Linda,
   Lately for me, looking for core concepts across disciplines has been
helped by the cognitive linguists: Mark turner (The Literary Mind) and
Lakoff and Johnson in their various works, including Philosophy in the
Flesh, which I'm reading now. Turner's point is that story is not just
a literary form, but the central way the mind works, and parable
(projecting one story from another)is a key component of human thought.
Lakoff and Johnson, of course, are laying out core metaphors that seem
to underlie so much of what we think of as literal language.
   I have had some success with film. The idea of perspective, for
example, can be thought of as "where do you place the camera" when you
film a scene. What's the difference between saying "They came into the
room" versus "they went into the room"? It has everything in the world
to do with a fixed point of reference, which could be a camera or could
be a central consciousness within a story. "My thigh clung to his with
dampness, and I watched the sun rising up through the tamaracks and
willows." That's the opening line to Silko's "Yellow Woman." Verbs like
"looked", "could hear", and "watched" anchor the opening paragraph. The
sun can't rise up through the trees except from this on the ground
perspective. You have to be facing it to watch it. Students seem to
follow this as a pattern of choice on the writer's part. We enter the
story inside the character and inside this moment in time.
   Halliday says he approaches grammar from the perspective of "meaning."
(It would be more accurate to say "metafunction", but that's a
technical term that he takes much time with.) I like to use "purpose".
Instead of asking what are the forms, and then secondarily how do they
find their way into use, we can ask how certain purposes are carried
out.
  Writing can be convincing, and that's a common purpose. But how does
that happen? Or if we start with a text we recognize as convincing, how
does it get that way? How does writing cohere?
   That means understanding that form is not neutral, that it somehow
brings the meaning into being, at least in a form that a reader might
find accessible. The text is an interactive event.
   All of this is theoretical, I guess, but I'm building a course around
it and it seems to be working.
    For next Monday, they have to research a word, including looking at
the OED.
   Today we talked about how the noun "pimp" has become a verb, as in "I
pimped my ride." I wanted to convince them that poetry lives off the
page more so than on. The example was theirs, starting with "ride" for
car.
   I think you're right, we have much to gain by breaking down the
boundaries between disciplines, and we maybe need a new kind of
specialist, a border crosser, to get it done. It's so hard to do
precisely because academic life asks us to live on the edge of a
specialized discipline. If you look away for even a short time, you can
feel it is passing you by.

Craig

> Your response really resonates with me, Craig.  It is also my experience
> that
> “students  who have had huge exposure to literary texts are not
> particularly
> attentive to  how they work.”  They don’t  understand how the language
> works,
> and I find they also  have trouble understanding aspects of  the context
> of a
> work.
> I’ll have to remember the passages from Tim O’Brien and from
> Hemingway,  as
> I too believe that it’s really important for students to see the
> connections
> between grammatical choices and meaning.  I’ve also been thinking about
> extending  this idea to other kinds of ‘languages’ across disciplines.
> One thing I did last term that worked fairly well for  some students was
> to
> use familiar and classical artworks to demonstrate basic  concepts of
> repetition, symmetry, texture, color value, etc. (my own knowledge  here
> is rather
> basic) , and then to look at some of those same concepts in what  I
> thought were
> more familiar literary works. My reasoning was that the concept  of
> symmetry,
> for example, is more abstract in language than in painting—where  you
> see the
> actual lines and shapes on the canvas--so that students should be  able to
> understand the abstraction in literature once they've understood the
> literal idea
> when used in a painting.
> I’m still working on the notion of looking at the grammar of art (and
> the
> grammars of film/ music/ dance) in a grammar class to help students see
> that
> grammar is not a set of rules, but a set of principles, preferences,
> conventions, that writers/artists make choices about.  (Actually, I’ve
> just added your
> book to  my reading list for this, Craig.)
> My basic insight (I’m sure it’s not original) is that there really is
> only
> a small set of concepts that we use to understand the world, and those
> concepts inform most of our perceptions.   If we teachers/professors
> could work on
> looking at the connections across our disciplines instead of  establishing
> the
> borders of our turf, I think we could make a kind of  progress in
> education.
> But the system of education has us so distracted with so many things that
> seem very far removed from learning itself.  And we are distracted by the
> privilege  we give to science and math, and we think that a test score has
> exaggerated  meaning in terms of student achievement and in terms of
> teacher
> competence.  It’s way overdone. But I’ll hop off my  soap box for now.
> Thanks for reading this! If anyone has any suggestions for my
> investigation
> into “grammar across disciplines”, I’d be happy to hear  them!
> Linda Di Desidero
>
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