Seeds, Clouds, Thorns

Hey, y’all. Niya and I met last night to discuss our presentation for Tuesday, and it occurred to us that it might be useful to post some of our thoughts and questions about Bitzer, Miller (Donner and Blitzen!) et al. in the days leading up to class. We don’t expect anyone to answer now, or ever; we just wanted to give you a sense of what to expect, and the chance to begin thinking about the issues we may (or may not) raise, rather than have to respond to thorny-practical or cloudy-theoretical questions on the spot. Hmm. “Practical” may be a strong word, actually. For one of the issues with which I continue to struggle, when it comes to this course, and the readings, and pedagogy/composition studies/rhetoric in general, is the degree to which this is an applied or theoretical field (or set of fields), and therefore how to ground my thinking and orient my work within it (or them). I may have so far given the impression in class that I had some sort of super-traditional British education, but the truth is that I grew up attending schools that were alternately private and public, Catholic, Presbyterian and secular, in three American states (Texas, Illinois and Georgia), as well as Scotland and England. My British O Levels were heavier on science than they were on the humanities (at my convent, we had to choose, weirdly, between chemistry and history, between physics and art; the subjects we *had* to pursue were biology, language, literature and God), and I followed those exams with A Levels (2 year intensive courses required for admission to university) in Theatre Studies, Sociology and English. My undergraduate degree is from Barnard College, in Women’s Studies and French—while at Barnard I focused on psychoanalysis, film, queer and feminist theory, and wrote my thesis on the de-essentializing impact of direct action, bodily engagement and physical risk on identity politics. And finally, after 10 years in the workforce, writing for AIDS service organizations and market research companies, and being extremely politically active, came an MFA. All this is to say, then, that I consider myself someone well trained in adapting to diverse intellectual rubrics and cultures—and someone fairly well versed in the personal/political and theory/praxis debate. So why do I find myself perfectly interested in these readings at a theoretical or conversational level, and yet at a terrible loss when it comes to discussing them in  a way *that serves the purpose of this class*? Is it the acute awareness that we all come to the course with very different relationships to teaching, composition, and academic culture—that some of us seem not only versed in but fully committed to the principles of composition (as I slowly and dimly perceive them), while others of us are still getting there, and may never arrive? Is it the anxiety that questions and doubts will be experienced as—or indeed will function as—attempts to divert and obstruct? Is it  the fact that I am lacking a basic understanding/definition of composition, not to mention a sense of its history? Or is it simply that I am 38 years old and the doors to certain neurological pathways are swiftly slamming shut? [Pause to make the sign of the cross.] There are certain specifics I would love to discuss. One is the particular ethics and conflicts around teaching composition when one is a fiction writer dedicated to the power and beauty of language. That may not mean much to the critics and rhetoricians in the class, however, and anyway, it seems the class is not about that. (Or is it? Half the readings we have encountered so far—Booth, Miller, Gilyard—have made plenty of room for those sorts of internal struggles.) Here are some other questions, though, and I’m sure I speak for Niya when I say we welcome your vote! 1. To what degree have technological and Internet interventions ruptured the division between public and hidden transcript (Miller’s discussion of Scott)? I’m thinking here of  sites such as ratemyprofessors.com, as well as anonymous blogging, and avatars, and new opportunities for resistance and reaction to the classroom experience those create.  Does the use of course blogs allow for some airing of the hidden transcript then, in a way that either further radicalizes one’s teaching, or at least makes the airing safer for the student and more manageable for the teacher than in-class power struggles? Or does the airing merely hobble what was so powerful when hidden? What will thereby be driven further underground, in the always-already of the hidden? Is the hidden transcript even any of our concern as teachers? Won’t it always, by nature, escape us? 2.  How do we apply the rhetorical-situation-versus-no-such-thing debate (Bitzer versus Batz) to teaching? My immediate reaction—born of my interest in psychoanalytic theory—is to consider the teaching of comp as a rhetorical situation, and ask who is the audience and who is the speaker in the classroom? According to traditional, “banking” pedagogy, the teacher is presumably the speaker, the student the audience, ready and waiting to be changed. The “need” for “knowledge” is the exigence. And yet, if one considers the teaching relationship to be transferential in a psychoanalytic sense—as I do, as I consider all relationships, in fact—then the teacher must serve as screen, and mirror, and is therefore the audience to the student’s speech. Yet—and here’s where things get both cloudy and thorny—it is the student that even liberatory teaching aims to change, no? So does the rhetorical model not break down here? And do you all see what I mean, about how easy it is for me to fall down a theoretical rabbit hole with all this? Perhaps rhetoric and psychoanalysis cannot speak to each other at all. Perhaps none of this is what we’re supposed to be doing in class. 3. When Niya asked Jeff for guidance, he suggested (among other things) applying some of the theoretical issues raised to particular writing assignments. I have a pairof assignments that go together, and I would be willing to share them, and get some reactions to them, *if* they are interesting to the class as a whole. One asks students to a) read the first chapter of Joan Didion’s Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11, b) pick out the fixed ideas Didion identifies in our public discourse, as well as all the autobiographical information she both delineates and implies, and then c) write a short, “publishable” letter to Didion, describing what in the student’s own history/experience/background, leads her or him to feel doubtful/interested/resistant/passionate/whatever with respect to one of those ideas. The next assignment involves reading and responding to part of poet Carl Phillips’ essay “Boon and Burden,” on the limitations of interpreting art through the identity of the artist, and which involves a really beautiful, measured critique of an Amiri Baraka poem full of inflammatory language and imagery. It’s meant to challenge the very mode of analysis we’ve just engaged in—looking at the speaker and audience’s subject position—and to provide a model for measured critique of provocative material. I have a vested interest in offering up these two assignments, of course, as I just made them up, based on my utter lack of experience as a comp teacher, and I have no idea whether they are appropriate or practical. I have more than a little anxiety about assigning these readings and exercises to a group of students that includes, for example, one young veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a young woman who is the only black person in the room—not to mention raising queerness, as Phillips does, in this context, and as a lesbian teacher who has yet to find an opportunity to come out to a group of at-least-on-the-surface-socially-normative students. 4. Which leads me to another issue I’d like to discuss, one that both Gilyard and Miller refer to either directly or indirectly: teaching to and as a member of both minority and majority groups…how to prepare…how to address…There are several more ideas that Niya and I kicked around, but I’ll leave this post here. At the very least, everyone should now have an idea as to why I am so colossally unqualified to teach methods for organizing thought! When we make our presentations, we will be much more focused on the texts, of course, with quotes and so on—this is just a case of me throwing out some seeds, seeing what, if anything, takes immediate root. Please, send us your shoots!

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