The Grammar of Selfhood

The Shen article was a striking reminder of just how little we can take for granted as teachers. It is easy to overlook the arbitrariness of the language we use, the logical forms we expect, and the stylistic qualities that we value. Often, I think, instructors fall into the trap of objectifying these arbitrary values as if they were sacred, universal truths rather than temporary cultural constructs (that vary dramatically both within and across cultures).

As Shen reveals, the standards of “correct” writing and argumentation are culturally relative, and these differences shed light on the nature of the self. Shen’s experiences confirm the idea that our sense of selfhood is (at least in part) linguistically structured, and that the language that we use to articulate the self is determined largely by our cultural conditioning. I found it striking that a child raised in communist China would learn to efface the “I” in formal writing in favor of the collectivist “we” of “the working class, the Party, the country, or some other collective body” (217). This shows that, beneath the simple grammatical convention lies an entire system of valuations that runs counter to many of the assumptions of traditional English composition. Not only this, but these conventions play a structural role in the shaping of personal identity, such that Shen experiences the shift from one sytem to the other as a radical transformation: “the process of redefining myself” (218).

During my experiences at the writing lab, I have often worked with international students who were grappling with similar grammatical difficulties, but I had never considered the possibility that such apparently surface-level concerns could be manifestations of a deeper struggle between conflicting notions of selfhood. In the future, I will try to be even more sensitive to these types of concerns. Students from different types of backgrounds (and this does not simply means students from different countries) will inevitably carry with them a set of standards and norms that may or may not correspond to what we are teaching as “correct.” Because of this, I think it is very important that we make students aware that what we are teaching is simply a useful tool – a widely accepted set of standards and conventions that is accepted by the academic community as “correct.” If we continue to reinforce this point, perhaps some of the difficulty implied in the process of self definition will be allayed.