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Essay Available:
Pages:
4 pages/≈1100 words
Sources:
1 Source
Style:
APA
Subject:
Literature & Language
Type:
Essay
Language:
English (U.S.)
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Topic:

Importance of the Contact Zone in Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”

Essay Instructions:

Assignment 1: Entering the Conversation (15%)
Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”
Your Task:
Throughout your academic and professional career you will be asked to summarize and respond to materials you engage with in order to “join the conversation.” Your first assignment of the semester asks you to look at Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” and join the conversation.
For this essay, you should:
Provide a brief summary of Pratt’s argument.
Join the conversation by either agreeing or disagreeing with her argument. Support your position by drawing on personal experiences or observations.
Audience:
Your audience for this assignment will be your instructor and your classmates, but you should pretend as though no one reading your essay has ever read Pratt’s article. Thus, you should thoroughly represent the text’s main ideas and key points and provide accurate textual evidence throughout.
Requirements:
To achieve your purpose with your audience, use the following strategies in your essay:
Introduce the text and the author at the beginning..
You must select an argument (claim) that Pratt makes, an argument that touches on an issue that you have ideas of your own to advance.
You must present this aspect of Pratt’s argument only, and then you must demonstrate to the reader your own argument on the issue(s) it raises.
In your rough draft, you need to briefly summarize Pratt’s point via a quotation, and then advance your own argument on the issue that has been raised.
It is always good to signal your reader and use reporting verbs such as "Pratt argues/claims/states," "According to Pratt," and "for Pratt, the solution appears to be," etc.
Anytime you are summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting from the article you should note it at the end of the sentence via an in-text citation, as following: (Pratt 537).
Formatting guidelines: at least 900 words (all drafts must be at least 900 words in order to get credit – this is equivalent to at least three full pages. Drafts exceeding four pages will lose points for lack of concision), Times New Roman, 12 font, standard margins, double spaced, using MLA format
Top right corner of all pages: Your last name and page number
Top left corner (1st page only): Your name, professor’s name, Class title, date submitted, who helped you
with the essay, if anyone (LRC tutors, name of a Penn State faculty member)
Title (1st page only): Double space again and center the title. Do not underline, italicize, or place your title in quotation marks; write the title in Title Case (standard capitalization), not in all capital letters (Come up with a unique title that reflects your particular essay).
Works cited page: The last page of your essay should be a works cited page, which lists the reference for Pratt’s essay. Copy and paste the following reference into your works cited page:
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the contact zone.” Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, edited by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002, pp. 604-623.

Essay Sample Content Preview:
Your Name
Subject and Section
Professor’s Name
September 11, 2019
Summary – Arts of the Contact Zone
It is often said that culture reflects a person’s personality. It acts like a certain guide that influences how a person would perceive, think, and act on the same factual circumstances. However, culture can exist in many ways and not only as a collectivity of the traditions, beliefs, and ideals in the society. It can be further sub-differentiated between ages, ethnicities, and gender, and even professions, among others. Accordingly, Mary Louise Pratt, in her article entitled “Arts of the Contact Zone”, aptly argued and explained that it is the exposure to all these kinds of “sub-cultures” that shapes the individual that we are today and will be in the future. Thus, she states that it is important for anyone to study these ‘contact zones’ when trying to learn about a culture rather than view them as distinct and different entities. In order to further understand her arguments, this article would summarize her contentions and provide a feedback based on my own knowledge and experience. All in all, I believe that understanding Pratt’s concept of ‘contact zones’ would allow individuals to be fully appreciate how different cultures have affected and shaped the one that we have today.
The Contact Zone
Mary Pratt defined her concept of the contact zone as “a social location in which several discourse communities mingle” and exist “in dynamic relations with each other, struggling for power in ways that mirror larger social struggles for political power and justice” CITATION Pra91 \p 10 \l 1033 (Pratt 10). In other words, she described these zones as areas where both interaction and conflict exist between different cultures, regardless of whether it is manifest on subtle in character. In the succeeding discussions she described what these zones are and exemplified (i.e., Spain and its colonizers) how they affect one another.
Further in her discussion, Pratt also talked about the different ‘actions’ of the contact zone, such as (1) transculturation and (2) collaboration, among others. On the one hand, transculturation happens when “members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture” CITATION Pra91 \p 28 \l 1033 (Pratt 28). This is the process where inferior culture (and members of which) accepts the intrusion of a foreign one and uses some of these traditions or ideologies as building blocks for their own. On the other hand, Pratt also discussed about the action of “collaboration”. She defined this concept as the representation of mixed ideas and values from both dominant and inferior cultures that exist within the contact zone.
Transculturation and Collaboration
Despite the number of concepts that Pratt discussed, the two main ideas provided above created the most convincing arguments for me.
On the one hand, transculturation could be seen based on how our ...
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