Composition
Janet Carey Eldred
Let me begin
with two arguable premises: first, that the essay historically has formed and
should continue to form a significant part of composition studies, and second,
that composition could benefit from identifying a product as well as a process,
or, in our own parlance, “a product.” Given the time period
composition came of age (again),[1] a late 20th-century
marked by postmodern thought, the compositions we produce should be hybrids,
forms rich in dialogism that recognize the disparate forms of writing that we,
as a field, have come to value. A
hybrid form that relies on juxtaposition has the possibility to
reconcile—or productively explode—the tensions between those
practitioners who promote personal writing and those who advance academic
writing (or argument), the tensions between those who conduct field research or
studies and those who critique cultures or texts, the old saws—that
empirical research is necessarily invalid or that postmodern research invents
fact. Composition as a form could
even be attractively and productively used to “certify”
practitioners—whether undergraduates passing a writing requirement,
upper-division students concentrating in writing, graduate students earning
degrees in rhetoric and composition, adjunct faculty applying to teach
composition, or faculty seeking tenure.[2] One would write, publish, study, and
teach composition and would do so by selecting and juxtaposing a few of the
forms we already know—ethnography, the essay, the critical essay,
historical rhetorical scholarship, reports of quantitative data. Our identity
would be defined by composition’s synthetic and associative powers. In short, the form would be—and
needs to be—recognizably “ours,” an ownership not so
difficult to realize when one reads the history of 20th-century
composition as a series of practitioners slouching toward this form.
Lynn Bloom suggests in Composition Studies as a
Creative Art that literary nonfiction can provide the field with this
formal identification. Literary
nonfiction, to its credit, is an expansive form that encompasses, among other
sub genres, the personal essay, the profile, even a certain kind of literary
criticism. Yet this form presents
two complications. First, literary
nonfiction already belongs to the world of small literary magazines, a world at
this point only tangentially related to composition studies, a world with its own
established boards and members and conferences and a workshop pedagogy that
privilege the aesthetic. As Doug
Hesse emphasizes, “a work does not become ‘literary
nonfiction’ because it supports, say, a psychoanalytical or any other
kind of reading. Essays become
literature as readers attribute to and recognize in them a certain aesthetic
and way of construing individual subjectivity—that is, a particular voice
and stance toward the world” (“Recent Rise,” 326). We can try
to simulate this world, but ours will always be a pale imitation—the
composition basement, the Reader’s Digest condensed version,
again. Moreover literary nonfiction seems to have an elitist Romantic bent, a
penchant for individual genius that jars with the central aim of composition,
that is, to teach everyone to write.[3] Literary nonfiction, for the most
part as it has developed, also (with some notable exceptions) eschews the
political, the essay that has “something to declare.”[4] (At best one might say there is a small corner
of the belletristic world reserved for political declarations.)
I want to press this question of genre and generic
contexts further with the following example:
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Janet Carey Eldred
In 1995 and
1996, we adopted two toddlers, two boys, from a Russian orphanage. Although these adoptions strike me as
the most heroic and unique acts of my life, they are properly neither. We adopted our children because I am
impatient and we wanted badly to be a family, and international adoption
seemed—and was—the quickest and surest path. So much for “heroic.” “Unique” doesn’t fare
much better. This year alone, if
the patterns from the late ‘90s hold, somewhere between 15,000-20,000 of
the world’s “immigrant orphans” will be adopted by
We are as rock solid a family as
any that evolves through the miracle of birth—we are perhaps even
stronger than some biological specimens.
Yet, we are also an adoptive family in an age that boasts such a thing
as “genetic counseling,” in an era that can explain your whole life
in the tealeaves left behind during your first formative year. In short, genetic and developmental
theories press all around us. I can
describe the feeling only like this:
It is as if we are playing a continual game of rock-paper-scissors, that
classic children’s introduction to power. You know the rules; they are listed on the
World RPS Society website (yes, there really is one), but I will summarize them
here. On the count of three, each
player simultaneously “throws” one of three options—rock,
paper, or scissors. Rock smashes
paper to win, paper covers rock to win, and scissors cut paper to win. No one technology, no one strategy is
necessarily more powerful than the other.
It’s a game of relationships and odds. Most often, I open with rock, even
though, according to the RPS Society, “Use of rock as an opening move is seen by many players to be a
sign of aggression.”
Regardless, I pound my fist into my open palm. It is a bold, rock-solid statement: our
family cannot be shattered.
Yea,
yea, yea. Any child familiar with
the game can tell you that paper covers rock.
We know this from
experience. We read an article in
the paper or see a news report headlining what I call the triplets—(FAS)
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or (RAD) Reactive Attachment Disorder, physiological and
psychological maladies, each potentially atrocious, each linked with some
frequency to Eastern European orphans—and then that flimsiest of mediums,
paper, blankets our rock, obliterates our strong foundation. Suddenly,
rock-solid love isn’t enough; in fact, it makes us weak, vulnerable. We’re blind: we can’t see what may be right in
front of us. Paper, those
cautionary tales or horror stories that make the headlines, make every move my
sons make, every simple childhood mistake seem not so simple, not so innocent
after all.
Case in point:
Shura,
my youngest son, went down to the railroad tracks. I dropped him off to play with Sara, his
friend from school. I dropped him
off, made small talk with Sara's father, pet their dogs, and drove off, leaving
Shura and Sara on the swings in the small backyard, a Good Housekeeping
picture.
Not too long passed,
apparently, before they started talking about the railroad tracks and the man
who lives there with a Walmart cart.
Sara got excited talking, or so I learn later when Shura repeated the
story: "There was a woman down
there walking, alone. And this man
sexed her. Then he killed
her."
I don't know who it was--Sara or Shura--who suggested that they, little nine year
olds, go down to the tracks, just to see the Walmart cart and what was in it. Anyway, it doesn't matter
who instigated because Shura went.
He always follows.
"He’s a wanderer," I tell my aunt. "I'm sure other
parents in the neighborhood whisper. Kids
in our neighborhood don't run wild. They have schedules, have had them since
infancy. They belong to
clubs.” “Not to the streets,” I am thinking of adding
dramatically, but my aunt interrupts.
"Isn't that sad?" she asks my uncle. "We used to go outside and play all
day, come in when the streetlights went on." They grew up blocks apart in
I am urged on by her reminiscence.
"Shura always asks permission to go in the front yard, where he
promises to stay, but then a stray dog goes by and he follows it until he sees
his friend Ned heading to the park, where they find two other children heading
home for a snack, a good one, and there's plenty the friend says, to go around,
and so they go."
And so it goes, again and again.
"Oh, your cousin Steve was like that," my aunt reassures me,
with all that's unstated: our kids
are adopted, genetically uncertain.
Natural-born Steve turned out o.k., good job, family man after a
carefree and adventurous surfer past.
Hell, he married his hippie girlfriend when nobody else did. "But times have changed," she
says. She sounds as if she is
worried, at least a little.
Still, we are worried about
different things. She frets about the general dangers of a world gone awry,
about childhood freedom lost in modern times. I worry about some would-be genetic
threat lurking just under the skin or about some psychic damage suffered during
those "formative years" spent in a Russian orphanage. If she harbors concerns about the
triplets, RAD or FAS, I appreciate that she keeps these thoughts to
herself. So many people
don't, and I've got my own voices.
I don't want or need the volume of theirs.
Aloud as I speak to her, I am composing the kinds of things mothers
say to each other over coffee, and she is granting me full maternal
entitlement, but in my head, against my own will, I'm conjuring notes for a
juvenile delinquent's file (Doesn't
recognize boundaries, Puts himself in high-risk situations), a file that doesn't exist—at
least not yet.
Might it someday? Two hours after I dropped Shura off at Sara's, her
dad brought him home, not because of the railroad tracks but because he and
Sara got in a fight with a kid who pulled a knife. Once they ran back to
Sara's, someone called the police and Sara's father drove Shura home. Sara's dad says nothing, but Shura tells
us about the kid with the knife, "a real knife," he says
breathlessly. He recounts happily
the rest of the two hours he's spent with Sara, includes offhandedly the story
of the railroad track and the woman who got sexed and killed and the Walmart
cart.
"The knife was scary," he says, like the rest of it wasn't,
like he's talking about a ride at an amusement park. When I suggest the railroad tracks
should have been scary too, he says, "Oh Mom, that's just a myth!"
Later, he remarks, just in passing, that he's told Sara he'll be back
at
He doesn’t know it, but he will never go back to Sara's. That night we cut a check for a summer
day camp, located four blocks from our house, with hours extending
From here on out, all his days will be structured, all his actions
watched, though not by us because we're not good at it. If
he shits, someone will know it, just as they did when he was in the orphanage.
You see, at such moments, love is
no longer enough. We are shaken, shattered. As someone who works in words, I know
what to do next: I will give up on
rock and choose paper as my opening move.
I have court documents that make me legally the mother of my sons, that
make them mine “as if,” in the words of the Kentucky Revised
Statutes, they were born “of my own flesh.” This law has strength, power,
“real teeth” as the skeptics like to say. My sons’ legal documents bear the
names with which we as parents branded them (it was our perogative). Our sons’ parents exist for
us only as names on these or other documents. Our papers cover their fleshy, their
weighty entitlements; an ocean and a language away, their biological parentage
is trumped by our literal claims.
Parenthood in a family likes ours derives its power from words: we are because paper makes us so. We
haven’t the thickness of blood, and so, cannot, should not claim that
strength. Yes, yes, yes: as most
writers love to assert, it’s paper that matters. Paper rules. It rocks.
Until someone brings out
scissors.
Like all children who have
matriculated from a
Case in point: My elder son Alyosha loves all things
Russian and fantasizes incessantly about his native country. His first personal narrative (a 2nd
grade assignment) records in complex sentimental 7-year old terms, his leaving
Leaving
“Alyosha,” said Tosha, some
one’s here to see you. I was
in the toy howse that was in the sandbox.
I came rite away. I saw a
wrmen. I said momy! Before we left we had a prtey because
they would mise me so much. I was
leaving
Weeks before
writing it, he drew a picture of a long black limousine-type car arriving at a
palatial homestead. The caption for it reads, “The russiens are filly
hoem,” which in his private 7-year old spelling translated to, “The
Russians are finally home.” He frequently imagines such trips
back—always in grand style—sometimes with me, increasingly leaving
me behind. Although he makes little
effort to learn Russian, despite some opportunities, he expects that when the
time comes, he will instantly once again recognize the language, or that
language or not, Russians will simply recognize him as the long lost relation
he is. This is why, when he is
angry with the stupidity of his mother, he cuts through our literal
definitions, denies me the only paper he deems valuable. “You are not Russian,” he
pronounces, a statement unambiguously true.
And that’s the game. In
choosing my strength, I must guess what others—and what even we
ourselves—will cast. I am
prepared. Come at me with the “love
conquers all” or “you’re so heroic” stories, and I will
cover you with paper, reminding you that love matters no more for us that it
does for any family made by the sparking of two bodies. Furrow your brow with RAD and FAS, wave
your New York Times Magazine with the
“Detached, Disturbed, Unreachable” headline, ask me with that catch
in your voice “Are they (pause) o.k.?” and I will shred your
research to ribbons, excoriating you for your popular, sensationalized
science. Pull out your scissors,
try to deny me maternity, and I will smash your efforts with a maternal love as
weighty and fierce as Toni Morrison’s Sethe, a woman who would slit her
child’s throat before subjecting that baby to injustice.
“This is no way to
live,” you say.
Perhaps not. It’s just a simple game, one I
should be able to quit at any time, but there’s paper all around (genetic
and developmental theories abound), so I’ll go another round—and
another and another. But I
won’t lose. I can’t
lose. I will play it and live
it as long as there’s a need to, which is to say, as long as the
world’s immigrant orphans continue to find home on our soil and as long
as we continue to harbor orphan doubts.
The response one
might expect to an essay like this is
just the one I received from a creative writing publication (a small literary
magazine) whose editorial judgment I greatly admire: One reader remarked, "I admire the essayistic quality of this."
But another said: "Interesting treatment, but in my judgment the
editorial agenda ends up overpowering the literary one." In the language I’ve been using
here, the readers judged, rightly I would say, that aesthetic concerns are
trumped by declaration. Yet as a writer (and a mother) would I want for this
piece to read any other way?
Revision is always possible, but can I—should I—silence my
declaration to make a better essay? What would it mean for my children or my
family if I did? What have I
sacrificed for art, or rather, for genre?
I would argue that “Rock, Paper, Scissors”
falls short as an essay, but stands as a composition. Finally, “creative writing”
seems hesitant, even unable, to embrace a great deal of the inquiry that our
field values. Composition studies does
have a literary, stylistic component, one I wish had a greater presence, but
the field’s academic roots are varied. The field emerged in the late 20th-century
as a confluence of different disciplines—education, communication,
rhetoric, creative writing, literary analysis—all of which share
intellectual interests in how humans learn and express themselves, but do so
through different kinds of written products, among them case studies and
academic prose and empirical studies—all genres pretty much at odds with
an essayistic truth.
And yet we crave the personal, the intimate narrative
detail that literary nonfiction and personal essays can provide. We pay an
aesthetic and emotional price for such distance. Yes, I could (and still may) write about
issues orphans have in composing identities using postmodern theories borrowed
from the study of diasporic literatures, but must this necessarily entail
masking the central experience behind my inquiry? Must I remain hidden behind some Oz-like
curtain? Can’t the
“I” (or some other breathing persona) come forward? Creative
nonfiction is so attractive at the beginning of the 21st century
because it allows the “I” to surface; it has the potential to blend
two distinct, institutionalized traditions—journalism and creative
writing (including memoir).
It’s a hybrid—bringing together investigative research with
narrative, either first or third person.
But there’s a problem with adopting creative nonfiction broadly
for composition studies’ purposes.
The academy, except insofar as it houses journalism and creative
writing, again doesn’t really figure in. The turf wars over ownership of
this genre are only beginning (creative writing seems to be slightly
ahead). Despite successful forays
into creative nonfiction publication venues, composition instructors with a
bent toward the belletristic have slim chance of claiming the form, cultural theorists
slimmer still, and qualitative researchers slimmest of all.
We need in the academy a different kind of hybrid, one
that perhaps expands creative nonfiction and/or the personal essay to include
the academic. Such a form could blend
the richness of our traditions—the narrative essay (first person and third),
as well as research (whether investigative, critical, qualitative, or
quantitative). It could adapt the
voices of these distinct traditions so that a self-consciously literary voice,
or a reporting or declaring voice, or even a confessional,
“Romantic” voice finds itself dialogically situated along side of
an academic critical voice, a voice that acknowledges and investigates, in
Peter Mortensen’s words, “the cultural and narrative forces”
that comprise and create it. Where
better for such a form to flourish than in a discipline named composition.
While we’re tempted to look elsewhere, perhaps because of professional insecurity,
perhaps because interdisciplinary research has yielded results—good
results—in the past (and our rediscovery of journalism and creative
writing has proven no different), it now seems the time to look straight ahead
of us, even behind us. The answer
is before us, it defines us. While
literary nonfiction and creative nonfiction have already been adopted by the
creative and commercial writing worlds, this hybrid called composition is
already recognizably ours. We would
be doing, after all, the work our field has always done, even if in separate
pieces in separate publications.
Many composition scholars write personal essays, or are beginning
to—Chris Anderson, Anne Gere, Lynn Bloom, Elizabeth Hodges, Min-Zhan Lu,
Randall Roorda to name just a few—but their essays aren’t visible
to their composition colleagues.
They’re seen now as extracurricular, a part of the small literary
magazine world. And when scholars
have written hybrid books (for example, Brenda Brueggemann’s Lend Me
Your Ear, Min-Zhan Lu’s Shanghai
Quarter, or Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, or Victor
Villanueva’s Bootstraps), the work is described as
“unusual”; its presence is unexpected, its case anomalous. The
question is, why? Why, in Lynn Bloom words, don’t we write what we teach? Why aren’t we more accustomed to
reading essays by teachers and scholars in our professional
publications? One could blame the
editors of books and journals in the field, but as Bloom notes, “we have
met the editors and they are us.”
We have also, of course, met the peer reviewers, and we have a
consistently steady stream of representatives from publishing houses who want
to meet with us. We have
significant publishing venues (scholarly journals and books, a large—by
academic standards—textbook market).
And while we currently don’t see a great number of pieces by those
who teach and study composition, a few are beginning to filter through. One might argue that a journal like College
English can’t accommodate “creative writing.” For years,
though, it did publish poetry; in retrospect, a section on literary nonfiction
would probably have been as appropriate, if not more so. [5] If we’re willing to
borrow an essay to include in a reader, say an excerpt from Michael
Dorris’s The Broken Cord, shouldn’t we at least be willing
to consider Anne Gere’s essays on the same topic (Native American
children and fetal alcohol syndrome)?
We might expect that her perspective would more closely reflect the
experience of a life spent teaching composition and, thus, be equally if not
more appropriate for a writing classroom.
Even if no overt references are made to the teaching of writing (and for
now its seems, editors insist on such an overt connection), I would argue that
issues that converge on writing instruction surely inform the piece, issues
such as how selves are figured by the media, and how individuals who experience
the failures of words might create in other art forms to compose different
representations. Of course, the
inclusion of literary nonfiction in our journals would always beg the
disciplinary question, Is it good?
After all, if composition teachers are good creative writers, why
aren’t they publishing elsewhere, where reviewers presumably know quality
when they see it? But this, as
I’ve tried to express through my word choice, is odd criteria to
apply. It’s like asking a
journalist to peer review a piece for the New England Journal of Medicine. We have a peer review system to
determine quality, and we have different standards of what is good for our
rhetorical purposes. An essay
that declares or theorizes or reports data might not find a home in a creative
writing journal, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the piece should
not be published in some creative form.
This is not to say that we should see only literary
nonfiction in our professional journals, although it is possible to imagine
such a sub-section, just as we’ve come to expect book reviews and
editorial introductions (even cartoon sketches in Written Communication!),
even though none of these forms “typify” these publications. In
fact, I’m arguing quite the reverse: While I
am arguing for more space for essays in our professional publications, I am not
ready to see the personal essay become once again the composition genre de
jour, the current house specialty. Personal essays,
whether directly about teaching writing or about issues related to it, can only
go so far in advancing our knowledge as professionals and practitioners,[6] only so far in
capitalizing on the broad power of composition, and thus deserve only a sliver
of our academic space, perhaps, because of their engaging accessibility, a
slice of our course “readers.” Academic inquiry, its methods, its
processes, even its much maligned specialized jargon, contribute to our
understanding through logics that the personal essay does not deploy. And journalism, at its factual and
ethical best, accounts for events happening now and of interest to people now,
in this moment. Again, the standard
form I am arguing for would be some sort of hybrid of research, that juxtaposes
the variety of methods we currently recognize, and the essay, either first
person or third. I can’t say
that I’ve achieved all this in “Rock, Scissors, Paper,” but I
feel as if I’m slouching away from the essay as its come to be shaped by
small literary magazines and toward a form I prefer to call composition.
Other more singular forms of writing—the book
review, textual analysis, cultural analysis, the personal essay, qualitative
studies, the synthesis of scholarship—would become the specialized,
valuable subcategories in composition publications, electronic and print. I
don’t know where that kind of composition will end up taking me or,
practically speaking, what advice I’ll end up giving students in my
writing classes, but I’m convinced that after undertaking such an
inquiry, I’ll know more about composition. I might emphasize even more the
importance of balancing aesthetic concerns with ethical ones. I might urge students to pit personal
memory against historical memory or community memory—to test memory
against different kinds of stylistic representation. Composition as a
form thus described might be impossible to achieve, but the effort—and
the possibilities—seem worth it.
These issues, of course, relate most directly to our
roles as writers and scholars.
Teaching the form poses a different set of problems. Even at its most respected, composition
is a monster much looser and baggier than even Henry James could imagine.
Patricia Bizzell underscores the challenge when talking about hybrid academic
discourse, a form in which students would cite “texts and engage them
rigorously, but . . also talk about their own experiences in ways that feel
right to them” (19).
“In all this,” Bizzell explains, “the goal is to help
students develop a range of experimental discourses. I don’t think we should encourage
them to think that each one has a unique, ‘authentic voice’ sort of
hybrid discourse that he or she must discover. Rather, I am encouraging a sort of
craft-person attitude toward writing, in which various tools are developed and
students learn to deploy them with greater facility” (20). Composition in its fullest sense expands
this range by adding to personal and textual analysis all our current research
methodologies, as well as those provided by journalism. It would take all the collective
wisdom of the last half-century to teach composition. But luckily, we have that collective
wisdom in our collections of good textbooks, many of which are now out of
print. We’d have to cover the processes and the elements
and the ethics of narrative[7] (first and third person),
of academic writing, of classical argument, of literary writing, of research,
of journalism, especially fact collecting and checking, skills that now receive
little classroom attention. And
since we couldn’t possibly do it all at once, we’d have to decide
where to start, what kind of assignments we could devise that would move
students along the path of producing essays that are academic, in the best
critical sense; public, in the sense of investigating, reporting, or declaring;
and “personal.” Of this
trio of terms, “personal” needs the most elaboration. To borrow from Phillip Lopate’s
“Introduction” to the Art of the Personal Essay, the
traditional personal essay is “approachable and diverting,”
“intimate,” “implicitly democratic . . . in the value it
places on experience rather than status distinctions.” It is, above all, a literary form that
recognizes the “multiplicity of selves” (xxiii). Thus when I employ the word personal
here, I’m not talking about pure expression of the sort one might find in
a diary, even the most literary of diaries. Instead, “personal” here
entails what James Kinneavy in A Theory of Discourse refers to as
“expressive,” the focus on how a self gets constructed, a focus
which can be extended to include how selves get represented (e.g., Mike
Rose’s Lives on the Boundary). What Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner
call “the problematic of experience” thus becomes the focus of
expressive writing: “what
[experience] is, who represents it to whom to what ends, in what manner, and
whether and how such representations change that experience” (258). Biographies
and ethnographies, in this sense, are deeply “personal” forms and
provide an option for those “who do not wish to represent/live the
personal in [their]work” ([Kirsch and Lu], “Politics of the
Personal,” 42).[8]
Like first-personal
narratives, third-personal narrative forms can be essayistic when marked
by the additional characteristics Lopate identifies. I’m
further assuming that our “personal” voice would also be critical,
or at the very least stand in juxtaposition or counterpoint to an academic
critical one. Rather than adopting the “ideal of ‘light
learning,’” a stance, which according to Lopate, “graciously
informs without humiliating or playing the pedantic schoolmaster” (xlii),
our hybrid composition would embrace learnedness, rejecting the idea that to do
so necessarily results in pedantry.
(Indeed, isn’t the leisured essayist who need only allude to
certain texts to establish his “cultivation,” his
“well-stocked, liberally-educated mind” [xli-ii], a pedant, though
a dilettantish one to be sure?)
Hybrid essays could both embrace higher literacy’s promises and
exhibit a healthy skepticism of its excessive claims. Our attempts would create a record of
how to produce compositions out of now fragmented parts and alienated
histories, how to work out a theory and practice of generic hybridism: the
fusing together of different kinds of writing that we’ve been schooled
and professionalized into keeping separate.
One more clarification seems crucial given our
pedagogical history. Composition as
I have imagined and sketched it would not be merely about moving students along
Britton’s personal to research trajectory, a curricular model still
followed at many colleges. Nor would it be about getting the personal into academic writing (which
thanks in large part to feminist scholarship is becoming more acceptable),
though that’s part of it. It would also be about something perhaps even
more difficult—getting the academic into the personal, or more
accurately, setting the academic alongside the personal, creating what
Victor Villanueva refers to as “the autobiographical as critique”
(“The Politics of the Personal,” 51). Artists and professional writers have a
deep distrust of academics, a distrust which some in the field of composition
studies share. It’s not
unusual to hear, even in academic writing circles, complaints about “the
academic voice” and celebrations of creative nonfiction’s return to
the “personal voice.”
Such comments should give us pause.
Making room for first-person narrative in our profession and our
classrooms is one thing; compelling it in these spaces is quite another. It
would lead to the irony Deborah Brandt imagines: “Not too long ago, it was only the
institutionally secure who got to write about themselves. Now, it seems, it is only the
institutionally secure who do not have to” (58). We are not yet in that situation, nor
are we in the situation where the personal is forbidden. Rather, we seem cornered into choices we
don’t want to make: those wanting to write personal narratives find
themselves constrained by the academic, those wanting the academic form feel
compelled to reveal personal details.
But again, the concept of composition proves the door, the exit that we
didn’t imagine existed. We don’t have to choose between these
voices and forms, these ways of knowing, unless we, as a field, continue to
shift from one monologic extreme to the other, continue to deny our roots in
composition.[9]
While
it’s tempting to either knock down one side or simply erase the division
by talking about how the personal can do the work of the academic or
vice-versa, it’s necessary to sustain the integrity of both genres,
something composition as a form can do.
As Lu and Horner remind us, there’s more than luxury at
stake. They argue that “we need
. . . to sustain the tension between experience and discursive
understanding” (emphasis added), that not to do so “leads to the
danger of one discourse speaking in the name of experience against other
discourse.” It leads, in
other words, to the rickety straw figures we know
so well by now—the expressivist,[10] the social constructionist. By this point in our field’s
history, it doesn’t require even a feather to knock either down.
From the lofty and millennial distance of 2003, I’m
surprised we ever insisted on keeping all our discourses separate. But we have. Or at least I have. And I’ve learned from the process
of separating genres and fusing them.
Finally, I’d like to make this unmodest proposal: Essays that blend or fuse the academic
with the “personal” (whether construction/representation of self or
others) hold enormous promise to us as individual writers and as a field. They are difficult now to publish
because they’re deemed “too academic” or “too
journalistic” or too “editorial” for small literary magazines
(where they probably won’t be seen by others in the field, unless we
create publishing or indexing methods that make them so) and, frequently, they
are judged irrelevant or “too personal” for our academic
journals. We also, somewhat
ironically, have to deal with the spectre of the newly revived personal essay,
which casts its cultivated eye askance at all things academic or
“pedantic” (see Lopate).
All are judgments we can change and are changing, at
least in the professional publications now in our collective hands. For
example, the submissions statement for College Composition and Communication
reflects such as change:
“[Y]ou should consider a diverse readership for your article, a
readership that includes at least all teachers of college-level writing at
diverse institutions and literacy centers, and may include administrators,
undergraduate and graduate students, legislators, corporate employers, parents,
and alumni. . . . You are encouraged to submit articles in whatever genre and
format best fits your purposes, and to use alternate genres and formats if they
best express your meanings.” Similarly, the September 2001 issue of College
English featured Jane Hindman’s experiment with personal academic
form.[11] It seems like a good time
to make changes. Outside the
academy, nonfiction and memoir are gaining respect again, even market
share. Change might be as easy as
easing an essay section or a review of nonfiction into a publication like College
Composition and Communication or College English, although such
attempts will have limited impact.
Perhaps it might entail more ambitious projects: we might encourage
graduate students to write dissertations that are themselves compositions
juxtaposing various genres. We
might challenge ourselves and our students to write hybrid dialogic
compositions in addition to academic articles or personal essays. We might publish our own Best
Compositions, much like Best American Essays or Anchor Essay Annual
series. Our annual volume could
come complete with an introduction that comments on the form, and a
“Notable Essays” section that includes citations to essays
published in small literary magazines as well as more academic
publications. We probably, too,
should change our indexing practices to allow for essays variously placed to be
located through traditional search means.
With such a change, more of the work that appears in our journals would
also be appropriate for the classroom—first year to graduate.
The prospect of such a profound genre shift in the field
of composition is daunting.
Reclaiming a name and an idea we’ve tried to run from is going to
be difficult, but I for one feel compelled to try.
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[1] We know from composition historiograhers
such as Robert Connors, James Berlin, Charles Paine, Nan Johnson, Susan Miller
and others that composition as a subject, if not a discipline, has existed for
some time. In looking at
manuscripts from the antebellum period, Peter Mortensen and I found that
authors used the phrase “composition and rhetoric,” alongside
others such as “chemistry” or “natural history,” as a
heading for lessons.
[2] I realize that this at
first might seem like an unattractive proposition. But when I think of people in the
field—a number of whom experiment with various kinds of writing—it
makes a great deal of sense. The
“product” we now compose as scholars always resembles the work
produced in some other field: cultural studies, ethnography, textual criticism,
“theory.” Yet what we
have to offer to future scholars is the opportunity to choose methods of
inquiry as well as innovative forms to present the results of such inquiry.
[3] Chris Green explores (and
challenges) creative writing pedagogy in his “Materializing the Sublime
Reader: Cultural Studies, Reader-Response, and Community Service in the
Creative Writing Workshop,” College English 64.2 (2001). Green begins with his experience as a
reader of manuscripts by death row inmates. “The poems were not models of good
writing: cliché after cliché pummeled the reader, couplets
brashly rhymed, and abstraction after ineffective abstraction was marched out.
. . . While we did not accept any of the poems [for publication in a literary
magazine], reading them led me to ask how my students might write poems that
matter as much. Given the pedagogical
configuration of the workshop as I then ran it, I realized that for the most
part, I could only help students write poems that looked good in the
workshop” [ms. 1].
[4] The idea of
“something to declare” comes from Julia Alvarez’s collection
of essays, Something to Declare (New York: Algonquin, 1998).
Publications that invite such “declaring” essays are on the fringes
of the creative writing world, which still sees art and politics at odd. Julia Alvarez, for example, could
publish her “declaring essays” only after making it as a successful
novelist. She earned the right to
declare, one might say. Composition
studies, on the other hand, is increasingly embracing political
engagement. See for example Peter
Mortensen’s “Going Public,” which urges composition scholars
and students to write locally about public issues. “Going Public,” College
Composition and Communication 50.2 (1998): 182-205.
[5] Inclusion of essays
isn’t without precedent.
Under Louise Smith, for example, Nancy Sommers published “The Language
of Coats,” an essay that juxtaposes the experiences of her father’s
work in the coat industry with her own work as a teacher of writing.” College
English 60.4 (1998):
421-25. Tellingly, this
essay was published as an “Editor’s Choice” item. Still earlier, in 1993, she published
“I Stand Here Writing” in College English 55.3: 420-28. Both
essays directly connect personal experiences with the teaching of
writing. Brenda Jo
Brueggemann’s “On (Almost) Passing,” published in the October
1997 of College English ably connects issues in the field with her own
lived experience. 657-60.
[6] Kirsch, Gesa and Joy Ritchie. “Beyond the personal” CCC 46 (1995): 7-29. See also the symposium collective, “The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain,” College English 64.1 (2001): 41-62. (Contributing authors are Deborah Brant, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, and Gesa Kirsh.
[7] See Lu and Horner; Gesa E.
Kirsch and Peter Mortensen, eds. Ethics and Representation in Qualitative
Studies of Literacy (Urbana: NCTE, 1996).
[8] See also Ellen
Cushman’s contribution to “The Politics of the Personal”
symposium: “When a researcher’s personal life becomes the object of
intense scrutiny, s/he becomes the butterfly that has been exoticized and
chased after” (45).
[9]
As Lu and Horner remind us, there’s more than luxury at stake. They argue that “we need .
. . to sustain the tension between experience and discursive
understanding” (emphasis added), that not to do so “leads to the
danger of one discourse speaking in the name of experience against other
discourse.” It leads, in
other words, to one school of composition pedagogy claiming as entirely theirs
something that they cannot own (259).
Finally, there can be no disciplinary ownership of
“experience.”
[10] Elbow on this
[11] “Making Writing
Matter: Using ‘the Personal’ to Recover[y] an Essential[ist]
Tension in Academic Discourse,” College English 64.1 (2001):
88-108.