Notes on Composition Theory

David Bartholomae: Writing With Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow

“Most discussions like the one we are about to have begin or end by fretting over the central term, academic writing. It is clear that this is not just a contested term, but a difficult one to use with any precision.”(62)

“Within the writing performed in 1990 under the rubric of English studies, writing by English professors, you can find writing that is elegant, experimental, sentimental, autobiographical, spare, dull, pretentious, abstract, boring, dull, whatever” (63)

“I want to argue that academic writing is the real work of the academy. I also want to argue for academic writing as a key term in the study of writing and the practice of instruct…there is no writing that is writing without teachers” (63)

“The desire for a classroom free from the past is an expression of the desire for presence or transcendence, for a common language, free from jargon and bias, free from evasion and fear; for a language rooted in common sense rather than special sense, a language that renders (makes present) rather than explains (makes distant)” (64)

“If our goal is to make a writer aware of the forces at play in the production of knowledge, we need to highlight the classroom as a substa- tion-as a real space, not as an idealized utopian space” (66)

“These are writers taking pleasure in (or making capital of) what are often called "literary devices"-dialogue, description, the trope of the real, the figure of the writer at the center of sentimental realism.” (67)

“I think it is possible to say that many students will not feel the pleasure or power of authorship unless we make that role available.” (69)

Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals: Peter Elbow

“I fear there is a conflict between the role of writer and that of academic. I wish there were not” (72)

“about roles, not professions” (72)

“It's not that I care absolutely more about simply saying that virtually every other course writing-treats input as central and output as serving it seems to me, of making students experience they are in the academy-and a slim hope at at least one course where writing is the center” (75)

“Readers like to imagine that writers are always thinking about them; they naturally think their parents always have them in mind.” (76)

“The main thing that helps writers is to be understood; pointing out misunderstandings is only the second need. Thus-and this is a crucial consequence-I assume that students know more than they are getting into words. Most of my own progress in learning to write has come from my gradually learning to listen more carefully to what I haven’t yet managed to get into words.” (77)

“to see the act of writing as an of finding and acknowledging one's place in an ongoing intellectual conversation with a much larger and longer history than what goes” (78)

“Admittedly, first year students often suffer from naivete. For being naive and taking oneself too seriously can take the same propositional form: implying simultaneously, else is just like me" (80)

Responses to Bartholomae and Elbow

“This is inevitable. We are about the same age, both products of a similar moment in English (my teachers were also shaped by the New Criticism), both working inside the same profession.” (84)

“The academic, for him, is a person with an eye to the past (or to books and articles) and with a skeptical, critical attitude towards language. The writer is the person who works with pleasure and authority on his or her own and without being skeptical or distrustful, at least of his or her own language project.” (84)

“Finally, I would say that it is the idea of ‘criticism’ that most marks our different positions on the role of the teacher.” (87)

Elbow’s response: “But I am not. There is a crucial matter of theory here. You say in passing that I can’t have it both ways, that I can't stick up for both perspectives on the human condition. But you never give any reason for this theoretical composition.” (88)

“So does freewriting pretend to be free? Yes and no. It is not free from the teacher's authority (until a person takes it over by choice), nor from the forces of culture and language. But it does create freedom in certain crucial ways” (89)

“trying to help students see themselves as writers” (92)

Rohan Theory vs. Practice and Swimming

“Thus if the theory of swimming lessons is based on trusting the teacher, the teacher must be a confident swimmer him or herself. A swimming theorist is also a practitioner. A theorist is a doer. Doing comes before theory but theory, manifested in the directions of a teacher/practitioner, encourages the doing.” (91)

The Polyvalent Mission of Writing Centers Garner and Ramsey

“For, regardless of the work actually done in writing centers, the prevailing

view of theorists has been that writing specialists do their best work when opposing the practices of mainstream education, creating an anti-space where the oppressive and mass template methods of the academy can be undone.” Success, whispers Riley, is something to be feared. Having lived on the margin for so long, we cannot relinquish the language and paradigm of an oppressed group.” (26)

“Writing within and for that order is not empowering because when students

write they are, quite passively, being written upon.” (30)

“Autonomy has limits, society sometimes wisely limits, and by virtue of guiding limits we may construct freedoms. Perhaps freedom is another name for good regulation.” (32)

“On the other hand, does the critical thinking prompted by the writing center tutor oppose the situation’s coercive force?” (34)

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