Fit vs Imaginative

Complicity vs Resistance

Readings as instructions.

Miller: Institutional autobiography

Vatz: exigence means translating information to meaning (no perfect fit as response)

The exigence of the autobiography (at basic definition) would mean: story of one’s self. Literacy narrative is the traditional composition exercise (story of my own literacy acquisition). There is often an implied fit to the problem (by learning to write I became literate, by learning to use a computer I became computer literate, and so on). The Freire fit is:  I learned to overcome oppression.

I was lost/now I am found.

The same narrative is carried over in Miller’s usage of Rodriguez: class determined my literacy as moment of liberation (and the students’ response to that narrative).

In contrast, Miller offers a method that allows for “discursive versatility,” the “ability to speak, read, and write persuasively across a wide range of social contexts.” The genre/medium proposed is institutional autobiography, the location of autobiography in an institutional context. “What experiences have led you to teach, study, read, and write in the ways you do?” (Miller 25)

Gilyard’s essay may, in fact be responding to this exigence. His experiences: fiction (what was read in class), music (James Brown), ethnicity (Asian/African-American), disciplinarity (this was a talk at CCCC).

Four categories. Each is an institution (a place where ideas and identities are formed). At their intersection (across a wide range of social contexts) we might find an institutional biography, “the space for imaginative wanderings, for scholarly recreation” (Gilyard 262).

For example, I might “translate” this autobiography by filling in different areas for each category:

Fiction: Neuromancer

Music:Parliament/Funkadelic

Ethnicity/Nationality: American

Discipline: Rhetoric/Composition

Exigence: What is the intersection? How does the intersection inform identity? How would this intersection lead to my own institutional biography, my ability to write across a wide range of social contexts?

Research into each would reveal details. The details would form a pattern.

This intersection can also be called “pattern formation” the basis of scholarly activity.

For Gilyard, “time” seems to be the point of intersection: 1968 (MLK assassination), 1890-1903 (Wrights and Dunbar), a class time (Chang Chun Tao), James Brown (”there was a time”), and an anecdote at a Syracuse bus station “a woman was taking an inordinately long time at the window…” (269).

The result, the institutional autobiography, we can say is this essay; it weaves together the four areas via the pattern.