Cinnabar and Alabaster

6. our baggage: "composition helps define 'levels' of writing, authorship, and status that are necessary for vernacular literary study to maintain its traditional place in the center of mass education. it also…supports a comprehensive social desire to maintain the cultural ideal of 'social place.' but as a carnivalesque site within consequential discourse hierarchies, composition additionally embodies a contrary impulse, giving both its faculties and its students what bakhtin called 'temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order'"…."in addition, composition instruction offers the culture at large an emblem for the repugnant 'body' of writing by individuals. it is an institutionalized way of discriminating between those who will or will not occupy a space for contributing to (and for changing) powerful discourse traditions"
13. (amy tagged this: ) "if we are to contemplate more than personal or local causes for the stunning regularity in descriptions of prejudice against student writing and those who implement instruction in it, or of incidents that appear to pit 'composition' against 'literature,' we must go beyond, or before, examples to identify and explain patterns that reproduce them"
54-5. "as foucault often pointed out," the "kind of enclosed unity" the english courses of the american college represented as composition was developing "requires 'outsiders who make insiders insiders.' like the carnival, composition's moment of origination involved allowing it to act as a relay, a metaphoric switch that diffuses the 'center' throughout lower, metaphorically and actually rural orders"…."as the symbolic national domain of 'literature' was suddenly produced over and against the actual public realm, a newly identifiable, low, and now alien 'writing'" emerged; "nonliterary writing by the unentitled acquired…implications and connotations of murkiness and mythic danger. in composition, literary authorship could be openly compared to the inadequacies of popular writing and especially to inadequate student authorship. like early american popular writing, institutionalized writing-as-composition could be implicitly demeaned as unequal to writing from the advanced elect"
57. "whatever clinical distance a written text might place between a teacher and the student's person was compressed by transferring images of recitation onto the situation of written examinations. in the continuing view that a student's written language reveals personal flaws as readily as his speech, the quality of the student can be identified with the correct or incorrect quality of that student's texts. the embarrassments that students were meant to feel after corrections of their (appropriately) 'mechanical work' placed them well within the range of shame that idiosyncratic speech, or the body, can evoke. writing, in fact, exposes errors and infelicities that speech might elide. thus a pedagogic obsession with mechanical correctness also participated in a broadly conceived nineteenth-century project of cleanliness….undertaken in all good as well as bad faith to convince the masses of their dirtiness while saving them from it. it used the figure of separation between human and animal in an impulse to promote scrubbed surfaces….it raised the issue of contamination from the pointedly unwashed masses, while also…placing them in the dangerous site of the physically messy carnival"
59. as the "theme" developed, "observations from personal experience and narratives about them replaced any purchase on participating in public discourse the student might once have had. consequently, both the written status of mechanically marked compositions and the content of those compositions were now reduced to objects of inconsequentiality."
61. the development & promulgation of assignments in generic "modes rather than actual purposes for writing results in convincing both students and teachers that their already demeaned 'practical' instruction further has no actual practical purpose, except by rather oblique metaphoric extensions that suggest (as rhetorical education never had) that writing can be undertaken and executed well without a specific goal in mind."
68. lit leaking in & taking over served to "increasingly identify introductory writing courses with the result of reading 'important' literature, leaving individual purposes for composing to more advanced courses"
98. the composition course, as it has traditionally been practiced, "divorces writing from any claim on a value system and instead contains it in 'valuing' or 'processing' of language that is even purer than the literary subject's perspective on specific literary objects. in its emphasis, for instance, on 'meaning,' without reference to meaning to, the course extends…the new critical desire to give priority to meanings that are entirely within written language"; "literary subjectivity, and now the subjectivity inevitably created by allowing composing processes to become purposes for writing, focus on the author/writer, not on the results of authorship or of writing"
100. "the subjectivity of composition now created by its model programs appears to result for its students in an infantile and solipsistic relation to the results of writing
198-9. ideally, "with….commitments to articulating many relations between discourse and power and to undertaking close analyses of the social implications of current and past writing pedagogies….students of writing might be imagined as actual people in actual writing situations. such writers do not write without reference to the appropriateness of that action in a specific circumstance. they conceive of resistant written language as the actual form of their desires, not as a set of determinate 'meanings' that they can singularly shape. given responsibility to account for the place their writing will take among others in specific situations—its particularities and the responses it is designed to elicit—students could become aware of the window on full participation in discourse communities their writing represents"; in reality, concerning the roles we allow for, "students are rarely asked to become either the 'writing teachers' that successful writers actually must be for themselves or the teachers of reading they must be for others."