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September 18, 2005
performing selfhood (authorship 4/25)
Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1997.
1 sentence summary: Although we like to think that, as teachers, we're teaching our students "good" writing by encouraging awareness of and complexity in rhetorical moves and discouraging the unthinking or facile, in fact many of the moves student writers make that we dismiss are rhetorically sophisticated, pupose-driven, and meaningful; what we too-often fail to realize is the degree to which "good" writing is defined by entrenched academic preferences prioritizing certain (habitually white, upper-middle-class, well-steeped in traditional educational environments) strategies over others, an entrenchment that, despite all our idealism towards democratic education, continues to reinforce the status quo.
keywords:autonomous self, composition vs. writing, emotion, expressive pedagogy, expressivism, honesty, individual, move, "presentation of self" (Goffman), significant, the turn, voice, unified self,
passages:
xii. "What if we viewed 'being personal' not as some natural 'free' representation of self, but as a complex cultural performance?" "When students write about themselves in ways that seem unsuccessful (e.g., trite, superficial, sentimental) to us, are they drawing on forms of authoritative discourse the university seeks to stigmatize?" "Can we read against our own aesthetic...?"
xiii. "Too often the student is seen as a pawn of inimical, capitalist-bred, media-purveyed discourse in which all that is bad in our society is encoded and endorsed. The composition teacher then rescues the student by providing the defensive strategies of analysis. This view understates what I see as the moral power, energy, and self-confidence that is admirable in student writing, and in the students themselves."
6. Goffman on self-as-a-performance; Berlin "debunking" the idea that the student has a "true" self that can be exposed in writing.
9. "English teachers operate on a principle of inversion, expecting students to magnify the menial...to subvert the conventional evaluation of significance.... And how could a student possibly know that?"
15. For Christian students (& i assume others Newkirk doesn't notice) our demand that they write "thoughtfully" by questioning their own beliefs on paper is unreasonable & dangerous; there are other ways to demonstrate thinking without refusing any value-system but our own.
19. The argument against expressive curricula based in its invasion of students' privacy is almost entirely based on opponants' projections of what they expect students to mind; students don't say it.
21. There is no unified, singular self, only a malleable one or array of them differently performed for different situational purposes.
27. Bourdieu "argues that this discomfort with emotional appeals is a feature of the 'aesthetic disposition' assumed by those who belong (or seek to belong) to the cultural aristocracy."
35. "The modernist criteria of emotional displacement provided (and continues to provide) a justification for dismissing sentimental literature."
86. Demanding students' "honesty" & working with such root metaphors for writing as "discovery" and "exposure" displays a faith in that unrealistic unified self.
90. Arguments against expressivism construct the student as "morally and civically deficient," as "acting in bad faith" when speaking from the stances they already inhabit.
93. "Self" for Kinneavy is interactive: something created & recreated in our communication with others (Buber too).
101. Postmodern demands for virtue to = epiphanies & moments of question/change go against working-class values where virtue is better equated to steadfastness, to faith in the face of challenges.
104-5. The "divorce between writing and composition" has brought about the replacement of literary content in comp classes with cultural-studies content in comp classes without actually changing much of what it purported to intend.
top 5: Berlin, Bourdieu, Buber, Goffman, Kinneavy
Posted by ttobryan at September 18, 2005 11:33 AM