Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
5. despite writing for a newspaper for a year, "or maybe because of it--because i had had the experience of seeing my name in print and still being the same person i had been all along--i never really considered myself an author. publication didn't change me the way i assumed it changed an author.
10. definitions: "throughout this project, i use the term 'author' to signify a commonplace understanding of the term: one who writes with originality, autonomy, morality, and proprietorship"; "for the most part, when i use the term 'author,' i mean what foucault means by the 'author-function.' an author is not a flesh-and-blood human being; an author is instead ephemeral. part of the purpose of this project is to point to the cultural baggage that accompanies the term 'author' because i believe that composition studies' adoption of the term is problematic."
15. more definitions: "i define co-investigation as the cooperative study of an issue of concern to all parties. all parties have experience and knowledge to contribute to the study, experience and knowledge that shapes and reshapes the questions and objects of that investigation. i make no claims of equality...as the teacher involved in the present study, i exercised an institutional form of authority and i exercised power that was not available to the other members..."
18. foss & foss's useful definitions: "'experiential expertise'--expertise based on knowledge of personal experience" vs. "'presentational expertise'--expertise based on the selection and representation of experience, an expertise that has traditionally been associated with the researcher rather than the researched"
20. the difference: "whereas critical pedagogy aims to empower students with critical knowledge that the teacher already possesses, co-investigation aims to engage students in questions to which teachers do not already know the answers"
23-4. our positionality only enables us to do so much: "while teachers may have the power to grant students some degree of institutional authority in the classroom, they do not have the legitimizing power to authorize students as writers" & a conception of authority as grant-able--power the powerful can choose to share--"fails [in this context] because it rests on the assumption that teachers possess the requisite cultural authority to authorize others. my institutional authority in the writing classroom enables me perhaps to empower students as institutional agents, but it does not enable me to empower students as writers. my institutional authority in the writing classroom can position me as a beneficent teacher working to empower students in an institution designed to keep students in their place. but a student's writerly authority comes not from my sanctioning of her writing--though my sanctioning of her work or my belief in the value of her work certainly is part of the writing's symbolic production....i cannot, as a teacher, authorize a student's writing as anything other than student writing."
38. "despite composition studies' professed agenda of forwarding student empowerment, the field has been slow to acknowledge the workings of an author/student binary informing so much of the work we do with students and their writing. like any other binary, the first term, author, holds the elevated position of dominance, while the second term, student, holds the position of the dominanted. where authors are required to be original, students who write are often required 'not to be original. a student's job is to comprehend and repeat the ideas of others. yet, paradoxically, students are required to be autonomous in their writing' (howard, 'binaries' 2)."
39. the binary in (robie's version of) crowley: "where an author's text could be described as timeless because of its universality, a student's text could be described as timeless because it is 'expendable'...because of its status as practice for the 'real thing.' if an author is ephemeral, a student is a very real material presence in the classroom. and, if an author is presumed to be possessed of morals, a student is immoral, ready and willing to steal the words of others at the first opportunity"
44. & building off brodkey, "it is not enough simply to replace the masculine transcendent author in the garret with an image of a writing student or of a favorite female author."
47. on joe harris's statement in Cs: his policy "is based on the notion that 'professional' authors have control over their work after it is published" so that "textual control becomes one of the boundaries that separates student from author, via the assumption that students need a kind of protection that authors themselves are rarely afforded. citation of one's work--positive or negative--is a mark of respect for any writer; it means, after all, that one's work has been read and has been deemed worthy of response"
48. in her own treatment of students' work: "by treating hickel as an author whose work is worthy of discussion, i am according him the respect that accompanies any citation, be it supportive or antagonistic. in contrast, creating a separate class of citation for students, as harris suggests and as we've been doing for decades now, places them outside the economy of citation, depriving them of the possibility that their writing might provoke agreement or disagreement"
49-50. as trimmer points out, "to remain the heroes of teaching narratives, we must construct the student as deficient, as needing our help. to construct the student as deficient is ultimately to construct ourselves as equally deficient, for we are and have historically been identified with the low status of those we teach"--so treating them as kids is so easy it's almost automatic.
53-4. foucault's 4 characteristics, according to amy who can count better than he can: "the author-function
1. is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses;
2. does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture;
3. is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; and
4. does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subject positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy"
55. "like the author-function, the student funciton does not 'operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times.' there are exceptions to all of the patterns that i will claim make up a student function in composition scholarship, but it is their status as exceptions that prove the existence of a student function. the student function, too, is defined 'through a series of precise and complex procedures'--the patterns informing composition's treatment of students and their writing. and finally, the student function, like the author-function, 'does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual'; the student of the student function...refers not to an actual person but to a timeless, sexless beginner, a nameless stand-in for the individual students we teach."
59. "readers want to know everything they can about an author as a person--what he eats for breakfast, how and where he writes best, how many lovers he took while writing the book that made him famous. yet teachers want to know next to nothing about the biography of a student writer as a writer. many teachers prefer to keep 'him' ageless, sexless, timeless. pass him, move on to the next group of students next semester"
60. "the discourse of the student function is deeply engrained in our work; it will take much more than simply reversing the Author/student binary to effect a change in the way our disicpline perpetuates the student function."
61. "our perceptions of students as transients, often realized in our public expressions of delight at facing an entirely new group of students each semester, allow--even encourage--us to perpetuate the student function. why not keep our students anonymous, keep complaining about them, keep describing them as the opposite of professional writers (whose functions, in their roles as authors are anything but transient) when we know we don't have to deal with them after this semester?"
75. the goal: to "begin to represent students as social, historical, political, gendered, complicated people in stories that go beyond the binary of author/student"
80. no proponent of artificial authorization, robillard argues instead for "approach[ing] student writing as student writing--with all that entails for student authorship, legitimation, and rhetorical situation--rather than working to authorize student writing by addressing it to 'real' audiences. approaching it [in this way] means readin git for what it might teach us about writing in the university rather than reading it as the writing of 'authors.' it means acknowledging students as contributors to our knowledge-making"
85-6. in the bartholomae/elbow debate "elbow argues for treating students as writers as opposed to treating students as academics. because the debate sets up binary oppositions--and is regularly cited in composition studies as representing binary positions--what is often overlooked are not only the assumptions about authorizing student writers but an early challenge to those assumptions. reread through the lens of student authorship, bartholomae's challenge to the process movement's discourse of empowerment not only provides a new vision of the well-known debate but also shows another way in which that debate represents a central moment in the history of composition theory"--"authority, as represented in bartholomae's illustration, is a quality that teachers posses, that they can give to others. this begs the question--do teachers have to--can teachers--relinquish the authority they bring to the classroom in order that students may posses writerly authority?": this "raises specific questions about how we understand students' textual authority. what or who can authorize a student as a writer? how does attention to one's cultural, historical, social, material situation function in the production of text? how does the ideology of the autonomous author contribute to a student's understanding of herself as a writer?"
95. "if we think of composition studies as a field of cultural production and if we recognize that teachers cannot grant students authority as writers because the kind of authority that teachers possess is primarily institutional, it is worth considering how the field of composition studies...is premised on the tension between cultural capital and economic capital"; "if we conceive of writing skills as primarily a form of economic capital, it makes sense to encourage students to seek authority as writers from audiences other than the teacher, for these are the kinds of audiences that they will be required to address once they enter the 'real world.' if, however, we conceive of writing as a way of knowing...we are less likely to focus our attention on the world outside the classroom" (& what do we know about the "real world" anyway?): "we might think of scholars in composition as participating in a field of restricted production. we write primarily for other composition scholars. our work is only granted value by virtue of its being authorized by others in the field"
150. "at the same time that composition studies wants to use autobiographical writing as a way to authorize student writing early in a required writing course--to establish them, however briefly, as authors--the field limits its representations of studen autobiographical writing to examples that illustrate 'voice' or 'authenticity'"--& this starkly limits the sorts of contributions to our knowledge we allow them to make.
169-70. "our scholarly representations of students--as well as students' expectations about our representations of students--affect their perceptions of themselves as writers or as non-writers. students cast themselves and the authors of their assigned texts in familiar power relationships in two significant ways....many students referred to themselves by first name only yet referred to the authors by last name only. secondly, the assignment explicitly asks students to include an alphabetical cast of characters. while some students left themselves off of the list altogether, others put themselves last on the list despite my request that they include their own names alphabetically. students' obedience to the hierarchy of teachers over students superseded their obedience to the requirements of this teacher--me--and to the assignment i'd created"
172. the problem of conflation: "in 'writing and Writing,' crowley points to the concept of 'author-ity' as that which distinguishes poststurctural approaches to texts and current-traditional approaches to texts. 'author-ity' to crowly is 'the relative appropriation of privilege by a text through the agency of its author's name' (94). the problem with crowley's term is that it enfolds the term 'author' into 'authority' unproblematically....an author is more than one who writes with authority. simply referring to students as authors in the scholarship does not change the authority with which they write for their teachers or for 'real-world' audiences."
173. in her class, "authority replaced author as the object of inquiry because authority was something we could discuss and debate with relatively little symbolic capital at stake. as members of this culture, each of us in the classroom held dear the notion of the autonomous, originary author in ways that made challenges to that notion difficult....as a group, we did not find ourselves so attached to a notion of authority as autonomous....even more significantly, students and i found it easier to discuss their authority over their writing rather than their authorship of their writing because 'authority' is a term that can apply to any writer, while authorship applies only to those who have been published or who make a living from their writing."