sources for Elbow

Bartholomae, David. “Writing With Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” College Composition and Communication, 46 (1995), 62-71.
This article by Bartholomae was written six years after the debate with Elbow began. He argues that there no writing without teachers, that to hide the role of teacher is to “hide the traces of power, tradition, and authority present at the scene of writing.”
He also argues that Elbows classroom of uncritical comment is the longing for a utopian space “free from institutional pressures, a cultural process free from the influence of culture, an historical moment outside of history”—a sentimental longing for transcendence. Bartholomae would emphasize a classroom in time, present to all the forces that are acting on any cultural situation. Whereas Elbow has argued the teacher’s position as a coach of students in uncritical partisanship, Bartholomae would make the classroom “available for critical inquiry, for critique that is part of the lesson of practice.” Bartholomae does recognize the “empowerment” that comes to student who recognizes the validity of his own experience, that he is the “Author” of his life. But in a move that is reminiscent of both/and argument, Bartholomae says that authorship in that sense is also a lie.

Bartholomae, David and Elbow, Peter. “Interchanges: Responses to Bartholomae and Elbow.” College Composition and Communication, 46 (1995), 84-92.
In another installment of the debate, the two address each in written statements. Bartholomae begins by summarizing the argument between them: Elbow would encourage students to see themselves at the center of the discourse, trusting language to convey meaning whereas he would place them on the periphery and teach them to skeptical. Bartholomae begins by being dismissive of a student voice, opting instead to show how that voice is not hers but written by the culture as part of culture’s larger attempt to “preserve the idea of an independent, self-determining subjectivity.” The voice of a writer isn’t present until the student shows evidence of “work directed against writing (that is, against the culture’s desire to tell a certain story . . .).” Bartholomae says that he would spend more time reading in a writing course, difficult reading at that. He wants students to adopt a critical perspective on those texts in order that they can be “able to work closely with the ways their writing constructs a relationship with tradition, power, and authority—other people’s words.” Bartholomae also addresses the role of the teacher: whereas Elbow finds significance in appealing to what students can learn in the “absence of instruction,” he would have teachers who prompt students to write “in way that they would not if left to (not their own) but the culture’s devices.
Elbow answers that his approach isn’t in either/or opposition to Bartholomae, but an and/both approach. “You assume without argument that if I celebrate ‘independent, self-creative, self-expressive subjectivity,’ I must be against the notion of people as socially constructed;” he isn’t “attacking” academia so much as trying to reform it of it dependence on skepticism. Elbow defends the practice of freewriting, allowing the students space and permission to write whatever they want, saying that it is not just a celebration of the individual feeling but a practice that can show “more nakedly than other kinds of writing all the junk that culture and the past have stuffed into our heads.” Freewriting is a “paradigm of the real and the utopian: an example of how we can use our authority as teachers in our institutional settings to create artificial spaces that can heighten discovery and learning.”
Elbow also points out that Bartholomae does believe in a self governing power within the individual, one that “must engage in the critique of language and culture and recognize their power over us so that we can step somewhat out of the way.” Elbow suggests that if students “attend more and more closely to their experience,” they will come to the same realization but in a manner that allows them more self confidence and fulfillment.

Elbow, Peter. “The Believing Game—Methodological Believing.” Paper at the CCCC, New Orleans. Apr. 2008.
In this paper, Elbow describing the “believing game” which he now sees as “the core of all (his) work.” He defines the believing game as the discipline practice of “not just listening to views different from our own and holding back from arguing with them; not just trying to restate them without bias; but actually trying to believe them.” In justifying the attitude, he says it has been “evolutionarily” useful in educating children to the wisdom of parents and others with authority. In his book, Writers Without Teachers (73), he recommends it as the operative principle in a learning situation where peer writers share their work with each other.
The believing game is contrasted with the doubting game which Elbow defines as “the most widely honored and taught in our culture.” It is the methodological skepticism behind the scientific method and the doubting that questions religious and political authority. Elbow says that the success of that sort of doubting has caused us to lose sight of the necessary benefits that can come from the believing game.
While he believes that both modes of thought are necessary for good writing, he believes that the doubting game is so dominant in society that the believing game needs to be stressed in order to overcome the imbalance. The believing game can: 1) enable us to find flaws in our own thinking by exposing us to viewpoints other than our own normal one, an act which can reveal the assumption we normally don’t recognize; 2) enable a more extended analysis of competing points of view to see virtues in a position which the doubting game disqualifies on a sort of technicality of logic; 3) enable us to “achieve goals that the doubting game neglects” through exercising a different “dimension of intelligence” and a “different way of interacting with others.”

Elbow, Peter. “Voice in Writing Again: Embracing Contraries.” College English, 70.2 (Nov, 2007): 168-88.
Elbow stresses the importance of voice in writing, relating it closely to author’s intent. He asserts that “everyone have a real voice,” that voice is the “true self:” and source of “rhetorical power,” and that “the goal of teaching to develop the self.” He contrasts his position with that of others who claim that “we do not write, we are written by out culture. We are socially constructed, and what we mistake for a self is a subject position that changes as we are differentially interpellated from one social context of our life to another.”
Elbow traces these conflicting views through history. The Greek sophists, he says, believed that they could craft as speech that could be delivered effectively by any self. That view was opposed by Plato who said that the power of language came from the self who delivered the speech. Aristotle took a position between the two saying that speakers could fool listeners with a consciously constructed voice, but that one is more likely to believe a man of good character.
In modern times, Elbow traces the conflict to the New Critics. The NC’s stressed voice in a work, the persona that was embodied in the text. But they also stressed this persona was relevant only inasmuch as it was embodied “in the text.” The author’s intent was of no relevance. “They were interested in the self in a text but insisted that this self was continually made and re-made by language—not a reflection of the historical self or author.”
While Elbow takes the position that author is not dead and that his intent is a function of the work, he doesn’t discount the extent to which the self is created in a social context. He criticizes the either/or attitude that has separated the two views. He says that his own work has been represented by people who failed to see that he was “carving out a both/and analysis and making arguments that embrace contraries.” He isn’t rejecting the either/or attitude toward self as a private or public entity, but neither is saying that simply both/and approach is correct. Both are valid
He doesn’t argue for a compromise between the two points of view, but a fluctuation between them which will reveal perspectives that neither point of view alone could offer. His position is related to the doubting and believing game which he formulated twenty five years earlier. He argues for the ability to accept the contradictory notions which, while not synchronically logical, functions with the added element of time to create a self with social resonance.

Elbow, Peter. “Come to See Myself as a Vernacular Intellectual: Remarks at the 2007 CCCC General Session on Receiving the Exemplar Award.” College Composition and Communication, 59.3 (Feb 2008): 519-24.
Elbow begins by discussing his 1973 work, Writers Without Teachers. He says that he was “bothered by the gateway power that teachers have in institutional classrooms to determine a student’s experience of writing and the judge whether writing is good or bad.” His intention in Writers Without Teachers was to encourage writers to meet outside an institutional setting, that what writing needed was “naked empiricism: careful accounts of what written words make happen inside reader’s heads.” He knew that the ‘no arguing’ rule and the lack of authority or sanction to judge writing would cause dissent among professionals so included an appendix on the believing game in which he attempted to show “how deeply intellectual it is to harness both intellect and will in the task of trying to believe multiple and conflicting views.” Elbow says that his long term goal has been “visionary, but pragmatic too: to change our very conception of literacy so that all vernacular dialects and languages are deemed appropriate for serious writing.”
Elbow uses the term “vernacular intellectual,” coined by Grant Farred and developed by Carmen Kynard, to described his own career as one who “functions at the intersection of the intellectual and the popular.” That position is prominent in today’s cultural studies. Mohammed Ali and Bob Marley are examples of people who moved up from popular culture to take a place at the intersection while others, including Elbow, are people who have “turned away from the accepted, dominant intellectual modality and vocabulary” to adopt a “new positioning and idiomatic language.”

Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Feb, 1995): 72-83.
Elbow again details the conflict he feels exists between being a writer (who principally functions through the believing game to create texts based on personal experience) and the academic (who functions through the doubting game to analyze given texts for relative meanings). He traces the conflict to the composition classroom and the nature of texts to be studied: are they peer created or are students asked to write about traditional texts? Although he uses both, Elbow primarily focus on the first.
Much of the essays is a discussion of the conflicting goals of the academic and the writer. Elbows associates the academic with readers who consider meaning to be fluid and indeterminate, who distrust the nature of language as a set of arbitrary symbols, who position themselves in the context of important others who have written on the subject. Writers are those who have an intention to communicate a certain understanding, who trust language to be able to communicate that understanding, and who Elbow sometimes encourages to act as if they were the only one to ever speak on the subject.
Elbow addresses some critiques of his position as “naïve” or “romantic,” that it encourages “arrogance” in the notion of self being above or apart from its relational nature to others. While he acknowledges that his position can “appear” this way, those appearances are deceptive in the same way that theory doesn’t always reflect empirical reality. It ignores the social nature of what actually happens in the classroom among individuals who study each other’s writing.

Elbow, Peter. “A Method for Teaching Writing.” College English 30 (1968): 115-125.
In the abstract of this article, Elbow states that he “proposes to teach writing from the hypothesis that true writing and good prose are only end products rather than the primary objectives.” He directs the teaching method toward college freshmen who aren’t already excellent writers (whether he has a different program for “excellent” writers is a question he doesn’t address).
Elbow identifies two criteria that teachers normally use to judge students writing: is the true in that good reasoning and documentation; is the writing good in effectively using form and style. Elbow identifies a third way of judging writing that isn’t normally used: “does the writing produce the desired effect in the reader.” He says that this quality “tends to be intangible and difficult to specify,” but it is the one that people exercise in judging language “whether consciously or not, from the day they begin to use language at all.” The course he describes is one to reestablish this basic premise: “putting words on paper to produce a desired effect.”
Elbow recommends writing letters to government officials or newspapers, anything the class can “take seriously.” Each member writes a letter which is then copied and distributed. Class hour is spent judging the effectiveness of each. Such an assignment enables a student to identify the skills he already possesses, to realize that he does “in fact have standards and criteria for judging writing.” Such a specifically imagined audience also helps the student clarify his writing. Elbow also discusses the benefits of peer review material saying that it helps students to study material that is flawed in order to better comprehend what makes good writing good, that they are more likely to accept the judgment of peers than they are a teacher’s, and that is it simply more interesting.
In the second half of the article, Elbow discusses his experience helping conscientious objectors write letters to the draft board during the Vietnam War. In helping the writers, Elbow says he discovered the importance of voice, the expression of self. This sort of writing stresses sincerity and belief, clarifies the understanding of rhetoric as “a transaction between the self and the audience.”

Elbow, Peter. “Opinion: The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?” College English 64 (2002): 533-46.
Elbow addresses the relationship between literature and composition teachers from the same point of view as he talks about being a writer vs. being an academic: from “a personal and subjective point of view,” in “large arguable generalizations” that are “based on my ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ of things.” He says that he misses the “comfort and pleasure” of planning a class around a literary text, but feels a duty to the students to teach in the more difficult manner of focusing on students and their own writing.
He says that he is writing at a time when people in “people in composition have taken to using rubber gloves for the word ‘process.’” He goes on to defend process in composition by saying that it parallels the way that close reading is still revered in critical theory even the school of New Criticism (which developed close reading as a technique) is now discredited.
The teaching of composition finally made Elbow feel “useful” in that his concern wasn’t just for teaching, but “also for students: attention, interest, and care for them, their lives, and what’s going on in their minds,” “a felt value in identifying with students.” He views literature as it is taught today (2002) as promoting a “distancing mode” of reading, of “critical detachment,” of reading a text as “a complex artifact rather than as a device for making sense of their (student’s) lives and feelings.” He isn’t promoting an “either/or” between the two perspectives, both are necessary, but he feels the approach that focuses on students personal lives—and the emotional attachment to issues that come from such an approach—is neglected to such a degree in the present culture that it needs to be emphasized in the composition classroom.
His argument is based on feelings—he says that as a student he felt was “supposed to learn to be in some subtle internal sense different—somehow ‘higher’ or ‘finer.’” But if his argument is mostly couched in his feelings, he also offers a defense for so doing by arguing that it is “a common failure of rationality or intelligence to restrict the definition of rationality to the exercise of conventional reasoning,” that there is a link between “feelings and cognition.” Focusing on feeling as a precognitive awareness enables a different perspective on the problem of false consciousness.

Fishman, Stephen M. and McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson. “Is Expressivism Dead? Reconsidering Its Romantic Roots and its Relation to Social Constructionism.” College English 54 (1992): 647-661.
In the first part of this paper, Fishman addresses the charges of social constructionists against expressionism, that it makes students “suckers” and “powerless” by failing to teach them an academic language, that it serves the forces of conservatism and the status quo by teaching them that they already possess everything they need to write well, and that it teaches a naïve view of the writer as independent.
Fishman agues against this perspective on expressionism as isolationist by comparing the expressionist view to that of German romanticism. He likens the age of Enlightenment to modern life wherein individuals were seen as independent and nature mechanical, a critical intelligence in opposition to larger forces, who banded together in uneasy political arrangements to protect themselves. Romanticism, in reviving interest in personal experience, Fishman identifies romanticism as an attempt to reestablish a connection between individuals in a “transformational” rather than a “transactional” manner. He views expressionist writing as more than simply self discovery, but an attempt to clarify and realize the fundamental connection between people. In this way, Fishman sees the radical nature of expressionism, not the conservative.
In the second part, McCarthy examines Fishman’s composition class to show how helping “students grow in their ability to understand their own experiences” is not “incompatible with learning disciplinary language” or other social constructivist goals. McCarthy conducts her study by monitoring the class and its writing and through student interviews. From this research, she provides examples of classroom activity in line Elbow’s methods and precepts which show that “expressivist and social contructionist approaches are not mutually exclusive.”

Gardiner, Ellen. “Peter Elbow’s Rhetoric of Reading.” Rhetoric Review 13 (1995): 321-330.
Gardiner begins by addressing criticism of Elbow’s methods as conservative and writer focused. She feels these comments ignore the social implications of Elbow view on the reader in the writing process. If Elbow can criticized as regards the social nature of his method, it’s that he tries to “manage” it, not ignore it.
“Discourse as used by human beings is always interested, always located in a person speaking and an audience listening.” Gardiner uses this Elbow quotation to establish the fundamental nature of writing as a social act. She identifies his method of discouraging criticism during peer reviews as a reaction to capitalism and its influence in the educational system—“Elbow wants to help insecure, vulnerable student writers stave off ‘hostile corporate takeovers’ of their texts by readers who have internalized the harsh critical voices of those who belong to the academic discourse community.” But in doing so, in limiting the exchange between writer and audience, he is preventing the dialogue from being authentically social.
Gardiner recommends more latitude in peer and teacher review of student writing: “to argue, to negotiate is, implicitly or explicitly, a necessary part of all authentic language relationships.”

Larson, Richard L. “Review: [untitled].” College Composition and Communication 25 (1974): 66-70.
The juxtaposition of these two book reviews from 1974 illustrates the impact of Elbows first book on writing, Writing Without Teachers. Larson criticizes a book by Donald Hall for not appreciating the history of composition enough to build on priori knowledge in the field and simply repeat the same information but with a slight difference in structure and style. Although he doesn’t use the term “current-traditional,” Larson critiques the book in much the same way in that it simply repeats long standing precepts and advice.
Of Elbow’s book, Larson identitifies new approaches: “a learning environment that is radically different from the environment Hall assumes;” Elbows interest in “what goes on in a writer’s life—in his mind—as he writes.” Of the latter, Larson writes: “That emphasis alone is enough to differentiate his book from virtually every book about writing now available.
Larson discusses the originality of ideas like freewriting and the doubting/believing games and calls the book, an “earnest” one.

Pemberton, Michael A. “Modeling Theory and Composing Process Models.” College Composition and Communication 44 (1993): 40-58.
Pemberton purpose in this paper is “to broaden the discussion of epistemology in composition studies by connecting it to research in the branch of scientific philosophy known as modeling theory.” He notes that as composition studies have become more theoretical, they have adopted methodoligies of the social sciences and are using models as conceptual frameworks to understand complex behaviors and structures for underlying patterns.
A model can be used by theoreticians whose concepts are so far removed from observation and experience to make explicit the connections between the theory and the everyday world, or a model can be use to organize a field of empirical data into a generalized or representative example. He examines the ways models are made for their epistemological and philosophical assumptions, how they can both help and hurt an understanding of the processes they are designed to describe. Pemberton uses the observations in relation to expressivist, social constructionist, and cognitive models in composition.