Thursday, August 6, 2009
Who agrees?
The '91 speech by McQuade seems to be a watershed one, in that the speeches that follow seem to have a more personal, more narrative feel...
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Knowledge, Disciplinarity, and "Useful Anxiety"
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.
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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