In his essay, Jeffrey Williams laments the fact that theory in relation to practical criticism is “no longer subordinate to practice but a significant if not the foremost activity, in and of itself” (282). He sees the wave of theory anthologies published in the late 80’s as having “polemical significance and legitimates a certain line of criticism and a particular direction of doing work” (282). The number of new texts formalizes for Williams the movement in literary studies from scholarship to criticism to theory.
For Williams, the formalization of theory is also the death of theory in a way. Being accepted into the academic classroom changes the nature of theory from a critical perspective outside a culture and its power structure to a sort of consumer product, closely related to “institution structures: the university and its exigencies—which includes professional concerns and pedagogical imperatives; the economics of publishing; the confluence of historical factors, such as the shift in the demands for legitimacy in a post-1960’s environment” (285).
Theory has become associated so closely with the theorist who had the principle hand in its development that a sort of personality worship has replaced the active principles involved in the theory. Williams argues that these histories are misleading in another way: they tend to make all theory appear to be the same in relation to importance or sphere of influence.
To compensate for the foreshortening effect, Williams recommends that theory be taught in to “institutional-professional narratives” as well as “historical narratives” in order to construct a temporal and spacial context in which to give more dimension to the theory narrative.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
response to Schultz
Lucille Schultz looks at 19th century composition from a perspective like that of Donald Stewart which opposes a “doctrine of correctness” with a more organic view of composition. Schultz identifies the current-traditional approach as “dominated by grammar, rules, style, abstract topics, and other easily named features” (10) and locates it as the dominant approach in the mid 19th century, especially at the university level. She also identifies an opposing point of view in some text books aimed at younger students.
Her essay takes the form of an argument in which she brings up a point from the dominant theory and opposes it with suggestions from the marginalized texts. To three current-traditional guidelines found the olds texts—“students learn to write by learning rules; young writers are not capable of inventing their own subject matter; and students write about general, abstract topics” (14)—Schultz gives examples of a counter approach in the other texts that value personal experience and learning to write by writing. The purpose of her essay is to acknowledge these dissenting viewpoint and to show how they prefigure much of contemporary composition theory.
Her essay takes the form of an argument in which she brings up a point from the dominant theory and opposes it with suggestions from the marginalized texts. To three current-traditional guidelines found the olds texts—“students learn to write by learning rules; young writers are not capable of inventing their own subject matter; and students write about general, abstract topics” (14)—Schultz gives examples of a counter approach in the other texts that value personal experience and learning to write by writing. The purpose of her essay is to acknowledge these dissenting viewpoint and to show how they prefigure much of contemporary composition theory.
response to Fulkerson
Like Dante giving order to chaos in The Inferno, Fulkerson seeks to systematize composition theory. Unlike concentric circles, he graphs the various theories on a grid. One axis plots the “axiology” or intention of the theory, the other plots more empirical elements like specific process, pedagogy, and evaluative elements and the epistemology on which those elements are based.
The axiologies he defines are “critical/cultural studies, expressivism, and procedural rhetoric” (655). The first two would seem to be dialectical pairs. In cultural studies, the emphasis is on the varied forces which work to shape the fluid self; in an expressivist view, the emphasis is more on self as unified and autonomous. The third approach, rhetorical, would seem to be a sort of synthesis between the two. Rhetoricians are generally not comfortable with “the claim that ‘all truth (reality) is a social construct’” (671), but they do hold that the purpose of comp theory is more focused on the individual in a social context than as an independent entity: “composition as argumentation, genre-based composition, and composition as introduction to an academic discourse community” (671).
Most of Fulkerson’s essay is concerned with describing how each of those schools of intention are manifested, detailing how the classes are taught as well as implications for the supposed “process” which happens in a student’s mind as he writes in accord with the axiology.
But in the final paragraph, Fulkerson suddenly turns from a primarily descriptive mode to a valuative one. He calls the current situation “dangerous” for comp studies. The different schools are set in their own grids and there is no unification in sight.
The axiologies he defines are “critical/cultural studies, expressivism, and procedural rhetoric” (655). The first two would seem to be dialectical pairs. In cultural studies, the emphasis is on the varied forces which work to shape the fluid self; in an expressivist view, the emphasis is more on self as unified and autonomous. The third approach, rhetorical, would seem to be a sort of synthesis between the two. Rhetoricians are generally not comfortable with “the claim that ‘all truth (reality) is a social construct’” (671), but they do hold that the purpose of comp theory is more focused on the individual in a social context than as an independent entity: “composition as argumentation, genre-based composition, and composition as introduction to an academic discourse community” (671).
Most of Fulkerson’s essay is concerned with describing how each of those schools of intention are manifested, detailing how the classes are taught as well as implications for the supposed “process” which happens in a student’s mind as he writes in accord with the axiology.
But in the final paragraph, Fulkerson suddenly turns from a primarily descriptive mode to a valuative one. He calls the current situation “dangerous” for comp studies. The different schools are set in their own grids and there is no unification in sight.
response to Stewart
Donald Stewart’s article places the composition teacher in a universe that has distinct parallels to the universes of Bishop and Popken. The comp teacher is unappreciated and at odds with a mechanistic institution.
Stewart focuses on writing that is based on a “principle of organic unity” in which the writer gives himself over to the subject and lets it guide him to the proper form in which the composition should take. That the subject itself should have some essential nature to be given form isn’t too far removed from a view of the individual as having some unique quality which needs to be expressed in the surrounding world.
The rules of grammar and spelling, the tradition of teaching set forms for composition, even the “current-tradition” of rhetoric and theory which posit deterministic forces are set in opposition to this unfolding of an organic unity. This “doctrine of correctness” (136) results in the “tyranny of mental habit” (137) with the result that writer doesn’t trust himself enough to “submit implicitly to the guidance of his subject” (137).
But unlike Popken, Stewart does posit a way out of determinism and into freedom of choice. Much as Freud posited freedom of choice through a process of analyzing the ways one’s behavior has been determined by unconscious forces, so too can the comp teacher can free himself from the dominance the “current-traditional approach.” It is a rigorous and ironically rational program to achieve this mystical union with the organic unity: “read and assimilate recent research on invention, arrangement, and style; on protocol analysis and problem-solving; on rhetorical epistemology; on the recursiveness of the composing process . . .” (139) That’s just a partial list.
Unlike Bishop and Popken, Stewart doesn’t emphasize the affective element of such a process. Burnout and alienation from the dominant discourse don’t win out. That the writer is granted some mystical union with his subject seems to pave the way for the comp teacher to achieve some union with larger world of students and colleagues.
Stewart focuses on writing that is based on a “principle of organic unity” in which the writer gives himself over to the subject and lets it guide him to the proper form in which the composition should take. That the subject itself should have some essential nature to be given form isn’t too far removed from a view of the individual as having some unique quality which needs to be expressed in the surrounding world.
The rules of grammar and spelling, the tradition of teaching set forms for composition, even the “current-tradition” of rhetoric and theory which posit deterministic forces are set in opposition to this unfolding of an organic unity. This “doctrine of correctness” (136) results in the “tyranny of mental habit” (137) with the result that writer doesn’t trust himself enough to “submit implicitly to the guidance of his subject” (137).
But unlike Popken, Stewart does posit a way out of determinism and into freedom of choice. Much as Freud posited freedom of choice through a process of analyzing the ways one’s behavior has been determined by unconscious forces, so too can the comp teacher can free himself from the dominance the “current-traditional approach.” It is a rigorous and ironically rational program to achieve this mystical union with the organic unity: “read and assimilate recent research on invention, arrangement, and style; on protocol analysis and problem-solving; on rhetorical epistemology; on the recursiveness of the composing process . . .” (139) That’s just a partial list.
Unlike Bishop and Popken, Stewart doesn’t emphasize the affective element of such a process. Burnout and alienation from the dominant discourse don’t win out. That the writer is granted some mystical union with his subject seems to pave the way for the comp teacher to achieve some union with larger world of students and colleagues.
response to Popken
Randall Popken approaches his essay with a very similar view of the individual as that of Bishop. In choosing Edwin Hopkins as a historical archetype of the composition teacher, he has choose a man who was devoutly Christian, who believed he had a “calling” to teach—definitely a man who believed he had a choice in life. As a Christian, Hopkins equated the self with a soul. The self like the soul was an autonomous entity that wasn’t fundamentally changed by secular forces like psychology or politics. Moreover, the soul/self is set in opposition to these forces. No wonder then that Hopkins had such a tough time administering his duty in the profane world of the university.
Hopkins believed in a pedagogy in which “each student (. . .) should receive as an individual the attention of the instructor” (621). He believed that teaching comp wasn’t a process of lecturing to large numbers of students, but a process of reading large numbers of student-written papers. The time consuming nature of such a process wasn’t appreciated by an administration that was more attuned to the philistine world of science and commerce.
Popken details Hopkins’ attempts at labor organizing. Like Bishop’s longing for a “Burkean parlor” (325), Hopkins wants an environment where he and his colleagues feel a little more appreciated. But that doesn’t happen and—again paralleling Bishop’s article and her concern with “burnout”—Hopkins suffers a physical and emotional debility.
In choosing a man whose fundamental conception of self as entity forever separate from the world around it, Popken has almost guaranteed an unhappy ending to a story in which one seeks to be appreciated by that world. But then, the godless Marxists didn’t have much more success in the endeavor. Popken doesn’t formulate any suggestions to change the situation. Like a religious view of man’s fate, he seems to suggest that world is forever the same as it always was and will be and you just better get used to suffering.
Hopkins believed in a pedagogy in which “each student (. . .) should receive as an individual the attention of the instructor” (621). He believed that teaching comp wasn’t a process of lecturing to large numbers of students, but a process of reading large numbers of student-written papers. The time consuming nature of such a process wasn’t appreciated by an administration that was more attuned to the philistine world of science and commerce.
Popken details Hopkins’ attempts at labor organizing. Like Bishop’s longing for a “Burkean parlor” (325), Hopkins wants an environment where he and his colleagues feel a little more appreciated. But that doesn’t happen and—again paralleling Bishop’s article and her concern with “burnout”—Hopkins suffers a physical and emotional debility.
In choosing a man whose fundamental conception of self as entity forever separate from the world around it, Popken has almost guaranteed an unhappy ending to a story in which one seeks to be appreciated by that world. But then, the godless Marxists didn’t have much more success in the endeavor. Popken doesn’t formulate any suggestions to change the situation. Like a religious view of man’s fate, he seems to suggest that world is forever the same as it always was and will be and you just better get used to suffering.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
response to Bishop
Wendy Bishop sums up the thesis of her address to the CCCC in one sentence: “Acknowledging institutional fatigue, I outline possibilities for individual renewal.” In the great debate on whether composition should emphasize the individual as a sort of autonomous whole or the social and political forces which shape individuals, Bishop approaches her topic from the first perspective. Compositionists, she says, are a “dedicated minority by choice: as agents instead of as those acted upon” (324). In positing free will, Bishop both defines the essential nature of self and uses it as the fulcrum for her argument.
Opposed to the individual is the institution of English education, a place where “activities and theories were being discarded or overwritten even as I felt I was just beginning to gain success with them,” a place where “scholarship appear(ed) to have a decade’s currency, if that long” (327). Staying current with changing theory and the various perspectives they offer of identity causes “burnout” (327). But again, she emphasizes the nature of man as opposed to the mechanistic universe as a way out of the problem. After comparing her colleagues to rocket ships crashing in the desert, she says: “I know these individuals continue because they have chosen to” (329).
Bishop restates the fundamental dilemma by quoting Joe Harris. Harris thinks that a different theory of intellectual life needs to be created: “one that admits to the ways in which we are positioned by gender, race, and class, but that also holds out the hope of a more fluid and open culture in which we can choose (emphasis his) the positions we want to speak from and for” (330).
In Bishop’s article, choice and free will trump the determinism of theory and leads to an education environment that is “not theory or practice, this or that, it’s person to person” (332).
Opposed to the individual is the institution of English education, a place where “activities and theories were being discarded or overwritten even as I felt I was just beginning to gain success with them,” a place where “scholarship appear(ed) to have a decade’s currency, if that long” (327). Staying current with changing theory and the various perspectives they offer of identity causes “burnout” (327). But again, she emphasizes the nature of man as opposed to the mechanistic universe as a way out of the problem. After comparing her colleagues to rocket ships crashing in the desert, she says: “I know these individuals continue because they have chosen to” (329).
Bishop restates the fundamental dilemma by quoting Joe Harris. Harris thinks that a different theory of intellectual life needs to be created: “one that admits to the ways in which we are positioned by gender, race, and class, but that also holds out the hope of a more fluid and open culture in which we can choose (emphasis his) the positions we want to speak from and for” (330).
In Bishop’s article, choice and free will trump the determinism of theory and leads to an education environment that is “not theory or practice, this or that, it’s person to person” (332).
Friday, January 23, 2009
What is comp theory
What is comp theory? Well, to the carpenter in me, it is a much simpler thing. It’s the way to compose a house—the most ergonomic way to hold the nail gun, the proper order of walls to be built, nailing patterns and bracing. It’s spacial and sequential, and revising is not a thing one plans on. It’s a one-way method that I’ve grown comfortable with. Unfortunately, that isn’t the comp theory I’m probably supposed to be talking about. Writing about.
In my mind, comp theory presupposes a teacher and students. A teacher has some sort of knowledge or understanding that he or she is trying to pass on to the students. Comp theory is about that relationship.
Comp theory questions both sides. Of the teacher, it asks: what is the nature of the understanding that a teacher possesses? Is it an objective knowledge of proper syntax and grammar? Or the themes that have been embodied in literature—how they are manifested in the words; the historical changes they undergone? Comp theory would seem to say that this is an old fashioned view—by objectifying knowledge, by considering it to be a factual as a rock, one’s underlying motive is more to preserve the status quo than enlighten the student as the forces that are constantly shaping one’s view of one self and the world.
Comp theory would seem to be about enabling students to express themselves. But if—in theory—the objective self is a sentimental illusion and the world keeps surpassing the concepts and attitudes that describe it, what exactly can one teach another? It would seem that the only thing properly taught is a process of change and flux.
Comp theory is about strategies to deal with the changing nature of understanding the self and the world. What type of assignments are given to enable the diversity students to each acquire this understanding? Are the assignments given to groups of students to work on collaboratively or individually?
At this stage in the class, my understanding of comp theory is awfully theoretical. I am not a teacher. I don’t have the hands-on experience to be able to immediately transfer these ethereal concepts into flesh and blood situations.
I came back to the university a few years ago because I wanted to write. I’d gotten my undergraduate degree twenty five years earlier and spent a good of intervening years trying to write stories—without much success. At the start of every writing workshop I’d entered during those years—and even the ones I’ve taken here at CSU—the teacher usually threw out the disclaimer that “no one can teach you how to write.” I’ve spent a number of years figuring out exactly what is meant by that.
These days, I think it relates to something Jane Smiley said. She was being interviewed about the process of revision in developing character and theme. “Where every student eventually arrives is a place where the formal problems of the work are the same as the psychological problems of the student and the philosophical problems of the student’s world-view.” At that point, only the writer can make the story work.
But although there is definitely a psychological aspect to writing and one would hope the process is therapeutic, writing is not psychotherapy. Writing seems to be a much more self contained act where both teacher and student, analyst and analyzed, are located within the writing individual. At least it seems so in my case—not being a teacher and unsure whether or that profession lies in my future. At this point, I’m more interested in comp theory from the student’s perspective than the teacher’s, how it applies to the act of writing itself. How, exactly, does one learn the thing that no one can teach?Tuesday, January 20, 2009
On page 12 of the COMPbiblio text, the synopsis of a David Bartholomae article addresses an issue that plagues me when I think about theory in regard to writing--or maybe the issue simply plagues in me about writing in general. Bartholomae is responding to an article written by Peter Elbow in which he feels Elbow is perpetuating the myth of "an independent, self-creative, self-expressive subjectivity." Bartholomae suggests that this sort of attitude creates the false impression that the self precedes the forces which act on it, that it devalues the political forces and psychological mechanisms which operate to shape the self. He asks if the university has a right to perpetuate these myths which relate to ego and power by asking students to "participate in a first person, narrative or expressive genre whose goal is to reproduce the ideology of sentimental realism . . . a narrative that celebrates a world of private life and whose hero is sincere." Not just studying particular texts or authors would seem debated here, but whether holding students individually responsible for papers and grades might not be unconsciously teaching them beogeouise values. I was relieved to read that he answered tenatively "yes."
I'm a WASP male in my fifties. I grew up in a small town in Iowa, the son of Lutheran parents. My idea of a self is still tinged by connonations of a soul, some essential element that isn't subject to time or worldly forces. My parents did have the grace to posit this soul beyond race or gender, but it is still a concept that gives me problems when I study theories that posit almost any notion of self as illusory. Identity at its most definitive is a composite thing shaped by everything from global to peer group pressures, from economic to sexual forces. It's not hard to believe all these things are at work at once, but how to unify them in a soul-like self is hard. I'd like to posit some mechanism not unlike Freud's superego, some free floating demiurgic entity which runs around in my psyche creating little pathways of connection between the various identitys until the web is so thick that it becomes one thing. But since a mechanistic view of psychology doesn't seem valid anymore either, that concept doesn't hold much more promise than soul.
I think I am going to take some refuge in the ideas of people like Wendy Bishop and Peter Elbow. Bishop promotes a connection between composition and creative writing, which I transcribe as a way to connect theory with my personal life. She also discusses the "process and art of revision--and its importance to the classroom--through personal narrative" (25). It sounds like how I regard the process of writing, a way of distilling the facts of my life for the essential connections it shares with others.
But Peter Elbow might be my hero. He was told by "numerous professors that he could not write well" (77) so became a writer. He's apparently developed methodologies to overcome the "writing axiety phenomenon" (78)--I'm definitely going to look those up. "He even questions his own early desire to be the perfect student" (78). Sounds to me like he's grappling with his self as if his soul depended on it, too.
I'm a WASP male in my fifties. I grew up in a small town in Iowa, the son of Lutheran parents. My idea of a self is still tinged by connonations of a soul, some essential element that isn't subject to time or worldly forces. My parents did have the grace to posit this soul beyond race or gender, but it is still a concept that gives me problems when I study theories that posit almost any notion of self as illusory. Identity at its most definitive is a composite thing shaped by everything from global to peer group pressures, from economic to sexual forces. It's not hard to believe all these things are at work at once, but how to unify them in a soul-like self is hard. I'd like to posit some mechanism not unlike Freud's superego, some free floating demiurgic entity which runs around in my psyche creating little pathways of connection between the various identitys until the web is so thick that it becomes one thing. But since a mechanistic view of psychology doesn't seem valid anymore either, that concept doesn't hold much more promise than soul.
I think I am going to take some refuge in the ideas of people like Wendy Bishop and Peter Elbow. Bishop promotes a connection between composition and creative writing, which I transcribe as a way to connect theory with my personal life. She also discusses the "process and art of revision--and its importance to the classroom--through personal narrative" (25). It sounds like how I regard the process of writing, a way of distilling the facts of my life for the essential connections it shares with others.
But Peter Elbow might be my hero. He was told by "numerous professors that he could not write well" (77) so became a writer. He's apparently developed methodologies to overcome the "writing axiety phenomenon" (78)--I'm definitely going to look those up. "He even questions his own early desire to be the perfect student" (78). Sounds to me like he's grappling with his self as if his soul depended on it, too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)