Chapter 3 D. Natsagdorj, Mongolian travel writing, and ideas about national identity

In 1927, upon his arrival in Berlin, D. Natsagdorj, one of approximately 45 young Mongolian students who participated in an educational program in Germany and France, composed a long travel poem, “Notes on the Trip to Berlin.” Not only does this poem serve as an early example of Natsagdorj’s writing, it emphasizes Natsagdorj’s role as a didactic writer for the early Mongolian People’s Republic, in particular in conveying the values of the cosmopolitan socialist, a modern subjectivity that quite consciously separated itself from the previous aristocratic, Buddhist, and pastoral identities of pre-revolutionary Mongolia. “Notes on the Trip to Berlin” provides a geographical orientation of the new economic and cultural flows from Mongolia to Western Europe through the Soviet Union. Natsagdorj’s poem is also significant because it is one of the few examples of Mongolian travel literature and enables Natsagdorj to actively resist the image of Mongolians perpetuated by Western travel writers. From the perspective of Natsagdorj’s Mongolian readers, “Notes on the Trip to Berlin” teaches them the process of navigating socialist and pre-revolutionary identities as Natsagdorj grapples with socialist and pre-revolutionary literary forms and language

Designing Arguments for Academic, Public, and Professional Audiences

This college-level textbook guides students through five different types of arguments: evaluations, responses, persuasive rhetorical arguments, proposals, and practical professional development arguments. Students are introduced to rhetorical concepts and strategies to enable them to more effectively appeal to different types of audiences. Students will gain practice in audience-based reasoning, basing their reasons and evidence on the assumptions, beliefs, and values of their readers.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1040/thumbnail.jp

(Re)Writing Communities and Identities

(Re)Writing Communities and Identities enables college-level students to develop their ability to compose various informative and expressive genres, including analyses, reflections, summaries, syntheses, and informative reports. While students raise their consciousness about their writing process and audience-based informative strategies, they also familiarize themselves with important social and cultural issues related to the theme of identities and communities.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1041/thumbnail.jp

Literacy Under Authority: The Mongolian Cultural Campaigns

In the twentieth century, authoritarian states throughout Asia mobilized mass populations to adopt modern subjectivities and national identities. Literacy campaigns and the development of formal education systems were key strategies in shaping these subjectivities and identities, a social process that continues to have enormous material, affective, behavioral, and epistemological ramifications, even long after the eclipse of the authoritarian governments themselves. To contribute more to the understanding about how these massive social projects coerced and persuaded nonurban, pastoral, and semi-nomadic populations, this article explores the 1950s and 1960s Cultural Campaigns in the socialist Mongolian People's Republic (1924–90), which emphasized hygiene, health, literacy, and ideology. Oral history accounts document how the socialist Mongolian state infiltrated the private spaces of Mongolians and shaped their attitudes toward reading and writing and other desirable social goals. Additionally, these accounts suggest ways that pastoral Mongolians subtly resisted and challenged the authority of the socialist Mongolian state

Words, borders, herds: postsocialist English and nationalist language identities in Mongolia

This article focuses on the sociolinguistics of globalism (Blommaert 2010) in Mongolia by examining two dominant language identities, postsocialist English and fundamentalist nationalist Mongolian. Postsocialist English, emerging as a vital part of the free-market capitalist economy in the 1990s, is analyzed in relationship with the now receding language identity of socialist Russian. Postsocialist English supports the values of transnational development, neoliberal economic policies, and post-industrial educational practices. The Mongolian fundamentalist nationalist language identity, on the other hand, responds to free-market globalism by appeals to the land and the traditional pastoral economy of herding. Yet, despite the fact that postsocialist English identifies Mongolians with anti-traditional and urban cultural and social values, the fundamentalist nationalist identity does not perceive of English as a threat; in fact, postsocialist English is used to mediate the anxiety that nationalist Mongolians feel towards China and their other new Asian trading partners. As free-market globalism continues to transform postsocialist Mongolia, including urban migration and the industrial mining of coal and other raw minerals, a sociolinguistics of globalism can continue to navigate the ways in which Mongolians craft their identity through language and, especially, the ways it relates to traditional notions of the land and the pastoral economy

The pastoral home school: rural, vernacular and grassroots literacies in early Soviet Mongolia

Citation: Phillip P. Marzluf (2014) The pastoral home school: rural, vernacular and grassroots literacies in early Soviet Mongolia, Central Asian Survey, 34:2, 204-218, DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2014.991611Literacy before and after the 1921 People's Revolution in Mongolia has been largely represented by socialist historiography and post-socialist urban perspectives, which have rendered unofficial and non-pragmatic literacies invisible. This study explores rural, vernacular and grassroots literacy theories to recontextualize the pre-revolutionary category of Mongolian home schooling and to offer a new perspective – pastoral literacy – which enables historians and other researchers of Central Asia to represent the literacy practices of non-urban semi-nomads more accurately and vividly. This study applies the pastoral literacy perspective to literacy narratives extracted from University of Cambridge Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia interviews and demonstrates that pastoral home schooling was a socially and culturally salient domain for acculturating young Mongolians into the 1960s. Mongolian pastoral home schooling consisted largely of personal, male teacher–student relationships, authoritative teaching models, alphabet-based curricula, as well as texts and materials adapted from dominant religious and state literacies

Excluding the masses: Aptitude in classical and modern rhetorical theory.

In my discussions of how aptitude operates in the composition theory of the United States, I explore current-traditional, expressivist, and social rhetorics. Although classical commonplaces persist, I argue that American rhetoricians, relying upon universal, Enlightenment conceptions of human nature, hope to make language training accessible to a wide range of human beings. These egalitarian attempts, however, reveal uncomfortable consequences. For example, the meritocratic possibilities of current-traditional rhetoric are challenged by static conceptions of language and mind---and, importantly, the rise of standardized language testing in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Also, expressivist rhetoric, exemplified by Peter Elbow's enthusiasm for the discovery of authentic voice, may lead to the construction of a false expression/rationality binary and the exoticizing of the texts and experiences of marginalized students. Finally, I describe how James Berlin and other social rhetoricians situate themselves in the current nativist debate led by cognitive psychologists, psychometricians, and conservative educators.This dissertation interrogates how classical rhetoric and three broad formations of rhetoric in the United States have defined and deployed aptitude, a keyterm signifying the innate traits that impact the speaking and writing performances of students. Analyzing aptitude as an ideological construct, I argue that it plays important roles in determining the boundaries of rhetorical theory, forming judgments about the natures of individuals and human beings, and providing a "natural" means to justify the exclusion of certain groups (e.g., non-citizens, women, and other marginalized groups) from rhetorical training.In my examination of classical rhetoric, I argue that statements about innate talents can be categorized according to their strength, that is, to how rigidly natural ability is conceived of as determining final linguistic performances. The strongest position maintains that innate differences in human nature determine linguistic performances and account for social stratification. A less restrictive version of aptitude, one advocated by Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian, maintains that though natural ability is important, gifted students still require training, practice, and experience if they are to become ideal orators. Finally, a sophistic position denies either the importance or existence of natural traits

Chapter 3 D. Natsagdorj, Mongolian travel writing, and ideas about national identity

In 1927, upon his arrival in Berlin, D. Natsagdorj, one of approximately 45 young Mongolian students who participated in an educational program in Germany and France, composed a long travel poem, “Notes on the Trip to Berlin.” Not only does this poem serve as an early example of Natsagdorj’s writing, it emphasizes Natsagdorj’s role as a didactic writer for the early Mongolian People’s Republic, in particular in conveying the values of the cosmopolitan socialist, a modern subjectivity that quite consciously separated itself from the previous aristocratic, Buddhist, and pastoral identities of pre-revolutionary Mongolia. “Notes on the Trip to Berlin” provides a geographical orientation of the new economic and cultural flows from Mongolia to Western Europe through the Soviet Union. Natsagdorj’s poem is also significant because it is one of the few examples of Mongolian travel literature and enables Natsagdorj to actively resist the image of Mongolians perpetuated by Western travel writers. From the perspective of Natsagdorj’s Mongolian readers, “Notes on the Trip to Berlin” teaches them the process of navigating socialist and pre-revolutionary identities as Natsagdorj grapples with socialist and pre-revolutionary literary forms and language

Religion in U.S. writing classes: Challenging the conflict narrative

In the United States, composition researchers have consistently depicted First-Year Composition (FYC) teachers' responses to students' faith-based writing in terms of a conflict narrative. According to Goodburn (1998), Lindholm (2000), Perkins (2001), and Vander Lei and Fitzgerald (2007), FYC teachers hold strict secular expectations and reject the religious identity and expression of their fundamentalist Christian students. This study explores this conflict narrative by analyzing how 24 FYC teachers in the Midwestern United States describe their own religious identities as well as those of their institutions and respond to two faith-based student texts. The study results challenge simplistic depictions of the conflict narrative. The religious affiliations of the FYC teachers coincide with national averages and neither relate to how teachers described the religious environment of their institutions nor the grades the teachers gave the faith-based texts. Furthermore, rhetorical variables such as genre and audience awareness affect teachers' responses to faith-based writing. Composition researchers, this study concludes, need to complicate how they depict situations in which students express their religious identity within secular post-secondary institutions

Language, literacy, and social change in Mongolia : traditionalist, socialist, and post-socialist identities

Citation: Marzluf, P. (2018). Language, literacy, and social change in mongolia : Traditionalist, socialist, and post-socialist identities (Contemporary central asia: societies, politics, and cultures). Lanham: Lexington Books.Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia is the first full-length treatment of literacy in Mongolian. Challenging readers’ assumptions about Central Asia and Mongolia, this book focuses on Mongolians’ experiences with reading and writing throughout the past 100 years. Literacy, as a powerful historical and social variable, shows readers how reading and writing have shaped the lives of Mongolians and, at the same time, how reading and writing have been transformed by historical, political, economic, and other social forces