I wanted say more about a provoking thought Allison posted a few days ago. Her comments to Laura's latest post quite articulately captured the participatory feeling that one gets when approaching the comp/rhet/writing studies (whatever we are) field. There is a sense that we can have a stake in it--that there is something meaningful to be said and terribly important to do. And she links it to the self-reflection of the discipline and (if I recall correctly) the way knowledge is constructed within it.
Allison's sentiments, ones that I wholeheartedly identify with, are echoed in Bartholomae's opening comments in his 1988 address. He says of his indebtedness to CCCC that it "provided as sense of community that made me believe I could get started--that there was, in fact, good work for me to do, that it was good work, and that I could do it in good company. My graduate progam did not give me this sense of vocation" (169). In sharing this anecdote, Bartholomae notes that he is "taken" with the number of people who share this story. And my mentioning this might be enough to indicate that I too felt this deep connection with this sense of what the discipine offers, particularly when one is gazing at it from the field of "lit-ter-a-ture". Increasingly I feel a drive to think about comp studies, a sense of circulation and imperative; correspondingly, I feel a stark lack of that drive, overwhelmed by a sense of accumulation and dustiness, when I type about literature.
Allow me to let B. speak for me: "not cranking out just one more paper, not laddering their way up to the top, not searching for difficult texts and dull readers, not bowing or scraping before another famous book, or another famous person, but doing work that one could believe in...where we felt like we could make things happen, not just in our own careers, but in the world" (170).
There is something starkly personal and perhaps hokey about this sentiment. But I would like to suggest that perhaps this feeling about comp studies is MORE than a feeling. More to do with its epistemological....well, not nature, but oh! how about composition? Yes! Its epistemological composition.
In brief I want to link this feeling to a few points in Odell and Bartholomae's addresses. I found myself nodding a lot during Odell's address--for me, he was essentially arguing that we invite the chaos of change and diverging approaches (and with that, dispense with the concern that we have to nail something down in order to count as a discipline). I love how he frames this discussion; his rhetoric to me seems intentionally directed towards "practicing what he preaches"--making a contention/suggestion out of one given point of view (carefully distinguishing from arguing a fixed point of view). He says, "One may argue that our knowledge is tentative, provisional, subject to ongoing revision. If this revision ever ends, so will our discipline. And so will our ability to survive as thinkers and as teachers. Given this point of view, I think we need to be concerned with not with current trends in our discipline but rather with our relationship to those trends.....The question...is rather, What does each of us need to do in order to contribute to the advancement of learning in our discipline?" (147).
Odell's sentiments can be nicely linked to Bartholomae's. For me, this connection is forged via tiny phrase that really jumped out at me from B's address: "useful anxiety" (175). As B. states, this anxiety is productive. The uncertainty or relativism or lack of tradition or lack of disciplinary boundary seems to counterintuitively make the discipline approachable (but significantly NOT in the sense that "anything goes"). This anxiety becomes strong exigence for comp scholarship and practice. As Odell plainly concludes, "composing" (an indebtedness to Lunsford here) the epistemology of the discipline in this way generates the "responsibility to contribute to our individual and collective understanding of how people use language to communicate" (151). This anxiety creates an imperative for intellectual engagement and is to me entirely integral to the field. It's what makes me what to think about it, to say the least.
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A very interesting entry, Hannah. I like your idea that the lure of comp is attributed to "more than a feeling." My sense is that because the field has always been so intimately tied to practice--and not just any practice, but a supremely important one: writing instruction--it has a social mission that makes it different from literary studies. There is a discernible sense among practitioners, as B notes, that our work has very important consequences, that we do something that is recognized as "our work".
ReplyDeleteSo, I have to ask, are we witnessing a metamorphosis here in your field of study?
Hannah,
ReplyDeleteI am invigorated by your boldness in declaring, "I feel a stark lack of that drive, overwhelmed by a sense of accumulation and dustiness, when I type about literature."
That description of dustiness seems apt. One of the reasons I decided to apply to PhD programs in comp/rhet is because I feared my talent would be wasted and relegated to dusty bookshelves and to poetry readings that only, like, 4 people attend. For me, creative writing is less likely to "change the world" than comp--which is either a pessimistic way of looking at it, or practical. Hmmmm.
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ReplyDeleteHannah, I'm intrigued that you use the phrase "type about literature" rather than "write about literature." It's a sentiment I know well, but I've never considered it in these terms... And Heather, I can relate to your thoughts about your involvement with poetry and r/c as well. I remember having a conversation with John Henry last year when I was kicking around the idea of a jump... I expressed my boredom with literature--that I didn't think I could be "useful" in this arena. "What's the point?" I asked him. "To be a custodian of culture!" he said rather matter-of-factly. That, to me, is not enough.
ReplyDeleteA CUSTODIAN????
ReplyDeletethat is...odd.
keeper, guardian, steward, protector.
ReplyDeleteLaura-a totally appropriate question. I like how you've framed it as 'metamorphosis' rather than 'switch'. Morphing, surely; switching, no. I think I still believe, as Bartholomae argues in his afterword, that there is no reason to choose one over the other. Much of what the practice of literary study exercises is useful to comp studies and vice versa. The question for me as I chug along the dissertation track is whether this is a job-search-tenable position to hold...
ReplyDeleteFurther, I agree with the impact of practice in cultivating this change the world attitude. Though I'm not fully articulating it, I think still it's more than that, something about the field of inquiry [something like Lunsford's history of writing] itself that compels contribution.
Heather and Allison, first, of COURSE John Henry said that, and I love it! What an appropriate image given my 'dusty' adjective.
Makes lots of sense, Hannah. I'd add to Allison & Heather's comments that we should be cautious about constructing a false binary between comp and lit (i.e., comp is meaningful and "real"; lit is not--I've significantly reduced the complexity of what you both said, but I hope you take my point). I think literary studies can be extremely powerful work for students and teachers because, through language/textuality studies, we learn something about culture and how it gets reproduced, circulated, interrupted via the medium of language. In addition, gives us a window into the past and the tools for imagining possible futures. Basically, I'm talking about the rhetoric of literature...this isn't to say that lit is always taught/studied with this emphasis, but I certainly believe the potential is there.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said Laura; in my burgeoning enthusiasm for comp, I tend to impose that binary--which isn't necessary or productive. I think it's more of a feeling than a rational thought...I throw myself into stuff headlong...
ReplyDeleteI'll echo Heather on this one. My impulse to enforce that binary is likely more about enthusiasm for this new shiny bright thing than about a particular distaste for literature as an area of study. I do have to remind myself that I came into r/c via literature, that I wanted to do more rhetorical work with literature before realizing I wanted to jump into r/c all the way... The more I read this summer, the more I am reminded of the vast area of crossover between fields. Both are indebted to each other in more ways than they are distinct from each other, and that's what makes graduate school so fun!
ReplyDelete