Shona's Response to Van Meenan "Writing, Drawing, & Entering"

[Anonymous]

#744

Van Manen offers yet another navigational tool for conceptualizing the meaning-making process of felt sense. Although the term felt sense is not mentioned as a part of his analysis, the filter we’ve crafted in our previous readings, of writing through felt sense, seems very present.
In “Entering”, Van Manen offers a phenomenological extrapolation on the notion of an “inner-self” through which the writer inhabits the “inner-space” of writing. He notes that it is more likely that the “writer dwells in the space that the words open up”(1). This resembles Gendlin’s theory of fresh thought emerging through the process of felt sense; a continuum of development through revisiting, re-thinking and listening to bodily information and potential. The process of writing opens up the possibility for “reading a story” through idea-making, as Van Manen puts it, which unfolds within one’s own creative process (1); A multi-dimensional, experience-based creative mechanism.
The process of phenomenological writing as unfixed, moving and interminable speaks to our compositional work with new media in this course. The meaning inhered in our textual narratives, essays and poems have been continuously expanded upon as they are made pliable and malleable upon new surfaces of digital presentation. Transitioning our language use, from stories we tell in our written text, into an altogether different medium for public expression certainly “disturbs its taken-for-grantedness” (“Drawing” 2).
I find a meaningful challenge in drawing the lens of experiential writing into theoretical, academic work. The narrative of human experience seems to carry a pregnant potential in the work of critical examination.

[Sondra Perl]

#764

Lovely and thoughtful, Shona. Feels very apt to me, esp. the discussion of what happens when we move from pen and paper to digital media.

[Author]

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