Witchcraft! Sorcery! Frankenfurter?

Inspired by the mention of my alma mater, I decided to search through the relics of my college days to find my Eng Comp notes or something of the like. I thought: "Well if Bartholomae suggests that our comp classes should be structured in a particular manner, what better way to see if his vision is carried out by his very own English Comp staff?" I remember being subjected to a trace of the model which was discussed as a "theoretically driven seminar with challenging reading and writing assignments" (Mutnick 184). Each Eng Comp class at Pitt has a "theme" introduced by the professor, whether it be film, Feminism, Eastern European folklore, etc. Although I could not find the notes from Jack's class (they HAVE to be SOMEWHERE!--I think), I was successful in recovering the notes from my Women and Literature course from my freshman year and from my Cultures of Mesoamerica class. Let me tell you, people, it's some scary stuff.

I say "scary" for Women and Lit because I, as a 19 year-old, was charged to understand the ideas of Bakhtin and Foucault--to master their philosophy and put it to work. I admit that while I was able to understand, on a cursory level, what Bakhtinian and Foucauldian theory meant to the literary world, I was not able to fully employ their ideas into my own text. In other words, using the language of theory was like on the job training: we learned as we experimented. I thank my professor for allowing us some flexibility in that arduous task and also for understanding our struggle to comprehend things like sexuality and power or social phenomenon and polyvocality (what????). And if learning the language of the academie really was an "on the job" learning experience, I guess I should've gone to class more often.

As Bartholomae indicates, "some students will need to learn to crudely mimic the 'distinctive register' of academic discourse before they are prepare to actually and legitimately do the work of the discourse" (Bartholomae 627). I felt the truth in this statement in my Women and Lit class as I struggled to place words like "dialogism" and "historical poetics." Indeed this language is not part of my every day lexicon. (Okay. It totally is, but I just don't want to brag.) I believe that Bartholomae and Rose approach like topics--a students' place within making meaning of and creating text. However, they bring these topics up in different mediums: the college student entering the world of academic discourse (Bartholomae); the college students' native discourse as interpreted (and/or interrupted?) by academic discourse (Rose). On one hand, Bartholomae approaches how students can assimilate into the classroom culture. On the other hand, Rose lets us know that unique voices are no less intelligent because thoughts are not uttered through "academic" language.

Allow me to summarize using my notes from my Cultures of Mesoamerica course (another personal relic discovered in the abyss of my mother's basement):

In the Mesoamerican culture post Spanish colonization, religion is a veritable blend of indigenous tradition and colonial influence. In other words, "Catholicism" is not "pure"; it incorporates the personae of local gods, goddesses, and the principles of magical folk ritual. Enough with the boring stuff.

We have WITCHES who are:
*born with their supernatural powers
*have an innate/inherent gift
*able to project themselves as (anthropomorphic) entities to explain something that they cannot explain through words
*are independent from "ordinary" man

We have SORCERERS who are:
*people who have learned their powers over time
*are public about their powers
*use them to cure
*hired to cause harm
*use powers to socially interact with others

I wanted to have some fun with this analogy. I thought of WITCHES as people who enter higher education with the basic fundamentals of composition--perhaps like the students whom Bartholomae refers to. Although we cannot say that each student is "innately" talented, witches have been acculturated to understand the system of traditional education. That is to say, they are able to use their "powers" of understanding the system of educational prose so that they may project themselves into the text of the academy. Talented witches may be able to accurately portray themselves (identity) into their texts--or, metaphorically speaking, when a witch anthropomorphically projects herself or himself into animal form to convey meaning inexplicable through human words. (Which is exactly you were thinking, right?)

The SORCERER is a "basic writer" who must learn the language of the institution. To be sure, a basic writer is neither stupid nor incapable of writing coherently. The key, here, is that the Sorcerer is capable of learning the "spells" of the institution. The Sorcerer's challenge is to take his or her ability and apply it to the form of academic discourse so that the or she may be increasingly power-full. Rose indicates that any type of literacy (cultural, visual, historical, textual) is as significant as the other, and to be able to participate in multiple layers of a literate world, it is like a Sorcerer learning the spells of his magical counterparts.

What am I? I think that we are all Witches and Sorcerers in our own right. The Witch in me enjoys writing. The Sorcerer in me likes to think that I have the ability to learn, to "grow," to appreciate my own unique cultural literacy. The moral of the story is that as each of these characters, as a student, I have power. As a Witch, I can project myself onto the page, "morph" my thoughts into written word because I have learned that system of communication. But if I didn't already behold the powers of the Witch, I could be a Sorcerer--one who learns how to interpret her own view of the world over time, suggesting that I am not "fixed" into one magical (or social) status. So what are you? A Witch? A Sorcerer? Hopefully not the third kind of magical persona: the blood sucking vampire. Although, I'm really not one to judge; I'm, like, really into vampires.