Last evening's class ended on an extremely compelling note: that the idea of "amassing available resources with an audience in mind" applies both to writers and to readers; that authorship and readership are both enabling and constraining. There's much mental work that goes into fictionalization of one another, and this is the intellectual activity of writing that -- from decade to decade -- is either believed or disbelieved, popular or not popular, heralded or doubted. If "audience" is actually an abstraction, then how should we abstract writer, writing, or text?
 |
| [photo credit: ZSmith] [click to enlarge] |
 | |
| [photo credit: ZSmith] [click to enlarge] |
In Doug Hesse's argument for getting "imagination" back into the curriculum, it seems there's quite a lot at stake for him, and so one possible way for us to bring closure to the "Politics of Self vs. Other" is to realize how this issue is intrinsic to epistemological debates (which, in turn, lead to debates about whether we should even be teaching writing in colleges at all) and how complicated these labels become: Does cognitivism best explain how writers write? Is it even possible/useful anymore to try to distinguish between expressivist and constructivist approaches to writing? Is all writing essentially pragmatic, given that it attends to the needs of individuals within communities?
This seems even more relevant to me, now, in the age of "The Common Core," which has some critics appreciating the language used to articulate these educational standards, but skeptical that the methods for delivering these standards are effective, imaginative, or even based on a liberal arts paradigm. Where is invention as a valued epistemology in The Common Core?
* * * *
Next week, we venture into "Politics" of Literacy & Social Justice. As before, here are some key concepts for you to think about in advance, also assigned for TIRP #3:
- community
- cross-boundary discourse
- feminist/feminism
- identity/identification
- ideology
- literacy
- marginalized/marginalization
- resistance
- voice
Here are some guiding questions for us over the next two weeks -- questions posed by Kirsch, Ritchie, Royster, Kinneavy, and Flynn:
- How are literacy and access related (i.e., how does one depend on the other, or stem from the other, or ensure the other)?
- What is the theoretical or practical reach of concepts like "resistance," "marginalization," and "community"? What can they achieve individually, or together?
- How do we deal with boundaries (e.g., racial, gendered, ethnic, classed, etc.) -- what are their limitations or possibilities?
- How do we deal with notions of authority and belonging (i.e., who has the right to write)?
- If writing achieves civic aims, what guarantees those aims?
A note on the readings:
- Please read Kirsch and Ritchie's "Beyond the Personal" and Royster's "When the First Voice Your Hear ..." in their entirety.
- I am excerpting Kinneavy's "Basic Aims of Discourse" (pp. 129-30, 134-38), although it is not very long, so you're absolutely encouraged to read the entire thing.
- I'd like us to read Flynn's "Composing as a Woman" (pp. 581-84, 586-91) instead of Ritchie and Boardman's "Feminism in Composition," because I think Flynn's piece follows Royster's quite well.
Have a great week,
-Prof. Graban
