Dialectic = logical argumentation
Dialogic = of dialogue
I see those two words individually and am fine, but seeing them together, my mind wants to do something horrible to me... I see "dialect" and "logic" and then they become transposed and I become inverted, and all sense of meaning warps into some odd universe where the answer to everything is 42.
OK, that's an exaggeration.
My point is that language is silly. It's a silly little thing we can play with, like a toy. We can hide poetry practically anywhere, causing someone else to stumble and trip over a mental tongue trying to taste the meaty details of an argument; is it savory? Sweet? Or mildly bitter? We can dialecticise dialogical clusters of words and say something important like, "The examples of scholarship we have showcased above serve to illustrate the point that life is material, not abstract, such that we have come to see the importance of fleshing out our use of the phrase lived/embodied experience as an extremely powerful concept" (95). But we know that flesh is no concept. It is a thing that can be felt, but that flesh dead decades or centuries ago cannot, so the fact that it once was covering meat and bone that mobilized an "embodied experience" is a concept we have to use our imagination to re-experience, re-feel, re-touch, flesh out and illustrate in a way that honors her/him/them and the life they lived and discussed within their rhetorical situation.
That's my take on Strategic Contemplation.
And Critical Imagination... I learned humility on page 77. "[S]cholars grappled earnestly with the complex challenges of engaging with historical figures whom they do not necessarily admire or admire fully." I read that and then Ramus laughed in my face and said, "Ha! Who's the jerk now?" I felt bad, but then stopped doing that. It's difficult not to allow personal feelings (when I'm being judgmental) to get in the way of learning what someone like Ramus has to teach. And I know better. In fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Bujak. She was a mean old nasty French woman who threw erasers with a goal to cause physical pain. I never saw her stand in the rain, 'cause I was sure she'd melt. She made me be the student editor of the school newspaper. She didn't even ask me if I wanted to be it, she just said I was it and so I was. I had to stay after school. I had to write stuff, more than the other kids. She was mean. I'll never forget her. To this day, I don't know why, but she believed in me. I learned back then that personal feelings can too easily get in the way seeing the truth in things. It wasn't until I realized how much I enjoyed being the student editor (I don't even remember doing anything, just that I loved doing it) that I realized she wasn't being mean at all.
Anyway, the point of that last bit of rambling was to say that I tend to let my judgments of the author dictate what I take from their work. If I don't like them, I disagree. Slap my hand! That's no way to learn. It's just not dia-logical. :)
I like your take on critical imagination. I'm not sure if I agree, but it's an interesting point of view because whereas I took CI to be something that was more internal, you are showing an external variation of that thought process. Your personal narrative bears strongly in the text because it shades how you are going to view CI and only with the grace of years have you been able to realize the gift that your mean and nasty teacher gave you.
ReplyDeleteHowever I still think that it's an interesting juxtaposition from where I imagined CI to be, and that's a strictly internal monologue with one's self...