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.