“Authority” in Composition Scholarship

Ellen Cushman and Terese Guinsatao Monberg expand notions of sensitivity toward cultural, social, and gendered identities in developing critical composition pedagogies in their essay. Most of the scholarship that Perspectives on Research has been concerned with this quarter has proposed a need for awareness and sensitivity to issues of identity in the context of the University; more specifically, in the context of the writing classroom.  The message seems to have been, thus far, that some deeper thinking needs to be done, on the parts of composition scholars as well as instructors, in developing new pedagogical methods for teaching student writing. Essentially, there has been a call for an expanded view of composition and what it should accomplish in the university classroom, rather than suggestions that the current system itself is fundamentally and irreversibly flawed. Ellen Cushman and Terese Guinsatao Monberg’s essay, however, seems to suggest just that notion. In their contribution to this identity in composition conversation, they argue that there is a need to rework the entire set of ideologies behind the scholastic system. These scholars contend that the productive solution lies with the acts of “Re-Centering” and “Re-Positioning”. Basically, it is not the composition pedagogies themselves that need so much attention; but rather it is the methods and ideologies from which these pedagogical approaches are developed that must be re-worked.

Much of Cushman and Monberg’s essay focuses on “questions of ethnographic authority” (167). They explain the relevance of the authority question by arguing that “While recent moves in composition and cultural studies scholarship have encouraged academics to cross borders and boundaries, many of us have remained skeptical, protective, and hesitant. For example, Jacqueline Jones Royster, bell hooks, Gesa Kirsch, Malea Powell, Janice Gould, and Patricia Sullivan, have all asked, warned, and/or demanded that scholars be more careful of where they step and for whom they speak” (167).  This is a notion that the entire essay seems to struggle against. Scholars must be free from limitations concerning authority and representation is effective critical composition pedagogical and research approaches are to be achieved. Their essay seems to move away from notions of political correctness in suggesting that certain boundaries have to be opened up within the discipline of composition studies and its growing relationship and relevance to cultural studies.

Activist Teaching and Research

The largely general conversation surrounding issues of cultural, social, and gendered individuality that various essays in Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice have been concerned with, specifically the ways in which these questions of the construction of identity have real implications within the academy  and the writing classroom,  seems to be grounded in a more specific and practical context in Gail Y. Okawa’s essay “Coming (in)to Consciousness: One Asian American Teacher’s Journey into Activist Teaching and Research”. Okawa’s essay seems to have actual suggestions for pedagogical awareness and approaches for teaching writing to students with backgrounds that differ from the more “mainstream” university population.  This essay was particularly interesting in that we very rarely get to hear contributions to this kind of conversation, concerning sensitivity to student individuality in the composition classroom, from a scholar who is actually a self proclaimed “teacher of color” (283). I doubt that the notion of using teaching as a platform for “activism” is something that is readily considered in discussions of critical composition pedagogies, or in considerations concerning research, so her take on the issue creates an interestingly new direction for thinking about implications for the writing classroom.

Relevant to this notion that Okawa develops about activist teaching is her discussion of the effectiveness of autobiographical narrative as a writing medium (282). She says of this specific medium, “I believe such writing provides a means of resistance to the isolation and objectification typical of the academy. As a way of accessing subjective knowledge and experience while simultaneously becoming the representation of that knowledge and experience, teacher narrative has the potential for both personal and social value” (282). Interestingly, the importance of student background has expanded to include the importance of the background and experiences of the teacher in the composition classroom. Rarely have I read composition theory written in the style of an autobiography.  It is usually expected that critical scholarship will be presented in the scholastic prose style typical of conferences and journals. The revisiting of the autobiographical medium is, I think, a very interesting aspect of Okawa’s essay; and allows for expanded definitions of what “good” writing can be.

Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities

Finally, the feminist discussion comes into the research class!!!! In their collaborative essay, “Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities”, Anne Donadey and Francoise Lionnet offer an overview of the changes that have occurred within the field of feminist studies during the past twenty years. What I found so interesting about Donadey and Lionnet’s treatment of feminism in the humanities lies with the fact that they offered such an unexpected approach to the larger feminist discussion. Instead of segregating feminist concerns, as is usually the case with all things “feminine”, they tried to incorporate them into a more comprehensive discussion of identity rather than just gender. Whereas feminism is usually this foreign concept that carries with it all kinds of connotations that are unique and separated from the rest of the academic disciplines, Donadey and Lionnet make feminist studies relevant to academic scholarship as a whole by blurring the boundaries that are often placed around it. At one point they contend, “The boundaries among “feminisms, gender, sexualities,” “race and ethnicity,” “migrations, diasporas, and borders,” and “cultural studies” have become more and more porous, and the corresponding essays in this book are most productively read in dialogue with one another. Feminism as we conceptualize it is as much about race and colonialism as it is about gender and sexuality” (225). Essentially, this essay draws a clear connection between the other material we have read this quarter and brings the discussion full circle. Donadey and Lionnet expand the definition of feminism in a way that I had never considered. I honestly had never considered issues of race and colonialism relevant to feminist studies.      

Ethnographically Sensitive Composition

In his essay “Keeping Honest: Working Class Students, Difference, and Rethinking the Critical Agenda in Composition”, David Seitz argues that ethnographic research should be incorporated into developing critical composition pedagogies. It is because of a lack of consideration for the ways in which students’ class and cultural backgrounds can influence their response to the application of composition theory in the writing classroom that many writing instructors lack significant “persuasive authority for some of these students in the classroom, or more importantly, in the practice of their everyday lives” (65).  Seitz calls for an increased effort, on the parts of composition teachers and theorists, to make considerations involving ethnographic research in all aspects of composition and the writing classroom, if they are to have any real impact on the students that enter these classrooms. It seems that Seitz’s theory is following in the tradition of most contemporary scholars in that he is forging a means beyond thinking about writing as some foreign practice that exists only in the composition classroom; instead, writing is being addressed as something that can have real civic implications.  

Seitz makes the point that, not only do students miss out on effective instruction when their cultural and socio-economic circumstances are not considered during the implication of critical composition pedagogies, but the academic community as a whole loses out on “views from outside middle-class institutions that imply valuable critiques to these theories and their application in the writing class” (65). In order to place his discussion into a more concrete context, he evokes specific references to three individual students in order to prove the negative effects of leaving ethnographic considerations out of composition: Lilia, Diana, and Mike. Seitz claims that the school histories and differing community values individual students bring to their writing will help to determine their response to their writing and the writing classroom in general. He notes that, “As the situations of Diana, Mike, and Lilia show, these contexts and values will shape different students’ approaches to these calls for critical engagement” (77).   

David Seitz’s essay succeeds in opening up a more wholistic discussion of composition and its place in reflecting and determining student identity. He concludes, of ethnographic research in looking at student demographics, “This research must continually try to understand the relations between their various ways of knowing and behaving in multiple domains” (78). His essay seems to be particularly relevant to a course focusing on research in that he is able to provide a new route for composition research and scholarship by integrating ethnographic concerns and concerns about writing pedagogy.

Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders

In this essay, Susan Stanford Friedman attempts to explain the studies of migration, diasporas, and borders both as three distinctive disciplines, as well as their tendency toward becoming ”increasingly interwoven and mutually constitutive in literary studies”. While admitting her own awareness of the exceedingly complex nature of the discussion relevant to these three areas of study, and of the unlikelyhood that an entirely exhaustive discussion can be achieved, she does provide an extremely useful overview of the philosophical, practical, political, historical, global, and local ideology associated with each of these concepts, respectivley, as well as points where the three seem to meet.  Friedman provides a useful summation of her goals for this particular text when she states, “I have attempted to name some of the many lines of inquiry; the pathways of exploration; the kinds of questions people have been pursuing; and the spectrum of concerns from material and political to metaphoric and psychological, cultural, and aesthetic.”

I find Friedman’s discussion of Borders and Borderlands particularly interesting, given that the notion of “border” is significantly ambiguous and contradictory; the ambiguity and contradiction surrounding “border”, then, also permeates Border Studies as a discipline. The ambiguity surrounding borders lies in the fact that they can be either physical geographic borders, or figurative and metaphorical. The contradiction lies, to name only a few of many points, in the fact that “Borders are fixed and fluid, impermeable and porous. They separate but also connect, demarcate but also blend differences. Absolute at any moment in time, they are always changing over time [...] Borders are used to excercise power over others but also to empower survival against others.” Essentially, borderlands refers to a kind of liminal space, a state of being inbetween. In order to contextualize her discussion of Borders and Borderlands, Friedman evokes Gloria Anzaldua’s “touchstone text for border studies”, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA.

Although Anzaldua’s text, as well as Friedman’s essay as a whole, seems to focus a good deal on borders as they relate to the construction of identity, it is made quite clear that borderlands can refer to the liminal space “across all kinds of differences: psychological, spiritual, sexual, linguistic, generic, disciplinary.” The idea that borderlands can exit across disciplines is one that is quite relevant to the concerns of a course designed to develop various perspectives toward research. It seems that research itself exists in a kind of borderland; it situates itself inbetween numerous academic disciplines, and, to be truly apt as a researcher, one must learn to navigate within this borderland. In this particular discussion, Friedman calls for collaboration across disciplines in truly sorting out the interwoven and individual concepts associated with Migration, Diasporas, and Borders. She says, “Perhaps a fitting end for this overview is a blending of the humanities and the social sciences evident in the geographers’ characterization of what they have learned from the rich literatures of migration, diaspora, and borders.” Essentially, Friedman has further complicated, or expanded, the possibilities for what “English Studies” can be.       

Cultural Studies

In his essay entitled “Cultural Studies” Jean Franco attempts to establish some kind of ideological boundaries, albeit a very loose set of boundaries, for what cultural studies has consisted of historically, as well as what it has become in a more contemporary sense; especially in the context of how it fits into the university as a scholarly discipline. In order to attempt a somewhat comprehensive discussion of what cultural studies is, Franco dedicates a good deal of his discussion to considering the distinction between cultural studies as it  has appeared in Britain, the United States, and Latin America. I found his discussion of cultural studies in the United States particularly interesting because of the complexities inherent in it as a subject of study in a country with such a mixed population. As opposed to the, largely, homogeneous collective identity in other regions of the world, the United States is made up of individuals. Hence, a strict definition of cultural studies would be difficult. Franco also mentions the influence that results from “migration and cultural hybridity” and the increase of globalization. He explains, “All aspects of cultural life are undergoing rapid change. Technology allows for the distant consumption of serially produced goods, and these agents of cultural production and dissemination have changed from states to financial institutions, cultural foundations and chains of art galleries related to finance capital or high-tech industries.”

It is also interesting to note, in terms of trying to formulate a set boundary for what cultural studies is, that  “there is considerable tension among national, regional, and international forms of cultural studies that is as yet unresolved.” Hence, cultural studies has a tendency toward being quite political in nature. The notion of cultural studies being a fundamentally political field is something that I had never really considered. Thinking about it after reading Jean Franco’s essay, however, it makes a good deal of sense. This, then is another component of the difficulty in grounding cultural studies in some scholarly discipline. The political nature that surrounds it is bound to complicate any ideology that comes out of it.

Franco concludes, at the end of the essay, that it “by no mean exhausts the subject of cultural studies or recognizes all its practitioners.” However, I think that the essay does succeed in opening up the conversation for where cultural studies is presently, particularly with regards to how it has begun to get incorporated into the university. Toby Miller is likely on to something significant when he contends that cultural studies is “a tendency across disciplines, rather than a discipline itself.” In terms of relating this discussion to concerns of scholarly research, it is helpful to think about cultural studies in this manner. Basically, it is meaningful to incorporate elements of cultural studies in as many aspects of our scholarly endeavors as possible. Not to see it as a solitary idea that exists in isolation, but to view it as a very real thing that can exist in many aspects of our educational experience.

Interpretation

Jerome McGann’s discussion seems to parallel a relationship between the notions we have been discussing in class regarding research and the process of interpretation. During the course of the past couple of weeks, it has become quite evident that research, in its true sense, is not about the end result of producing a research paper that comes to some kind of profound conclusion on a given topic; instead the research process itself is of primary importance. The act of researching, of reading various sources, considering different points of view, and attempting to understand and place oneself within the larger conversation surrounding  that topic should be the goal of scholarship.  Similarly,  interpretation  should be  perceived in the same respect.  McGann contends that we, as members of an “interpretive community”,  must move away  from the ideal that there is some kind of true  MEANING in a text or document , and, instead,  submit to the notion that “scholarship, like science, is committed basically not to truth but to rigor (as to method), thoroughness (as to empirical evidence), and accuracy (in the treatment of its facts and data).” He claims that views of scholarship and interpretation that suggest that they should be “about something” are inadequate. Rather than looking for some overall meaning, or definitive conclusion, it is more effective to view scholarship and interpretation as “procedures that do something about something.”

As part of his discussion on interpretation, McGann offers a distinction between the different types. He focuses, primarily, though on scholarly interpretation; a conversation regarding scholarly interpretation seems of particular relevance to the concerns of a research class, not only because it involves members of a university , whom he views as being an “interpretive community”, but also because of the direct relationship he establishes between research and the notion of interpretation. An interesting component of McGann’s discussion of scholarly interpretation involves the “double helix” that he views as being  formed by  “the history of a work’s production” and “the history of a works’ reception”; both of which are necessary for serious scholarship. He claims that “the works we examine have all been shaped by that double helix, and so have all our critical reflections on them.”

Essentially, McGann seeks to establish the inadequacy of current, as well as past, interpretive models. He does so, not to suggest that interpretation is an irrelevant waste of time, but to broaden the notion of interpretation to something more than extracting meaning from a text or document. He concludes his essay by stating that “To deliberately accept the inevitable failure of interpretive adequacy is to work toward discovering new interpretive virtues.”