Composition: History & Theory: 2000 - 2009
College English, Volume 63, No. 2: November, 2000.
Description
CONTENTS
Dialectics of Self: Structure and Agency as the Subject of English (Alan E. France): This is a discussion of the conflict France sees as existing between literature and composition. “The opening paragraph characterized the work of literature faculty as ‘discuss[ing] Dickens and Derrida’ and of composition faculty as ‘correcting dangling modifiers’”(145). He then makes this rather ambitious claim: “In this essay, I will argue that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and, further, that by harvesting some very general insights from two decades of cultural critique, we in English departments can develop curricula that will resolve a good deal of the conflict between literature and composition and improve instruction in both” (146). “In practice,” he writes, “students are assigned to write: assigned a topic or prompt; assigned a genre with conventions (most often of the personal essay); assigned a process of composition (incremental revision of multiple drafts); and of course assigned a word length, due date, and (usually) a grade” (147). “Yet,” France continues, “most would agree that writing effectively-jumping the communicative gap between self and others-requires both a sense of self as traditionally understood and a sense of how, at this moment, both this self and those others have been structured by culture. Inquiry into the processes that structure both personality and discourse can help our students understand the nature of-the constraints on and opportunities for-agency” (149). The article seems to highlight the differences and the commonalities between expressivist and social-epistemic approaches to composition, seeking to blend them in some way. He offers a number of ideas and a few sample assignments, including an interesting cultural critique that asks: “what makes something cool?” The Narrative Construction of Cyberspace: Reading Neuromancer, Reading Cyberspace Debates (Daniel Punday): “Where traditionally individuals have interacted with each other using face-to-face verbal and physical cues limited by their own physical and material conditions,” Punday writes, “cyber- space’s conditions of interaction are much more constructed. Individuals can leave their physical characteristics undefined in some types of online communication or can create virtual identities for themselves in others” (194). This approach, in and of itself, is nothing new, but the next part might be. Punday goes on to argue that while most of us seem to believe online space is a free and open environment where we can “try on” any identity we like, we actually carry with us a significant amount of baggage. Punday calls online environments “novelistic space,” arguing that the freedom we think we have is actually constrained by a number of standard narrative conventions: “Even when they seem to be experimenting with identities, critics have charged, individuals online most often are actually playing out conventional stories with easily recognizable roles for men and women, whites and minorities” (195). He examines a number of online environments using the 1984 William Gibson novel Neuromancer (where the word cyberspace first appears) as a kind of backdrop. OPINION: The Rhetoric of Reproof (Leonard and JoAnne Podis): “It is troubling that we-experts in rhetoric-so readily employ the conventional pugilistic approaches to academic discourse (and encourage our students to emulate us) without acknowledging that such a rhetoric is fraught with ethical traps,” the authors explain, “For instance, might not it be ethically suspect to engage in scholarly self-promotion at the direct expense of others or to approach our professional obligation to be critical with a ‘vanquish-the-opposition-at-all-costs’ mentality” (216)? Podis and Podis then go on to describe a number of situations (some from personal experience, others from prominent articles) in which they see the rhetoric of reproof in action. Among these are Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” in which he apparently engages in the “public mockery of a student,” which the authors find “ethically questionable” (222). Podis and Podis then take issue with Maxine Hairston’s “Diversity, Ideology and Teaching Writing.” Among their claims, they say Hairston is guilty of hypocrisy, and that she is little more than a staunch defender of the status quo.
CONNECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS (Brett P.)
On “The Rhetoric of Reproof”: While I happen to agree that Hairston is open to any number of alternative interpretations, I find this one to be full of text quoted out of context, and in general, poorly argued and dismissive. I also find it ironic that Podis and Podis do exactly what they argue against, and exactly what they accuse their subjects (Hairston and Bartholomae) of doing.
Date of Upload
3/15/09