Karyna's Response

[Robert Greco]

#441

Wysocki’s discussion on the social meanings of various mediums of composition, and production, and their relationships to one’s identity inspired me. I completely agree with her argument that “the available design of words and pictures, that is, comes with attached discourses. How one articulates words and pictures, then, can play with–or against–those discourses” (p. 26). A great deal of societal and structural pressure goes into creating norms by which self-expression, which composition is also a part of, has to be conducted. Our education system is a great, yet sad, example of such norms. Very often we see students locked into chains of five-paragraph essays, depersonalized language, punished creativity, and other sudo-tools aimed at advancing their skills. When reading scholars like Wysocki, operating primarily from the outside of my dominant discipline, I often find myself angry at mainstream psychology for socializing me into a very narrow and dry way of writing. Such dryness is precisely the result of those prevailing dichotomies discussed by Wysocki: psychology strives to be a science, thus, it has to compose texts that fit a certain standard, as much as men, in order to look mature and intelligent, had to read and write in uninterrupted text, while pictures were reserved for women, children, and uneducated masses.

And yet, our existence in the world of dichotomies and often willful denial of whatever is in between constitutes a much larger issue than that of one given discipline. As Wysocki, evoking voices of many others like Marx, claims, “we see ourself in what we produce” (p. 25). Simultaneously, we are the products of  our social and ideological environments, which  we reproduce in our work. I would guess that personal aesthetic preference is not the only reason why Tolstoy’s War and Peace  is permeated with endless detailed descriptions of the oak tree and Austerlitz sky, which could have easily been substituted by drawings. He could have saved a lot of Russian kids, myself included, from memorizing those and reciting them in front of the entire class.

Jokes and my high school grievances aside, combining text and picture serves several important purposes. First, it allows the author to exercise a bit more control over how his or her imagery, which is still present in any words-only work, is perceived. Coloring, composition, and various details can be visually expressed in a way that would enhance reader’s understanding of a narrative. Second, as Wysocki suggests, combining text and picture allows us to break away from the often rigid linearity of composing. Both of these features constitute, in turn, powerful mediators of our selves. Both the rise and prevalence of other forms of composing, little by little change the way that audience perceives itself. No longer we are just a chronological narrative. We are also full of chaos, color, and other elements of imagery, as they are essential parts of our bodily experience.

With all this said, I want to come back to the original quote stated above. Regardless of what methods we choose to teach our students, our responsibility is to allow them the choice of “play[ing] with–or against–those discourses” that surround them. We need to develop strategies that would not only provide them with the tools and mediums of composition but also would teach them to recognize those tools in themselves. And the “how we do this?” is the question which I, inspired by Wysocki, aspire to at least attempt to answer in my work.

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