Jarratt

Evoking Lunsford and Ede, Jarratt claims that the goal of rhetoric is to create an expanding, dynamic sense of ethos between author and audience (1390). At first, I didn’t understand this, but considering Kinneavy who emphasizes writing’s primary role as the articulation of the individual, Jarratt, Ede, and Lunsford begin to make more sense. What Jarratt is analyzing are the metaphoric and metonymic ways in which Spivak, Minh-ha, and Menchú Tum disrupt “first world” constructions of postcolonial female identities; each person whose work Jarratt analyzes does so by deconstruction.

Remembering structuralism from the Critical Theory class I took two years ago, structuralism looks at the relationship between constituents of a whole—how the individual elements of a text relate to the construction of the whole. Thus the accompanying assumption of structuralism is that the relationship between the constituents and the whole, as well as a sense of the whole, hinges on some sort of stable center. In other words, in order to have a notion of the whole, we have to have some central meaning associated to it, like a theme in literature. Post-structuralism/deconstruction on the other hand, de-stabilizes a sense of the whole, undoing the notion of centrality (Derrida called this “de-centering”). In deconstruction, therefore, the notion of one whole is abandoned. This paved the way for what amounts to cognitive dissonance in textual interpretation: feminist, queer, postcolonial, postmodern, historicist, and race lenses can all be applied to a text with equal validity.  

Jarratt’s subjects, each in her own way, disrupts the identity thrown over them by people who have materially different realities—people who lack the authority to do so, in other words. Metaphor and metonymy are the specific things Jarratt examines. Spivak, for example, creates reactive personae that contradict white, first world metaphors of Indian women(1386); Minh-ha replaces the context by which first world authors construct metonymy by redefining the relationship between the self and the collective (1389-90); and Menchú Tum—she’s another matter entirely.

Rather than leading the reader to assume that deconstruction and distancing one’s identity or one’s group’s identity from the audience is the modus operandi of feminists reacting to first world constructions of their identity, Menchú Tum actually seeks to close the gap between audience and author (1394). Jarratt wants to establish frameworks for subjectivity that do not so easily divorce themselves from context (1395). It is this context that gives rise to the individual dynamic, one that is too often placed out of that context or replaced altogether. Here, Jarratt moves to a pithy statement about advocacy: “And by enabling our students to write multiple versions of themselves informed by a knowledge of rhetoric in its political and figurative functions, we may give them access to their own experiences of conjunction and disjunction” (1396). Further, she responds implicitly to Bartholomae, who assumes that all students are trying to gain entrance into academic discourse communities: postcolonial feminist restructurings “might help us as we read student writing about the self to discover how students resist or refigure ethos and audience to characterize their own relations to the academy” (1391). If the way we characterize our identities through writing (and other rhetorical activities) is my establishing ourselves as similar and different to established identities, and by substituting the unknown with the known, then Jarratt’s considerations of that ever-dynamic process influence how we read the writing of students with disabilities as well as disability involves as much the ablist unauthorized metaphoric and metonymic construction of identity as first world [white male] constructions of postcolonial woman identity.