compositional-minded

With regard to this idea of the underlife as it applies to the student establishing a writing identity outside of his/her assumed role within the institution, I want to look quickly at diction as a kind of middle ground between the contained and disruptive underlives that Brooke points to. The contained underlife seems, to a certain degree, to be behavioral: how the student projects the possession of an identity outside of the assigned classroom role but, all the same, within the context of the classroom. The disruptive underlife, then, becomes Brooke’s ideal, the student thinking of him/herself as a writer capable of raising questions about, critiquing and effecting change through writing of any number of experiences or assigned roles (those of the classroom included). The student does not please by meeting expectations but instead thrives on the self-satisfaction of being an original thinker whose identity is defined by the tenor of the original thought.

Given the papers that I’ve seen so far from my own students, it seems like diction acts as a gateway to embracing this idea of original thought (a trial grounds, of sorts, for the disruptive underlife). It seems to happen in one of two ways: (1) the introduction of a casual diction that suggests how the student is writing outside/apart from academic expectations, instead using the vocabulary with which he/she actually thinks about things or (2) the introduction of an elevated diction that suggests how the student is writing in such a way that is intellectually above the academic expectations of the introductory composition classroom. There is, however, a paradox in each case. For the casual diction is often employed in the service of rote response (i.e., it ultimately fulfills the expectations it attempts to distance itself from). And the elevated diction, given its frequent mismanagement, actually serves to reinforce the student’s role as an introductory composition student, still learning the mechanics of the craft. In both cases, we see an impulse to originate, to establish the identity of a writer-thinker uniquely responding to experience rather than the identity of a student. The pedagogical task, then, becomes how to translate this impulse, executed in the form of diction, into the prize of Brooke’s essay–original thought.

I’m not sure that I have a definitive answer, but I think there is something about the question that clings to Faigley’s  discussion of the expressive process. One hesitation that I had in drawing upon Abrams to help understand a compositional model is that I couldn’t reconcile the Romantic dictate that the expressive quality of a work is, in effect, eliminated when the author’s thought process is introduced to it. It rightfully prizes spontaneity, but at a cost (reason, for lack of a better word) that I think composition must ultimately absorb. At the same time though, I think that a focus on spontaneous thinking could, in fact, be a point of entry for positioning the essay as one that expresses original thought. The construction of an essay would, in my thinking about this process, become the student’s translation of an immediate response. It would, in violation of Abrams’ understanding of the expressive, take the spontaneous response (a pre-writing exercise on a subject, done in class) and apply the mechanics of essay writing to it to produce a final paper. The catch would be this: The student hands in the spontaneous response, the teacher makes a copy of it, and the teacher returns it to the student. Shared in this process is the understanding that, in reading the final draft, the teacher will be looking for and correcting moments at which the student departed from both the language and, more importantly, the content of the spontaneous response. It is an interpretation of original thought which treats ‘original’ in the context of ‘first’ more so than in the context of new and identity-related. But I think the placing of a premium on first thoughts will breed a certain trust in them and, more specifically, a trust in them as ways in which to approach the institutional assignment within the context of the naturally occurring thought process (rather than one crafted around the expectations one has come to assume that the teacher/institution has).

Though it appears late, the image of the turntablist (invoked in Chapter 12 of Writing About Cool) seems an appropriate point of entry into this text. For the work that Writing About Cool does to bring the discipline of composition into the current moment has as much to do with those traditional components of the written essay that it refuses to dispense of as it does those technologies that it utilizes to make new our conception of the essay’s form(s). If Gilyard lobbies to ‘expand the bubble’ so to make room for the identity of the essayist, Rice takes this one step further, growing ‘the bubble’ so to make room for the essayists’ entire culture.

My intention is to frame the book first within its own terms—as a pedagogical text concerned with rhetorical strategies for ‘writing cool’ and as a cultural studies text concerned with the ideas that shape these strategies. In treating these as naturally interacting discourses, I will then attempt to show how, on the peripheries of these discourses, the book actively involves itself with a discussion of hermeneutics as a methodology. Putting aside for a moment the primary task of innovating the essay form, the book operates within the familiar context of essay-as-argumentation. But in focusing its energies on the way in which culture shapes those rhetorical strategies that, in turn, shape rhetoric, it suggests a method for extracting meaning that treats the act of information gathering as necessarily antecedent to the individual’s arrival at an argument or thesis. More loosely, it presents a compositional method that asks the writer to question “How does it mean?” long before he/she engages a text in terms of “What does it mean?”

As a pedagogical text

(Note: In attempting to show the way in which Writing About Cool integrates pedagogy and cultural studies, I will first effect what I understand is an artificial—but I would argue productive—separation of the two contexts. More specifically, in looking at Chapter 8 of the book, I will divide the chapter’s investigation of rhetorical strategies in gangsta rap from its simultaneous discussion of stereotype and the African-American male community. This discussion [of stereotype, myth and commercialism] will shortly thereafter be re-introduced.)

As a pedagogical text, Writing About Cool explores the discipline of composition as it can include a writing form other than traditional, prose explication. The book proposes an electronic, cool writing, with its definition of cool lying in closest proximity to Marshall McLuhan’s investigation of those ‘cool’ media that exhibit interconnectedness and demand from their viewers (in this case the readers of an essay) a high degree of participation. This ability to produce and communicate meaning without relying on the thesis-body paragraphs-conclusion structure to do so thus becomes the pedagogical goal of the text. Its actual pedagogy, more precisely, is one that examines the multiple strategies by which meaning can be created and conveyed on the web. The writing form it teaches is cool; the meaning that this form is capable of communicating need not be limited by any one adjective.

In a sense, the book’s pedagogy is one that encourages—or perhaps works outward from—a certain degree of mimesis. For example, Chapter 3 defines cool within the context of rebellion and then examines representations of James Dean as a way to both write [transcribe] this rebellious cool and also write in a cool manner [encountering the image forces participation in the reader’s actively associating James Dean, rebellion and cool]. The emphasis here, as seen in the exercises at the end of the chapter, is not on identifying as many cool icons as possible. Instead, it is on identifying the appropriation of iconic images as a rhetorical strategy that communicates ‘cool,’ an act of appropriation that the composition student could then emulate for the purpose of creating any number of meanings. The pedagogy is to evaluate and stockpile such rhetorical devices with the intention of deploying them simultaneously; Doing so draws attention to the way in which electronic writing both communicates a claim/thesis (in its simplest form: rebellion is a form of cool) and also connects the reader to a body of evidence that supports this claim: a familiar notion written in excitingly new terms. Looking ahead to Chapter 8, we can see how this pedagogical concern for strategy builds upon itself, yielding a rhetoric that both employs and exceeds what emerges from isolated iconic representation.

Again, suspending for a moment the discussion of stereotype and mythology in which Chapter 8 engages, consider the complex of rhetorical strategies the book identifies in the lyrics of gangsta rap. The references to violence become a rhetorical device that places the artist in opposition to a dominant (legal) system; Re/Nicknaming serves as a means of self-identification; The references to material items represent an economic achievement in spite of the adverse conditions detailed in the song(s). The simple rhetoric of cool as rebellion has become something much more weighty: cool as rebellion against a history of obstacles imposed upon the African-American male community. But the pedagogy is not this specific meaning. The pedagogy suggests that by increasing participation—by forcing the reader to make multiple connections at once—the rhetorical strategies of electronic writing (visual representation, self-identification, etc.) can be combined to communicate an argument far more elaborate and incisive than that communicated by the image of James Dean.

Rather than ask the reader to arrive at specific meanings, the pedagogy of the book instead asks the reader to inspire meaning, to determine a method by which the rhetorical strategies of electronic writing could be deployed to extend an argument’s scope. What if, for example, a mug shot of Snoop Dogg (replete with chains and a placard showing his less familiar given name) were juxtaposed (another lesson in rhetorical strategy from Chapter 3) with an image of Snoop Dogg endorsing a product. The gangsta rapper’s engagement of a particular and politicized variation on ‘cool as rebellion’ becomes compromised by the association of the commercial and manufactured with the projected image of transgression. Cool, in this case, becomes a useful template or starting ground. Beginning with the use of icons to communicate a simple idea, the book progressively accumulates other strategies for both reinforcing and critiquing this idea, to the point that the reader of the electronic text finds him/herself moving through thought in a manner similar to how one might engage an essay of Montaigne’s. It is important, in thinking about this, to remember that the book tasks itself, in simple terms, to create the essay without writing the essay. In this sense, it assumes its readers familiar with arriving at meaning but unfamiliar with methods for communicating it outside of the written text. A pedagogy that places the rhetorical strategies of electronic writing before the rhetoric—that contextualizes these strategies within a discussion of cool such that they can be applied elsewhere—thus seems logical. The reader must first learn the potential mechanics of the new form—how to create meaning within the framework of new media—in order to take advantage of its capacities.

 As a cultural studies text

Returning, briefly, to the iconic image of James Dean, there is a question that the book asks concurrent with the pedagogical ‘how to create meaning’: how is meaning created? For if we are to use the icon as a rhetorical tool for generating meaning, we must likewise know what ideas ascribe meaning to the icon. It is in this conversation that the book-as-cultural studies text overlaps with the book-as-pedagogical text. It is important to note, however, that this point of intersection does not disrupt the placement of the rhetorical before the rhetoric or veer the focus away from a pedagogy that strategizes alternative methods to communicate meaning. If we look at Chapter 9, we can see that the book’s cultural studies context only furthers the cause of interconnectedness as a method for meaning(ful) production.

When the book, in Chapter 9, turns to ethnography as a cool method for information collection (think cool in the sense of Baraka’s detachment), it poses the following question: What happens when we examine the ideas and cultural circumstances that underlie the adoption and, in fact, creation of rhetorical strategies? Referring back to those strategies explored in Chapter 8, representations of violence become survival strategies instead of acts of rebellion (strategies that address pressures both internal and external to the community that employs them); The act of language invention becomes a communal act of conveying a unique experience, an inversion of attempts to silence the oppressed voice; Representations of wealth become significant in terms of a deployment that occurs in the absence of wealth, a means of replacing financial lack so to maintain a certain posture.

What happens, then, if the electronic writer appends the hypothetical juxtaposition of the mug shot and advertisement images with a link to documentary footage of inner city children adopting similar rhetorical identifiers? And what happens if this documentary links to footage of the Detroit punk scene (a different set of rhetorical strategies deployed similarly to address a different set of exigencies)? In short, the electronic argument exposing the disconnect between gangsta rhetoric and commercial reality is expanded to raise the question of whether or not mythologizing a certain rhetorical stance has the effect of making light of the political-cultural circumstances under which it came to be (whether the mythology reinforces a stereotype which undermines the potency of the rhetoric).

In employing cultural studies techniques to ascertain the genesis of those rhetorical strategies which create meaning, the book is very much operating within the scope of its ambition to strategize a new, participatory essay form. It suggests, logically, that to produce a text that demands a cool level of participation from the reader requires equal parts participation from the writer. For example, in turning to cultural studies, it demands that the writer acknowledge the way in which the rhetorically deployed image is not static in its meaning (put crudely, Tupac’s “five double 0 Benz” resonates differently for different readers). We come, then, to understand how the book’s pedagogy is not simply to recognize how rhetorical strategies can create meaning. Instead, the pedagogy is to recognize how the specifically tailored rhetorical strategy can create a specific meaning and, moreover, how this act of specification is not one that limits an argument but one that invites greater nuance, greater permutation into the essay. The rhetorical strategy becomes the textual citation—an evidence that supports a specific thesis. Only, here, the process that includes thesis and support is reversed. The quote is often thought of as following the thesis, as chosen after the purpose or meaning of the essay has been determined. In Writing About Cool, however, it is of paramount importance that the multiple valences of a rhetorical strategy be understood well in advance of the act of composition, the execution of a workman’s intentions thus a product of how well he understands the capabilities of his tools.

Before moving on to the final discussion of the text as engaging a certain kind of hermeneutics, it is important to remember the space in which this newly taught/learned writing takes place. As a pedagogy concerned with how to create meaning it is, above all, concerned with how to make meaning within context of new media/the internet and, on a larger level, within the context of continuing technological innovation. In proposing an alternative to the high definition, hot, written essay of McLuhan, it is capitalizing on the potentials for information dissemination incumbent with the internet. It is thus a technological (almost science fiction) text as much as it is a pedagogical or cultural studies text. It envisions the essay as three-dimensional, occurring in space as the writer extends multiple media across multiple planes (of thought, of encounter, etc.). And it does so without dismissing traditional ideas about argumentation, about the need for the individual to communicate a unique complex of ideas. It simply re-envisions the form(s) in which this communication can take place and the role of the reader in discerning the internal logic, the connective tissue of the form(s).

 As a hermeneutical text

In truth, much of the work that would go into establishing this text as concerned with hermeneutics has already been done in an examination of its process. Because there is a way in which this process—one in which the book constantly builds upon previous conclusions—becomes a metaphor for the method of interpretation that it suggests. The rhetorical strategy is best utilized after a process in which an arsenal of rhetorical strategies is stocked. The specific rhetorical strategy is best utilized only after the ideas that create its significance are considered. In a fundamentally intuitive way—though a way that is often ignored—this book collects information before it puts it to use. And it is in this sense that it enters into that conversation in which Davis, Ray and Walker each lobby for a suspension of thesis formation until the last possible moment. Because, in its pedagogy and the way in which cultural studies comes to bear on this pedagogy, the book seems to imply that one would not interpret, for example, the poetic symbol without taking into consideration the lattice of ideas that have ascribed significance to the symbol. Similarly, one would not determine how a poet employs imagery without consideration to the multiple ways in which imagery can, as a rhetorical device, create rhetoric. Just as the act of electronically communicating meaning is preceded by an understanding of how meaning is communicated, the act of interpretation, within the logic of Writing About Cool, necessarily follows the accumulation of ideas/thought/research pertaining to what is being interpreted. It is a hermeneutics of information gathering before interpretation, where evidence precedes argument, where the focus of an essay is left undetermined until one performs a full assessment of how the means for proving this focus might vary or interact (bottom-up versus top-down interpretation).

Given the juxtaposition of the articles, it’s important that we think about one of the larger points Williams raises (that we read and revise ‘usage’ with a bias/intention that has social and economic implications) within the context of the power structures that Faigley invokes in outlining a social theory of writing process. Because it is a particular authority that we wield in reading for error and one which, at least in my case, would be applied with a certain arbitrariness (there are countless usage errors that I wouldn’t pick up on/would pick up on only some times/would pick up but would continue to use in my own writing/etc.). So I think Williams is right to suggest that there should be a hierarchy of error set up and an un-reflexive reading methodology employed. I think that it would lead to a fulfillment of what Sommers’ suggests in terms of revising so to respond to the text and its purpose/argument rather than to critique the writerly choices of the student (especially during the drafting process).

I don’t want to diminish the significance of the intersection of theories that comes about in reading Williams is of great significance, but I do think that the text operates most successfully on a level of pratical application. Namely, it asks us to evaluate (in fact, to come up with) potential methods for excising that psychic force which leads us to place a disproporitionate amount of attention and critique on certain usage errors. On the one hand we are asked to identify those errors which we truly believe to obstruct communication (to, in a sense, focus almost exclusively on these so as to better attune ourselves to the content, organization and coherency of the argument–the paper itself). It is an issues of order-of-importance, and a critical one at that. At the same time though, and this is something I want to explore in my presentation a little more, I think he suggests (at least leaves the possibility open) that this new methodological approach for reading the student essay can, and should, be taken up by the student as well. It seems like this hierarchy of usage errors-method could be deployed in a peer review setting in such a way that the student becomes more aware of the potential for language to obstruct meaning (and his/her unique take on this relationship) while also, in a way consistent with Macrorie and utterance, claiming more ownership for the text that he/she writes. Even within the context of anonymous excerpts, the sequence of identifying error, proposing revision and then defending this proposal before your peers (who, if Williams is right, would undoubtedly identify different errors and propose different revisions) would, I think, productively raise the issue of how each text is the singular product of the writer. There is a certain transitiveness to the accountability that Williams applies to teachers, and I think there are ways to exploit this (positively) within the classroom.

As a kind of exercise, I decided to resurrect an archaic form–the flow chart–to try and work through Ray (with the idea that, in the process of drawing lines between his examples, a new meaning would emerge). What I realized was a way in which the essay was productively self-proving of its own form. Essentially, he a) shows an evolutionary line between Tin Pan Alley (akin, for me, to the traditional essay in which an agreed upon form/process is applied to an assigned text) and Public Enemy (the Benjaminian essay where juxtaposition of seemingly unlike and/or under-used texts births a meaning); and b) calls for the academic essay to apply the spirit of innovation (and specifically quotation and manipulation of familiar meaning) that exists in and is utilized by other disciplines. And in the “tracks,” he does exactly this, juxtaposing Plato’s fear of the avant-garde with Hendrix’s reverb in such a way to prove that innovative quotation has a place within the domain of academic essay writing. It is, in a sense, circular, an application of a suggested method to show that the method is viable. But, as I said earlier, it’s very much a productive circularity, one that encourages the reader to experiment with it’s form. As such, it leaves open the possibility that this act of juxtaposition can yield a thesis in the same way that, in the analog to Tin Pan Alley, a close reading can.

So I decided to try and apply his methodology, beginning with one thing that interests me, baseball, and a knowledge of the way in which it has embraced innovation in the form of a statistical revolution. The goal was twofold: 1) to apply this example to poetry somehow and 2) to try as much as possible to not form conclusions until this process of connection was done (leaving open the possibility that I would find connective tissue to much more than poetry). So you have old baseball lineups that involve a leadoff hitter with speed and a cleanup hitter with power which, with the publication of Moneyball/the cult of Bill James, were replaced with lineups that instead prioritizes on base percentage and varied skill sets. The immediate connection, then, was with symbolism and the deliberate movement away from it in modernism, but, perhaps even more fully, in surrealism. If the roles in 1980s baseball lineups were those of absolute metaphor (1=wiry and fast ,4=rotund, powerful and plodding) than the roles in the 2008 baseball lineup were abstracted images with multiple meanings resonating outward. The next step then was thinking about the relative value of this innovation, which led me to think about static and potential energy (whose future state, as I understand it, is undefined). Not something I know a great deal about, but whose terms I can at least comprehend. A brief tangent landed me at David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive–non-linearity and increased demands placed upon the viewer–and then at Lil Wayne–potential energy as stylistically variable, undefined and capable of evoking those feelings associated (pleasantly) with suspense from the listener. Now these are all things which I think about (let’s say) weekly, but which I have never before juxtaposed. But in the process of juxtaposition two possibilities came forth.  If I wanted to write solely about poetry (a traditionally academic subject), I have a new vocabulary with which to approach it: potential energy, non-linearity and audience expectations. I think, at the end of the day, a fine and historically sweeping paper could be written that analyzes the way in which the potential energy of the abstract images becomes kinetic when the poem is uttered. Perhaps more interesting and in-line with Ray, the process could likewise yield a paper that examines the use value of non-linearity (in its multiple forms) across genres.

Pedagogically, then, you have both/either a pre-writing exercise (one in which a topic becomes clear by cross-disciplinary thinking) or the challenge of unearthing a thesis from the links you’ve created, basically four short essays (on baseball, surrealism, David Lynch and Lil Wayne) from which the writer has to extract a common thread (a conclusion, perhaps, that links the four). Both cases, I would suggest, keep in play what I saw as the primary theme of this week’s reading: how the essay is most fruitfully written when certainty is suspended until the last moment, after examples have been sorted through, included, discarded and related. I wouldn’t say at all that the readings came down against interpretation or even interpretive certainty. Instead, they simply argued that such decidedness is limiting to the essay form and thus a poor point of entry.

My aim here is to try and place the Davis essay, which I struggled to grasp at a number of occasions, within the context of something that a) I know (or at least think I know) a little bit better and b) I think comes to bear significantly on the piece. That something is the Pound poem “In a Station of the Metro” (which I’ll quote below since it is exceedingly quotable)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

So, in my thinking about this, the critical gesture becomes the fact that the simile (the ‘is like’) isn’t implied but is very deliberately excluded from the poem. What results, then, is an intense subjectivity that resists the authoritative (an exposure that does not dictate). And taking this one step further, it is a subjectivity that invites, from the reader, further subjectivity; it communicates an emotional resonance that is, within Davis’ vocabulary, finite to the writer and, moreover, it anticipates an emotional resonance that is finite to the reader, and, (again) moreover, one that recognizes it as apart from/potentially un-understood by the author. When Pound writes about this poem, it’s in terms of treating the image as an analytic equation, one that defines forms by way of an infinite variability. The juxtaposition as rendered here thus becomes as much an attitude toward poetry composition (one that resists the intent-drive of the metaphor) as it is a discrete composition.

And it is with regard to attitude (or maybe attitudinal approach) that I was finally able to get some footing within Davis’ essay. For me, there is an easing off of the interiority toward the end of the essay that I found critical to the argument itself. I would point specifically to this passage: “Again, this primary literacy does not prohibit a secondary, interpretive literacy. It’s primary only in the sense that it must come first and last” (140). The aim, then, is not to preclude the thesis (the singular/finite/internal/subjective argument) from the essay, but to re-calibrate the context in which the thesis is conceived (and to undertake this re-calibration before the thesis is approached, to ignore the bias so to better write on it). And I think this is a crucial suggestion, the framing of the thesis as an exercise of exposure and, as such, an exercise that will place it in communication with an outside that will not implicitly understand or receive it (or, more specifically, will receive it as the third sophist’s static). In this sense, it is likewise formulated in proximity to and, in a certain way, informed by such static. If this thesis is an organization of familiars (the signposts that Barthes birds-eye viewer sees in the overhead view of Paris), it must necessarily sift through the unfamiliar (the unrecognizable Paris landscape) to locate itself. It must, then, relate to the unfamiliar in two important ways: 1) in a way that acknowledges it without interpretation and, more specifically, without appropriation; 2) in a way that acknowledges the unfamiliar as a potential energy of sorts, one that could (not will, should, etc., but could) be internalized into the identity at some point. The identity must be preceived as evolving and the essay, by extension, must engage the identity at a moment in time that will not apply, necessarily, to future moments in time. What is dangerous (and especially dangerous to first-year writers) is a fixed means of self-identifying within the composition. Identity should be constellated around the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar in such a way that makes possible the coming into focus of the latter, the evolution of the identified self, and the flexibility of the form that essays (as essays will continue) will take.

As this was brought up in class today, I wanted to point to an instance in assignments my students just turned in that brought up an interesting angle. It would stand to reason (I think) that these two things (evidence and feeling) are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, inform one another in very productive ways. The political speech is driven by such a dialogue, a kind of felt evidence, which takes shape in the ability to translate, for example, an evidentiary discussion of economic policy into a rhetoric and/or an example that resonates with the emotion of the listener. And I saw my student’s making similar moves in body paragraph examples they turned in on Monday. What struck me as freshest about the writing they were doing was that they were asked to pull out quotes and unpack them in terms of the focus of their paper, and they did this, in a lot of cases, in a way that channeled, almost to a tee, the ‘feeling’ of the poem. Evidence indeed, but as felt by the reader and, more importantly, in the voice of the reader/essay writer. Was it always the language decisions I might make? No, certainly not. Was it always appropriate or accurate? Sometimes no. But it’s a spirit that absolutely needs to be preserved, by me, in the classroom, regardless of the fact that it may need some tweaking here and there (primarily in the form of having them draw clearer lines between textual evidence and felt reaction, pointing specifically to what in the text aroused this reaction, rather than simply juxtaposing quote and feeling and forcing the reader of the essay to do all the work). And I think this idea of reaction as synonymous with (or at least closely linked to) feeling is something that can be drawn out in a personal narrative that responds to the assignment (and occurs before the assignment is undertaken) in a way that, for the student writer, validates the responses they’re having by putting on display the way they link very closely to the nature of the academic task. It shows that there is an intense amount of overlap between the questions an assignment poses and the sort of gut reactions that the student has, and the work then becomes a very compelling adventure of aggregating, framing, translating feelings so that links are formed between them to the evidence of whatever text is being dealt with and, moreover, that this collection of links is the root source of an argument.

The term that resonated loudest for me in Bishop (also the term that allowed me to most clearly link her work to Brodkey’s) was that of “presence,” which, I think rightfully, the author leaves a bit undefined throughout the course of the essay. The first way in which it functioned successfully for me was, very simply, as a term of counter-point and, more specifically, one that anchored a discussion of rule (or, as Corder might call it, “reduction”) as obstacle. If the aim, as perhaps most clearly stated in Gilyard, is to foster the inclusion of the writer in his/her writing (to make room for the writer’s presence), there has to be a loosening of our assumed need, as teachers, to prescribe the form that an essay should take. But, in a very important way, this idea of presence was not treated merely as a negation of old fashion. To swear off rule or reduction is not enough; There needs to be a pedagogy that replaces it.

And I think Bishop locates this replacement in the relationship of narrative, process and presence (which I’ll address in that order). That there is some hesitance with regard to the inclusion of narrative or creative nonfiction in the composition classroom is, I think, understandable. The narrative can give way to a listing of detail that subverts the burden of proof (or the association of multiple examples) that is critical to a lot of the work composition students will be doing. Its nature is,  in a certain way, flexible  and in this sense, I think its role with regard to the essay can be easily misinterpreted. It is not a suitable surrogate for many of the essays our students will be assigned. But, and this is where Bishop really takes off for me, that the narrative is not aligned with the endgame of some assignments doesn’t mean that it is without utility to that assignment. In a manner that I think enables the work of Brodkey, Bishop seems to treat the personal narrative almost as a pre-essay, more of a means than an end. It [the personal narrative] becomes a tool by which the student can locate his or her line of thinking (or perhaps circle of thought would be a more accurate and pleasant phrase to describe this important scholarly wandering) with regard to a text or subject or question or whatever object the essay is addressing. And the key idea here is in the pronoun–’his or her line of thinking.’ The narrative is, then, the engine for a process by way of which the student locates his/her presence within the task at hand. The essay is something that is individually arrived at rather than dictated from elsewhere; The thesis emerges from the story of how the student was thinking about, for instance, the film; Ownership of the form falls back into the hands of the person who is actually forming it, and this happens because a stress is put on the work, the process which underlies the essay.

If an alignment of the essay with a future reward (’if I do this well, I get an A; if i get an A, I get a job) is a dangerous scenario that encourages a paint-by-numbers safeness, than, borrowing a little from Brodkey, the essay should live–and, in the case of voicing what I call the pre-essay, is always living–in the present tense, the tense the student can dicate the terms of. And it’s in thinking this way that I realized the subtle facism that I was wielding in working so extensively with prompts. If there’s anything that stifles the student’s presence, it’s the prompt, for in decreeing a topic, one collapses the perimeter of that narrative wandering that Bishop establishes as crucial to linking the individual writer to the writerly product. The essay, with a prompt, is already living in the future. Its skeleton has essentially already been written and turned in; The student only has to go through the mindless task of plugging in the gestures that can flesh it out. So what I’m going to try instead is providing obstruction (in the Lars Von Trier sense) rather than instruction. I haven’t fully thought it through yet (see a future Wiki), but I’m going to try to and establish criteria that force the student to reckon with the essay the entire way through, to constantly occupy a present tense relationship to the work they’re doing. And, ideally, this will force them to be present in the work, to be in a position of orientation and re-orientation, vision and re-vision throughout.

Ur poem: Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Resonating Visual Image: Night of the Hunter
Current Musical Fix: Bad Brains’ Rock for Light
Romanticized Historical Figure: Henry Hudson

In trying to orient myself to these entities, I tried to point to a discrete moment in each of them that either a) kindled my interest or b) to which I returned upon encountering them (physically or in thought). In identifying where they held me, I figured I might be able to discern both why they did so and how they did so similarly.

In the case of Browning (and I think this has a great deal to do with the role that the poem played in the movie The Sweet Hereafter), every time I come across the poem, I immediately go to those lines that occur toward the end of the poem: “And when they were all in to the very last/the door of the mountai-side shut fast/Did I say all? No! One was lame,/And could not dance the whole of the wa;/And in after years, if you would blame/his sadness, he was used to say–/’It’s dull in our town since my playmates left!/I can’t forget that I’m bereft/Of all the pleasant things they see/Which the Piper also promised me.’” I think about the aftermath of the bus crash in The Sweet Hereafter, the fact that I fondly remember seeing the movie with someone with whom I no longer speak, the fact that I saw it in New York, a city which has had more than it’s share of Hamelin-like trauma.

As for Night of the Hunter, it’s always the scene in which Robert Mitchum stands outside of Lillian Gish’s gate, poised to pounce, while the latter sits in a rocking chair with a shotgun.

And the two of them, in all respects opposed–the hunter and the protector of orphans–, sing the melody and counter-melody of the hymn that runs through the movie, with Mitchum taking “leaning/leaning/leaning on the everlasting Lord” and Gish taking “leaning on Jesus/leaning on Jesus/leaning on the everlasting Lord.” This juxtaposition of the threat of Mitchum’s presence and the balm of the hymn is something that I’ve never been able to shake.

With the Bad Brains album, it’s more of an exercise of will that I’m drawn to.  I love 110 second long speed-core songs on the album (and all their album’s for that matter), but am decidedly less enthused by the 6 minute long reggae songs which they devotedly put on each side of Rock for Light. And despite my knowledge of these relative levels of enjoyment, it remains one of the few albums that I’m determined to listen to all the way through whenever I play it.

And as for Henry Hudson, I know little about him and almost would rather keep it that way. I know that, on what would be his last journey, his crew mutineed with an end result that they cast Hudson, along with his son and a handful of crew members, out in a rowboat in the middle of the James Bay after Hudson had attempted to guide the ship through the bay’s ice. Needless to say, they were never heard from again.

The lame child un-consumed by the mountain; the orphaning predator held at bay by the new shepherd of the orphaned; the thrash band boldly (if incongruously on a superficial level) acknowledging their roots; the life-negating indignity of the rowboat. In each case the draw for me seems to be their engagement (in a number of different manners) with what is left behind. And the more I think about it, the more I see this as not only a concern in my writing but also, to some degree, a key contributor to my still-nascent poetics. To give context, the current project I’m working on is a series of short poems that frame a town by way of exploring what occurs in the wake of the departure and sustained absence of its native so (think: post-Favre Green Bay, WI). At times, the poem’s wallow as Hamelin’s lame child does. At times, they shepherd. At times, they are poems of celebratory remembrance (if only to give way to more wallowing), and at times they strand. But what they do at all times is gather: artifacts, miniatures, family members, broken-down tools. And I think this act of gathering is at the core of a poetics that attempts to give significane to the list. But it’s not just an issue of critical significance. I think back to Browning often when I’m writing (the image of the mountain-mouth is one that I frequently, well, steal) and I think about the degree to which he preached an enjoyment of poetry, and I realize, that on some level, my aim is to always surround his lame child with playthings.

It was pointed out both in the presentation and in the readings (namely Miller and Gilyard) that any grappling with the hidden agenda is both an ambitious and potentially problematic task. So in approaching the hidden agenda, I think it important to begin with a clear idea of not only what the potential and desired outcomes are but also how they can (and perhaps should) be achieved bit-by-bit. For me, the ideal case/desired outcome would involve some sort of conscientious accessing of the hidden agenda on the part of the student. Expanding on this further, the student sees the public agenda as a conditional obstruction. When an obstruction, the student would treat the hidden as a means of critiquing and ultimately changing the public agenda. However, the student is simultaneously aware of the fact that a) there is value in work and instruction that occurs within the public agenda/dominant discourse and b) that this work doesn’t preclude an engagement of the thinking that occurs within the student’s hidden agenda. To treat the public and hidden agendas as diametrically opposed is, especially in looking at Gilyard, a little misleading. Because the degree of voice and identity that the student brings to what is asked of him/her within the framework of the dominant discourse is, I think, where the infrastructure for change lies. It is an issue of fusion as much as it is one of friction.

So, if this responsible accessing is my endgame, the logical first step toward reaching it (the first bit in the bit-by-bit) would seem to be making the student aware that this hidden agenda is relevant, that it has a critical role. And, I should make clear, I’m thinking of the hidden agenda not so much as negative (”I find what is asked of my so oppressive) but as a positive (”I would like to be doing this kind of work in this kind of way but feel that it is inconsistent with what occurs/is appropriate in a classroom”). And I think technology, and more specifically blogs, are an interesting forum in which to encourage students to start thinking around this tension. If we want to whittle this idea of awareness of hidden agenda’s relevance even further, I think it can (not necessarily does, but can) begin with the idea of voice. And again, I think I’m biting Gilyard a little bit in bring up this point, particularly the moment at which he asks questions like “Who is deemed worthy of being marketed as an author? Whose stories get to be preserved in published, well-distributed formats” (266). Within the dominant discourse, such privilege does exist, and cripplingly so. Within the much larger discourse of blogs, however, this privilege, to at least some degree evaporates. Think (or rather, get your students to think) about the people who blog for XXL, the people who blog for ridiculously niche baseball websites, the people who blog for Fashionista. You can point to very discernible ways in which the kind of critical work that occurs in these spaces is akin (if not identical) to the textual analysis that occurs in the classroom (according to the public agenda/dominant discourse). The difference, though, is that this work can be cast more visibly as occurring on the author’s own terms, in the author’s own words/voice. In pointing to these examples and giving students the opportunity to address topics of interest in a manner that reflects their voice (while maintaining the critical eye that is cultivated in the classroom), I think the borderline where the public agenda ends and the hidden agenda begins can be blurred in a way that doesn’t obscure the importance of what differences exist (and should exist) on the poles of each agenda. When the voice exists and (dare i say) blossoms in a personal space such as the blog, I feel that it will naturally bleed into that work which is “of the classroom” but will do so with a filter. And when this starts occurring, we get closer to a conscientious accessing of the hidden agenda. And as this voice sturdies itself, as it learns even more clearly what is appropriate in what forum, I think we move toward answering Gilyard’s questions in a more democratic manner.

In reading the remainder of the assignment, I found myself furiously defining and re-defining the key terms in the margins of the essays (discourse: a circulation of ideas, rhetoric: a discourse emerging from the individual’s recognition of “what needs to be done,” etc.). The introduction of the subjective in Vatz (rhetoric and situation emerging from the individual’s perception and dictation of exigence), I thought, bled nicely into the ambitious possession-taking of discourse that occurred in Gilyard and Miller. And when I say ambitious, I don’t mean that as a mechanism for discrediting. The idea that students can/should turn an understanding of the dominant discourse in the classroom back onto itself (either as a critique of the discourse itself or as a means of expanding the bubble by fusing identity and practice) does seem to be a more perfect endgame. What came to mind, however, was the way in which, due to an implicit slipperiness in the vocabulary of these essays, there is a world of ground that lies between this endgame and its starting point. If I was wrestling with the idea of discourse, how would a first-year composition student situate him/herself with regard to it?

In thinking about a starting point–how to introduce the idea of discourse (let alone dominant discourse) into the freshman classroom–I came back to Miller (and in some ways to the concerns of Gilyard at the bottom of p. 266). Is the proper methodology to first direct attention to acceptable (or, perhaps for Gilyard, published) instances of transgression. The idea of discourse, as its laid out in Miller, seems predicated on expectation(s). The student is expected to behave in a certain manner, write in a certain manner and, by extension of obedience, graduate with a certain career in place. These expectations, I would hazard to guess, reveal themselves in even more communicable ways with regard to literary forms. For example, the poem, within a certain range of imagination, is “supposed” to take a certain shape (and here, then, is the student’s discourse on poetics). If this discourse is discussed within the framework of poems that combat it (and do so successfully), will the student then have a firmer footing with regard to an application of transgression to their immediate (i.e., composition classroom) context. There seems to be a certain amount of un-training that has to go on, and I’m not sure that it begins with the essay or with the classroom. I think it begins with the formulation, on the part of the student, of what discourse is, where it appears. Once achieved on this global level, I think then it can be applied locally, which may appear to be a reversal of order of operations, but I think it would be one that could define terms before we begin to call upon them.