Daimys – Response to Borkowski Chapters 9-11

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#690

There are a few things that struck me about this last section of the book. The first is that the longest chapter (ever) was between two really short ones. I’m not sure if this was to frame chapter 10, that seems the most important to the writer, in smaller more direct pieces, or if it would have been more effective to break chapter 10 into a few pieces, so the reader can have a break.

While I can appreciate his focus on class, I think his argument would have been more generative had he included race, gender, ethnicity etc. into his argument. Because, while it is true that class doesn’t necessarily have to do with race, for example, the reality is that most people below the poverty line are African-American or Latina/o. He uses many references that are written by people of color and different genders, but doesn’t really take the time to analyze that difference and what part that plays in his teaching.

The other aspect that was jarring was his shift to a hyper-academic writing voice. If you look in the notes, most of it is citations for chapter 10. And don’t get me wrong, I love using academic texts in personal writing…but goodness. All this name dropping and shifting had me dizzy. I guess it was because I was expecting for a memoir to sit with the personal, and teach me through his experience. But what chapter 10 seemed to do was ‘prove’ to me he was right in his construction of working class, and I wasn’t convinced. Since he left the personal out, and became an ‘academic’ I became an ‘academic’ reader and was critical of his lack of analysis.

[joshua]

#691

Daimys,

You make really great points here. My academic field is composition & rhetoric, so I immediately slid into that chapter, with its various academic referents, fairly painlessly (almost without noticing!). I can definitely see, though, how it could be “jarring,” and almost seem as though you were reading a different book (!) all of a sudden, when Borkowski launches into this comp/rhet discourse in Chapter 10. your pointing out Borkowski’s omission of any consideration of race, gender, and ethnicity is also really spot on. This was another blind spot of my own response to Borkowski’s memoir; the considerations of these omissions can also utterly refashion the ways in which I read this text. I noticed varying degrees of “hard-boiled” toughness to Borkowski’s writing, which makes sense; he mentions in his own literacy narrative that early writers he read were Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and other “hard-boiled” detective novelists. This genre consists of, to a great extent, mostly male, usually white writers. To (completely) generalize, there are often articulations of class consciousness in these novels, but rarely investigations of race and gender issues. In the way that Toni Morrison brilliantly examines in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, race in these novels is “invisible,” and white-by-default, which, given U.S. history, is gigantically problematic. As for gender, the hard-boiled detective novel offers little outside of abject fear of females. The female characters in these novels tend to be “femme fatales”*, less-than-fully dimensional seductresses who sexually tempt and lure protagonists, and then ultimately destroy and devour them. I think Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are great writers, don’t get me wrong. But it is interesting to examine these writings, and Borkowski’s work, through the critical lens of race and gender, and the ways in which their overt absences/silences can “speak” within, and haunt, these texts as well.
Wonderful post, Daimys!

*Femme Fa·tale
ˌfem fəˈtal,fəˈtäl/
noun
an attractive and seductive woman, especially one who will ultimately bring disaster to a man who becomes involved with her.
synonyms: seductress, temptress, siren, enchantress

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