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April 16, 2005
IS style paper intro
listening to:
I bought my first CD as a senior in high school, a time in anyone's life when almost everything is terribly profound. The CD, still earning its keep in circulation in my collection, is Toad the Wet Sprocket's Fear, track 3 of which includes a slightly eerie yet intimate female voice-over most of whose narrative about looking through coin-operated binoculars is relatively forgettable. This line has always stood out, however; I still hear it in all sorts of situations with no apparent connection to the song's preoccupation with sea-coasts, loud cars, butterflies:
You know how when you get so close to something that big, you can't see anything at all?
Even the most oblique reference to the study of style—or, really, the defining of, discussions about, classroom and hallway pedagogically-focused mentions of, pontifications on the stuff—brings that line around in my head again. The very word unsettles me, making me feel pinned to cork like a butterfly when asked to speak about it, progressively disqualifying me from expertise a little farther every time I learn a little more about the stubject, clouding my tenuous grasp on any one approach each time I encounter another. My students make statements about the stuff that I know I've made, statements that seem naïve, limited, problematicly exclusionary in their implication, and I'm frustrated every time by having no idea where to start to correct them, by being unable to decide whether correcting them is ethically any more responsible than leaving their perceptions alone. Style is political, hegemonic, prescriptive, descriptive, grammatical, creative, constricting, liberating, revolutionary: it's that big. From far enough of a remove to list those adjectives, it's possible to at least aproximate a sense—to have a feel for, if not any kind of vision of—what one's trying to ascertain. Any closer, and you can't see anything at all.
i have no idea where i'm going with this, by the way, but if i commit beginning to the page--and to the web--i'm hoping that'll shame me into conintuation. any suggestions?
(xp to compositionism)
Posted by ttobryan at April 16, 2005 10:35 AM