Fragment or Hybrid?

[Anonymous]

#396

I want to focus on three (one rather lengthy) passages of text from the midsection of Arola and Wysocki’s introductory chapter, passages that speak to the so-called divide between self-expression and social consciousness:

 
“[One] set of assumptions engages with a tension between the two stories, a tension between the felt experiences of an interior–being a body that composes, writes, and communicates–and a bodily exterior, of being one person among many, subject to study and impress from above or outside, mattering only because of one’s part in composing the many. This tension plays itself out in our composition classes as we decide whether to teach
one: that writing is about expressing one’s particular experiences.
or
two: that writing is always and inescapably part of larger social, cultural, and political structures, institutions, and systems and that individuals and (perceptions of) agency are always and only effects of those structures, institutions, and systems” (11).
 
“In classes shaped by the first set of values, writing ‘is a means of fostering personal development, in the great Socratean tradition of ‘knowing thyself’ (667); in classes shaped by the second set of values, ‘students read about systemic cultural injustices inflicted by dominant societal groups and dominant discourses on those with less power’ (659)” (12).
 
“We are fragmented between a perceiving and a perceived body, between a potentially expressive mediating body and a body that exists only in mediation by others” (13).

Is it possible, however, to be both a perceiving body and a perceived body simultaneously? Can we teach our composition courses in a way that values both self-awareness and critical consciousness? Someone like Adrienne Rich, a poet and teacher working with non-traditional students at CUNY, would say we must. After all, Rich was teaching in the midst of the open admissions experiment (’68 – ’75?), when the whole country was in the throes of the civil rights movement, the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, the Kent State shootings, the “Space Race,” Nixon’s resignation, and during the final, gruesome years of the Vietnam War. Rich, a social activist and poet, responded in writing that merged the expressive and the critical. We might even call her a Critical Expressivist, terms that, for whatever reason, have been largely set adrift from one another in the field of Composition. But this was the role she took on in the classroom as well as in her writing. For Rich (and for other poets (Whitman for example)), felt sense directly informed our understanding of larger social, cultural, and political structures that Arola and Wysocki describe. 

[Anonymous]

#412

Nolan, I love that you challenge the either/or approach that Wysocki seems to set up here.  Rich is a great example; I think we could find an infinite supply of critically engaged poets, novelists, playwrights and screenwriters.  I suspect that as soon as a scholar defines growth/process as merely “expressivist,”  they’ve tipped their hand about where they stand. I really like how you reclaim and repurpose the label here–Sean

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