Mary Louise Pratt

Last updated

Mary Louise Pratt (born 1948) is a Silver Professor and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 1970, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1971, and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1975. [1]

Contents

Her first book, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, made an important contribution to Critical Theory by demonstrating that the foundation of written literary narrative can be seen in the structure of Oral Narrative. In it Pratt uses the research of William Labov to show that all narratives contain common structures that can be found in both literary and oral narratives.

In her more recent research, Pratt has studied what she calls contact zones - areas in which two or more cultures communicate and negotiate shared histories and power relations. She remarks that contact zones are "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today." In her article "Arts of the Contact Zone," Pratt also coins the term autoethnographic texts, which are "text[s] in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them." [2]

Changing public discourse about language acquisition

As a part of the appointment, each Silver professor must write a Silver dialogue, an essay discussing a major issue in his or her field. Pratt used her essay to discuss the obstacles and possible solutions for promoting language learning in America. Pratt frames her argument with an anecdote from a multicultural wedding:

IT WAS a fancy California wedding party at a big Bay Area hotel. The groom's family spoke Urdu, and the bride's spoke Gujarati and Urdu. Both were practicing Muslims, but she was from southern California, sometimes regarded by northerners as too laid-back. The groom was attended by his two best friends from high school, one of Mexican- Jewish-Anglo parentage and the other of Chinese and Japanese descent via Hawai'i and Sacramento. [3]

Pratt uses the wedding as a segue to expose American myths about language. Pratt systematically challenges four common misconceptions about language learning: the willing rejection of heritage languages by immigrants, American hostility to multilingualism, the limit of second language learning to early childhood, and the need of language expertise solely for national security. With each misconception Pratt shows how these factors have come together to create a resistance to language learning that has helped cause the national security crisis that the Critical Language Institutes are trying to solve.

Pratt shows hope for changing the public discourse and outlines four ideas that need to be promoted in order to encourage language acquisition in America. Pratt sees a need to correct ideas about mono- and multilingualism. Americans need to be shown that monolingualism is a handicap and that relying on others' willingness to learn English will simply limit transcultural communication to "all but the most limited and scripted" exchanges. [4] Pratt also calls more encouragement of heritage language learning and using local non-English linguistic communities to fulfill needs in language learning and transcultural understanding. Along with using heritage communities, Pratt wants to see educators place more emphasis on advanced language competency and create a pipeline to encourage those who are skilled in language acquisition. In order to bring about these changes, she calls on her fellow academics and other LEPs (linguistically endowed persons) to change how we discuss language learning in American public discourse.

Honors and awards

She was American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019. [5]

Works by Pratt

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Erdrich</span> American author (born 1954)

Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Narrative</span> Account that presents connected events

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. Narration is a rhetorical mode of discourse, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which a narrator communicates directly to an audience. The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods that are more often used to analyse narrative fiction, to non-fictional texts such as political speeches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloria E. Anzaldúa</span> Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Composition studies</span>

Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States.

Itzaʼ is an endangered Mayan language spoken by the Itza people near Lake Peten Itza in north-central Guatemala and neighboring Belize. The language has about 1,000 fluent speakers, all older adults.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Bennett-Coverley</span> Jamaican writer, folklorist and educator (1919–2006)

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou, was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois or Creole, Bennett worked to preserve the practice of presenting poetry, folk songs and stories in patois, establishing the validity of local languages for literary expression.

<i>Love Medicine</i> Novel by Louise Erdrich

Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich's debut novel, first published in 1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel in subsequent 1993 and 2009 editions. The book follows the lives of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on fictional reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The collection of stories in the book spans six decades from the 1930s to the 1980s. Love Medicine garnered critical praise and won numerous awards, including the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Mona Siddiqui is a British academic. She is Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, a member of the Commission on Scottish Devolution and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She is also a regular contributor to Thought for the Day, Sunday and The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, and to The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian, Sunday Herald.

David John Bartholomae was an American scholar in composition studies. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 1975 and was a Professor of English and former Chair of the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary research interests are in composition, literacy, and pedagogy, and his work engages scholarship in rhetoric and in American literature/American Studies. His articles and essays have appeared in publications such as PMLA, Critical Quarterly, and College Composition and Communication.

The cultural studies theory of composition is a field of composition studies that examines both writing as an artifact of culture and the contexts of writing situations. It also examines what happens to writing when cultures come into contact with each other, situations often referred to as "contact zones".

Gabrielle Michele Spiegel is an American historian of medieval France, and the current Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University where she served as chair for the history department for six years, and acting and interim dean of faculty. She also served as dean of humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004–2005, and, from 2008 to 2009, she was the president of the American Historical Association. In 2011, she was elected as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.

Helen Elizabeth Haines (1872–1961) was a writer, reviewer, teacher and lecturer. She was instrumental in the development of the library science profession, though she herself never worked as a librarian or earned a professional degree. Helen Haines is best known within the library community as the author of Living with Books, which served as one of the leading texts on book selection and readers' advisory. In addition, Haines dedicated her career to combatting against literary censorship and promoting intellectual freedom as a hallmark of the library profession. Born in the late Victorian period as the eldest of five girls and educated privately, she worked in publishing after being turned down for a library job. As a protégée of Charles Cutter, she became the managing editor of Library Journal in 1896. She also served as an officer of the American Library Association. In 1906, however, her health broke down, and she eventually had to leave both positions and relocate to southern California. For her service to librarianship, Andrew Carnegie awarded her an annual pension.

Transculturalism is defined as "seeing oneself in the other". Transcultural is in turn described as "extending through all human cultures" or "involving, encompassing, or combining elements of more than one culture".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marianne Hirsch</span>

Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

In a 1991 keynote address to the Modern Language Association titled "Arts of the Contact Zone", Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of "the contact zone." She articulated, "I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today". Pratt described a site for linguistic and cultural encounters, wherein power is negotiated and struggle occurs. Although when introduced this term was in the context of literacy and literary theories, the term has been appropriated to conversations across the humanities and has been used in the context of feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory and in discussions of teaching and pedagogy. The contact zone is similar to other concepts that address relationality and contiguity such as positionality, standpoint theory, perspectivism, intersectionality, and relationality.

Mary J. Schleppegrell is an applied linguist and Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. Her research and praxis are based on the principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory derived from the work of social semiotic linguist Michael Halliday. Schleppegrell is known for the SFL-based literacy practices she has continuously helped to develop for multilingual and English language learners throughout her decades long career, which she began as an educational specialist before transitioning to the field of applied linguistics. As a result, her publications demonstrate a deep understanding of both the theories and practices related to teaching and learning.

Emily Susan Apter is an American academic, translator, editor and professor. Her areas of research are translation theory, language philosophy, political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, history and theory of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, and political fiction. She is currently Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University.

<i>Chinese Fables and Folk Stories</i> American compilation of Chinese folklore (1908)

Chinese Fables and Folk Stories, a compilation of 37 tales, was billed as the first book of Chinese fables ever printed in English when it was published by American Book Company in 1908. The co-authors were Mary Hayes Davis and Chow Leung. Widely reprinted today and also translated into French, Chinese Fables and Folk Stories has been noted as one of the most "reliable" works by Western scholars on Chinese folktales published before 1937. Each tale in the book is accompanied by an illustration, attributed to unnamed "native" Chinese artists.

Emily Hauser is a British scholar of classics and a historical fiction novelist. She is a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter and has published three novels in her 'Golden Apple' trilogy: For the Most Beautiful (2016), For the Winner (2017) and For the Immortal (2018).

References

  1. "Mary Louise Pratt". the silver dialogues. Archived from the original on 2005-11-13.
  2. Mary Louise Pratt (1991). "Arts of the Contact Zone". Profession. New York: Modern Language Association. 91: 33–40. JSTOR   25595469.
  3. Mary Louise Pratt (2003). "Building a New Public Idea about Language". Profession: 110–119. JSTOR   25595763.paragraph 1.
  4. Mary Louise Pratt (2003). "Building a New Public Idea about Language". Profession: 110–119. JSTOR   25595763.paragraph 9.
  5. "2019 Fellows and International Honorary Members with their affiliations at the time of election". members.amacad.org. Archived from the original on 2020-03-02.