Genre Awareness & Displacement
The problem is, the scenario (prompt from the last page) asks the students to debate whether a particular text should be appropriate outside of an academic setting.
Book 3 of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric discusses early on the importance of delivery and that to be successful within a given discourse (moving into Derrida a bit), you must understand how best to deliver your message to your audience. When students are asked to construct an argument in various composition courses, they are tasked with entering in conversation with those outside the discourse of higher education, yet expected to conform to the genre conventions of academic writing.
Book 3 of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric discusses early on the importance of delivery and that to be successful within a given discourse (moving into Derrida a bit), you must understand how best to deliver your message to your audience. When students are asked to construct an argument in various composition courses, they are tasked with entering in conversation with those outside the discourse of higher education, yet expected to conform to the genre conventions of academic writing.
Assimilate |
Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede in “Representing Audience: “Successful” Discourse And Disciplinary Critique” suggest that the institution (college) shapes writers’ ideology, thoughts, and style, yet those who are unable to assimilate to such ideas cannot be successful (821). While Mary Jo Reiff has argued that students can assimilate through genre awareness and understanding the rhetorical moves that authors make within a given text, there is a question of whether this process occurs naturally or is learned over time (“Moving Writers, Shaping Motives, Motivating Critique And Change: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing”).
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The Writing Process
Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle “Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)visioning “First Year Composition” as Writing Studies” problematizes the idea that we should even evaluate first year writers as being “good” or “bad.” Such evaluations can station writing as a non-expressive process or non-interpretive process, as Susan Sontag in “Against Interpretation” clarifies my stance by addressing the positive effects of exploration, expression, and various interpretations through art, “In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable (5).”
While Sontag’s piece clearly is more directed toward fine art, the transition to discussing writing seems plausible as Aristotle framed writing as an expressive process, similar to art. The “taming” of student’s writing to conform to standardized norms of “good” writing is somewhat problematic as it disseminates this idea that there is a singular way of crafting an essay. Gorgias also suggested that speech or the act of speech making, as a means of maintaining control/power. For Sontag, interpretation and expression reject linearity or simplistic thing. Connecting this back to freshmen composition, the ability to explore, navigate, and connect with a text should be driven by a similar method.
Conner’s piece that I had mentioned on the first page of this project mentioned that writing, or the school or writing instructor or composition, tried to gain legitimacy by borrowing from the hard sciences, yet these genres function far differently than writing courses.
While Sontag’s piece clearly is more directed toward fine art, the transition to discussing writing seems plausible as Aristotle framed writing as an expressive process, similar to art. The “taming” of student’s writing to conform to standardized norms of “good” writing is somewhat problematic as it disseminates this idea that there is a singular way of crafting an essay. Gorgias also suggested that speech or the act of speech making, as a means of maintaining control/power. For Sontag, interpretation and expression reject linearity or simplistic thing. Connecting this back to freshmen composition, the ability to explore, navigate, and connect with a text should be driven by a similar method.
Conner’s piece that I had mentioned on the first page of this project mentioned that writing, or the school or writing instructor or composition, tried to gain legitimacy by borrowing from the hard sciences, yet these genres function far differently than writing courses.