Nolan's Response

[Anonymous]

#526

Sondra’s article has me thinking about recursiveness in writing (“forward-moving action that exists by virtue of a backward-moving action”), and the questions, “To what do writers move back? What exactly is being repeated? What recurs” (364)? To this line of inquiry, I would add the question, “Why do writers move back?” I think of Chardin’s “Le Philosophe Lisant,” and George Steiner’s interest in the “reader’s quill,” an image that suggests the relationship of mutualism that exists between the reader and the writer. “The quill crystallizes the primary obligation of response,” says Steiner. “It defines reading as action. To read well is to answer the text, to be answerable to the text, ‘answerability’ comprising the crucial elements of response and of responsibility.” If, then, “to read well is to answer the text,” to write well must be to inspire a response. This is perhaps one function of recursiveness in writing–to appeal to the thinking, feeling bodies of our human readers, to imagine ourselves as them even–especially–as we write.

[Anonymous]

#531

Nolan, I feel you starting from a sense of the reader’s agency in shaping their response to a text, and then moving to think more about the writer’s desire to shape that response. You end with “This is perhaps one function of recursiveness in writing–to appeal to the thinking, feeling bodies of our human readers, to imagine ourselves as them even–especially–as we write.” Your use of “appeal” with “thinking, feeling” connects me to the rhetorical part of the composing process. Sondra’s work deeply deconstructs process, but in this 1980 piece, she sets up a vision of process that meshes the inward looking focus I associate with process and the outward looking lens of rhetoric:

“In closing, I would like to suggest that retrospective and projective structuring
are two parts of the same basic process. Together they form the alternating
mental postures writers assume as they move through the act of composing.
The former relies on the ability to go inside, to attend to what is
there, from that attending to place words upon a page, and then to assess if
those words adequately capture one’s meaning. The latter relies on the ability
to assess how the words on that page will affect someone other than the
writer, the reader…. As we move through this cycle, we are continually composing
and recomposing our meanings and what we mean” (369).

All of this resonates for me as I think about felt sense and how it connects to emotional appeals to our embodied, feeling selves. –Sean

[Sondra Perl]

#548

Nolan: I love your bringing in the concept of ‘answerability’ — much like Bahktin’s ‘response-ability’ — the call to answer or respond to the other is the basis of a dialogic pedagogy and a dialogic understanding of the world.

Sean: “Meshing inward looking focus of process with outward lens of rhetoric” Yes. How apt.

[Author]

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