire had become in his later books. In effect, the renowned success of Pedagogy of the Oppressed coupled with an academic tendency to overwhelmingly critique the definitive work of an author, contributed to the neglect of Freire, the personal essayist, who was in a constant state of processing and revising his ideas (especially in his latter years with his more personal writings). To negate this process of revision is also to negate Freire’s concept of emancipatory knowledge (a knowledge that comes from dialectical, critical, and selfreflective acts). The process of the essay can lead to emancipatory knowledge in writing. Peter McLaren and Tomaz Tadeu da Silva point out that emancipatory knowledge is in a constant state of revision and “is never realized fully, but is continually dreamed, continually revived, and continually transformed in the hearth of our memories, the flames of our longing and the passion of our struggle” (59). In other words to meet Freire’s criteria of emancipatory knowledge, an academic must study the full revisionary historical scope of his writings that spanned

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close to four decades instead of just the historical moment that embodied Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Hopefully, with time, Freire’s works will be read in a more comprehensive manner and readers will take more responsibility, as he said, in placing “my work within its historical and cultural context” (172). One way for academics to meet Freire’s request of treating his work “within its historical and cultural context” is to treat Freire as a Latin American essayist and follow Latin American essay scholarship’s emphasis on situating writers within history. Academics would then be enticed to study Freire’s works and life as a historical essay process and therefore treat Pedagogy of the Oppressed as one of many Freirian historical moments. To accomplish this, academics, especially those uneducated in Latin America issues, must understand the role essay scholarship plays in Latin America. From this understanding, scholars will better comprehend the history and cultural context behind Freire’s theories and pedagogies as well as draw the links to the elements of the essay. Freire will no longer be the static entity of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but a man tied to the revisionary process of his works. Stanley Aronowitz points out that part of Freire’s problem-posing education envelops the idea of perceiving “the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation” (11). Aronowitz interprets Freire as saying that life is not static, “but a process of becoming.” Freire believes that “humans are an unfinished project” (17). As essay scholars and essayists like Montaigne, Emerson, and Thoreau demonstrated in previous chapters, the essay plays an instrumental role in showing the writer’s process of becoming. Montaigne perceived the essay as a form that would free him to question, through a revisionary writing process, the accepted truths of his day. He turned to the essay as a means to reshape his beliefs in established individuals and institutions. When this writing form moved to the New World, Emerson found sanctity in the essay that helped create his ideal of national leaders for his country. For him, the essay played an instrumental role in the nation and individual’s process of becoming. Thoreau used the essay as a means to forge a U.S. identity that encompassed both its natural surroundings and the common man. For Thoreau, the essay served to keep democracy in check by critiquing institutions that robbed the people of their inalienable rights and freedom. The essay shaped and helped promote his rebellious and uncomforming democratic spirit. These essayists strove to be more enlightened human beings and citizens through the process of becoming in their essays. It represents the process where writers, according to William Gass, “essay to be.” Latin American essayists also see the essay in this way as well.


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Martin Stabb contends that two essayists outside Latin America, Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) from Spain and Waldo David Frank (1889–1967) from the United States strongly influenced contemporary Latin American essayists to view the essay as a process of becoming. Both of these men encouraged Latin Americans to use the essay as a way to achieve ‘authenticity’ and ‘self-awareness’ (In Quest of Identity 80). In Doris Meyer’s study of an early-twentieth-century Argentine essayist, Victoria Ocampo, Meyer’s discovered that Ocampo treated her essays as “anticipated dialogues” with her readers in hopes of forming her identity as an Argentine and woman (Victoria Ocampo, Argentine Identity and the Landscape of the Essay 60). Like other U.S. and Latin American essayists, Ocampo knew that she, as an American, did not fit within the European landscape and must instead actively forge and compose an Argentine identity to interpret her world. Beth Jürgensen notes in her study of Margo Glantz, a contemporary Mexican essayist, that she interprets the word “ensayo” (essay) as a form that is both an “active” and “transformative” act in ‘reading’ “the world” (190). Stabb notes that Mexican essayists with their rich, long history of essay writing do not write their essays in a “vacuum,” but treat their essays as “expanded footnotes” to the essayists that preceded them (The Dissenting Voice 128). In Latin America, essays become essayed by others to create a dialogue of voices in search of reading their Latin American worlds. Freire also follows Latin American perceptions of writing as dialogue by interpreting the writing act as a moment of “creation and re-creation” of past conversations, talks, and readings. He views writing as a test (an assay) of what was said in the past (Pedagogy of Hope 53). Writing, for him, is therefore rewriting and reliving many historical moments. By treating Freire as a Latin American essayist in search of authenticity, transformation, and recreation or as an essayist attempting to “essay to be,” scholars will come to a fuller understanding of the life and the historical ties that lie behind this Latin American liberatory educator. FREIRE’S PLACE IN LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

Carlos Alberto Torres notes that Freire’s introductory works (the early 1960s through the early 1970s) came during a time in Latin American history where political turmoil and class struggles were rampant throughout these societies. He claims that to understand Freire’s immense impact during this time or in subsequent years, it is absolutely necessary to research these Latin American historical moments (120).

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However, as Freire points out in his later and more personal writings, readers must also understand a writer’s early personal history in relation to the larger history as well: The man of today reflects in order to understand how the child of yesterday lived and what his relationships were within the family structure, in the schools and on the streets. On the other hand, however, the afflictions of the child of yesterday and the activism of the man of today cannot be understood as isolated expressions, even when we cannot negate either reality. (Letters to Cristina 14)

As Freire notes, we cannot isolate individual personal “expressions” from each other just as we cannot isolate them from our historical surroundings. One of the more critical components of Freire’s pedagogy lies in the intersection of the personal and social for nation-building purposes: “Identity is always personal and social and . . . while we cannot predict the path of historical action or name human agency in advance, we can never give up the struggle for self-formation and self-definition such that domination and suffering in this society are always minimized” (Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter xii). Through this intersection of the personal and social, Freire sought to educate peasants on their abilities to form an identity that called into question their social predicament within an oppressive environment. Part of this personal and social component weaves its way into Freire’s concept of problemposing education where the individuals see themselves as part of a world that is not a “static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (62). The personal and social encompass an identity that is tied to the educational process of individuals and their society. Indeed, the foundation of his pedagogy that encompasses his definition of pedagogical praxis (political practices and reflection in the classroom) makes it clear that these two entities are not distinct. Freire’s pedagogical beliefs closely follow Latin American studies of essays that emphasize both national and personal issues. Freire, like other Latin American essayists, clearly follows an American treatment of national and personal issues rather than a Spanish one. Sylvia Molloy contends that Latin American autobiographical writings (where she also includes personal essays) tie themselves to a “public story” that “serves the public interest” (82). Personal writings are thus tied to the historical discourse of Latin American issues. Jean Chittenden, in her study of critics writing about Spanish autobiography, clearly shows the distinctions between Spain and Latin America. Unlike France’s rich history of memoirs and autobiographies, Spain had little to show. Spanish writers, with their mixture of Catholic heritage and Arabic beliefs in transcendence,


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chose to manifest the personal only within the religious sphere (4). Instead of using the personal as a way to reflect on the past within a historical context, Spaniards worked to bury their past so as to erase their painful historical memories (2). Rainer Goetz, in his book Spanish Golden Age Autobiography in Its Context, notes that Spanish first-person accounts related to family merchant business rarely occurred during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In contrast, German and Italian personal accounts by merchants flourished during this time (21). Latin Americans, however, in quest of their personal and social identities as new nations, chose to pursue the personal as a means for defining themselves and developing a social conscience. It should therefore come as no surprise that a Latin American essayist would find Montaigne’s more personal critical writings attractive to fit his or her needs in blending the personal with the social. Doris Meyer discusses how “personal expression” in essay form represented one way for essayists to problematize “the status quo” (5). In Latin America, personal essays, as a response to national concerns of injustice, are seen as far back as the sixteenth century with the highly anthologized writings of the Mexican writer, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The Latin American essay (including its personal form) is in fact one of the primary ways of studying history. FREIRE’S SOCIAL PEDAGOGY AND ITS TIE TO THE ELEMENTS OF THE ESSAY

Ira Shor says of Freire that he had a “passion for justice, for critical knowledge, and for social change.[. . .] For Freire, teaching and learning are human experiences with profound social consequences” (25). Freire advocated a social pedagogy that extended beyond the classroom walls and into the fabric of Latin American nation building. Within this social pedagogy, there comes, as Ira Shor discusses, “the critique of domination in society” that leads to the “rejection of ‘banking’ methods.” These areas that make up part of Freirian education are highly embedded within the elements of the essay that are drawn from his personal and social experiences. FREIRE’S PEDAGOGICAL TIES TO SELF-REFLECTION IN THE ESSAY

Perhaps the beginnings of Freire’s critique of society’s domination and his rejection of his subjection to becoming a mere recipient of another’s knowledge originate in his personal recollections. As discussed throughout this book, the essay’s element of self-reflexivity plays an instrumental

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role in shaping the essayist’s thinking and process of becoming. Freirian scholars see self-reflexivity as a key component to his theories and practices as an educator. McLaren and Tadeu da Silva note that Freire promotes a “democratic socialist project” grounded in “discourses that encourage self-reflexivity” (53). They further contend that Freire’s theories of “self-transformation” and “social transformation” are deeply connected to each other (55). bell hooks, in a self-interview on Freire, talks about the importance of becoming “a living example of our politics” as revolutionaries (148). As an academic personal essayist, hooks holds Freire up as one of her most influential mentors in bringing lived experiences into academic discourse. William Timpson locates the heart of Freire’s pedagogical changes in the “personal motivation” and “progress at an individual level” (66). Although Freire encouraged academics and students to use the personal in their writings, he did not become a frequent public writer of the more personal form of the essay until the last decade of his life. As his life drew to a close, he realized the ethical responsibilities of revealing one’s life in relation to one’s theoretical and pedagogical practices: What is expected of those who write with responsibility is a permanent and continuing search for truth that rejects puritanical hypocrisy or veiled shamelessness. In the final analysis, what is expected of those who teach by speaking or writing, by being a testimony, is that they be rigorously coherent so as not to lose themselves in the enormous distance between what they do and say. (Letters to Cristina 3)

In his later, more personal books, Freire revisits his childhood to locate his motivations for his pedagogical stances. In Ana Freire’s introduction to the notes in Letters to Cristina, she elaborates on why Paulo Freire places such value in relating his childhood experiences: “In reminiscing about his childhood—which Paulo exposes in the most intimate way, describing its most difficult moments—he did not idealize or romanticize those days. He described them because those were the years that fed the critical thought of his adulthood” (192). In Pedagogy of the Heart, Freire discovers the importance of his childhood backyard where his mother and father taught him to read. While an exile in Geneva, he began to realize the “lived relationship” with his backyard homeland of Brazil and specifically his childhood hometown of Recife: “Before I could become a citizen of the world I was and am first a citizen of Recife” (38–39). In Letters to Cristina, he reveals how the “lived relationship” with his childhood influenced the man who became committed to social and educational reform: “My lived experiences as a child and as a man took place socially within the history of a dependent soci-


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ety that fostered my increasing radicality” (14). As a child, Freire experienced poverty and a hunger that hampered his ability to learn: “Many times, with no means to resist, I felt defeated by hunger while doing my homework. Sometimes I would fall asleep leaning on the table where I was studying, as if I had been drugged” (15). From these remembrances of childhood hunger, the adult Paulo Freire could begin to envision a progressive educator who does not merely define hunger but begins to search out society’s answers concerning the root of this past hunger: “If I cannot be indifferent to the pain of those who go hungry, I cannot suggest to them either that their situation is the result of God’s will. That is a lie” (45). The reasons of hunger were never taught to Paulo Freire as a child because he was subjected to an educational system that promoted a mechanical memorization of material instead of a critique of the dominating society that created this hunger: At this time, I was very removed from the educational experience in which students and readers become aware that they are also producers of knowledge, in which authors do not simply deposit comprehension of their texts into students. Understanding the text, in my school days, meant memorizing them mechanically. The capacity to memorize texts was seen as a sign of intelligence. The more I failed to memorize the texts, the more convinced I became of my insurmountable ignorance. (15)

With this personal disclosure, Freire reveals the childhood source that inspired the adult to analyze a society and education system that worked together in keeping the less fortunate from critiquing the roots of their poverty. Through this personal essay journey, he understands how this mechanized learning hinders him and others from participating in their process of becoming and self-actualization. By revising the past in the present through self-reflexivity, he essayed a critique of an earlier Freire within an oppressive learning environment. This revisiting of childhood mechanical learning echoes the words of another essayist, Montaigne, in “Of the Education of Children” who severely criticized certain education systems that emphasized recitation and ignored a child’s discoveries. The self-reflexive element of the essay thus served to revise and liberate essayists like Freire and Montaigne who come to terms with an oppressed and nondemocratic childhood education that hindered their early process of becoming. Consequently, essayists like Freire and Montaigne who arm themselves with the essay’s democratic element of selfreflexivity, use this form to combat nondemocratic pedagogies like mechanical learning.

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By revisiting his childhood, Freire also relived his theories about what he calls “the banking concept of education” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 58): Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed extends only as far as receiving, filling and storing deposits. (58)

Through Freire’s use of the essay’s element of self-reflexivity, Freirian scholars can comprehend what propelled this man to insist on an education system that rejected mechanical learning in favor of analysis and critique of their worlds. In an interview with Donald Macedo years later, he speaks about hunger and the drawbacks of a mechanical education: “I think teaching peasants how to read the word hunger and to look it up in the dictionary is not sufficient. They also need to know the reasons behind their experience of hunger” (Freire and Macedo, “A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race” 390). Freire can empathize and understand the peasant’s needs through his essays of childhood self-reflection. Ana Freire says that Paulo Freire’s childhood “was not an isolated experience in the Brazilian context” but that “It was a historically rooted way of living” (192). It was not one child’s story, but the story of many children. Also, just as importantly, scholars begin to understand how Freire discovered the root of this educational problem: “The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be ‘hosts’ of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 30). Consequently, the critique of domination through self-reflection is instrumental to the learning process. Through Freire’s personal essays, Freirian scholars not only begin to understand the life behind his theories, but inevitably begin to self-reflect about why they are drawn to his educational reforms. The self-reflective element of Freire’s essays encourages not only the writer to close the gap in “the enormous distance between what they do and say,” but entices the reader of the essay to do so as well. bell hooks demonstrates how he encourages her to do this: “I believe that revolution begins precisely with revolution in our daily lives. It seems to me essential that in our individual lives we should day to day live out what we affirm” (148). As a recursive process, the essay’s element of self-reflexivity can also appear when the adult Freire encounters others who remind him of how


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he once thought as a mere recipient of another’s knowledge. As an educator of peasants, they remind him of his childhood silence within his early education: “Excuse us, we ought to keep quiet and let you talk. You are the one who knows, we don’t know anything” (45). Freire selfreflectively uses the essay to examine both his past and present moments of silence in education as a way to reconfirm his theories on embracing a critique of domination and rejecting the banking concept of education. However, as seen in previous chapters, Freire’s self-reflective complaints about education’s neutralizing and mechanistic approach are not necessarily new. Although Montaigne, Emerson, and Thoreau come from different periods and geographic locations, their self-reflective complaints about education are quite similar. Readers will inevitably hear the echoes of Montaigne condemning a sixteenth-century academic world’s closed-ended writing form that left little room for a writer’s inquiries and personal reflections. In North America, they will remember Emerson in his essay, “The American Scholar,” pleading with academic institutions to let young scholars bring their home and workplace experiences into the curriculums. They will also remember him admonishing those who relied too heavily on Western European influences and failed to acknowledge the wealth of personal experiences here in the United States. Just as Emerson called on North Americans to validate their lived experiences and critique their reliance on Western Europe, so too did Freire call on peasants to value their lived experiences in the learning process and critique their reliance on corrupt educational and political institutions. Thoreau, as an essayist, came one step closer to Freire by valuing the lived experiences of the common man and discovering education not so much in the walls of the ivory tower, but within nature and his immediate society. As an essayist, Freire clearly fits in with these past voices who used the essay as a means to critique the nonself-reflective elements of education within their respective countries and time periods. Freire, more than the other essayists, however, stands out as someone who sees the political urgency of using this self-reflective essay form to help give voice to the plights of the dispossessed. In both of his predominantly self-reflective works, Letters to Cristina (see pages 191–252) and Pedagogy of the Heart (see pages 109–41), Freire has his wife provide extensive notes informing readers of poverty, discrimination, massacres, political turmoil, and other Brazilian and Latin American societal maladies. Such extensive and detailed notes seem to support Freire’s place as a Latin American essayist who situates the self-reflective element within the Latin American historical and social consciousness of the essay.

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Yet, as a reader and notetaker of Freire’s childhood and adult selfreflections, Ana Freire admits that she could not write traditional notes to his works: “I could not remain only the notetaker who neutrally explains and disappears so that the notes do not carry the sentiments and motives of the one who writes them. I did not want that” (Letters to Cristina 191). So, in effect, even the notes to Freire’s works follow the self-reflective element of the essay. Readers, notetakers, and the essayist himself all participate in the self-reflective process of this writing form. By not only providing reasons for the necessity of self-reflection in education but participating in this process as well through essays, Freire succeeds in making some academics see that distant academic writing devoid of any self-reflection has no place in his concept of liberatory education. Consequently, one cannot be a true Freirian educator and scholar if the life behind the writing remains silent. ACCESSIBLE WRITING AND THE FREIRIAN ESSAY

Ana Freire, in Letters to Cristina, points to another reason why Freire decided to write against the grain of traditional academic writing forms. Freire wanted to reach as many audiences as he could without the fear that some might not understand his theoretical and pedagogical ideas. As someone who reached out to the oppressed, he did not want others to accuse him of writing to just an elite audience of scholars. He therefore moved toward more accessible writing forms like poetry, letters, and essays. Ana Freire notes that Letters to Cristina are actually personal essays, but he wrote it as letters to increase the audience’s communicative responses. Another reason that she says Freire chose such accessible writing forms was to demonstrate his “real moments” in Brazilian history as a subject (192). He exposes Brazilian reality and makes it accessible to his readers through his personal writings. Ann Berthoff concurs with Ana Freire by saying that “Paulo Freire’s ideas are accessible and adapatable” (“Reading the World . . . Reading the Word” 129) In his later years, accessibility in writing was of paramount importance to him. Unfortunately, not all high-profile Freirian scholars participate in self-reflection or accessibility. In other words, some Freirian scholars fail in a process of becoming with their readers by depriving them of scholars’ lived and accessible experiences. These scholars inevitably failed to understand the role the essay plays in Freire’s concept of liberatory learning. Peter McLaren asserts that Freirian pedagogy can fall victim to “leftist high theory” that inevitably turns this pedagogy into “system-


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atized strategies” (“Paulo Freire and the Academy” 163). Instead of participating in praxis, these high theorists reduce the emancipatory qualities of Freirian pedagogy into a detached theoretical play. Some like Henry Giroux, one of the most well-known U.S. followers of Freire, wrote countless Freirian inspired books on race, class, and gender issues filled with academic jargon with little attention paid to self-reflection and accessibility. Readers of Giroux know little about the life behind his writings and thus, unlike Freire, readers can only point to his social and political convictions without knowing what life experiences caused him to move in this direction. Here is just one example of Giroux’s writing: Border Pedagogy necessitates combining the modernist emphasis on the capacity of individuals to use critical reason to address the issue of public life with a postmodernist concern with how we might experience agency in a world constituted in differences unsupported by transcendent phenomena or metaphysical guarantees. In that way, border pedagogy can reconstitute itself in terms that are both transformative and emancipatory. (Border Crossings 29)

If “border pedagogy” represents a way for students to become “transformative” and “emancipatory,” how can it serve its purpose through such inaccessible jargon that only some scholars can translate to their students? How “transformative” and “emancipatory” can “border pedagogy” be when students must rely on teachers to translate Giroux’s works and where the primary source of these theories thus remains inaccessible to its targeted audience? Donald Macedo, in an interview with Paulo Freire, speaks to the problems of teachers using “secondary or tertiary sources” instead of giving students the primary source: “The end result is that professors become translators of the primary source’s leading ideas. In so doing, they elevate their status by introducing translated materials that students almost blindly consume as innovative and progressive and, in some instances, also begin to identify these translated ideas with the professor-translator and not with the original author” (“A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race” 381). Students cannot carry out the full extent of Giroux’s interpretation of “border pedagogy” with its “tranformative” and “emancipatory” qualities if they have to rely on those in authority to interpret primary sources. Inaccessibility to empowering pedagogies hinders the student’s progress for Freire’s concept of critiquing domination. In fact, such inaccessibility seems to promote what Freire works against: the banking concept of education where teachers are the depositors of knowledge and students are the mere recipients. Not only is this true for some Freirian theorists, it also presents a problem in studying postcolonial theorists. Gloria

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Anzaldúa, for example, complains in an interview with Andrea Lunsford that postcolonial writers like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and JanMohammed are difficult to read and inaccessible at times for students (53). Donald Macedo, Freire’s translator, co-editor, and ardent supporter, also appears to downplay lived experiences in an academic world despite his stance on teachers providing primary sources. In an interview with Freire in Harvard Educational Review, Macedo chastises those academics who celebrate “personal, lived experiences” and who hold those accountable for this erasure who do not. He wants Freire to agree with him, but Freire avoids a direct response (377–78). Later on in the interview when Macedo again negatively comments on those who perform an “overcelebration of one’s own location and history,” Freire corrects Macedo by stating that he does not agree with those who conduct “an overcelebration of theory”: “To do so would reduce theory to pure verbalism or intellectualism” (382). The interview occurred the year before Freire published his most personal work, Letters to Cristina. In Pedagogy of the Heart he adamantly criticizes those who accuse him of lacking “rigor” through his “overaffective language”: “The passion with which I know, I speak, or I write does not, in any way, diminish the commitment with which I announce or denounce” (30). From these later more personal writings, Freire clearly wants to distinguish himself from those liberatory academics who do not let others access their life experiences with their audiences. If he agreed with them, his theories about education would come under serious scrutiny by those who would say that he does not participate in the same personal emancipatory learning process as those he instructs. “Pure verbalism or intellectualism” would make him inaccessible and thus contradictory to his theories of accessing the lives of those less fortunate. In Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1992), Freire clearly states that the purpose behind this book is to allow others to access his life in relation to his earlier work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He wants others to see his “pedagogical thought and its development” through “old weavings, facts, and deeds of childhood, youth, and maturity” (64). By sharing these moments, readers have access to testing his “consistency” between what he advocates and what he actually does. As stated earlier, one of the critical components of the essay (especially the personal form) is to meet its definition of assaying the writer. The reader can only perform this assay (this test) if the essayist provides the necessary access to his or her life. Freirian scholars who do not allow readers to access this assay are not participating in one of the key components of Freirian


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education. They are instead participating in a discourse that is inconsistent with Freirian theories and practices. In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire shares with readers his early realization as a scholar that he did not provide access to his targeted audience. In the early sixties, Freire gave a speech in Recife’s social center to an audience of Brazilian Northeast workers. He acknowledged that he made two mistakes with this audience: (1) using inaccessible language and syntax (2) ignoring the harsh realities of their conditions by being oblivious. Freire reveals that these two mistakes cost him credibility when a Brazilian Northeast worker, well versed in the “metaphors so common to popular discourse,” challenged Freire’s language as well as his knowledge of their plights (Pedagogy of Hope 26). By using the language and metaphors common to this audience, the Brazilian Northeast worker began questioning Freire about his middle-class house and his children. Later, in Pedagogy of Hope, Freire learns from this encounter the significance in letting the popular classes use their own language: “Here is one of the tasks of democratic popular education, of a pedagogy of hope: that of enabling the popular classes to develop their language: not the authoritarian, sectarian gobbledygook of ‘educators,’ but their own language” (39). The worker in effect began the process of accessing, in his popular-class language, Freire’s life in relationship to what he said in his speech. Freire says that this worker “called the attention of the educator there in front of him, seated, silent, sinking down into his chair, to the need, when speaking to the people, for the educator to be up to an understanding of the world the people have” (26). Not only did the Brazilian educator force Freire to allow others access to his life experiences, but forced Freire to admit that he failed to access their lived experiences by visiting their houses and viewing their impoverished conditions. The Brazilian worker proceeded to tell Freire the differences between the homes of the middle class and the homes of his impoverished audience. Freire views this oral experience as an essay: “The discourse of that faraway night is still before me, as if it had been a written text, an essay that I constantly had to review” (26). Like the essay experience that requires writers to revisit and rewrite the past into the present, so too will this Brazilian Northeast worker’s words require Freire to access and integrate these memories into his present discourse. The reliving and accessing of the essay’s personal experiences finds its way into Freirian thinking: “The moments we live either are instants in a process previously inaugurated, or else they inaugurate a new process referring in some way to something in the past” (27). If scholars use this “faraway night” experience with the Brazilian Northeast worker as an “essay” incident to be assayed in Freire’s works,

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they will begin to assay the “consistency” between what he says and does. Scholars can now participate in the true purpose of the essay, which is to assay (test) the writer. Through Freire’s later more personal works, scholars will see how such a reliving and accessing helps shape his theories and practices. Freire writes about just how important the practice of that night influenced his theories in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (27). In his preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire provides a description of a radical educator or an educator “committed to human liberation”: He is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. He is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. He does not consider himself the proprietor of history or of men, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he does commit himself, to fight at their side. (24)

From this passage, it becomes clear that this is not the detached Freire of that “faraway night,” but the revisited Freire who understands more than ten years later the significance of accessing the lives of those less fortunate so as to work with them toward liberation. Through this “essay” revisitation, Freire realizes that an educator cannot begin to critique domination if the educator is part of the inaccessible dominating discourse. Freire’s critique of “banking education” surfaces again when revisiting this incident. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he points to the drawbacks of this traditional education that are directly tied to inaccessibility. He first contends that “banking education” serves to create a mythical world that hides the facts from the dispossessed (71). This concealment of reality through myth leaves the truth inaccessible to these masses. By revisiting Freire’s “faraway night” where he saw himself as detached from the popular masses, scholars begin to see how Freire created a mythical world for his audience by not accessing and therefore not understanding the whole story through their inclusion. In contrast, the Brazilian Northeast worker participated in the problemposing education that Freire now advocates by accessing the whole story of both the scholar (Freire) and the audience members suffering in poverty: “problem-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing” (71). By constantly accessing this far away “essay,” Freire succeeds in understanding the repercussions of an education system grounded in telling the stories of a few instead of the many that make up his nation. A destructive “mythical world” is therefore one that prevents access to dispossessed worlds that contain a more comprehensive view of Brazilian society. Freire succeeded in “demythologizing” by revisiting the lessons of this “essay” moment and rewriting this


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moment into a more inclusive and accessible problem-posing educational process. Accessing “essay” moments of the past to participate in a revisionary process of education for the future seems to be critical in Freire’s developing thoughts on education. From this “essay” moment, Freire also learned the importance of dialogue in the education process: “Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality” (71). If Freire chose to ignore the Brazilian Northeast worker’s words or to erase this “essay” moment from his historical memory by choosing not to access it, he would resist dialogue both as an educator and an essayist. As a problem-posing educator, he must encourage dialogue so he can access the process of “demythologizing.” As a Latin American essayist, he must dialogue with past “essay” moments to access the revisionary process of his thinking. By accessing others through dialogue, Freire also learns to value both the knowledge of academia and the knowledge of the communities. After visiting islands in the South Pacific and dialoging with both academic and nonacademic communities, he appreciates what both have to offer him as an intellectual: “For that matter, this becomes one of the reasons why, not out of arrogance, but out of a legitimate sense of satisfaction, I have accepted the homage of the intellectuals of the academies, and the intellectuals of field and factory” (Pedagogy of Hope 184). His words about accessing both academic and nonacademic communities to become a fulfilled individual is strikingly similar to Emerson’s words in “The American Scholar,” “You must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all” (53). For Freire, “the whole man” achieves his wholeness through accessible dialogues with many audiences: “To be in the world necessarily implies being with the world and with others” (Pedagogy of the Heart 33). Freire believes that not only should the individual participate in this access but the university as well: “A university foreign to its city, superimposed on it, is a mind-narrowing fiction.[. . .] The university that is foreign to its context does not speak it, does not pronounce it” (133). One way Freire believes an academic can access many audiences through writing is to write beautifully. Freire strongly disagrees with those scholars who believe that to be scholarly one must participate in “difficult writing” rather than “fine writing:” “There is not the least incompatibility between rigor in the quest for an understanding and knowledge of the world, and beauty of form in the expression of what is found in that world” (Pedagogy of Hope 72). In other words, he questions why academics associate “ugliness with scientific rigor” (72). He

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questions why academics would want to lose their access to these multiple audiences by “wound[ing] the ear and good taste of the person reading or hearing his or her discourse” (73). Freire essays a personal example of how one sociology scholar, Gilberto Freyre, who not only accessed a young Freire through his beautiful writing, but made it a reoccurring memorable experience for Freire’s students. Instead of providing his students with examples of literary figures to demonstrate beautiful writing, Freire showed them the literary talents of a sociologist. Freire believes that so many enjoy Gilberto Freyre because he is a sociology scholar who writes beautiful rigorous essays instead of a sociology scholar who “wounds the ear” with unpleasing, difficult writing. For Freire, a critical part of a scholar’s ability to access and thereby impact the reader is to create pleasant and memorable prose. As a thesis and dissertation advisor, Freire wants his students to participate in “beautiful writing” as well: “It is for this reason that I always recommend that my master and doctoral students, when they are about to write their thesis, should vigorously read authors who write well and beautifully, even if the authors are not in their area of concentration” (80). He wants to mentor a new generation of scholars who can reach their audiences through a fine prose that is both rigorous and beautiful. Through Freire, essay scholars can relive the words of Montaigne who understood how the inaccessible nature of certain kinds of scholarly writing jeopardized the reader’s participation: “As for your beginning and exordium, I no longer remember it; nor consequently the middle; as for the conclusion, I do not desire to do anything about it (Essais of Montaigne I, 26). In a Freirian pedagogy that emphasizes access through dialogue, inaccessible scholarly writing presents a threat to the process of liberatory dialogues between educators and popular audiences: “Unless educators expose themselves to the popular culture across the board, their discourse will hardly be heard by anyone but themselves” (Pedagogy of Hope 107). FREIRE AND THE ISSUE OF SPONTANEITY

As discussed in earlier chapters, spontaneity represented one way for essay writers to free themselves from the constraints of closed-ended writing forms and instead pursue an open-ended form that would further their goals for questioning traditional systems. For example, Montaigne, a scholar entrenched in Pyrrhonian skepticism, sought out a writing form that would meet his needs as a wandering inquirer who questioned the established truths of his day. As a personal essayist and


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skeptic, Montaigne required a writing form conducive to skepticism, experimentation, and spontaneity that would permit him to stop, reflect, and revise his and others’ thinkings in midstream of his essay. This indefinite and antisystematic writing form served as one way for him to rebel against the accepted truths proclaimed by sixteenth-century teachers, scholars, and religious figures. When the essay’s element of spontaneity reached the New World, however, the Pyrrhonian skeptic’s suspension of judgment to pursue other spontaneous pursuits of inquiry did not work well for American nation builders. As nation builders, Emerson, Thoreau, and Freire did not have the Old World luxury of taking on perpetual roles of spontaneous wandering inquirers in a new world that required a conversion of spontaneity into acts of guidance and formation. In Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” he advises scholars to pursue spontaneous travels from department to department, from the workplace to academia, and from Europe to America. Emerson believed that those who confined themselves to narrow, rigid studies hindered the progress of a new nation seeking to build unity and form a defined place in the world. The essay represented a writing form that allowed Emerson to spontaneously wander for nationbuilding purposes. Thoreau, as a more rebellious thinker, used spontaneity in his essays to demonstrate his rejection of his nations’ newly formed orders that threatened the freedoms of the American individual. His spontaneous form of writing thus mirrored the spontaneous Thoreau who pursued individual democracy, appreciated the spontaneity of the natural world, and valued the insights of the common man. For both of these men, spontaneity served them well in pursuing their dreams of democracy. They embraced it in their writings and nation-building pursuits. Paulo Freire, as a New World nation builder, also found a place for the study of spontaneity in his perceptions of education and writings. However, in Freire’s discourse on spontaneity, he defines it as a natural instinct that falls short of the rigor required for critical consciousness raising. He sees spontaneity functioning in an aesthetic role where humans encounter an object of beauty and spontaneously appreciate it. They do not seek to prove why it is beautiful but merely appreciate the encounter with this object at that moment. He defines this as spontaneous curiosity (“A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race” 382). In contrast, epistemological curiosity requires humans to actively engage in the practice of knowledge making for an object under study. In education, this means that students and teachers take their experiences with critical readings and personal stories as a means of studying and writing about an object of knowledge (382). Freire believes that an educational system fails when it is unable to transform students’ spontaneity of

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curiosity into epistemological curiosity. Students fail to undergo this transformation in their discussions and writings because of an educational system that does not challenge them “to engage in a rigorous process of learning and knowing” (384). Freire’s negative reaction to spontaneity is deeply embedded in Latin America’s tumultuous political history. In Latin American politics, spontaneity signals the countless unplanned political rebellions that slowly ate away at the people’s hope for a democratic nation. Octavio Paz, the world-famous Mexican essayist and poet, describes the dangers of spontaneity when it enters the Latin American political realm: “Confidence in the strength of spontaneity exists in inverse proportion to the disgust toward systematic constructs” (The Dissenting Voice 8). Spontaneity thus fuels the rebels to instigate unplanned, openended rebellions without a clear direction for the future. Ernesto Sabato, an Argentine essayist and novelist, also notes the dangers of spontaneity, especially when he speaks of Latin American writers: “They are at heart anti-social, rebels, and therefore they frequently are sympathetic toward revolutionary movements. But when revolutions triumph, it is not unusual for them to become rebels again” (8). Many Latin American writers follow the essay’s element of spontaneity by moving from one rebellion to the next and thus fuel the instability in their respective countries. In developing nations that have little foundation to work from, spontaneity can in some ways serve to undermine their quest for nation building and stability. It would stand to reason that the instability of Latin American nations weigh heavily on Freire’s fear of spontaneous curiosity in the classroom, in writing, and in society. The lack of rigorous knowledge that he associates with spontaneous curiosity hinders the vital questioning process so needed in Freire’s theoretical and pedagogical practices. Spontaneous curiosity, with its unquestioning tendencies, therefore ties into Freire’s fear of mechanical learning’s unquestioning aspects. In contrast, those who engage in epistemological curiosity, develop “a rigorous understanding of their historical location so they can turn this understanding into knowledge, thus transcending and universalizing it.” (“A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race” 385). The epistemologically curious individuals thus begin building their foundations by questioning and understanding their historical location instead of ignoring it. Freire gives an example of this in Letters to Cristina where he demonstrates how one’s epistemological curiosity’s creates a “dialectic understanding of reality”: I dream of a time and a society in which one’s learning nature and epistemological curiosity will not be satisfied, say while a carpenter, with


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just the technical knowledge of operating a saw or working the wood to make a window, table, or door. In consonance with my evolving social and historical nature, I should go beyond the fundamental questions about what I do, how I do it, and what I do it with. I should challenge myself with other indispensable questions: who do I serve doing what I do, against whom or in favor of whom, and why do I do what I do. (115)

Freire’s example of epistemological curiosity is strikingly similar to Thoreau’s criticism of materialistic individuals consumed with the small sphere of their occupations and neglectful of the larger societal concerns around them: “Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of Men? [. . .] Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy plodding about their beans” (Walden 210). Unlike Emerson’s view that only the elite should participate in the knowledgemaking process of questioning their surroundings for nation-building purposes, Thoreau and Freire advocate this process for everyone. Stanley Aronowitz notes how uncomfortable Freire is with the elite’s control over certain kinds of knowledge: “Freire is plainly uneasy with the formulation that intellectuals are the chief bearers of scientific knowledge” (21). Epistemological curiosity represents an intellectual right that all should participate in as human beings. It, therefore, becomes a democratic form of teaching and writing. As epistemological curiosity enters this democratic realm in Latin America, Freire begins to see how it is mistaken as “spontaneous” by those comfortable with authoritarian and mechanical ways of learning: If anyone, on the other hand, assuming a democratic, progressive position, therefore argues for the democratization of the programatic organization of content, the democratization of his or her teaching—in other words, the democratization of the curriculum—that person is regarded by the authoritarian as too spontaneous and permissive, or else lacking in seriousness. (Pedagogy of Hope 6)

Spontaneity, the element in the essay that in previous chapters served as a positive democratic tool for Montaigne, Emerson, and Thoreau, takes on negative connotations when it reaches Latin America. Unfortunately, Freire must worry that his form of democratization runs the risk of Latin Americans misinterpreting it as “too spontaneous.” He inhabits a society that has grown to fear the word “spontaneous” despite its democratic element of freeing others outside of Latin America from the constraints of an unquestioning form of stability.

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay THE ESSAY’S ELEMENTS OF SINCERITY AND TRUTHFULNESS IN FREIRE’S WRITINGS

Given the widespread political and military lies and corruption that Latin Americans endured throughout the years, it should come as no surprise that some Latin American essayists would strive to use the personal essay’s element of truthfulness and sincerity to reach a public weary of their leaders. For essayists to use this particular element as a means of promoting their humbleness and sincerity works well in gaining a trust in the writer from a readership immersed in distrust of those in leadership positions. Latin American essayists are certainly not the first to see the power of this element to gain reader’s trust. In his research, Rainer Goetz explains how early Spanish first-person accounts (whether in the form of personal, business, or historiographical writings) revolve around documenting the truth of their experiences. The father of the essay, Montaigne, knew just how crucial this essay element was in gaining the trust of his readers. It is plausible, with the Spanish influences from his mother’s side, that he might have been influenced by this culture’s emphasis on truth in autobiographical writings. His preface, “To the Reader,” consists of sincere pleas to the reader to forgive him for speaking about himself and displays his unworthiness in writing such essays. In “To the Reader,” he uses humble words like “inadequate,” “simple,” “ordinary,” and “defects” to describe himself in these essays. As I discussed in Montaigne’s chapter, he needed to follow through with this element to set up a contrast between the stilted, distant, and formulaic writing style of scholars and his more personal, sincere, and exploratory form. It is a form devoted, as he says in the preface, “To the Reader.” It is not an essay element for pompous, corrupt individuals who use writing to build their self-importance and thus create barriers between the writer and reader, but an element for individuals interested in encouraging an honest, collective dialogue with their audience to improve their knowledge and society. It is also the crucial element of trust that this essayist hopes to gain from the reader by presenting himself in an unassuming and nonthreatening way. This was the rhetorical device for readers to trust Montaigne and, consequently, what he had to say in these essays. Freire also realized the importance of reaching out to others in truthful and sincere ways. Like Montaigne, Freire disdained the corruption that enveloped his country and wished to find a writing form where the truth could be spoken to readers about the many fallacies of their society: I do not write simply because it gives me pleasure. I write because I feel politically committed, because I would like to convince other people,


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without lying to them, that what I dream about and what I speak about and what causes me to struggle are worth writing about. The political nature of the act of writing, in turn, requires ethical commitment. (Letters to Cristina 2)

Of course, the audiences Montaigne and Freire tried to reach were completely different, however, both men lived in countries where corruption and distrust of leaders predominated in their societies. Both men knew that their audiences might want humble and sincere writers who would give them relief from an upper-class system enveloped in power, corruption, and superficiality. Montaigne, in his essays, asked his upper-class readers to participate in questioning what was previously unquestionable about the superficialities of sixteenth-century religion, monarchy, and scholarly writing. His sincerity and humbleness helped distance his empathetic readers and himself from these superficialities while simultaneously working to possibly change their perceptions of these constructs. On the other hand, Freire, as a middle-class essayist, must use his sincerity and humbleness to appeal to those of lower classes within a Latin American boundary-driven class society. Because he exceeds the class status of those he hopes to help (the impoverished masses), Freire must diligently work to remain sincere and humble if he hopes to gain the trust of lower classes weary of those from higher classes. Consequently, Freire must not only contend with convincing his scholarly peers of his sincerity, as Montaigne strove to do, but he also faces the challenges of convincing those who are below his class status. For Freire, this sincere element of the essay becomes crucial in persuading many critical audiences that he is true to his political and educational causes. Throughout Freire’s writings and in the writings of his followers, the word “authenticity” is frequently used to describe an educator and writer. In Freire’s work Pedagogy of Hope, he points out how important authenticity is within the act of teaching: “The more tolerant, the more open and forthright, the more critical, the more curious and humble they become, the more authentically they will take up the practice of teaching” (80). In Freire’s eyes, he cannot become an “authentic” or true teacher, especially to his country’s victims of deceitful rhetoric, without embodying the element of truthfulness and sincerity in his writings and teachings. From the previous sections about Freire, it becomes easy to see how this writing element of the essay would fit in with “authenticity” and appeal to him as a tool for reaching the people. This next section will explore how certain twentieth-century essayists influential to Latin America and Freire emphasize this element of sincerity and truthfulness (or as some refer to it as “authenticity”) in their writings. This

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section will also show how this element of the essay fits into Freire’s theoretical and pedagogical practices. Many unfamiliar with Latin American essayists and history might assume that Freire developed this concept of “authenticity” from Western European theorists. Most U.S. Freiran scholars in Composition Studies (see for example Anthony Petruzzi’s “Between Conventions and Critical Thinking”) assume that Freire relied heavily on Karl Jaspers and Heidegger to develop his theories on authenticity. Petruzzi seeks to demonstrate how “Freire’s concept of truth or “authenticity” “is not an object, it is the event of affective self-finding within the sets of social practices, one discloses ways to let oneself and others and new possibilities for existing to oneself and others” (317). Although, certainly Freire looked to some of these Western theorists to help him discover this “truth of humanization,” the search for “authenticity” has deep roots in Latin American history. The quest for the “authentic” Latin American takes place in the discussions of early-twentieth-century essayists who impacted the thinkings of today’s Latin American writers. According to Martin Stabb, Jose Ortega y Gassett (1883–1955), a highly influential Spanish essayist and philosopher in Latin America, developed an idea that the individual must acknowledge his or her authentic circumstance before action for change can take place (In Quest of Identity 69). Intellectuals took this idea of authenticity combined with intellectual rigor as a way to validate Latin American circumstances to better understand their true selves within their own context (69). In one of his essays “La pampa . . . promesas,” Ortega noted the insincerity of Argentinians who were missing authenticity in their lives (71). He saw them as individuals living a hollow existence and unable to commit to anything because of their New World insecurities (71). He, like Emerson, believed that the New World’s only salvation from this inauthenticity was to select a few representative leaders to lead these nations out of such emptiness. Through this concept of “authentic circumstance,” Latin American intellectuals realized the urgency of exploring and analyzing Latin American circumstances to create more truthful selves that were comfortable with their places in the world. Waldo David Frank (1889–1967), a Jewish-American literary writer, also impacted the Latin American writers and thinkers of the early- to mid-twentieth century. In his writings, Frank promoted an idea of the Americas coming together to achieve wholeness as a way to rid themselves of feelings of dislocation (76). Frank thought that North and South America could only achieve an “authentic” wholeness if they worked to eradicate this consumption of power and replace it with selfawareness based on honesty and love for fellow men and women across


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the Americas. Like Ortega, he believed that “authenticity” throughout the Americas can only come through self-awareness of their circumstances (76). Frank believed those consumed with egoism and who craved power as well as the industrial “machine” served to undermine this unity of the self and the new world. Victoria Ocampo, a noted Argentinian essayist who was friends with both Ortega y Gasset and Waldo Frank, perceived the essay (especially the personal form) as a way to fulfill this destiny of “authenticity.” In her article “Victoria Ocampo, Argentine Identity, and the Landscape of the Essay,” Doris Meyer points out that Ocampo used the essay as a way to share her Argentinian experiences with others and establish a dialogue with the reader. The essay represented a means to combat the Latin American feelings of emptiness and lonliness while working to connect with the reader as other: But, as Ocampo points out in the essay, in her mention of Waldo Frank, it need not be a lonely, inward-oriented experience. The rhetorical devices of the essay coax the reader into the shared experience of otherness by establishing correspondences, mediating between points of view, and evoking empathy to show how the void of insufficiency can be filled by reaching out rather than withdrawing. (61) Throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes frequent reference to the idea of “authenticity” as a means for the oppressed and educators to liberate themselves from their conditions and begin to connect through dialogue. They must not duplicate the egoism of their oppressors, but must instead strive to embody truthful qualities in their pedagogies: The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interest of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. (36)

Truth and humbleness are at the heart of this pedagogy that works to distance the oppressed from the false, egoistic characteristics of their oppressors. If the oppressed and educators can gain this sense of “authenticity” by examining their actual circumstances, they can prevent themselves from following the oppressive patterns of egoism and falsities that consumed many who gained voice and power in Latin America. A crucial part of Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed rests on the idea of dialogue between the leaders of this “true revolution” and the people. Sincere communication about the fallibilities of these leaders and the revolutionary process must take place with the people:

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay Sooner or later, a true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people. Its every legitimacy lies in that dialogue. It cannot fear the people, their expression, their effective participation in power. It must be accountable to them, must speak frankly to them of its achievements, its mistakes, its miscalculations, and its difficulties. (109)

In many ways, this perception resembles essayists, as early as Montaigne, who presented their “defects” and mistakes in their essays to show their readers a human side of their writings. Readers are more apt to enter into dialogue with sincere essayists who willingly share their imperfections. The sincere and humble essayist thus becomes much more believable than those inhumane individuals who profess to be infallible and who seldom question the fallibility of accepted truths. Montaigne knew that to present himself as fallible and imperfect worked in his favor to convince his Renaissance contemporaries that there might be other thinkers present and past who needed to be questioned as well. He enticed the reader to engage with him in questioning their Renaissance society entrenched in unwavering beliefs just as Freire encouraged the oppressed to participate in questioning Latin American oppressions and work toward achieving democracy. The sincere element of the essay thus becomes paramount to establishing dialogue and participation with an audience previously left out from the writer and leaders’ discussions. Freire emphasized the need for revolutionary leaders to break away from antidialogical acts that served to undermine sincere communication: To close, this tentative analysis of the theory of antidialogical action, I wish to reaffirm that revolutionary leaders must not use the same antidialogical procedures used by the oppressors; on the contrary, revolutionary leaders must follow the path of dialogue and of communication. (161)

Throughout his writings and especially in his latter, more personal essay works, Freire includes the sincere and truthful element of the essay to reach his reading audiences. He discloses in Pedagogy of Hope the early mistakes he made as a young educator in failing to acknowledge the language and conditions of his country’s poor when addressing them as an audience (24–26). He admits to his failure of dialoguing with the people and acknowledges that even in the present he must constantly remember this past moment so as to not repeat this mistake again (26). He presents himself as sincere in his mistake and humble in his vulnerability to committing this mistake in the future. Toward the end of Pedagogy of Hope, he offers readers another personal glimpse of his ineptness in dealing with those from lower classes (164–66). While staying with peasants in the Carribean isle of Dominica, he confesses his mid-


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dle-class preoccupation about asking them where the bathroom might be located or how he might take his morning bath. In these pages, he explains that his middle-class status makes him different from those he attempts to help, yet he learned through his mistake that he must continue to dialogue with them without feeling guilty about such class differences. Freire acknowledges that he made a mistake by behaving “like the white liberals who feel guilty when they talk with blacks” (165). In this incident, however, it had to do with the issue of class. By sharing these humble moments with the reader, he succeeds in following through with his theories about communication between educators and the oppressed. Readers and the oppressed are willing to listen to essayists like Freire who sincerely reveal their mistakes and speak the truth. While Pedagogy of Hope sporadically provides glimpses of this essay element, Letters to Cristina is filled with passages where Freire reveals, in sincere ways, his life in relation to his teaching and theories. Letters to Cristina is perhaps his most sincere form of writing because he chooses a family member, his young niece, as his audience. He sees several benefits that would come from writing to a young audience: “Writing so that a young person could understand would enable me to practice my pedagogical thinking as well.[. . .] In such a book I could not fail to refer to the changes in my educational practice throughout the years” (11). Readers will find more sincere elements in this form of the essay because they assume that Freire would reveal more about himself to a young relative than an unknown audience. The element of truth seems more credible in these essays, and the reader feels more like a family member sharing in his experiences. Although he writes to his young niece, Freire makes it clear that this is a serious book that requires extensive research and consultation with his peers: I then began to collect data and to organize my files of observations made over the years of my practice. I also began to speak with friends concerning this project, getting feedback and critiques. Coffee tables in Geneva, Paris, and New York mediated these conversations, which began to shape the book before it was put on paper. (11)

He is also quite preoccupied with telling the truth in these essays: “At any rate, I have made serious efforts to be as truthful to the facts as I possibly can” (12). Freire, like Montaigne who also explicitly stated that he wrote his essays to relatives, demonstrated that this form is both truthful and rigorous in its pursuit of knowledge and understanding. In the latter sections of Letters to Cristina, Freire explicitly shows readers that he also writes these essays to his extended family of educators, academics. In this work, he calls upon progressive educators to

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follow through with their theories by bringing in the element of truthfulness and sincerity into their relationships with students. Freire criticizes so-called progressive educators who profess to fight against gender discrimination yet lie in their practice through acts of sexism against their students (161). He defines a true advisor as one who fosters a “climate of mutual trust” between advisor and advisee (169). He is critical of those academics who deceive students by surprising them on exams (168). He calls upon educators to bring truth and humble dialogue to their classrooms and students just as he strives to do in his essays: “A good advisor, thus, is one who is humble, is alert to the contribution he or she must offer the advisee, and recognizes, without insecurity, the important subsidy the advisee brings to the advisor’s field of study” (169). In his last book, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Freire offers his final words about his hope for academic humility in creating a better world: Humility is not made of bureaucratic rituals. Humility expresses, on the contrary, one of the few certainties that I am sure of, namely, that nobody is superior to anyone else. The lack of humility expressed arrogantly in a false superiority of one person over another, of one race over another, of one sex over another, of one class or culture over another, is a transgression of our human vocation to develop.

For Freire, truth requires a commitment to the dream of a more democratic world whether it be inside or outside academia: “It would be horrible if we could dream about a different world as a project but not commit ourselves to the fight for its construction” (186). The essay elements in Letters to Cristina and other more personal works represent this enactment of Freire’s concept of truth as a progressive educator. It is the democratic form of writing that meets with an educator in quest of a more democratic world.

CHAPTER FIVE

Achieving a Place in Academia through the Personal Academic Essays of Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar

As discussed in the last chapter, Paulo Freire succeeded through his personal and theoretical writings to close the distance between Latin American and U.S. scholars. By interweaving his life experiences into his writing with what he read in the scholarly world, he educated both academics and nonacademics about his Latin American society. Freire fulfilled some of the democratic ideals of the essay that Emerson and Thoreau advocated for a nation-building continent. He followed essay predecessors like Montaigne and Thoreau who defined a true scholar as one who values both personal and academic knowledge. However, unlike most of his essay predecessors, Freire emphasized that these forms of knowledge should benefit oppressed citizens to better prepare them for articulating the inequities they experience within society. As mentioned in the last chapter, U.S. scholars of color, like bell hooks and Cornel West, discovered a personal way to speak about their academic experiences through the teachings and writings of Paulo Freire. Rudolpho Chávez Chávez and Raymond Padilla, in their edited collection The Leaning Ivory Tower: Latino Professors in American Universities, note that U.S. Latino/a academics are significantly influenced by the works of Paulo Freire and turn to the personal as a way to understand their academic constructed realities: “Each author, struggling with her or his own reality, is a study in authenticity and the engagement of

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liberation through self-critique” (14). These Latino/a academics were all part of the post–World War II generation and entered their professional careers sometime during the 1970s and 1980s. Within academia during these years, many of these Latino/a academics perceived themselves as the oppressed in search of liberation: “Through struggle with an oppressive academic world, the authors not only pursue their own liberation but simultaneously serve as liberating sponsors by restoring humanity back to those who oppress them” (14). With a few academic years behind them, many of these seasoned Latino/a scholars in the 1990s wrote personal essays as a way to chronicle the pioneering years when Latinos/as increasingly entered graduate and faculty positions. Just as their U.S. and Latin American essay predecessors, some of these Latinos/as strove to use the personal essay as a way to forge an academic identity grounded in democratic ideals. Their personal essays served to educate the general academic public in the 1990s about the struggles they endured to establish their rightful place as U.S. scholars. Through these personal testimonies, they hoped to raise a Freirian critical consciousness within academia that would pave an easier path for future Latino/a scholars. This chapter will focus on how certain established Latino/a scholars follow in the footsteps of past essayists by bringing the democratic elements discussed in this book into their personal writings. In this anthology that chronicled early Latino/a struggles in academia, Richard R. Verdugo points to institutional racism he experienced when he was repeatedly denied jobs despite his doctoral degree and many publications (106). Raymond Padilla and Tatcho Mindiola chronicle their difficulties in receiving tenure because of those in their department who undervalued Chicano education. Tatcho Mindiola remembers how the university president, while giving a speech, consistently referred to him as “Taco” (39). Dulce Cruz, as someone born and raised in the United States, was assigned to teach the university’s composition classes to “foreign” students because those at her midwestern university perceived her to also be “foreign” (91). She experiences what María de la Luz Reyes and John J. Halcon define as the “typecasting syndrome,” where a belief was held during the eighties and earlier “that Hispanics can only, or should only, occupy minority-related positions, such as those in Bilingual Education, Chicano Studies, foreign languages (Spanish), or student support services such as EOP” (“Racism in Academia” 304). Cruz relates how she immediately felt ostracized as a new graduate student because of this. A. Reynaldo Contreras speaks about the tokenism created as a minority faculty whose “legitimacy” is sometimes under question because some of his colleagues perceived him as only a product of Affirmative Action (The Leaning Ivory Tower 126). Contr-

Achieving a Place in Academia

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eras’s experiences can be explained by a perception held by many in the 1970s about minority quota systems: “In the mid-1970s, when minority quota systems were being implemented in many nonacademic agencies, the general public was left with the impression that Chicano or minority presence in professional or academic positions was due to affirmative action, rather than to individual qualifications or merit” (“Racism in Academia” 303). Ana M. Martínez Alemán reveals the fears she confronts in trying to be a Latina professor without losing her cultural roots (70). During this time, she believed that being a Latina immersed in her culture and an academic professor pressured to adopt Anglo ways were incompatible with each other. These personal essays about injustices in academia became a mentoring manual for many Latino/a graduate students and new faculty who cling to these stories as a way of comprehending their feelings of estrangement within the ivory tower. Unfortunately, these personal essays were not available for two noted Latino/a personal academic essayists, Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar, during their early years in the ivory tower. This final chapter will focus on these two contemporary Latino/a personal essayists in academia who are widely known for their personal essay scholarship. These scholars attended schools and became academics during the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike myself, these Latino/a scholars did not begin as personal essayists in academia but struggled to achieve it through their later groundbreaking works. In “Dare We Say I,” Ruth Behar acknowledges that such personal projects were unthinkable when she was a graduate student (B1). Both speak about the difficulties that they faced in writing traditional academic discourse during their early years within the academy. In Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Villanueva writes: “Victor struggles with the doctoral dissertation: not trusting in his Latino-literate, ostensibly oral ways, trying to maintain the voice of distance, of objectivity, of the researcher, without race, without a person. He believes he can” (115). Similarly, Ruth Behar notes the void of her identity in her graduate studies and dissertation process: Graduate school had given me back the confidence in my intellect that had been knocked out of me in college. But I realized that this confidence had been won at a price: in my years of graduate school and dissertation writing, I had been forced to put aside all the burning questions of my own identity and the painful memory of the torn personal and literary letters that had propelled me into anthropology in the first place. I had come to feel that my personal identity was neither relevant nor important. There was nothing special about me. Society, culture, history: didn’t those collective forms have everything to do with what we are? My life I had put on hold; I’d eventually get to reply to it, I

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay thought, when I found some time. As an anthropologist, I had an obligation to give voice to others. To give myself voice was narcissistic, indulgent; even now, I still feel the weight of this view. (Translated Women 331)

Both of these scholars wrote their dissertations in the early to mid 1980s, and both published their groundbreaking personal works in 1993. Both gained significant notoriety within their fields because of their personal scholarships. This last chapter will demonstrate how these two scholars worked to bring academic legitimacy to Latino/a personal essay scholarship, as well as the important role they played in making the private experiences of Latino/a academics public. In working toward such personal goals through the elements of the essay, these Latino/a academics, like other personal essay scholars of the past, strive to break with traditional academic writing in favor of personal writing as a way to bring humanity and tolerance to the ivory tower. CONVERSATIONS WITH VICTOR VILLANUEVA ON BOOTSTRAPS AND HIS INFLUENCE IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

I have known Victor Villanueva since I first presented a CCCC paper on autobiography in the spring of 1994. Through these past few years, we shared our thoughts on the personal, and he strongly supports my interest in personal scholarship. I see myself as someone who can speak with authority on Villanueva and work to explain why his use of the personal has met with such success. Victor Villanueva, a Puerto Rican academic in Rhetoric and Composition, is one of the most influential and successful Latino academics today. In a conversation that I had with Villanueva at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) a few years ago, he confessed that he initially thought his acclaimed personal work, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color , would end his academic career. He believed that such a personal critique and indictment of the obstacles he faced as an academic of color would further ostracize him from his work environment. I remember his laughter as he recounted how this book would surprise him by launching his career. I also remember watching academics of color and Anglo academics as well come up to him at a conference with smiles on their faces as they told him how much they enjoyed his book. The tangible success of Bootstraps came in 1995 when he received NCTE’s David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English. The success that Villanueva had with Bootstraps and his devotion to service in his field partially lead


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to his election as the 1997 chair of the CCCC. Villanueva, as a fervent follower of Paulo Freire’s liberatory theories and practices, strongly attests to Freire’s concept of studying one’s lived experiences in relation to the world as a method of changing society’s oppressive conditions. As the CCCC’s chair, Villanueva brought this use of the personal to the theme of his conference entitled “Ideas, Historias, Cuentos: Breaking with Precedent.” In his conference description of this theme, he asked potential conference presenters to adopt “a common expression in Spanish: Te cuento de mi historia—I’ll tell you a story about my history” (CCCC 98 Home). The result of this theme created a multitude of sessions and workshops centered on the use of the personal within a social and political context. As a frequent attendee of personal scholarship sessions at CCCCs, I watched these sessions grow in the last five years from sparse attendance to overcrowded rooms filled beyond capacity. In my field, I know that this burgeoning interest stemmed from the personal scholarship of such prominent figures like Peter Elbow, Nancy Somers, Mike Rose, Jane Tompkins, Lynn Bloom, Wendy Bishop, Richard Murphy, Carl Klaus, Richard Marius, Doug Atkins, Paul Heilker, and Victor Villanueva, to name just a few. As Lynn Bloom points out in a recent issue of College English, “In the past decade our professional journals have been receptive to the genre in publishing articles about essays and writing by essayistic academicians such as Peter Elbow and Nancy Sommers” (423). She goes on to say that a personal essay professional development conference sponsored by NCTE would take place in 1999. However, these are recent progressive developments in this field. The “essay” is still not considered a legitimate category at MLA or at CCCCs. Those who wish to submit personal essay scholarship must enter their work under categories like “Nonfiction and Creative Writing” or “Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing” (423). I can identify with Bloom’s comments about the marginalization of the personal essay at these conferences. I was guilty of succumbing to these categories when in 1995 I presented a personal academic essay under the autobiography section of MLA and used the word “autobiographical self” in my title so that I would be more accepted at this session. Bloom is quite optimistic, however, that this renewed interest in the essay would carry on into the millennium (422). I can also attest to the recent changes in essay scholarship within my work. In the early 1990s when I first started writing personal academic essays, I was told by a professor that this form of scholarship was seldom published in my field, and I should stick to more traditional articles if I hoped to make it in the scholarly world. At that time he may have been right. However, since that time, I have presented eleven papers

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on personal discourse, published three personal academic essays, reviewed a book on the Montaignian essay in Rhetoric and Composition and edited an ethnography book significantly grounded in more personal, qualitative ways of writing ethnographic research. The renewed interest in Montaigne plays some part in the recent academic receptiveness to the personal essay. However, from my discussions with Villanueva, Paulo Freire clearly has also contributed to the impact on personal discourse within Rhetoric and Composition. Given this field’s widespread knowledge of Freire that I mentioned in the previous chapter and my earlier discussion of Freire’s direct tie to the Latin American essay, I conclude in the last chapter that some U.S. academics use a hybrid personal form of writing that would include Latin American ways of viewing the personal essay. In the first half of this chapter, I will closely examine Villanueva’s Bootstraps and its relationship to the essay’s elements as well as demonstrate how a Latino academic weaves the personal essay elements discussed in the other chapters into his writing and his field of study. VILLANUEVA’S USE OF SELF-REFLECTION AND ACCESSIBILITY IN BOOTSTRAPS

In the previous chapters, many of the personal essayists had a heightened sense of awareness that they did not fit the traditional mold of a scholar. Their ties to the essay’s personal elements ostracized them from fully being accepted by the academic world of their time. Montaigne, as an independent scholar of wealth and privilege, was in a lucrative position to write as he pleased and critique traditional forms of academic writing without fear of repercussions. He clearly enjoyed his independence from the scholarly world and reveled in his ability to write against academic rigidity. As a writer and lecturer, Emerson was able to sustain himself financially and remain on the fringes of the scholarly world. He also criticized the academics in his country and did not want to conform to the rigid standards of U.S. academic discourse. Consequently, he was never hired as a scholar by a U.S. academic institution. Thoreau sought to reject all academic institutions in place of self-education within the natural world. For Thoreau, academia represented a support system to larger institutions that worked to curtail his individual rights and freedom. He clearly wanted to be ostracized by those academics who fed into systematization. Freire, as a Latin American academic, was within a contemporary Latin American scholarly world that took more readily to the essay’s elements. Within Latin America, this form of writing played a key role in these nation-building countries. Although Freire was


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ostracized for his radical thinking by Brazilian government officials (exiled and jailed), he is heralded by fellow academics throughout the world as an educator. However, as Villanueva points out, Freire gained notoriety in the United States only after he became part of the faculty at Harvard University (“On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism” 658). During his graduate and nontenured years, Villanueva, as a U.S. Latino academic from a working-class background, did not enjoy the security, as the previous essayists do, of writing about and against a familiar academic environment. In Villanueva’s eyes, he did not necessarily choose to be ostracized from academia: Yet fellow academics are foreign to me in many ways, and I think they will always be, that I will always be somehow an outlander. I am of color, now fully aware of color, and I am of poverty (not just “from” poverty), never (not even now, economically) of the middle class, not even quite the colored middle class (who are not equal with the white middle class). So I often feel alone professionally. But I just as often feel a member of a professional community—a community that extends beyond the university that employs me, a community that includes all English-language teachers. (xv)

Through the essay’s element of self-reflection, Villanueva articulates both his sense of ostracization and belongingness within an academic community. In Villanueva’s eyes, academia is a place of contradictions that he must analyze partially through the element of self-reflection: What follows will tell of the pleasures and frustrations I experience in working within an institution that constantly seeks change and continually impedes change, of my respect and affection for nice people who are too often unwittingly unkind to people of color. (xvii)

In contrast to some of the previous personal essayists who associated ostracization from academia with the personal, Villanueva’s final comments at the end of his prologue suggest that his use of the personal essay might provide some hope for acceptance: “This is the personal made public and the public personalized, not for self-glory nor to point fingers, but to suggest how, maybe, to make the exception the rule” (xviii). Indeed, Latinos and Latinas Ph.D.s are the “exception” to the “rule” within academia. In an article entitled “Facts in Brief: Students of Color Make Modest Gains in Graduate Degree Attainment” from Higher Education and National Affairs (American Council on Education), they reported that the number of Ph.D.s awarded to Hispanics from 1977 to 1996 is as follows: “1.6 percent of those received in 1977, 2.1 percent in 1985 and 1990, and 2.2 percent in 1996” (1). The only minority group that gained significant increases in doctorate degree

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attainment were Asians/Pacific Islanders. These statistics from this article came from the National Center for Education Statistics. Villanueva discovers through his research from the U.S. Department of Education that “Latinos received 26 Ph.D.s—not 26% but 26” in English Language and Literature for 1995 (“On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism” 651). This is in contrast to 1,268 Ph.D.s awarded in this same field to the Anglo population. At CCCCs, where he was chair, only 1 percent of the membership represents Latinos and Chicanos (651). Although these statistics are not heartwarming for his fellow academics to hear, Villanueva’s disclosure of this information helps his audience see why he considers himself the “exception” and why he feels different from the general academic population. Indeed, it is quite disconcerting for many academics committed to diversifying their curriculums and faculty to accept that in twenty years Hispanic Ph.D.s have only increased from 1.6 percent to 2.2 percent. It is a hard pill to swallow for Villanueva and this writer. This knowledge of these statistics makes Villanueva different from his essay predecessors. Unlike Montaigne, Emerson, Thoreau, or perhaps even Freire, as a middle-class Brazilian, Villanueva is quite conscious that less culturally informed academics regard him as beneath them. He is not given the privilege to critique academia with the same confidence of his essay predecessors, and he was born into ostracization through his background. The essay’s element of self-reflection works to educate other academics about Villanueva’s right to belong in academia as a workingclass Puerto Rican who does not have to completely relinquish his background to fit in. Through the element of self-reflection, Villanueva hopes that others will self-reflect and then reconceptualize their views about merging the “exception” into the “rule,” so that he and others like him will find academic life less contradictory. In one book review of Bootstraps, written by Clyde Moneyhun, readers can clearly see that Villanueva’s strong element of self-reflection does indeed impact those academics who identify with his working-class origins: Which is how we come to the meaning Villanueva’s book has for me personally. I’m a first-generation college student from a working-class background now about to receive the highest degree in the land. I work at a big state institution deeply involved in the creation and maintenance of the ideological hegemony that contributes to the material oppression of the class to which I am still bound with ties of love, loyalty, and interest. Who am I here to serve? The lure of self-interest is strong. My education to this point has been in many ways a struggle against working-class beginnings. (224)

Moneyhun is able to take Villanueva’s autobiographical insights on his working-class origins and begin to self-reflect on his own predicament


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in academia. He boldly leaves the traditional role of the objective book reviewer to participate in the self-reflective questioning process of academic ideologies that undermine his working-class roots. In this passage, readers see an academic book reviewer and graduate student from working-class origins who achieves a diminished sense of isolation through the personal writings of another. In Bootstraps, Villanueva takes his readers on a self-reflective journey where he explores the contradictions between his home life and school. Through this journey, he realizes that the reason he feels out of place in academia is because some academics failed to discover the history and lives of those like him. Their failure to access Latinos/as results in research mistakes that harm the dispossessed. Villanueva discusses how academic credibility is seldom questioned because of society’s faith in their research: But limitations imposed on academics notwithstanding, there remains the problem that the public at large and those who go to the professors to learn, to become teachers and the professors themselves, put a lot of stock on Ph.D.s and research tables and the printed word. The result is that too many accept the answers, including those who are the victims of the problems and the victims of the solutions. (12)

As I discussed in chapter 3, Emerson and Thoreau, almost 150 years earlier, warned U.S. academics that they needed to bridge the growing gap between the ivory tower and society to help build a democratic nation. Both believed the essay represented the writing needed for attaining accessibility in this nation-building process. Thoreau went one step further than Emerson by stating the importance of studying the lived experiences of the common man and ethnic groups like Native Americans and African Americans. He believed that their cultural ways had something useful to bring to scholarship and our nation. Unfortunately, the academic movement to create more connections with diverse communities has only just begun to gain momentum. The rest of this section will demonstrate how Villanueva’s self-reflections in Bootstraps reveal academia’s inaccessibility to part of U.S. society through their inattention to self-reflection in their research and writing. This inaccessibility hindered the democratic process this nation was founded on and harmed academics of color like Villanueva. Throughout Bootstraps, Villanueva gives many examples of how his personal experiences markedly contrast with the research findings made by academics. By accessing his early experiences with language and writing through his use of self-reflection, Villanueva works to refute and revise established academic theories and practices. One example of this

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comes when he self-reflects on the different language used within school and on his block where he grew up as a child. Villanueva corrected his parents at home when they broke English rules, but he knew that such dogmatic behavior and practices did not belong on the block: On the block, not only could infinitives be split, but if emphasis was desired, words could be split (fanfuckentastic); the subjunctive would be solidified into a state of being (if I be you); and, like other languages which don’t make some silly analogy between language and mathematics, more negatives simply meant greater emphasis. “Ain’t no way” never implied there was a way. (8)

Later, as a scholar, Villanueva discovers how little top scholars in his field—like Carl Bereiter and William Labov—knew about the creative language of his block. The cognitive theorists in Rhetoric and Composition such as Bereiter told Villanueva that he and others on his block suffered from “verbal deprivation.” Bereiter developed elaborate cognitive theories about African American problems with deficient language abilities (9). Instead of associating this deficiency with genetic development, Bereiter blamed it on their home environment that provided little means of verbal expression (10). Labov later attempts to qualify Bereiter’s research with his study of Harlem kids who he finds have significant “verbal stimulation” but are foreign “to the white, middle-class researchers” (11). Another scholar, Arthur Jensen, goes back to the genetic explanation by claiming that “blacks are genetically incapable of ‘cognitive conceptual learning,’ Level II intelligence. The best they can do is Level I, ‘associative learning’” (11). Ten years later, Thomas Farrell attempts to disqualify the genetic explanation. He claims that the problem with “black ghetto youths” is their oral culture that prevents them from participating in more elaborate thinking and inhibits their cognitive development (11). Villanueva notices a circular pattern of research mistakes: “’Round and ’round she goes. Since the question is always ‘what’s wrong with them,’ the answer gets repeated too: bad language equals insufficient cognitive development” (11). The end result of such research mistakes is that Villanueva fears that academics will also see him as deficient. The fears of his low standardized test scores (even though he now knows such tests are biased) haunt him, and he feels that others see him as a product of tokenism (13). His hauntings make him wonder “if, maybe, he isn’t as smart as people say he is” (13). As a Latina/Angla researcher of his book, I cannot objectively distance his fears from my own. Even though I grew up as part of the middle class, as part Latina, I also have some similar fears. I also have low standardized test scores that almost jeopardized my admission into


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graduate school. I am also haunted by the fear of tokenism and do not always believe in what others say about my intelligence or my performance. If it were not for a Jewish professor (Dr. Irving Deer) who believed in my intelligence and told others in the department about me, I would not be here today writing this book. Sometimes, in the classes I took with him, he self-reflected on the hardships and insecurities that he faced in his youth and young adult years. As a young Jewish immigrant in the 1930s, teachers initially placed him in a class for slow learners. As a young professor in the 1950s, he discovered that some academics sought to undermine his work because of his Jewish background. He once told me that I reminded him of those early years. I have to wonder that if a “bright” middle-class Latina/Angla like myself or a brilliant Jewish professor like Dr. Deer can experience these feelings of nonbelongingness and insecurity in their developing years as academics, then perhaps something is indeed amiss in academia. After accessing Villanueva’s self-reflections, I can confirm and confront why academia has a part in bringing about these fears. In our personal correspondences, I expressed my fear to him as I wrote this book. He helped me interpret this fear grounded in the idea that academia would view me as an academic imposter who did not meet with ivory tower standards. This fear of being an imposter is found in almost every academic (some hide it better than others), but it is most acutely manifested in academics of color. Our shared experiences help me question, in a self-reflective manner, the origins of this fear. I, like Villanueva, had to question the academic legitimacy of research methods and academic writing in my field that may prove to be detrimental to me. These are steps that must be taken to reveal what may be the true imposters of academia. As a scholar of the personal essay, I have to question whether these feelings of insecurity would be so prevalent today if academia (especially in the humanities) would have been more attuned to a democratic personal discourse in academic writing. If, many years ago, certain academics in my field like Bereiter had adopted the skeptical self-reflective approach of Montaigne, I wonder if they would have inevitably avoided the “round and round” linear process that Villanueva mentions in the above quote and instead have questioned their perspective about “what’s wrong with them.” Ultimately, they might be compelled to take a more critical eye to their own thinking and ask the question What’s wrong with us? as Montaigne did when he eyed the New World. Likewise, with the Montaignian process of self-questioning, the repeated answer of “insufficient cognitive development” would change too, as academics are forced to confront, almost immediately, their societal biases of “insufficient.” Montaigne knew that this skeptical self-reflective perspective in

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writing and research eliminated a linear track of thinking and instead promoted a more expanded outlook on issues that scrutinized the subjectivities of the writer. A few hundred years later, Paulo Freire demonstrated how this skeptical self-reflective perspective could benefit not only the privileged but had great benefits for the dispossessed as they questioned their place in the world. The travesty for the dispossessed is that it took academia almost five hundred years after Montaigne to accept the skeptical self-reflective element of the essay in their scholarship. The other travesty comes in the form of academia’s failure of accessibility in their research and writing. As Villanueva enters the world of academia, he is shocked at how little academics know about his dialect and culture. Villanueva learns from Freire that such nonaccess not only applies to conservative academics but to so-called radical ones as well: “Freire writes about ‘experts on Marx’ who have never had a cup of coffee in a worker’s home. How much can they really know?” (18). Thoreau also knew how important it was to have that cup of coffee with the common man when he wrote Walden. He learned that there was another education out there within the common man that was vital to the nation-building process. He also understood the necessity of accessing those from other cultures such as Native Americans. They provided another education for him. Yet, as I have discussed in previous chapters, many academics of the past chose not to proceed with this accessible type of education. Consequently, academic ignorance of the common man and other cultures took place over the years and research mistakes, like the ones Villanueva mentions, inevitably developed among scholars who were ill-equipped to study them. THE MOVEMENT FROM MIMICRY TO SPONTANEITY IN VILLANUEVA’S ACADEMIC WRITINGS

Villanueva devotes another section of the book to studying how illinformed academics reject the variety of cultural writing and rhetoric styles that he is comfortable with in favor of a rigid academic style of writing that Montaigne criticized many years ago. While Villanueva is taking English courses at Tacoma Community College, he encounters a part-time Indian instructor (Ph.D. from Oxford) who suspects that he plagiarizes his writing. His writing is “not typical of her students,” and he is flattered by her description of his writing as “too serious” and “too abstract” (68). He thinks that his writing makes him college material. However, when he reaches the University of Washington, this writing style is rejected by his English 301 professor who gives his paper 36 out of 100 points (70). Villanueva is devastated, but he is determined to fit


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in. He goes to the library to see how the professor writes, he follows the writing pattern that reminds him of the pattern in the “five paragraph paper” he learned in high school, and he receives 62 out of 100 points on his next paper (70). Throughout the rest of his undergraduate years, he became a mimic of his professors’ writings: “Professorial Discourse Analysis became a standard practice: go to the library; see what the course’s professor had published; try to discern a pattern to her writing; try to mimic the pattern” (71). The result of such mimicking gave him As and Bs on his papers. At that time, Villanueva was willing to become a mimic to belong. His obsession becomes his college degree: “School becomes his obsession. There is the education. But the obsession is as much, if not more, in getting a degree, not with a job in mind, just the degree, just because he thinks he can, despite all that has said he could not” (71). Villanueva’s obsession with fitting in transformed him into a academic mimic. As I discussed in the previous chapters, personal essay scholars from Montaigne to Freire abhorred academic mimicry. Montaigne perceived those scholars who filled their writings with other’s words and writing patterns as those with little to contribute to original thinking. In contrast, his personal writings that directly tackled scholarly issues provided a rich analysis that promoted more complex scholarly conversations. He believed that his form of writing that spontaneously mixed the personal with scholarly issues gave him a better understanding of his research. He clearly felt, unlike Villanueva in his graduate years, that he had a vested interest in what he read and wrote. Emerson and Thoreau saw academic mimicry as a hindrance to the nation-building process. Emerson viewed the U.S. academic world as one filled with insecurities because of their dependency and mimicry of Western European scholarship. He urged them to study American culture with all its richness and spontaneity to help better understand our nation. However, like Villanueva, most U.S. academics at that time studied in an unfamiliar environment (Europe) and suffered from similar insecurities. Emerson and Thoreau knew that the study of their culture was absolutely vital to ending the U.S. academic’s mimicry of European scholarship and writing. The personal scholarly essay allowed Emerson and Thoreau to spontaneously revise Western European scholarship to fit their needs in studying American culture. Paulo Freire, with his liberatory approach to writing and research, saw mimicry in the form of the banking concept of education where teachers were the depositors of knowledge and students were the recipients. In this rigid form of education, academic mimicry was inevitable and explorations of other more spontaneous writings fell by the wayside. The dispossessed in the classroom, like Villanueva, seldom questioned the

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mimicry, since the traditional writing form being used at the time left little room for this. Villanueva is disempowered in an academic environment that tells him that success comes when he mimics the writings of professors unfamiliar with his culture or language. As a graduate student, Villanueva noticed “logic” as a recurring problem that professors see in his writings (73). By accident, he hears a tape of a conference paper on contrastive rhetoric by an applied linguist, Robert Kaplan: Kaplan describes a research study conducted in New York City among Puerto Ricans who are bilingual and Puerto Ricans who are monolingual in English, and he says that the discourse patterns, the rhetorical patterns which include the logic, of monolingual Puerto Ricans are like those of Puerto Rican bilinguals and different from Whites, more Greek than the Latin like prose of American written English. (73)

Unfortunately, Villanueva learns years later that Kaplan’s paper was never published in academia. The paper, however, inspires Villanueva to begin taking rhetoric courses as a way of understanding how his writing might be different from his professors. He studies the Greek Sophists’ emphasis on language artistry. In the great Sophist, Gorgias, he discovers a man obsessed “with rhyming words and echoing rhythms, with parallelism and antithetical structures, with parallels that are even careful to contain identical syllables” (80). Villanueva discovers a more spontaneous and rhythmic form of writing similar to his own. He studies the Second Sophistic movement that arose with the Byzantine Empire and impacted the Arab and Spanish world. He knows that he should pay particular attention to this history because of Spain’s four-hundred-year occupation of Latin America (84). He realizes that the seven hundred years of Arab domination in Spain has left its mark on Latin American ways of rhetoric and writing. He learns that there are vast differences between English and Arabic prose with “a greater attention to the sound of the discourse than to the sense, the language more than the logic; in short, the sophistic” (85). By studying this history, Villanueva reveals that he follows Freire’s emphasis on historical analysis as a way of empowering himself in academia. Villanueva also discovers a study of Arabic prose by Sa’Adeddin that helps explain why Latinos and Latinas might be drawn to the personal: “Another study of Arabic prose by Sa’Adeddin showed a heightened use of first- and second-person personal pronouns indicating an attempt at close reader-writer interaction (Lux and Grabe)” (84). As an ardent follower of Freire’s liberatory theories and practices, Villanueva understands how writing about his lived experiences empow-


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ers him, but through historical analysis he also understands that personal writings belonged in his culture for hundreds of years. These empowering and cultural elements of personal writing compel Villanueva to question the criticisms of his writing in graduate school that curtailed his more natural and spontaneous tendencies: If my writing was “too formulaic,” it was likely in my using contemporarycommonplaces, mimicking the formulas of psychological interpretations of texts or Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence or even deconstruction. If it was “too novel,” it was likely too speculative, that global tendency of Spanish speakers, of Arabs, of sophists; or maybe it was stylistically novel, long sentences, digressions which would prove to be relevant, but only for the patient reader. (87)

As a Latina/Angla writer, I find that my writing comes much closer to Villanueva’s descriptions of the Sophists, Arabs, and Spanish than the writings I see in academia. Villanueva finds research from Maria Montano-Harmon that suggests that Anglo Americans living in concentrated Latino areas of the U.S. also exhibit similar writing and rhetorical patterns (85). He notes that in her study she found five Anglo American students from a southern Arizona town who frequently associated with Chicanos and who were borderline bilingual. These five writers showed a marked use of Spanish rhetorical patterns of writing that differed considerably from the other forty-five Anglo American writers that did not have this type of close contact with the Latino/a community. Villanueva can only speculate that these sophistic ways of writing embedded in Latino/a communities might be easy adaptable to Anglo Americans exposed to these rhetorical patterns (85). As Latinos/as increase in population and geographic distribution within the United States, their impact on non-Latinos/as’ rhetorical and writing patterns will inevitably increase and impact writing classrooms. Since more personal and spontaneous writing is an intricate part of Latina/o writing, U.S. academics will have to democratically reexamine more traditional Western European-based academic writing. As Villanueva demonstrates, Spanish and Latin American styles of writing and rhetoric within the United States are no longer foreign but part of our nation and academic world. SINCERITY AND ACCEPTANCE IN VILLANUEVA’S SCHOLARSHIP

Villanueva believes that the key for Latino/a acceptance in academia, which will inevitably increase their numbers, resides in permitting Latinos/as to write “frankly,” so they can begin dialoguing with academic audiences about their experiences.

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay I believe that our best recruiting tool for those graduate students of color, the undergraduates of color, the students who have vaulted the fault line and are in college at all will not be the pictures of people of color in the Council Chronicle or in the convention program books or even our wonderful conventions—since all of those media mainly reach the already-subscribed; rather, it will be through our journals, the journals on library shelves or online, with people of color writing frankly, sympathetically, and all of writing about what matters to those students of color. (“On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism” 652)

Villanueva seems to be saying here that academic audiences must move beyond the visual “pictures of people of color” and instead work toward understanding the lives behind those pictures. People of color and those who write about them must be frank or truthful about their lives if a democratic academy is to take place. In the one review I found on Villanueva’s Bootstraps, Raul Sanchez consistently equates Villanueva’s personal scholarship with democracy and truth. In examining the metaphor of Villanueva’s title Bootstraps, Sanchez sees a personal examination of the “metaphor’s ideological underpinnings” as a way to make our institutions “more truly democratic, more truly inclusive, more truly responsive to difference” (163). Through a truthful persona, Villanueva seeks to bring about a more tolerant and humane academy. In his closing remarks, Sanchez again equates Villanueva’s faithful and truthful writings with democracy. He says that Villanueva’s vision that “faithfully” and “accurately” portrays Latinos opens doors for “people of color who live in this country” to experience the American dream of “democracy and opportunity” (168). Villanueva, at least with this reviewer, succeeds in presenting himself as a sincere personal essay writer in search of discovering the truth about the challenges Latinos/as face in their quest for higher education. Villanueva, like his essay predecessors in earlier chapters, successfully uses the essay’s rhetorical element of sincerity to demonstrate his search for democratic truths. Like Emerson and especially Thoreau, Villanueva sincerely comes across as someone committed to building a more democratic U.S. nation grounded in truthful U.S. cultural experiences. While Emerson and Thoreau worked to create the sincere American scholar against the backdrop of an insincere Western European academy, Villanueva creates the sincere academic of color against the backdrop of a sometimes insincere and distant U.S. academy. In today’s world, the personal essay once again takes on a radical form that critiques the distant writing of academia. As Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman note, these contemporary radical thinkers find value in this form and “appropriate” it to further their causes (14). Villanueva and


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others in previous chapters demonstrate that this sincere form, in whatever time period or geographic location, works to shake up academia’s traditional perceptions. It is a form that claims no exclusive tie to any group and democratically serves anyone who chooses to use it to advance their causes. This is what also makes the essay a democratic form. Contemporary radical academics like Villanueva did not think twice about appropriating a form partially grounded in the Western European father of the essay. They took it and made it conform to their agendas. Like Montaigne’s “To the Reader,” Villanueva uses the sincere element of the essay in the beginning of Bootstraps to establish that his essays are not for “self-glory” but to serve others (xviii). In a sincere style that would appeal to a U.S. audience, he also claims that he writes these essays for the love of his country and people (x). Villanueva, like his essay predecessors, thus appeals to his audience through sincere humility. This effective rhetorical element promotes the image of a selfless American who writes for his readers. Throughout Bootstraps, Villanueva equates sincerity with an admission of his authentic identity as a Puerto Rican. He contrasts himself to those Latinos like Richard Rodriguez who claim that they can assimilate into mainstream America (39). He sees Rodriguez as failing to acknowledge how U.S. society regards Mexican Americans as a minority and not as assimilated immigrants who can blend into mainstream America. Rodriguez creates a confessional autobiographical story that is largely based on his personal experiences. It is, in some ways, as Henry Staten points out, a self-revelation embedded in familial ties to upper-class Mexican American values, which eventually contributes to Rodriguez’s shame of his own family members and Chicanos (112). He comes from a family who take little pride in their cultural heritage, so Rodriguez searches for an upper-class culture in the Anglo world. In contrast Villanueva’s family (especially his father) educated their son about Puerto Rican politics and history such as Operation Bootstrap, Governor Muñoz Marin’s Puerto Rican prosperity program, and other significant Puerto Rican events (xiii). Unlike Rodriguez, Villanueva’s early influences to take pride in one’s culture propels him in the direction of examining complex rhetorical, political, cultural, and language issues that impact his life’s journey. Clyde Moneyhun, in comparing and contrasting Rodriguez and Villanueva, comments that Villanueva is obsessed with the “grander schemes of political ideology” that have created the conditions of the life he has led. . . . When he looks at the riddles of his life, he balances the dialectic of the personal and the political, the individual and the systemic, the willed and the determined. (Moneyhun 222)

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Edward Heckler, in his book review of Bootstraps, commends Villanueva for “trenchantly” critiquing “issues of color, cultural identity, and language in Contemporary America” rather than merely recounting his personal experiences through a simple story (563). The weakness in Rodriguez’s simplistic story is that he isolates not only himself from the issues that would help him understand his Latino predicament, but he isolates his uninformed readers as well. Rodriguez’s claim of a racelessness is “a decision to go it alone,” and he risks losing the kinship he has with his Mexican American community “without fully being fully adopted by the white community” (40). Villanueva rejects Rodriguez’s path toward alienation and instead chooses to speak the truth about his cultural predicament in the third person to a predominantly white academic audience: There is the foreigness of his fellow academics, a fellowship he doesn’t feel he belongs in, unpublished, not knowing of procedures and standards, their not appreciating the distances someone of color must travel, telling of hard times when he tries to speak of poverty, telling of that economic bad flu when he tries speaks of a chronic condition. He is scared, professionally alone, trying to meet all of the profession’s demands and his culture’s demands to be an active parent, still trying to cope with poverty. (118)

Through such sincere disclosures to his academic audience about his alienation, Villanueva hopes to educate his readers about these feelings of lonliness. He hopes that his reading audience might self-reflect on his words and sincerely begin to reach out to their fellow academics of color. He sincerely discloses what other academics of color, like Rodriguez, would not. Consequently, Richard Rodriguez left English studies in an isolated state from his culture and academia. On the other hand, Victor Villanueva enjoys academic success by revealing his culture’s personal truths. It is this essay’s element of sincerity to one’s culture and a predominantly white academic audience that helps Villanueva gain respect and therefore an increasing sense of belongingness in academia. At the end of his book, Villanueva appeals to his academic audience by sincerely admitting the differences and commonalties he shares with them: “There are experiences that I no doubt have in common with others of color, experiences those not of color will never be able to understand fully. By the same token, I can never know, not fully, the experiences of the white middle class. Yet we all have our commonalties” (142). As I’ve shown in this section, Bootstraps is devoted to demonstrating these differences and commonalties. Throughout his essays in that book, Villanueva uses the elements of self-reflection, accessibility,


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spontaneity, and sincerity to prepare his readers to accept these differences and commonalties. He begins to create a dialogue with readers by self-reflecting on his early years growing up in New York City and up until his current predicament in academia. His self-reflections encourage academic readers to reflect on academic knowledge that is questionable and perhaps harmful to people of color. He also provides his readers with access to his life as an academic of color. Through this window of access, academics can read about the life experiences of a fellow colleague who brings both academic knowledge and personal testimonies to refute previously held theories about those like himself. He becomes much more convincing than other academics because readers can see that he has the knowledge of an academic and the personal knowledge of that which is studied. Those academics in Rhetoric and Composition who are familiar with Paulo Freire’s liberatory theories can clearly see Villanueva implementing Freire’s reading of the world through academic and personal knowledge. With these two forms of knowledge, academics (white and nonwhite) are more empowered to analyze their academic world and its inequities. Villanueva gives them the tools needed, through his accessible writing, to develop a Freirian sense of critical consciousness. Because of this access, readers begin to understand why Villanueva had to depart from academic mimicry to a more spontaneous form of personal writing that allowed him to fluctuate between academic and personal knowledge. And finally, his sincerity plays an instrumental role in getting them to trust his knowledge. He is now ready to ask his audience to make a sincere commitment to understanding and helping those scholars like him: With every man for himself only a few will win out. We are individuals, but that doesn’t mean we must dive headlong into individualism. We need to cling to our various collectivities—Puerto Rican, Latino, of color, academic, American—and they need not be mutually exclusive if we consider them critically, and if we accept that we carry contradictions. We all stand to gain by developing a critical consciousness. (143)

It would be nice to believe that Villanueva’s personal accounts and his use of these democratic elements freed him from the need to revert back to traditional academic writing. It would be nice to believe that, like Montaigne, he could turn his back on traditional academic prose. However, he acknowledges in his review of Keith Gilyard’s Race, Rhetoric, and Composition that seven years after Bootstraps the writings of his earlier academic days still haunts him: For the second time in two weeks, I tried writing a straight academic review of Keith Gilyard’s Race, Rhetoric, and Composition. I don’t

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay understand the impulse really. Maybe it’s the compulsion to belong, to assimilate, to accommodate, to deny that in some sense I still don’t belong, despite the successes. Even though I no longer feel any of that old insecurity—a at least not consciously—it still must be operating somewhere within me. (195)

His words starkly contrast with another prominent rhetorician close to Villanueva’s age who smugly told me one day after reading his personal academic essay that he would never write in the traditional form again. However, unlike Villanueva, this upper-middle-class Southern white gentleman working at a prestigious Southern university felt right at home in academia. He could easily take a personal flight out of the academic tradition. RUTH BEHAR AND HER RISE TO ACADEMIC PROMINENCE

Ruth Behar, as a Cuban American Jew (Jubana), met with early success in her field of anthropology. Her first book, The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa Maria del Monte, was published by Princeton University Press shortly after the completion of her doctorate. After receiving her postdoctorate at the University of Michigan, she discovered that she was awarded the highly coveted MacArthur fellowship. Her second book, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, gave her national prominence with its selection as a Notable Book of the Year for 1993 by the New York Times. She is also a well-known editor publishing anthologies like Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba and Women Writing Culture. More recently, within the literary field, she is also gaining prominence as a personal essayist with works such as “No Returns,” “Juban Arica,” “The Story of Ruth, the Anthropologist,” and “The Body in the Woman, the Story in the Woman.” One of her more recent books entitled The Vulnerable Observer is a series of personal essays that chronicles her personal relationships with the places and persons she observed in her ethnographic studies. Behar’s rapid climb within the anthropology field can be somewhat attributable to her strong stances about bringing the personal voice into ethnographic writings. In Translated Woman, she devoted the last chapter, “Biography in the Shadow,” to drawing personal connections between her struggles as a Latina academic and the struggles of Esperanza, a Mexican peddler, who played a central role in her ethnographic study. Reviewers of her book seemed puzzled over why she would include such an autobiographical piece in her ethnography. Gelya Frank conducts a review of Translated Woman’s reviews and discovers how


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angry some reviewers were about this last chapter that revealed the ethnographer’s subjectivities. One reviewer from the Boston Globe found Behar’s confessions to be “embarrassing or distracting.” Victor Perera sees Behar as disingenuous when she compares herself to Esperanza (357–58). In 1994, a highly public debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education took place between Daphne Patai and Ruth Behar concerning the use of the personal in scholarly writing. Patai, in her essay “Sick and Tired of Scholars’ Nouveau Solipsism,” criticized Behar for writing “Biography in the Shadow.” As a scholar in Women’s Studies, Spanish, and Portuguese, Patai accused Behar and others who participated in personal scholarly writings as self-serving academics or nouveau solipsists. Patai believed we, as scholars, “just aren’t that important” (A52). She said that scholars’ “self-reflexivity does not change reality. It does not redistribute income, gain political rights for the powerless, create housing for the homeless, or improve health” (A52). Behar responded with an essay entitled “Dare We Say I” that is perhaps the most highly visible account of why a Latina and others of color perceive personal writing not as solipsism but as a “sustained effort to democratize the academy” (B2). Yet, feminist scholars like Maya Socolovsky as late as 1998, still view Behar as a self-indulgent colonizer or assimilationist of those she studies (74). The criticisms she receives seem not too distant from the words of those who criticized Montaigne’s self-reflective interpretations of the New World. As I discussed in previous chapters, critics viewed his self-reflections of the New World inhabitants as fostering the creation of Americas’ noble savage. However, very few of these scholarly critics mention the essay’s democratic qualities that these writers use to study other cultures. In The Vulnerable Observer, Behar sees not just personal writing but the personal essay as the form necessary to responsibly connect with those she observes and writes about: Unconsciously at first, but later with more direction, I chose the essay as a genre through which to attempt (the original meaning of essai, or essay) the dialectic between connection and otherness that is at the center of all forms of historical and cultural representation. (20)

For Behar, the essay is a writing form conducive to personally testifying about what she observes in relation to her life experiences. From her contemporary readings about the personal essay in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman’s anthology The Politics of the Essay, Behar learns that the essay is for radical scholars like herself who, in their rebelliousness to academic constraints, find sanctity in a creative form that blurs the boundaries between the self and other (20).

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Although Behar is of a different gender, Latina culture, religion, and scholarly field than Villanueva, the experiences and perceptions that they have of academia are similar enough to demonstrate how Latino/a academics (especially those from working-class and immigrant backgrounds) survive the culture shock of the ivory tower. Behar’s use and analysis of the essay’s elements of self-reflexivity, accessibility, spontaneity, and sincerity parallel Villanueva’s personal writings. Latino/a academic trailblazers like Behar and Villanueva offer hope for democratizing academia through the personal essay. BEHAR’S USE OF SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND ACCESSIBILITY TO RECONCILE HER ETHNOGRAPHIC IDENTITY IN ACADEMIA

Like Villanueva, Behar uses self-reflection to speak about the sense of nonbelongingness she often feels within an academic environment. However, Behar’s ostracization is different in that her multifaceted identities of cultures (Jewish, Cuban, and American) places her in a triangle of cultural displacement. She believes that this sense of cultural displacement draws her to the field of anthropology: At the same time, I began to understand that I had been drawn to anthropology because I had grown up within three cultures—Jewish (both Ashkenazi and Sephardic), Cuban, and American—and I needed to better connect my own profound sense of displacement with the professional rituals of displacement that are at the heart of anthropology. (Vulnerable Observer 21)

As a Cuban-Jewish immigrant with parents who spoke in strong Spanish accents, her family felt marginalized by third- and fourth-generation New York Jews. Within the Cuban exile culture, she felt different as a Jubana whose grandparents immigrated to Cuba in the early twentieth century. As a committed Latina academic, she sees herself as a secondrate gringa who is sometimes treated as an underprivileged Latina yet at other times not racially pure enough as a Jubana to fall under the category of minority. Behar hoped that anthropology would give her a sense of identity: “I went into anthropology because I thought that a discipline rooted in the foreignness of other worlds would help me to solve the puzzle of my identity” (“Writing in My Father’s Name” 165). Given her acute sense of cultural displacement, she finds it difficult to take up the “privileged eye” of an ethnographer who could authoritatively write about a culture: “But as an ethnographer for whom the professional ritual of displacementcontinually evoked the grief of diaspora, I distrusted my own authority. I saw it as being constantly in question, constantly on


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the point of breaking down” (Vulnerable Observer 21). The versatility of the essay that she says “desegregates the boundaries between self and other” works well for a writer who experiences such an acute sense of cultural displacement (20). As I have pointed out in previous chapters, the essay (especially in its contemporary form) crosses boundaries in that all creative forms of writing are permissible within it. Although purely speculative, one has to wonder if Montaigne, who had a French Catholic father and a mother of Spanish and Jewish origins, may also have found that he needed to locate a writing form that spoke to his cultural and religious displacement. Although little if any research has explored the impact of Montaigne’s familial cultural differences on his personal writing, the study of Behar’s subjectivities as a culturally diverse ethnographer creates possible connections between the two. It would seem quite natural that the culturally displaced who feel ostracized and “impure” in many communities gravitate toward an essay form that crosses many literary borders. In an essay where she explores her multilayered Cuban-Jewish (Juba) identity, she begins to see, as an anthropologist, that her multicultured existence complicates a traditional view of other cultures as alien: “Then there are the cities— Havana, New York, Miami Beach, Ann Arbor. In my Juba, there is room for all these villages and cities, and many other places for which I do not yet have names. In Juba there are no aliens” (“Writing in My Father’s Name” 166). In a talk Behar gave at the American Ethnological Society, she self-reflects on her border identities: “I am here because I am a woman of the border: between places, between identities, between languages, between cultures, between longings and illusions, one foot in the academy and one foot out” (The Vulnerable Observer 162). It is Behar’s self-reflections about her “between” states as a multifaceted Latina that guide her to question traditional scholarly beliefs of the distance between the observed and observer in ethnographic studies. As a border person, she cannot draw such distinct boundaries. She questions progressive anthropologists like Clifford Geertz who “embrace the cause of subjectivity with only half a heart” in their criticisms of those ethnographers who take “an autobiographical stance” (The Vulnerable Observer 8). Yet, as she says, Geertz is searching for a form of writing that articulates the subjectivities of the observer (9). She believes this desired form of writing lies within the personal essay. Behar finds that the essay is also an accessible form that moves through different communities. Like the ethnographer who must fluctuate between the academic community and the community studied, the personal essay, as I have shown in previous chapters, has “one foot in the academy and one out” (162). Emerson and Thoreau also pressed

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academics to traverse these communities. In some ways, ethnography is the scholarly endeavor that Emerson and Thoreau wanted from American academics. They wanted academics to visit these American communities and weave this knowledge into their scholarship for nation-building purposes. This was the American scholar they envisioned in their works who would close the distance between the ivory tower and communities to further the development of democracy. For them, the essay represented the writing form that could achieve this. Like Montaigne, Behar adamantly criticizes those academics who wish to place themselves above other communities by using an inaccessible form of writing. She claims that in the general public, personal writing is “the key form of storytelling in our time” with figures from Shirley MacLaine to Colin Powell revealing their personal histories (26). She observes, as does her essay predecessor Paulo Freire, those academics who try to distance themselves from other communities to establish a nondemocratic sense of superiority: “Isn’t it a pity that scholars, out of some sense of false superiority, should try to rise above it all” (26). Behar goes on to examine how these personally connected writings are especially important to anthropologists of color who study “their home communities and nations” (28). As Behar points out, with these particular academics “the lines between participant and observer, friend and stranger, aboriginal and alien are no longer so easily drawn” (28). These anthropologists bring about a shift in anthropological theory and practice by working in the direction of identification rather than difference when studying cultures. Behar’s analysis of these anthropologists provides insight when examining Villanueva as an autoethnographer who studies the language and writing of his Latino culture and academia. Through his personal writings and identification with both of these cultures in Bootstraps, Villanueva succeeds in becoming the accessible link that bridges the gap of ignorance between these communities. With this movement toward identification, academics of color will help gain new insights for academia with less emphasis on the inferiority of the culture studied (which inevitably separates these communities from each other). As Behar notes, this accessible identification is seen as another added academic dimension of theory and practice that will benefit both the observer and the observed: “the new focus on the possibilities and limits of identification is making anthropology finally and truly possible by leading us toward greater depth of understanding, greater depth of feeling about those whom we write about” (The Vulnerable Observer 165). Behar believes that accessible writing is more than just the acquisition of this greater academic knowledge in her field. It is a way to access a “large audience” that can-


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not be reached through “jargon-laden analyses” (“Dare We Say I” B2). It is also a way for this “large” and diverse audience to connect with the writer. She echoes the words of essay predecessors in this book when she says that accessible personal writing works “to engage both the reader’s heart and intellect” (B2). The personal academic essay thus produces an intellectual dialogue of identification. However, in the quest to access a “large” audience, Behar confronts the problem of ostracizing those she observes in her ethnographic research. In Translated Women, Behar uses English to translate Esperanza’s words, so she can make the book more accessible to a wider academic audience. Unfortunately, the translated words make Esperanza’s personal story as well as Behar’s personal essay inaccessible to Esperanza’s Mexican community as well as Esperanza. In a predominantly English-speaking academic setting, Latino/a academics studying their familiar Spanish language environments must face the dilemma of translating stories. Gloria Anzaldúa, in an interview, speaks about a similar dilemma she faces when she struggles with the use of Spanglish writing to reach her dominant audience: Say my goal is a liberatory goal: it’s to create possibilities for people, to look at things in a different way so that they can act in their daily lives in a different way. It’s like freeing up, an emancipating. It’s a feminist goal. But then I have to weigh things: okay, if I write in this style and I code-switch too much and I go into Spanglish too much and I do an associative kind of logical progression in a composition, am I going to lose those people that I want to affect, to change. (59)

Simultaneously, Latina academics such as Behar are well aware of what can be lost in accommodating yet educating this dominant audience. Esperanza, as the observed, refuses to accept the book partially because her story is told in English: “I already know my historia,” she says. “And besides, this is in English. My children can’t read it” (77). Behar is hurt by Esperanza’s words, but she understands Esperanza’s concerns about this English translation: “It pains me to pack the book away. But I understand that not accepting the book is my comadre’s way of refusing to be the translated woman” (77). Esperanza indicates that she will accept the book when it is written in her native language of Spanish. Behar reveals to her reading audience in Translated Woman that she can identify with what it is like to be a translated woman through her experiences of nonbelongingness in academia. For Latino/a academics like Behar, the quest for accessing a larger academic audience at the expense of translating the words of the disempowered is a difficult choice to make.

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Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay SPONTANEITY AND THE ESSAY: BEHAR’S GROWING RESISTANCE TO BECOMING A TRANSLATED ACADEMIC

“The Biography in the Shadow” chronicles Behar’s experiences in academia from her undergraduate years to the present. In a similar way to Villanueva’s Bootstraps, Behar’s essay represents a personal journey from academic mimicry to a more spontaneous form of thinking and writing that is in keeping with Latino/a cultures. Behar begins her academic journey in the late 1970s by attending the ivy league college of Weseylyn and majoring in the College of Letters. She chooses this major under the assumption that if she reads the “Great Books of the Western World Program,” she “would gain the tools to think great thoughts and write great books” (325). Her motivations for selecting such a program is not unlike other Latinos/as such as Renato Rosaldo, Richard Rodriguez, and Victor Villanuevea, who initially equated the study and mimicry of Western “great books” with their intellectual acceptance into academia. However, such a belief cannot be sustained when Latinos/as in the 1970s discovered that they were not a part of the “great books” shelf. The Latino/a academic mimic eventually realizes that there is little hope for reaching that shelf. As Behar approaches her comprehensive exam in the College of Letters, she decides not to devote time to studying the comps but instead directs a García Lorca play, The House of Bernada Alba. After taking the comps, she “received a ‘creditable,’ an ugly, borderline grade,” and she fulfills one of her professor’s prophesies that Behar “was not mentally suited to pursue Philosophy with a capital P” (327). Years later, Behar comes to the realization that this was an act of defiance: “By treating the great books, my passport into those other worlds I so desperately wanted to enter, as unimportant to me, I expressed my defiance” (329). Behar resembles past essayists in previous chapters who moved away from merely worshiping “great Western books” and instead sought out an education grounded in their cultures and interests. They needed, as essayists in search of American democracy, to move from the nondemocratic mimicry of “Western great books” to a more liberating and spontaneous study of the familiar. As I noted in the previous chapter, Freire strongly advocated that the disempowered study their cultures and conditions to help them move in the direction of democracy. For Latino/a academics like Behar and Villanueva, this realization helped gain their confidence to break away from traditional academic research and writing. With this sense of critical consciousness, Behar revisits her past academic life and draws another conclusion about her academic


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failures: “Maybe, just maybe, it was not a lack of ‘natural affinity’ or a deficient ‘mental nature’ that kept me from doing better in Philosophy with a capital P, but a sense of alienation at its cultural and linguistic otherness” (330). In her last year of college, Behar takes a course in anthropology and finds “an intellectual home” in a field that goes beyond “the little shelf of great books” (330). However, she follows the same detached writing track Villanueva did in graduate school and becomes an academic mimic: “In graduate school, I forced myself to learn to write coldblooded logical essays with a beginning, middle, and end; and I forced my flights of imagination in check, to learn to muzzle them to facts” (330–31). Like Villanueva, she becomes a star pupil with this writing form conversion. She experiences the same unhappiness he does with this rigid form that leaves her life at a distance from those she studies: When it came time to write my dissertation about the way of life and history of a small peasant village in northern Spain, I wrote an elegant exposition about the relationship between family inheritance and communal land tenure. There was no link between this topic and my life; it was pure intellectual exercise. (331)

This “intellectual exercise” that conforms to academic writing standards later becomes a book published by a prestigious university. The success with her dissertation gives her the confidence that she has made it in academia, but she wonders at what price to her personal identity (331). As her writing translates into another form to meet the standards of academic success, her personal identity is lost in translation. Both Villanueva and Behar came to realize after their graduate years that this detached form of academic mimicry worked to maintain their feelings of invisibility and nonbelongingness. These feelings were most acute during the crucial graduate years during the 1970s and 1980s when these working-class Latinos/Latinas entered the culture shock of academia. The testimonies about their struggles with mechanistic forms of writing and research follow the pattern of their essay predecessors from Montaigne to Freire who also criticized a restricted form of education that left little room for spontaneity. As I have shown in previous chapters, academic personal essayists seem bound through the use of this form to defend it and criticize those who stand in their way of using it. As Villanueva and Behar demonstrate, the defense entails more than a defense of the form. It is also a defense for revealing their identities among academics who barely know who they are. Latino/a academics like Villanueva and Behar desire an equal chance at “essaying to be” in an academic world.

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In 1991, Behar publishes an essay—“Death and Memory: From Santa María del Monte to Miami Beach”—that seeks to reclaim her personal writing about the Spanish village she studied for her dissertation. The essay chronicles her return to this diminishing Spanish village in 1987. The essay focuses on the changing customs of funeral rituals as well as her preoccupation about her grandfather’s, Zayde’s, deteriorating state from cancer in Miami Beach. Instead of merely reading about these Spanish rituals, Behar allows readers a window into the Jewish rituals of death and mourning that influence her observations: “This essay tells two stories. It is a lament about death, loss, and grief, inscribing my mourning, a double mourning, as an anthropologist and a granddaughter” (The Vulnerable Observer 81). Through her essay, readers can spontaneously move between these two cultures to assess the thoughts from both the observer and observed. Readers learn that Behar gravitates toward the death of memory in Santa María because of her grandfather who is dying a continent away: In the course of these movements and shifts of perspective, the boundary between social realms that are purely personal and those that are part of ethnographic fieldwork became blurred. My grandfather was subjected to my anthropological gaze while I was drawn close personally to the people of Santa María. (82)

When the personal enters the ethnographic, a spontaneous movement and shift occurs in the writing and the once believed distinct boundaries between the observer and observed considerably diminish. Both the observer and observed are part of the ethnography and the personal essay. By blending her personal essay into her observations at Santa María, Behar realizes what was forgotten in the “intellectual exercise” that later became her dissertation and subsequent book published by Princeton University Press. The “cold-blooded, logical writing” that prevented the entrance of Behar’s personal spontaneity created an incomplete ethnography that left the observer feeling incomplete as well. Behar’s personal essay “Death and Memory” represents her attempt to retrieve the incomplete ethnographer who was lost in a translated writing form many years ago. BEHAR’S USE OF SINCERE WRITING TO UNCOVER HER TRUTH AS AN ETHNOGRAPHER

As I pointed out in other chapters, the essay’s element of sincerity plays a crucial role in establishing the reader’s trust with the writer. Latino/a academics like Villanueva and Behar who seek acceptance in academia


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under their own identity terms must use the element of sincerity to reach that distant audience. With this sincere element, both of these Latina/o scholars use truthful words that may not flatter their audience or themselves, but the honesty establishes a connection with the reader. As a Latina ethnographer, Behar presents herself as a vulnerable observer whose subjectivities taint her observations. In “Death and Memory,” she reveals how her precarious cultural identities lead her to identify with various generations of Spaniards in the village of Santa María. Behar sincerely tells readers that her primary focus on the aging peasant villagers of Santa María mirrors her infatuation with the rural lives of her grandparents in Cuba. She candidly admits that she paid scant attention to the generation of villagers who migrated to the city because they reminded her of her parents’ stories of immigration from Cuba to the United States (79). The villagers’ disdain for new materialism reminds her of a similar disdain her dying grandfather had for capitalistic ways that he saw his family accepting in the United States. Behar goes on to skeptically scrutinize whether this infatuation stems from her romantic perspective of a distant Old World. Did she see these elderly villagers and grandfather as her link to a distant Cuban life that never belonged to her as a Cuban exile? By admitting to this uncritical nostalgia as an observer, she sincerely shows readers the vulnerability of a Latina anthropologist who studies a culture similar to her family’s experiences. However, as she discloses, it is more than nostalgia but also an admission of emotional loss for a dying village and dying grandfather. Jill Dubisch, a commentator on an earlier version of “Death and Memory,” empathizes with Behar rather than criticizing her vulnerability: It is a deeply felt tragedy for us as anthropologists when those communities as we have known them cease to exist, not because we lose our subject matter (we don’t), but because we fear the total loss of that rooted and continuous and meaningful life which we had sought outside our own. That may be why we feel these changes as more tragic than the villagers do. For you this sense was heightened by the parallel loss of your grandfather and all that he represented. (83)

Behar succeeds in reaching fellow non-Latina academics who can identify with the personal attachment that comes when they study communities. Through her sincerity, readers begin to identify with their own remembrances of losses and are now more capable of listening to a Latina Jew speak about the complexities of her cultural and family heritage. With this connected identification, Behar achieves a sense of belongingness in academia. To work toward a sense of belongingness in academia (especially in the humanities), Latinas/os need to sincerely

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write about the personal challenges they face in their field of study. Behar and Villanueva are just two examples of Latino/a academics who have come to this realization. They represent two prominent Latina/o academics who will pave the personal path of the essay for those who follow after them. Yet, as I’ve shown throughout this book, there are many other past essayists from different time periods and geographic locations who also strove to legitimate the personal essay in scholarship. Personal academic essayists like myself owe them a debt of gratitude as well. As Behar concludes in “Dare We Say I,” personal academic essayists, “after years of being taught to construct arguments in an impersonal, detached voice,” will inevitably make mistakes (B2). Like any form of writing, it takes training and practice. She has hope that the future generation of students will continue with personal scholarship and criticize their predecessors: “The next generation of students, having read and criticized our first faltering efforts at writing ourselves back into our scholarship, will do better” (B2). As part of that next generation of scholars, I feel a deep sense of obligation to continue to research and practice the personal essay. These personal essayists have clearly shown me the personal essay’s importance to my nation’s quest for democracy and the instrumental role academia must play in fulfilling these democratic goals. They have paved the way for me to “essay to be” in both my personal and professional life.

CHAPTER SIX

Conclusion

From what I discovered in my research, essay scholars in the humanities primarily focus on traditional Western European and U.S. essayists. The purpose of this book is to show what is lost in essay scholarship (especially for U.S. scholars) when Latin American and Latino/a’s ways of personal writing are not part of these studies. As a writer of mixed Latin American, U.S., and European ancestry, my purpose was also a personal one in which I hoped to demonstrate the commonalities and differences that these personal essayists have as they strove to bring more democratic elements to academia. Given my lived experiences with these various cultures, I believe that someone like myself is well suited to make these connections and to demonstrate to others the benefits of a more inclusive perspective on essay scholarship. Like Ruth Behar, who turns to the personal essay as a way to alleviate her cultural displacement, I also devoted my scholarly efforts to reconciling these personal worlds through this book. In many ways, this was a therapeutic undertaking. In my readings and writings as a personal essay scholar, I tried to identify certain elements that I thought would embody an essay form that many scholars claim to be democratic. Self-reflection and a skeptical nature appeared to be an element that might lead to democracy. In a democracy, citizens should be able to question established truths and use their experiences in this skeptical process. Self-reflection not only allows writers to question others but to question their own line of thinking as well. I also discovered countless essay scholars (as I mentioned in the introduction) who wrote about the elements of self-reflection and skepticism in the personal essay.

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A democratic society should also be accessible to the people. As Ruth Behar claims in her discussions of the personal essay, those who practice a democratic personal form would work against inaccessible writing that was understood only by an elite few. A democratic personal essayist would also want to provide a window into the life of the writer to promote accessibility. The life behind the writing is important in a democratic society which professes not to hide information from others. The freedom to be spontaneous without the constraints of rigidity, whether it be in writing or in society, seems to hold democratic value as well. As I pointed out in this book, rigidity hinders the process of questioning and exploration so vital to a democratic society. Spontaneity in academic writing is a necessary element to fluctuate from the lived experiences of the writer to his or her scholarship. Early essay scholars from Montaigne to more contemporary essay scholars like Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar claim that traditional forms of academic writing leave little room for this type of exploration. As these contemporary scholars claim, it also goes against the history of their cultures’ writings that emphasized the essay form and personal discourse. The final element of the essay that is absolutely vital for democracy is sincerity. If essayists do not sincerely attempt to adhere to their theories and practices through their lived experiences, then they are not part of a democratic vision. Corruption and deceit have no place in a democratic world and so essayists must strive to tell the truth about their experiences. They must present themselves as sincere and humble individuals in their personal writings if they are to be believed by their readers. Personal essayists such as Montaigne, Thoreau, Freire, Villanueva, and Behar succeed in reaching their audiences through that important element of this form. Because these elements tie to democracy, I was compelled as a researcher and writer to study the historical, political, and cultural backgrounds of these essayists rather than merely studying their aesthetic writing qualities. I wanted those within English Studies to acknowledge the importance of studying the form of the essay as well as its deep historical, political, and cultural significance to our world. Within English studies, we must study Latin American and Latino/a essay scholarship to help us achieve this balance. As a personal essay scholar in search of connections between different time periods and geographic locations, the selection of who I studied was not randomly made. Many of the essay scholars that I chose were quite knowledgeable of other essayists discussed in this book. I wanted to focus on these threads of communal knowledge about the essay passed down from Europe and then appropriated by U.S. and

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Latin American scholars. In my study of Montaigne, I focused on his connections with ancient philosophers like Pyronnian Skeptics, Plutarch, and Seneca. As an old-world essayist, Montaigne used this form to explore a Renaissance world of questionable established truths. The ways and beliefs of the Old World were no longer the center of humankind, and Montaigne needed a skeptical and exploratory writing form that would meet with a European world filled with new discoveries. Montaigne, as a personal essay scholar, criticized those gatekeepers of knowledge (scholars) for using a writing style that did not meet with their changing world. Although he was not necessarily a personal essayist, I saw it as important to also discuss Francis Bacon as someone who read and disagreed with Montaigne’s writing style and philosophies. I wanted to make the distinction between those who used the essay as “wandering inquirers” and those who used it as “severe inquisitors.” Within Montaigne and Bacon, I saw a difference between those who viewed the essay as a skeptical form to suspend judgment and those who viewed the essay as a call to action. As I crossed over to the United States, I selected Emerson as an essayist who was inspired by Montaigne and Plutarch yet who could not follow (because of differences between Europe and the United States) the same purpose for the essay. Unlike Europeans like Montaigne who regarded themselves as the center of power and privilege, Emerson’s America was fraught with New World insecurities as a developing nation. Emerson felt a responsibility to be more than just a wandering inquirer. I demonstrated how the essay’s purpose shifted on American soil as Emerson and Thoreau used this form to build the confidence of a new nation grounded in democratic elements. I selected Emerson and Thoreau to show the differences in how U.S. essayists used this form to promote their ideals of democracy. Emerson encouraged U.S. leaders to critique representative men within Europe for self-development, while in contrast, Thoreau, through his personal essays, deeply criticized those Europeans embedded in corruption and bureaucracies. Instead, he discovered his inspiration among his fellow Americans. Like Montaigne, they also criticized the scholars in their country who relied too heavily on imitation rather than discovery. Both Emerson and Thoreau also emphasized the necessity of bringing lived experiences into scholarship. When I moved to Latin America with its rich history of the essay, I found this form was once again used for nation-building purposes that worked to breed confidence in these developing countries. Some believed as Emerson did and relied more on Europe for inspiration. Others followed Thoreau’s belief in the necessity of discovering inspiration from those within their own soils who would create positive authentic

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histories. Paulo Freire represents one such figure who encouraged Latin Americans (especially the dispossessed) to value their histories and cultures as a way to combat an elitism that served to undermine democracy. Freire, in his personal essays and other works, revealed that this elitism was also found in our educational institutions that encouraged memorization and imitation rather than critical consciousness and liberatory learning. The dispossessed and students in the classroom could not critique their world in relation to their lived experiences through a process of memorization and imitation. Scholars have a responsibility as well to be true to liberatory learning by allowing others access to their personal lives. I finally focused on how two contemporary personal Latino/a essayists, Victor Villanueva and Ruth Behar, sought to democratize the academy by revealing the inequities they faced as academics. As academics who felt ostracized from a primarily Anglo American scholarly world, they needed a writing form that would reveal their personal historical and cultural identities. They represented Latino/a scholars who were harmed by a traditional academic writing style without an outlet for personal writing. Their strong advocation for the inclusion of personal academic discourse helped others see the vital role the personal essay plays in creating a more democratic environment for minority scholars. For myself, I pledge to continue to uphold my support for the personal academic essay in my scholarship and teaching. I am a firm believer that those who are committed to using the democratic elements of personal writing will improve the humanity of English Studies. I look forward to the day when we can all work in a more democratic environment. I finally look forward to the day when scholars and teachers realize that the personal essay had a part in creating a more tolerant academic world.

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INDEX

Abolition, 44–45, 61 Academia: achieving a place in, 103–132; difficulty with writings of Freire in, 75; failure of accessibility in writing, 114; gaining acceptance in, 13, 111; injustices in, 105; institutionalization of, 55; lack of democratic personal discourse in, 113; necessity for venturing outside of, 55; rights to belonging in, 110 Academics, Latino/a, 103–132; academic legitimacy for, 106; acceptance in academia, 117–122; affirmative action and, 104–105; degrees awarded, 109–110; education of readership on personal experiences, 117–122; as “exceptions,” 109–110; perceptions of oppression by, 104; racism and, 104; regarded as foreigners, 104; tenure and, 104; tokenism and, 104, 112, 113; “typecasting syndrome” and, 104 Accessibility, 65; academic use of, 7–8; in Behar, 124–127; gaining respect and, 13; as guide to students, 8; knowledge of books and lived experience in, 58; in personal essays, 16; purposes of, 46; in

shaping of democratic system, 42; Thoreau and, 67, 68; in Villanueva, 108–114; of writing, 67, 68; in writings of Freire, 86–92 Achebe, Chinua, 40 Action: affirmative, 104–105; men of, 56, 59; personal moral aspects of, 38; political, 10, 12; rhetoric of, 36 Activism, 74 Addison, Joseph, 2, 10 Adorno, T.W., 3, 6, 10, 58 Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon), 34, 36 Agrarianism, 62, 63 Albee, John, 59 Alcott, Bronson, 45, 46, 53 America(n): community of “Western European,” 53; educational movement in, 42; formation of democracy in, 39–69; independence from Western Europe, 53; intellectualism, 73; scholarly development in, 67; search for community, 53 American Revolution, 49 “American Scholar, The” (Emerson), 11, 44, 52–58, 58, 59, 75, 85, 91 Anaxagoras, 26 Anderson, Chris, 3, 10, 11, 38, 58

149

150

Index

Angelou, Maya, 15 Antisystematization, 7 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 1, 16, 87–88, 127 Apathy, 32 Arguedas, Alcides, 73 Arnold, Matthew, 2 Aronowitz, Stanley, 76, 78 Assaying the writer, 88 Assimilation, 119, 123 Atkins, G. Douglas, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 33, 107 Atwan, Robert, 11, 43 Authenticity: in addressing injustice, 9; Freire and, 9, 98–102; search for, 98; through self-awareness, 99; Villaneuva and, 9 Authority: maintaining, 34 Autobiography, 61; ethnic groups and, 15; fiction mix, 8–9; Latin American, 80; nontraditional writers and, 15; overlap with essays, 15; personal essay as, 13 Bacon, Anthony, 34 Bacon, Francis, 2, 48, 57; The Advancement of Learning, 34, 36; antisystematic form of essay by, 39; criticism of imitation, 37; Essays, 35; essays’s use for political action and, 10, 34–38; impact of Renaissance on, 16; interest in less personal form of essay, 35, 38; Novum Organum, 38; “Of Truth,” 35; plain style of, 1; political differences with Montaigne, 37; practicality in writing by, 35; privacy and, 33; Pyronnian Skepticism and, 37; references to Montaigne, 34, 35; use of essay form, 10 Bahktin, M.M., 7 Baldwin, James, 15–16 “Bean-Field, The” (Thoreau), 64 Behar, Ruth, 5, 12–13, 133, 134, 136; accessibility and, 124–127; “The Biography in the Shadow,”

128; Bridges to Cuba, 122; “Dare We Say I,” 105, 127, 132; “Death and Memory: From Santa María del Monte to Miami Beach,” 130, 131; ethnographic identity and, 124–127, 130–132; “Juban Arica,” 122; “No Returns,” 122; personal essay scholarship of, 8, 105, 122–132; The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, 122; resistance to being a translated academic, 128–132; rise to academic prominence, 122–124; selfreflexivity and, 124–127; sincerity in writing, 130–132; spontaneity and, 128–132; “The Story of Ruth the Anthropologist,” 122; Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, 122, 127; The Vulnerable Observer, 122, 123, 125, 126, 130; Women Writing Culture, 122; “Writing in My Father’s Name,” 124, 125 Being: moments of, 6 Belief: institutionalized, 44 Bello, Andres, 72 Bereiter, Carl, 112, 113 Berlin, James, 2 Berry, Edmund, 49, 50 Berthoff, Ann, 86 Bhabha, Homi, 88 Bickman, Martin, 53, 54 Biography, 27, 28 “Biography in the Shadow, The” (Behar), 128 Bishop, Wendy, 107 Bloom, Lynn, 107 Bolivar, Simon, 72 Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color (Villanueva), 13, 105, 106–114 Border Pedagogy, 87 Bosco, Ronald, 44, 49 Bowyer, John, 49 Bridges to Cuba (Behar), 122

Index Briggs, Charles Frederick, 67 Brody, Jules, 23 Brooke Farm, 44 Brooks, John, 49 Brown, John, 45 Brutus (Plutarch), 27 Bunge, Carlos Octavio, 73 Burkholder, Robert, 53 Butrym, Alexandra, 6 Calvinism, 19–20 Carlyle, Thomas, 46, 49, 53 CCCC. See Conference on College Composition and Communication Channing, William Ellery, 43, 45 Chávez Chávez, Rudolpho, 103 Child, Lydia Maria, 67 Chittenden, Jean, 80 Cicerionianism, 20 Cicero, 16, 18, 21, 22, 28, 57; ideal of whole man, 18; impact on career training, 19; influence on education, 19 “Circles” (Emerson), 56, 57 “Civil Disobedience” (Thoreau), 42, 60 Clapp, Edwin, 55 Class, 87; lower, 97; popular, 89; struggle, 79; upper, 97; working, 89, 109, 110 Classicism, 41 Clifford, James, 41 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 44, 53 Colonization, 40 Commercialism, 63 Conference on College Composition and Communication, 106, 107 Consciousness: collective, 7, 16; critical, 93, 104, 128 “Consideration upon Cicero, A” (Montaigne), 21, 22 Consolation to Helvia (Seneca), 30 Constructionism: social, 2 Contreras, A. Reynaldo, 104 Copleston, Frederick, 25, 34 Creef, Elena, 5

151

Croll, Morris, 19 Cruz, Dulce, 104 Cruz, Sor Juana Ines de Latin America, 73, 81 Cultural: displacement, 124, 125, 133; experiences, 118; history, 71; identity, 4, 72, 120, 131; marginalization, 8, 124; nationalism, 61–62; roots, 105; theory, 2; traditions, 74 Culture: Anglo Saxon, 49; engagement with, 5; imitation of, 41; Latin American essays and, 4; Latino/a, 13, 73; national, 55; oral, 112; pride in, 119; respect for others,’ 41 Curiosity: epistemological, 94, 95; spontaneity of, 93–94 Cuvier, George, 44 “Dare We Say I” (Behar), 105, 127, 132 “Death and Memory: From Santa María del Monte to Miami Beach” (Behar), 130, 131 Deconstructionism, 7 Deer, Irving, 113 Demades, 33 Democracy: cultural influences on, 41; fear of, 49; Jacksonian, 62; Jeffersonian, 63; Latin American, 74; Latin American essays and, 12; quest for, 12; Thoreau and, 11; of writing forms, 62 Deocritius, 26 Dewey, John, 45, 53, 54 Didion, Joan, 8 Dillard, Annie, 8 Discourse: academic, 82, 105; dominating, 90; encouragement of selfreflexivity in, 82; historical, 80; interpreting, 25; personal, 108, 113; philosophical, 25; popular written, 18; rhetorical, 16, 25, 42; for social and political reform, 72; on spontaneity, 93; traditional, 105

152

Index

“Discourse for Training Children, A” (Plutarch), 51 “Divinity School Address, The” (Emerson), 51 Douglass, Fredrick, 61 Duval, E.M., 3, 18, 21, 22 Earle, Peter, 72 Education: banking method, 81, 84, 85, 87, 90, 115; Bilingual, 104; circles of learning in, 57; criticism of, 83; departmental specialization in, 3, 5; Emerson and, 44, 51–58; emphasis on recitation, 17, 83; excessive testing in, 8; for the future, 91; implications of, 52; interdisciplinary, 3, 56; liberatory, 75, 86; literacy and, 76; mechanized learning and, 83, 84, 85; memorization of material in, 83; moments of silence in, 85; within nature, 85; need for use of primary sources in, 87, 88; neglect within, 55; neutralizing approach in, 85; noninstitutional, 75; observation of life in, 58; oppressed groups and, 83, 84; reconceptualization of, 53; reform, 44, 53; Renaissance, 21; secondary sources in, 87; self, 108; self-reflective complaints about, 85; traditional, 52, 90; use of great books as inspiration in, 57 “Education” (Emerson), 51 Eisely, Loren, 8 Elbow, Peter, 107 “El hombre mediocre” (Ingenieros), 73 Eliot, Charles, 45 Eliot, George, 65–66 Elitism, 12, 46; intellectual, 73; Western European, 16 Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 35 Emerson, Ellen Tucker, 43 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 3, 43–58, 135; on academic mimicry, 115; admiration of Montaigne, 45, 46;

“The American Scholar,” 11, 44, 52–58, 75, 85, 91; autobiographical reflections of, 51; biographical background, 43–45; “Circles,” 56, 57; concept of hero worship, 49; desire to be American hero, 50; “The Divinity School Address,” 51; “Education,” 51; on education, 44, 51–58, 85; English Traits, 45; “Experience,” 45, 58, 59; formation of democratic society and, 41; hero worship and, 50, 51; impact on education reform, 54; influence of Montaigne on, 43; influence of Plutarch on, 45; lectures of, 44; “man thinking,” 54, 57; “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” 45, 46, 47, 51; multiple use of essay form, 43; “The Naturalist,” 44; “Nature,” 44, 58; on nature, 56; “Of Books,” 51; “On the Education of Children,” 51; “Plutarch,” 45; on readers, 58; rejection of formal religion, 43, 44; rejection of traditional rhetoric, 43; relations with Thoreau, 46, 59; Representative Men, 48, 50; risk-taking by, 43; “The Scholar,” 51; search for representative men as models, 48, 51; “soul active” of, 58; “Universities,” 51; use of essay form by, 11; “The Uses of Natural History,” 44 Empowerment: of disenfranchised, 42 English Traits (Emerson), 45 Engster, Dan, 24 Environment: academic, 109, 124; natural, 52, 56; oppressive, 80 Erasmus, 20 Essay, personal: abhorrence of mimicry in, 115; accessibility in, 6, 8, 16; as antigenre form, 6; as autobiographical work, 13; Bacon and, 10; of Behar, 105, 122–132; as cultural critique, 9; cultural issues

Index and, 5; disclosures in, 13; expression of oppression in, 5; freedom of expression in, 6; function of, 5; increasing significance of, 42; of Latin American women, 73; marginalization of, 107; Montaigne and, 10, 62; political contexts of, 2, 3, 5, 34–38, 42; as radical form of writing, 2, 3, 66; rhetorical value of, 42; rhetoric of sincerity in, 6, 16; self-reflexivity in, 6, 16, 133; social contexts of, 2; spontaneity in, 6, 16; theoretical implications of, 67; Thoreau and, 59–60; topical, 62; use by Latino/a academics, 104; of Villanueva, 105 Essays: accessibility in, 111; as access to great leaders, 49; active form of, 2; on American democratic identity, 39–69; authenticity in, 9; conservatism of, 16; contradictory skeptical nature of, 34; conversational form, 46; critiques of, 1; as cultural history, 71; defining, 5–8, 51; as democratic tool, 42; derivation from Western European influence, 16; differing emphases on, 4; dissuasion from use of, 1; education and, 51–58; finding the truth through, 30; flexibility and, 54; formation of national identity and, 51–58; as form that allows questioning, 78; free form of, 17; gaps in scholarship, 4; genre boundaries and, 3; German influence on, 3; historical/theoretical aspects of, 2; historical use as self-indulgent endeavor, 1; as imitation of conversation, 30; institutional practices, 1; as intellectual history, 71; jargon and, 8, 87; marginalization of, 6; nation-building role of, 12; nonpersonal form of, 38; nontraditional use of, 3; offering of denied opportunity in, 8; overlap

153

with autobiography, 15; persuasion and, 65; as political tool, 42; as process of becoming, 78, 79; radical, 74; self-reflexivity in, 81–86; separation from traditional writing, 10; significance of Walden to, 65–69; skepticism in, 48; specialization and, 3; spontaneity in, 134; study of form in, 4; textual practices, 1; thesis/support form of, 2; transformation and, 2, 42; use by nontraditional essayists, 15, 16; use of plain language in, 8; versatility of, 125; Western European tradition in, 3, 10, 16 Essays, Latin American, 4; achieving self-awareness and, 79; addressing national audience with, 72; authenticity and, 79; cultural influences on, 9; culture and, 4; element of persuasion in, 97; evolution of, 72; French literary influence on, 72; fulfilling destiny of authenticity in, 99; historical influences on, 4, 9; influence of Montaigne on, 72; nation-building role of, 12, 71, 72, 73; as political/cultural critique, 4, 11–12, 71–102; problematizing the status quo in, 81; sincerity in, 96–102; spontaneity in, 12, 92–95; study of form in, 4; transformation of conditions of poor and, 74; truthfulness in, 96–102; by women, 4, 73 Essays (Bacon), 35 Essays (Montaigne), 16, 33, 77 Essay to be, 53, 54 Ethics, 49 Ethnography, 41, 122, 130–132 “Experience” (Emerson), 45, 58, 59 Experience(s): academic, 103; accessible, 86; childhood, 82; of common man, 85, 114; contradictions of, 26, 42; conveying, 24; cultural, 118; documenting truth of, 96;

154

Index

Experience(s) (continued) educational, 52; empirical, 1; illusion of order in, 24; learning as, 81; lived, 32, 52, 58, 82, 85, 86, 88, 103, 107, 116; oral, 89; over knowledge, 28; personal, 111; scholarship and, 52; sense, 25; sharing, 99; teaching as, 81 Expressivism: attacks on, 2 Farrell, Thomas, 112 Flexibility, 54 Ford, Henry, 59 Frame, Donald, 17, 22, 34 Frank, Gelya, 122 Frank, Waldo David, 9, 79, 98, 99 Freire, Ana, 82, 84, 86 Freire, Paulo, 11–12, 74, 103, 126, 134, 136; on academic mimicry, 115; academic neglect of, 76–79; accessible writing and, 86–92; activism of, 12; authenticity and, 9, 98–102; critique of societal ills by, 12; death of, 75; democratic change and, 12; educational criticism by, 86–92; emancipatory knowledge and, 77; exile of, 75; as father of liberatory education, 75; feminism and, 76–77; influence on Latino/a academics, 103; Letters to Cristina , 80, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 94, 97, 101; as mentor, 76; need to reach many audiences, 86–92; pedagogical resistance of, 75; Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 88, 89, 91, 97, 100, 101; Pedagogy of the Heart, 82, 85, 87, 88; Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 76, 77, 78, 84, 90, 99; place in Latin American history, 79–81; risks taken by, 75; self-reflexivity in essays of, 81–86; service to oppressed populations, 12; sincerity in writings, 96–102; social pedagogy of, 81; social transforma-

tion and, 82; as spokesperson for dispossessed, 74; spontaneity and, 92–95; theories of self-transformation of, 82; truthfulness in writing, 96–102 French Revolution, 30, 31, 49 French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 49 Freyre, Gilberto, 92 Friedrich, Hugo, 17 Fuller, Margaret, 46 Fumaroli, Marc, 19 Galarza, Ernesto, 15 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 8 Garver, Eugene, 35, 38 Gass, William, 3, 10, 11, 43, 48, 50, 51, 53, 58, 78 Geertz, Clifford, 125 Genres: boundaries of, 3, 62; mixing, 61, 69, 71 Ghandi, Mohandas, 42, 60 Gilmore, Michael, 63, 64 Gilyard, Keith, 121 Giroux, Henry, 76, 87 Glantz, Margo, 79 Goetz, Rainer, 81, 96 Good, Graham, 3 Gorgias, 116 Gougeon, Len, 60 Graff, Gerald, 76 Grant, Michael, 18 Greeley, Horace, 66, 67 Gross, Robert, 63, 64 Haefner, Joel, 1, 10, 16 Halcon, John, 104 Hall, Michael, 23, 24 Hamlin, William, 40, 41 Harding, Walter, 62 Hartman, Gary, 7, 33 Hawthorn, Nathaniel, 44 Heckler, Edward, 120 Heidegger, Martin, 98 Heilker, Paul, 1, 2, 12, 107 Heitsch, Dorothea, 23, 29 Hero worship, 49, 50

Index Hesford, Wendy, 7 Hesse, Douglas, 1 Hierarchies: destabilization of, 3; dismantling of, 10; institutional, 1; patriarchal, 1 Hoffman, George, 18, 23, 31, 77 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 53 Hong-Kingston, Maxine, 8, 15 hooks, bell, 9, 16, 75, 76, 82, 84, 103 Hovey, Kenneth, 27, 37, 38 Hoy, Pat, 8 Hurston, Zora Neale, 8 Idealism, 49 “Ideas, Historias, Cuentos: Breaking with Precedent” (Villanueva), 107 Identity: academic, 104; American, 11, 48, 51–58, 61; authentic, 119; collective, 6, 72; cultural, 4, 72, 120, 131; defining, 72; democratic, 64; educational, 52; ethnographic, 124–127, 130–132; mixed, 5; multiethnic, 5; multifaceted, 124; national, 41, 42, 51–58, 71, 72, 74, 78; national scholarly, 11; personal, 6, 53, 80, 81, 105; pressure to choose, 5; search for, 52; social, 80, 81 Individualism, 41, 52, 59, 61 Industrialism, 62 Ingenieros, Jose, 73 Intellectualism, 73, 87, 88; European, 74; rebellion against, 74 Interdisciplinary studies, 3, 56, 57 Jargon, 8, 87 Jaspers, Karl, 98 Jeanneret, Michel, 16, 20, 21 Jefferson, Thomas, 56 Jensen, Arthur, 112 Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher, 3, 16, 118 Johnson, Linck, 61, 62 Jones, Howard Mumford, 55 “Juban Arica” (Behar), 122

155

Judgment: questioning, 48; suspension of, 48, 93 Jürgensen, Beth, 79 Kahn, Victoria, 25 Kamler, Barbara, 7 Kaplan, Robert, 116 Kazin, Alfred, 11 Khare, R.S., 40 Kiernan, Michael, 35 King, Martin Luther, 42, 60 Kitchen, G.W. Klaus, Carl, 3, 10, 11, 107 Knowledge: of academia, 91; of books, 58; of communities, 91; emancipatory, 77; experience over, 28; human, 26, 30; limits of, 30; over character, 38; production of, 83; recipient of other’s, 85; scholarly, 25; as virtue, 27; of the world, 91 La Boétie, Etienne de, 22, 23, 45, 46 Labov, William, 112 Lamarck, Antoine, 44 Language: academic, 24; accessible, 20; creating meaning through, 25; creative, 112; foreign, 104; inaccessible, 89; Latin, 20; mastery of, 18; overaffective, 87, 88; plain, 8, 29, 46; play of, 7; of the poor, 100; popular, 29, 89, 100; school/home, 112; sexist, 77; traditional, 24; vernacular, 19–20 Latin America: class struggle in, 79; democracy in, 74; distinction from Spain, 80–81; essay as political/cultural critique in, 11–12, 71–102; historical discourse in, 80; literary history in, 72; noblesse oblige in, 73; political history in, 94; political turmoil in, 79, 85; reliance on essays in, 72; reliance on European influence in, 73; repressive regimes in, 74; role of essay scholarship in, 78; as sick

156

Index

Latin America (continued) continent, 73; societal maladies in, 85; spontaneity and, 12 Latino/a: assimilation, 119; culture, 13; impact on rhetorical and writing patterns, 117; research mistakes concerning, 112; writing, 12–13 Lawrence, Cecile Ann, 5 Leonard, Peter, 76 Letters and Epistles (Seneca), 28 Letters to Cristina (Freire), 80, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 94, 97, 101 Levy, F.J. Lives and Moralia (Plutarch), 49 Locke, John, 1, 2, 57 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 55 Lopate, Phillip, 3, 15 Lorde, Audre, 16 Losse, Deborah, 40 Louppes, Antoinette de, 17 Lukacs, Georg, 3, 6, 64 Lunsford, Andrea, 88 Luther, Martin, 50 Macedo, Donald, 76, 77, 84, 87, 88 MacLaine, Shirley, 126 McLaren, Peter, 75, 76, 77, 82, 86 Malcolm X, 15 Mann, Horace, 45, 53 Marius, Richard, 107 Martínez Alemán, Ana, 105 Marx, Leo, 55 “Master of Arts” (Montaigne), 20–21 Materialism, 51, 95 Mayo, Peter, 76 Mead, David, 55 Medievalism, 24 Meyer, Doris, 4, 72, 79, 81, 99 Michelangelo, 50 Militarism, 74 Milton, John, 50 Mindiola, Tatcho, 104 Mittman, Elizabeth, 3, 118 Modernism, 6 Molloy, Sylvia, 80

Moneyhun, Clyde, 110, 119 Montaigne, Michel de, 2, 6, 54, 134, 135; on academic mimicry, 115; anti-Ciceronian essays of, 20, 22, 23; antisystematic form of essay by, 39; on artificial systematized writing forms, 7, 28, 29; biographical information, 17–18; “A Consideration upon Cicero,” 21, 22; on control of destiny, 24; conversational writing form of, 23; criticism of European cultural ways, 40; criticism of imitation, 37; death and, 31; departure from traditional writing, 18–34; on education, 85; education and training, 19; emphasis on creating “good history,” 30; ethnography and, 41; as father of the essay, 10; flexibility in essay exploration, 18; historical influences on, 23–24; impact of Renaissance on, 16; influence on Latin American essay, 72; interest in science, 24, 25; “Master of Arts,” 20–21; on the New World, 39–40; on nobility of human beings, 40; “Of Books,” 28; “Of Cannibals,” 61; “Of Coaches,” 61; “Of Experience,” 24; “Of Friendship,” 21, 22; “Of Husbanding Your Will,” 31; “Of Pedantry” and, 17; “Of the Education of Children” and, 17, 83; “On Duties,” 20; Plutarch and, 10, 26, 27, 28; political differences with Bacon, 37; pursuit of truth by, 32–33; Pyronnian Skepticism and, 10, 25, 33, 37, 93; rebellion against scholarly knowledge, 25; retirement from political life, 18, 19, 36; rewriting of original book, 77; ridicule of scholars by, 10; Seneca and, 10, 26; spontaneity of, 23; subversion of classical rhetoric by, 23; “To the Reader,” 29, 39, 96, 119; trav-

Index el journals, 41; use of classical figures by, 10; use of essay form, 10, 15–34; views of authority, 34 “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” (Emerson), 45, 46, 47, 51 Montaigne, Pierre Eyquem de, 17 Montano-Harmon, Maria, 117 Moraga, Cherrie, 5 Moral Essays (Plutarch), 28 Morality, 49; rhetoric of, 31; rightness of, 35; Stoic, 30, 32, 33 Mortality, 43 Moser, Patrick, 22 Mowitt, John, 16 Murphy, Richard, 107 Myerson, Joel, 65 “Naturalist, The” (Emerson), 44 Nature: God in, 43; as guide for future, 44; human mind and, 56; interconnectedness of, 57; involvement with, 68; man and, 56; man’s limitations in use of, 45; operation of, 44; science and, 44; understanding, 44 “Nature” (Emerson), 44, 58 Neilson, William Allan, 55 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 29 Noble savage, 40 Noblesse oblige, 73 “No Returns” (Behar), 122 Novum Organum (Bacon), 38 Obaldia, Claire de, 4 Ocampo, Victoria, 9, 79, 99 O’Donnell, Thomas, 1, 2 “Of Books” (Emerson), 51 “Of Books” (Montaigne), 28 “Of Cannibals” (Montaigne), 61 “Of Coaches” (Montaigne), 61 “Of Experience” (Montaigne), 24 “Of Friendship” (Montaigne), 21, 22 “Of Husbanding Your Will” (Montaigne), 31 “Of Pedantry” (Montaigne), 17

157

“Of the Education of Children” (Montaigne), 17, 83 “Of Truth” (Bacon), 35 O’Keefe, Richard, 46, 50 “On Duties” (Montaigne), 20 O’Neill, John, 18, 26, 33 “On the Education of Children” (Emerson), 51 Ortega y Gasett, José, 9, 79 Padilla, Raymond, 103, 104 Paradis, James, 24, 25 Parmenides, 26 Patai, Daphne, 7, 123 Paz, Octavio, 94 Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 88, 89, 91, 97, 100, 101 Pedagogy of the Heart (Freire), 82, 85, 87, 88 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 76, 77, 78, 84, 90, 99 Perera, Victor, 123 Peterson, Merrill, 56 Petruzzi, Anthony, 98 Pico, Gianfreancesco, 20 Plato, 27, 29, 50 Plutarch, 10, 16, 26, 27, 28, 32, 48, 49, 50, 54, 135 “Plutarch” (Emerson), 45 Political: action, 10, 12; activism, 60; applications of essays, 49; contexts of personal essays, 2, 3, 34–38; corruption, 34, 85, 96, 97; history, 28; independence, 72; indifference, 32; institutions, 34, 85; movements, 62, 64; philosophy, 19; rebellions, 94; reform, 72; rhetoric, 19; turmoil, 79, 85; use of essays, 10; writing, 19 Politics: becoming living examples of, 82; education for careers in, 35–36; investment in, 5; Latin American essays and, 4; Renaissance, 10; virtue and, 36 Poliziano, 20

158

Index

Positivism: scientific, 73 Postcolonialism, 87, 88 Postmodernism, 7 Powell, Colin, 126 Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, The (Behar), 122 Pyronnian Skepticism, 10, 16, 25, 33, 37, 38, 48, 92, 93, 135 Qualley, Donna, 7 Racism, institutional, 104 Regosin, Richard, 22 Reification, 64 Renaissance: Bacon and, 16; Cicero and, 18; education, 21; as era of translation, 19; Montaigne and, 16; popular written discourse in, 18 Representative Men (Emerson), 48, 50 Reyes, Alfonso, 73 Rhetoric: of action, 36; Ciceronian, 10, 62; classical, 23; deceitfulness of, 20, 97; discourse of, 42; expressivist, 2; inaccessibility to common people, 20; of labyrinths, 36; Latin, 20; as manipulative tool, 19; of morality, 31; political, 19; scholastic, 23; styles, 114; theory of, 2; of truthfulness, 68 Rhetoric of sincerity, 65; in Behar, 130–132; in Freire, 96–102; of nontraditional writers, 8–9; purposes of, 46; in shaping of democratic system, 42; Thoreau and, 68 Ripley, George, 44, 46 Rodo, Jose, 73 Rodriguez, Richard, 15, 119, 120, 128 Rojas, Lourdes, 72 Romanticism, 6, 11; American, 44; literary, 44; scientific, 44 Rosaldo, Renato, 128 Rose, Edward, 59 Rose, Mike, 8, 107 Rubinstein, Annette, 59, 62

Sa’Adeddin, 116 Sabato, Ernesto, 94 Sanchez, Raul, 118 Scaliger, Joseph Justice, 23 Schneider, Richard, 60 “Scholar, The” (Emerson), 51 Science: comprehension of, 24; falsity of accepted truths in, 28; nature and, 44; traditional concepts of, 24 Scott-Kilvert, Ian, 27 Sealts, Merton, 53, 54 Self: actualization, 83; awareness, 79, 98; definition, 72; and other, 125; reformation of, 60; search for, 9; sufficiency, 65; transformation, 82; truth of, 33; unitary, 7 Selfhood: social nature of, 5 Self-reflexivity, 65, 133; in Behar, 124–127; critique of domination through, 84; egocentric use of, 7; in essays of Freire, 81–86; in Freire, 81–86; gaining respect and, 13; interdisciplinary, 57; in personal essays, 16; postmodern, 7; purposes of, 46; revising past in present in, 83; self-absorption and, 7; in shaping of democratic system, 42; in Thoreau, 67 Seneca, 10, 16, 26, 28, 30, 32, 48, 135 Shakespeare, William, 30 Shor, Ira, 76, 81 Sierra, Justo, 73 Silva, Tomaz Tadeu da, 77, 82 Sims, Gregory, 31, 32 Sincerity, 134; gaining respect and, 13; in personal essays, 16 Skepticism, 46, 47, 50, 51. See also Pyronnian Skepticism Slavery, 30, 61 Smith, Harmon, 58 Social: conscience, 81; constructionism, 2; contexts of personal essays, 2; identity, 80, 81; injustice, 41; institutions, 5; interaction, 56;

Index oppression, 5; pedagogy, 81; reform, 44, 60, 72, 82; theory, 76; transformation, 82; writing, 72, 73 Socolovsky, Maya, 123 Socrates, 48 Somers, Nancy, 107 Soyinka, Wole, 40 Spain, 116; distinction from Latin America, 80–81 Spivak, Gayatri, 88 Spontaneity, 65, 134; in Behar, 128–132; dangers of, 94; in Freire, 92–95; gaining respect and, 13; home/academia connections and, 7; of mixing genres, 69; in Montaigne, 23; in personal essays, 16; as positive democratic tool, 95; as problem in Latin American essays, 12; purposes of, 46; risktaking and, 6; in shaping of democratic system, 42; studies of, 6; as vehicle for exploration, 6; in Villanueva, 114–117; in writing, 26 Stabb, Martin, 4, 71, 72, 79, 98 Staten, Henry, 119 Sternbach, Nancy Saporta, 72 Stoicism, 30, 31, 32, 33; relationship to Christianity, 49 “Story of Ruth the Anthropologist, The” (Behar), 122 Tebeaux, Elizabeth, 47 Texts: locus of authority in, 1; neutral essay, 1 Theory: cognitive, 112; cultural, 2; leftist high, 86; postcolonial, 87; postmodern, 7; of reification, 64; rhetorical, 2; social, 76 Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 58–69, 134, 135; ability to interweave theory into practice, 67; abolition and, 61; on academic mimicry, 115; accessibility of writing by, 67, 68; on agrarianism, 62, 63; “The

159

Bean-Field,” 64; “Civil Disobedience,” 42; 60; on commercialism, 63; “common man” and, 42, 78, 114; on consumption with material, 64; criticism of education system, 75, 85; critique of capitalism, 63, 64; cultural nationalism of, 61–62; on democracy, 11; on education, 85; formation of democratic society and, 41; individuality of, 63, 66; justification of personal essays by, 11; literary nonconformity of, 62; on Old World nations, 60–61; personal essay and, 59–60; protest against inattention to scholarly development, 67; on reformers, 60; relations with Emerson, 46, 59; retreat by, 62; rhetoric of sincerity and, 68; self-reflexivity and, 67; significance of Walden to essay form, 65–69; on simplicity, 60, 61; spiritual potential of, 60; spontaneity of, 65–66; use of essay form, 11, 34–38, 65; Walden, 11, 58, 62–64, 95 Thwing, Charles, 55 Timpson, William, 82 Todorov, Tzevetan, 40 Tokenism, 104, 112, 113 Tolstoy, Leo, 42 Tompkins, Jane, 107 Torres, Carlos Alberto, 76, 79 “To the Reader” (Montaigne), 29, 39, 96, 119 Transcendentalism, 44, 45, 62, 65 Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Behar), 122, 127 Trimbur, John, 1, 16 Truth. See also Sincerity; absolute, 25, 57; accepted, 39, 78, 93; accessibility of, 90; contradiction of experiences and, 42; conveying, 28; dialectic reflexivity of, 47; elusiveness of, 48; essays and, 30,

160

Index

Truth (continued) 96–102; falsity of, 28; of humanization, 98; inability to arrive at, 38; individual, 20, 47; previously held, 39; privileging; pursuit of, 32; quest for, 28; questioning, 92; rhetoric of sincerity and, 9; scientific, 25; search for, 21, 30, 48, 57; of the self, 33; skepticism and, 26, 48; suspension of, 47; weighing of contraries and, 58; worship of, 63 “Universities” (Emerson), 51 “Uses of Natural History, The” (Emerson), 44 Vengeance, 40 Verdugo, Richard, 104 Villanueva, Victor, 9, 12–13, 128, 134, 136; accessibility and, 108–114; Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, 13, 105, 106–114; fear of ostracism by, 106; “Ideas, Historias, Cuentos: Breaking with Precedent,” 107; influence in Rhetoric and Composition, 106–108; mimicry and, 114–117, 128; personal essay scholarship of, 105, 106–108; self-reflection of, 108–114; sincerity in writings of, 117–122; spontaneity in, 114–117 Voluntary Servitude (La Boétie), 22, 23 Vulnerable Observer, The (Behar), 122, 123, 125, 126, 130 Walcutt, Charles Child, 59, 60 Walden (Thoreau), 11, 58, 62–64, 95 West, Cornel, 76, 103

White, E.B., 7, 8, 10 Williams, Patricia, 15 Wolfman, Brunetta, 5 Women Writing Culture (Behar), 122 Wong, Jade Snow, 15 Woolf, Virginia, 6 Wordsworth, William, 6, 44 Writing: about lived experiences, 116–117; academic, 86, 114, 134; accessible, 8, 67, 86–92; authenticity in, 9, 98–102; barriers to readers in, 28; beautiful, 92; biographical, 27, 28; cultural, 114; democratic forms of, 12, 62–64; difficult, 91; ethnic, 15–17; ethnographic, 122, 130–132; fine, 91; inadequacy of traditional forms of, 24; interrogative mode of, 26; Latino/a, 12–13; memorable, 92; mimicry in, 114–117, 129; nontraditional, 8, 15, 16; open-ended forms, 92; personal, 9, 80, 117, 123, 126, 133; political, 19, 72, 73; postcolonial, 88; private, 33; revolutionary, 74; scholarly, 123; social, 72, 73; spontaneity and, 27; students own lives, 8; systematized/antisystematized forms, 10, 28; traditional, 86; truth in, 33 “Writing in My Father’s Name” (Behar), 124, 125 Xenophanes, 26 Xenophon, 29 Yancey, Kathleen Blake, 7 Young, Charles Lowell, 48 Zeiger, William, 11

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