by Patricia L. Jones

Created on: December 11, 2008

This article represents my personal reflections on the places created by "The Arrival," a 20006 graphic book by Shaun Tan, in which rhetorical questions can be safely constructed. For the duration of this article I will refer to these spaces as Public Spheres, in the tradition of Rosa Eberly's book, "Citizen Critics," released in 2000. Specifically, I focus on the narrow margin of Public Spheres that enable conversation about foreign language; as it is seen, learned, and taught, by Teachers of English as Second or Foreign Languages, and English Language Learners placed in an environment that is not native to their culture or language. By examining these Public Spaces as they relate to questions of experience and struggle in these narrow corridors of human experience, I hope to expose doorways into wide-open spaces of rhetorical discovery where correlating pedagogical issues can be confronted.

Distant Arrivals and Nearing Departures:

A Critical Discussion of Rosa Eberly's Public Spheres in "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan

There are mouths in these walls. The long, narrow space presses against me; tight enough to force me to feel the hum of sounds made in throats too distant to belong with the eyes that watch me. The walls have always been able to talk; the real problem is always the same - we, as a "native" people, do not listen. Yet the walls talk on, and they watch and they wait. The multiplicity of voices and these faces, imbedded in the roughly hewn surfaces of the hallway by the lives which have passed through the narrow corridor of "There" to "Here," belong to a unified presence of which I am becoming a part. We are strangers. We are immigrants. We are one. We are forged together by a shared moment of urgency when the need to belong to something larger than self surpasses the importance of self. We are students. We are road-warriors. We are survivors. These are our stories, our hopes, and our communal future.

Living Lies:

The Daily Makepeace of Telling Tales Our Neighbors Want to Hear

Two men pass on the street, one tips his hat and the other nods his head, lacking a hat to keep him warm. A trolley clatters by on tracks made crooked by the great earthquake and fire of 1910. The year is 1932 and the men are standing on the bustling waterfront of San Francisco, CA. As the crabs clatter from cargo holds on the ship into the large crates on the dock, street urchins or starving children depending entirely on how you look on them fist fight for what is dropped too far away

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