First Year Courses & Programs

Basic Writing (ENGLWRIT 111)

Unit 2
Stories Taught and Untaught

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In Unit 2 you will explore a disturbing question for all of us who wish to be unique individuals: "How is it that we all start out originals and end up copies?" And you will explore as well anthropologist Clifford Geertz's surprising answer: "It is the copying that originates." Or, in other terms, as we live out the scripts, the "stories," given to us, we cannot help but "revise" them. And in our revisions we both find and create our "selves."

Gwendolyne Milan was born in Mexico and was a student in this course. In her essay "The Third Generation," Milan tells how her generation of women--her cousin, her sister, and herself--revised the "stories" handed down to them by the generations before. But first, as she points out, the stories "performed" by her mother and grandmother had to be spoken, had to be told: "It was the revelation of these stories that made a change, a change in our mentalities," she writes. "We were given the opportunity to compare our lives to theirs." To put it more simply: Milan proves the old adage--"What children don't know won't hurt them"--is a lie, a dangerous lie. What children don't know can hurt them. Thus Milan also adds a dimension to Epston and White's discussion of stories and power: stories left untold can be lived tragically; a knowledge buried, hidden, or disguised can dominate our lives.

Maxine Hong Kingston was born, as she writes, "in the middle of World War II." The daughter of Chinese parents, Kingston was raised in San Francisco, and the excerpt you will read here -- "Father's Drowned-in-the-Well Sister" -- is from her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. The excerpt, like the book itself, represents, among other things, Kingston's attempt to restore (we might say, "to re-story") pieces of family history her parents left behind in China. Her efforts, like most writers', are ultimately intended to give voice and meaning to her "self."

Naomi Wolf, in "The Making of a Slut," tells the story of her girlhood friend Dinah, singled out by her peers as the class "slut," not because she was promiscuous but because, as Wolf says, "there was no visual language in our world for a poor girl with big breasts walking tall except 'slut.'"  Wolf's story is the story of Dinah.  It is also, however, an exploration of the ways in which one girl's scapegoating inhibits all girls and one girl's ostracism symbolizes the alienating effects of what Foucault called the "ruse" of both the 19th century's sexual repression and our own century's sexual liberation. For in "The Making of a Slut," we begin to see the ways in which tales of sexuality can be used as a strange surveillance device to keep women as diverse as Judith Ortiz Cofer's cousin, Maxine Hong Kingston's aunt, and Wolf's classmate Dinah "in their place."

Perhaps the most challenging reading you will encounter in this unit is Michael White and David Epston's "Story, Knowledge, and Power." Epston and White are therapists from New Zealand and Australia respectively who help their patients change their lives by changing--sometimes literally re-writing--the stories they perform, that is, by revising the stories they have been told and have come to believe about themselves. For their practice of "narrative therapy," these men draw upon the theories of anthropologists Edward Bruner and Clifford Geertz and the French historian Michel Foucault, whom O'Hara and Anderson mentioned in the opening reading for Unit 1, along with others as well.

With "So Tsi-fai," Sophronia Liu, too, remembers a childhood friend and the devastating effects of scapegoating by teacher and peers.  Condemned by Sister Marie for a multitude of offenses - "for being late, for forgetting his homework, for talking in class, for using foul language" - So Tsi-fai's real "sin" is, like Dinah's, being poor.  Looking back nearly twenty-five years and half way around the world to her sixth grade in Hong Kong's Little Flower's School, Liu performs the truly magical act of writing: She speaks (out) for her lost classmate and voices a story of poverty and prejudice that might otherwise have been buried with this fourteen-year-old boy.

In a somewhat different vein, Oliver Sacks, a well-known neurologist and writer, presents "Rebecca." While it is easy to read this story as a simple narrative of adversity overcome, it is important to ask yourself more: How does using what Gergen calls the "language of deficit" to evaluate individuals profoundly distort not only our self-images but also our actual selves? How does Sacks's restorying of "Rebecca" in a different language reveal, perhaps even create, a wholly different Rebecca?

Like Astrea Young, Mary Crow Dog grew up in a place her ancestors had inhabited for generations. But, as a Sioux Indian raised on a South Dakota reservation, she tells the story of a people who have suffered more than a century of officially sanctioned persecution and cultural destruction, akin to the "pogroms" suffered by Eastern European Jews. "Invisible Fathers" raises many questions, not just about whose stories will be told but also about whose language will tell them.