B.
Language offers Alurista both a representational vehicle and an experience in itself. That is, language can communicate something external to it (or something that we perceive as external); but reading and comprehending, the work of communication, is itself a linguistic experience. Alurista's poetic language conveys ideas as well as providing the tools with which the reader can create and communicate on his or her own. "I consider myself a revolutionary writer on two levels," he says. "On the first level, my literature is revolutionary because it advocates a revolution" (Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors 281). We can call this the communicative work of his language. But the revolution does not end there. "Second," he concludes, "it engages in revolutionizing the poetic form. I try to develop new forms of expressing our thoughts, our emotions." Alurista sees these formal revolutions as part of the process of creating a "multidimensional reality" for his readers wherein they can view their experiences of the world in a completely novel way (Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors 274).
Multidimensional perspectives come partly from Alurista's playing with enjambment, or word placements on a page (some of his poems are printed as spirals and other shapes), but mainly from the multilingual quality of his work. Alurista was one of the first contemporary Chicano/a writers to publish bilingually, and this has been one of the most widely discussed aspects of his poetry. As Alurista notes, however, and as I wish to stress here, his bilingualism is an aspect of formal innovation that seeks to redefine experience and his readers' view of reality. It is not simply a representation of Chicano/a speech patterns. Alurista claims that his poetry seeks to disrupt language's linear structures, emphasizing incompleteness and circularity.
Summary: Reduce the material to three sentences.
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Synthesis: After you find an A and a C person, use the space below to come up with some major points regarding the material each of you each summarized. Look for intersections, major concepts/ideas, repeated information, overlaps, surprises, and add one question for the group that points forward to what we could examine next (given the information that we have).
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