The charm of language

51due网站精选Essay代写范文:“The charm of language”。这篇论文主要讲述了语言学研究学者玛丽路易斯对语言术语方面的独特见解与专业领域的贡献。“为了进一步说明这个新术语，一般的读者是不熟悉的，她回到瓜蔓波马后，根据手稿提出的概念“自我”的插图来对其进行描述，让人们去认识它。”

Mary Louise Pratt, a prominent scholar in linguistics and trans-culture study, starts her article Art of the Contact Zone, with a vivid description of her daily experience, of her son gaining the phonics, arithmetic skills, geography and history, even personal ethos and views toward the world through the media of his beloved baseball cards. Then, diverting herself from this concrete example of literacy to a less common historical event of the discovery and acceptance of the grand work The First New Chronicle and Good Government by and indigenous Andean, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, she introduces a term called "contact zones", which means the "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths" (P519) 

To further explain this new term, unfamiliar to most common readers, she returns to Guaman Poma's manuscript and proposes the concept of "autoethnography" for illustrations. According to Pratt, autoethonographic text refers to "a text which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them" (P519). The intended audience of such texts includes both the "metropolitan audiences and the speaker's own community" (P520). Characterized by a mixture of Quechua, the native language of Andean indigenous of Latin America, and ungrammatical but expressive Spanish in written text, Guaman Poma's letter is intended to present to King Philip III of Spain, in order to give a chronicled account of the Andes long history and their profound sufferings brought by the Spanish conquest. 

Through out this masterpiece, we can see Guaman Poma's adoption of chronicle, the official Spanish genre, as the main writing apparatus tracing his ancestors' life, his parodies of Spanish history referring to the commotion in Castille stirred by the lust for Andean's resources in the conquests' mind, and the representational drawing scattering among the texts, whose style originating from Europe but spatial symbolism derived specifically from Andean systems. All these techniques in Guaman Poma's repertoire serve to his passionate expression and the Spanish governor's better understanding of his intense proud of his Andean cultural heritage and honored tradition and his implacable hostility to Spanish exploitation and abuse to his fellowman. The critique, bilingualism, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, and absolute heterogeneity of meaning well "exemplified the sociocultural complexities produced by conquest and empire" (P519). This great product of the contact zone from hundreds of year before echoes disbelievingly with Richard Rodriguez's article, The Achievement of Desire, in his 1982 biography, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, describing his intellectual development.

If the Andean convention of the Inca Empire suffering from the Spanish colonialism is to be regarded as Guaman Poma's contact zone, for Richard Rodriguez, his encounter with an English-speaking educational system since his early years as a young Chicano, or Mexican-American, may be the most distinct evidence of contact zone.

As a smart and advanced user of English, Rodriguez elaborates his idea fluently, comfortably, even elegantly in English. His education experience of deviating from his Spanish family, of idolizing his English grammar teacher, of hungrily searching for major ideas and themes from "adult books", of feeling nostalgia and back to his once separated family, is neatly woven into the findings and descriptions of "the scholarship boy" by Richard Hoggart. His listing novels and authors such as Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, Moby Dick, and so on are of great familiarity to most English readers. Even the story-beginning style for narrative makes English readers feel comfortable and something for granted. Several bumps, something strange to the common English readers, however, remind us of Rodriguez's working-class Spanish origin. 

The most obvious feature of this article's writing style is the large amount of sentences enclosed in brackets, serving different purposes. Some are informative. Such as in this sentence, "Negatively (for that is how this idea first occurred to me): my need to think so much and so abstractly about my parents and our relationship was in itself an indication of my long education", contents in the round brackets has explained the reason why his thinking about his relationship with his parents are negative -- due to the reason that that this is his first perception when he was still a young boy. Some contents are descriptive, providing more concrete and vivid description supplementary to the sentence before. As in " Yearning became preoccupation then. Boyhood memories beckoned, flooded my mind. (Laughing intimate voices. Bounding up the front steps of the porch. A sudden embrace inside the door.)", words in parentheses accounting the boyhood memories in detail emotionally express the author's burning desire to going back to his Latino family culture. Some eliciting rhetorical questions are also bracketed, intriguing the readers to reflect on the situation described by the author and follow his story. "How did I manage my success?" This question is not only imposed to the audience to raise their curiosity and continue their reading, but also help the author to transit from mere describing of his childhood to a deeper reflection of his educational experience. All of the contents in the brackets are of great importance to this article, which may be the usual habit and typical of many Spanish writers but rare for that of English. Also, specific terms with abundant Latino culture implications may also appeal more to Spanish readers instead of English readers who find it hard to fully grasp the meaning of words such as Pochos and gingo. 

Apart from the techniques of writing in the contact zone, however, something more striking and thought provoking was the idea underlies in Rodriguez's account of his lifetime experiences of "escaping - striving for acceptance - turning back". When he was still a Spanish boy, he had already started to escape, self-consciously or unconsciously from the "safe house", a term defined by Pratt as "social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves a horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression" (P529). Instead, he strived to gain the American identity, an identity defined by white people with Anglo-Saxon origin, as he gradually developed his alienation from his scarcely educated parents, his joking siblings, and noisy relatives. His joy and proud not from his Mexican cultural identity, but from his fluent English losing all trace of a Spanish accent, his grandiose reading program of a long list of books read and to be read, and his jargon for literary criticism bubbling at the tip of his tongue. As he goes farther on the road of radical self-reformation paved by years of education, he gradually discovered that“I was able to frame the meaning of my success, its consequent price-the loss”. The loss of his pass quickly aroused the nostalgia to his long-parted family and the impulse to return to them in the deep of his heart. After enjoy the relief brought by the return, he again, "realized that I had not neatly sidestepped the impact of schooling". The return to the family and native culture was "precisely the measure of how much I remained an academic". 

How painful for the author, of his being dragged and pulled between two cultures, the seemingly lagging-behind culture he born with and the so-called advanced culture he yarned for. Moreover, the joys of the contact zone, "the exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom" (P529), may have never been genuinely tasted by Rodriguez throughout his pursuit of education. For he has never engaged in a dialogue with dominant culture, but try to transform himself into a member of the culture that he did not born in. Luckily, he finally realized the problem and tried to place himself in a niche, which is the autoethnography, using the English rhetoric skills to express his Mexican identity and to foster the better understanding and equal communication between these two cultures. 【-Z】

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