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July 17, 2008
Kopelson carnival - my first take
After a few months of traveling and dissertating and forgetting to blog about any of it, it seems fitting to re-enter the sphere as a participant in the carnival Derek opened last week on an article in the newest CCC: "Sp(l)itting Images; or Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition" by Karen Kopelson.
Anytime I read an article that invokes the attitudes or ideas of graduate students, I find myself looking for my place in the continuum of those ideas. In this article, it's hard to see that I fit at all. Joe Harris's wonderful book A Teaching Subject was a primary inspiration for pursuing graduate work at all, but I did not come to Rhet/Comp as a disenchanted lit scholar, although a hold a lit MA by intention. I still love literature and literary studies, and while I have more than a few problems with anything called "critical theory" I do enjoy the cultural aspects of literary studies. Like other rhet/comp students mentioned, and most notable the student "Brenda" in the article, I chose this field for my PhD work precisely because I saw it as interdisciplinary in nature and because, like Brenda, I see it as "a great opportunity to engage any number of literary, theoretical, historical, and philosophical texts while resisting getting caught within a reductive 'specialty'..." (759). In short, I was interested in the field precisely because I am skeptical of narrow specialization as the defining hallmark of a scholar holding a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Like some of the students quoted it the article, I found the content of some of my graduate courses did not match their catalog descriptions. Some part of my comprehensive exam process emerged from the sense attributed in the article to a student who "echo[ed] Mulderig and Swearingen" in her concern that she would have a degree in rhet/comp without ever taking a course in classical rhetoric. That wasn't my situation, but I did believe I needed a lot more of that history or even study of practices to honestly claim a degree in the field.
And, like some of the students, I was also asked to tie my dissertation project "to the field." Something like Paul's comment about answering the question of why this topic is of interest to the field. While this is not precisely a "pedagogical" requirement, the discussion around that idea indicated that the pedagogical connection was at the heart of the request. How does a rhetorical analysis of a written text relate to the field of rhet/comp? I figured out an answer, and I don't believe it will ruin my project, but my project isn't in the high theoretical realm, so maybe my project is really the problem in that equation.
Having said all that about how I "fit" in terms of the study being analyzed, I find some obvious omissions in the analysis. First of all, the step away from "service" is taken as a given, as in it is a given that no one in the field of rhet/comp wants to be considered to be in a service discipline or activity. This assumption supports the rationale behind the incorporation of rhetoric to composition studies in earlier decades, the "foraging" effect for theories that can be imported from other disciplines and applied to teaching writing, and the seeming conflation of "pedagogy" with FYC. I disagree with both. I don't mind one bit being in a "service" field. That is not to say that I believe I or anyone else in the field should shrink into the walls and take our marching orders from someone else, whether those someones are administrative or disciplinary. What I do mean is that investing time, energy, research and scholarship in developing my own skills with language across a range of communicative opportunities and being able to share that knowledge to enable students to communicate more effectively in what Harris referred to as "the discourse communities they already" or will choose to, inhabit, is a marvelous way to spend a life. To do so in an institution where effective communication is required of every student not only in every field of study but in the activities of life outside of and beyond their formal education is as rewarding a career as I could imagine. That's why I gave up a good solid career in financial services to pursue it.
So I came to the field from a "different path" too, but not the same different path Clancy did. I always did like teaching, and did a fair amount of it in my financial services career, but it wasn't just the teaching that drew me to rhet/comp. I'm also a writer, and like many writers, I enjoy literature, but I am always interested in how the literature is constructed and what the writer is doing as much as I am interested in the content. That's how I read almost every text these days. And I don't really mind the pedagogical question - heck, I'm the one in the job talks practice sessions who most often will raise it. But I don't raise it because I think the scholarship has to have immediate attachment. If ever I get to be in a position to interview a job candidate, I'd be just as happy to hear that the one is separate from the other, provided of course that there is something else in that pedagogical response.
The students in the article discussed the need for rhetorical scholars who can critique political rhetoric, propaganda and the role of dissent, to pay more attention to governmental policies and the rhetorics of social movements. All of these factors were present in my decision to teach composition and to pursue a PhD in a rhet/comp program. However, and this is important within the context of the article, I don't imagine that I have to either tie all of my scholarship directly to classroom practices, or that I can only teach from what I personally research with the intent of building a scholarly portfolio. This brings up the second omission I see in the analysis: the nature of specialization, teaching, and interdisciplinarity.
The article cites Ellen Barton's comment about "one-way interdisciplinarity" in the discussion of the "import and apply" tendency of the discipline. I'd argue that it is precisely the specialization required academic success as a scholar that prevents rhet/comp as a discipline from having its work imported by other disciplines. The very breadth which brought some of the students mentioned in the article to the discipline flies in the face of specialized knowledge, and specialized knowledge is the kind that seems to get published or otherwise benefits advancement. Additionally, the ability to conduct scholarship in one's specialty has long been regarded as the privilege of rank and tenure, perpetuating the somewhat mythic cycle of "scholar go to ivy; teacher go to community college." Why can't we be both? Why can't we lear to study our teaching subject as a professional development function of being paid to teach students to be better writers, as Emma noted in her comment, and still research and publish in the area of specialization we enjoy? Why can't we, in other words, communicate in the separate rhetorical situations as the audience and constraints of those situations requires? We could end the question of what Zizek has to do with FYC for good if we as an entire field could do that. Can I answer both questions independently? Sure. The scholarship that most informs my teaching is different than that which I read to pursue my own research interests for purposes of consideration, conversation and possible publication, and I'm proud of both.
That brings me to the conclusion, which Collin described as carrying the weight of "exhaustion," a sentiment I shared when I finished my course work. It's a sense of enough, already! But I also understand why it is so hard to move from the charge Kopelson makes ("that we make a concerted, collective effort to release ourselves from the pattern reflected here" to to actual concerted, collective effort. The problem is that we don't agree, even yet, on who we are and what we do vis-a-vis the rest of the academic world. We still, internally, use the word "service" as a pejorative, until we hyphen it to the word "learning". Some of us still believe that the classical tradition in rhetoric is either process or more of the dead-white-guy problem. Some still believe composition as a discipline needs something more to be legitimate. And we still want specialization while carefully constructing our work in terms of FYC, as if that were the only course in the whole curriculum that we as a discipline taught.
So here's my what if moment. What if we "flipped the script" on that service notion. What if we embraced the idea and made the university, its students, its faculty, and its administration our field of study? What if we examined not only the writing practices of our students, but the writing practices of the faculty in their other courses, the writings that appear in other disciplines in their peer-reviewed journals and the assignments and syllabi they provide to students? What is we analyzed the texts of the administration in terms of writing and the expectations of student abilities on graduating from their institution of higher education? What if the texts of our scholarship, whether driven by classical rhetoric theories or "imported" interdisciplinary theories or new critical theories, were the textual practices of the institution as a whole, along with whatever else we look at? And what if then our "service" to the rest of the university was to publish about those practices and our analysis of them?
Me and my crazy ideas. But it is a carnival, right?
Posted by cageyer at July 17, 2008 10:53 AM
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