Our first assignment in Writing 512: Current Comp Theory was to write our professor Lisa Ede a letter explaining our expectations for the course, our thoughts on theory, and perhaps some ideas that we’d like to research. This is the letter I wrote Lisa, although not formated quite as nicely:
Dear Lisa,
“No one knows what the fighting’s for / We are tired of the tune / We must not relent“ — thus sang the Clash in “Inoculated City.“
Maxine Hong Kingston writes “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.“
In class, you asked us to freewrite about our thoughts on theory. I found myself silenced, by the pressure to not be the one who loves theory, by the pressure to conform to those around me. I don’t know what it was, but I was afraid to share what I thought. I was very happy when Sarah presented a positive view of theory. Here is what I wrote:
When I think about theory I think about a framework for understanding and analyzing and conceptualizing things, specifically how things are constructed or composed: composition, rhetoric, gender, society, institutions. I think about different frameworks for viewing things, different perspectives, or lenses, with which to view a text, an act, or the world. Theory provides not only a lens with which to see, but also a framework with which to act. We are all guided by some theory, whether it is known or unknown. There is no atheoretical act or person. Theory provides a way to unmakes, make things knwon, to re-vision the world, especially in a world that works so hard / effortlessly to mask, hide, and rework ideas, actions, and people.
As I scan Villanueva’s text, I realize I want to read every essay included. There seems to be an intersection of every interest of mine: feminism, process, audience, voice, multiculturalism, remedial writers (which is relatively to class, ethnicity, and gender), the personal, exclusion and inclusion, diversity, racism, etc.
This is encouraging, exciting, enlivening…
This is frightening, mortifying, incapacitating…
You told us on Tuesday that we are not to view this as a time to master everything and to know everything about theory…
I am not certain if it is the hour of the night at which this is written, or the very truth in my head that I must master all this theory in order to know as much as I’d like that makes my stomach knot.
I’ve written about this in a few other places, and it seems like it is important for me to mention it here. I have a friend who is teaching elementary school in rural South Dakota. A third grade boy there often comes to school dressed as a girl, acting “girlish.“
That is, until one day a group of eighth grade girls beat him up, leaving him with two black eyes and many bruises. He has since worn jeans to school. It’s awful that these girls beat him up.
What’s just as awful is that they didn’t have to, because his classmates and people in the community would have tried to compose him differently using their language: sissy, faggot, queer, girl would have been hurled at him in ways just as painful as fists. They probably still will.
Over the last two terms, I’ve changed the way I view “texts.“ They are no longer just artifacts to be created and studied. What they do matters; texts are now acts in my head.
And I’m looking for a way to act.
How do we effect change in a society wrought with oppression? How do we use language to facilitate this change? How do we interrogate ideas and values without setting up a system just as oppressive as the one we/I wish to dismantle/destroy/deconstruct? How can we fight? Is fight the right word?
From my limited reading of Foucault, it seems he believes the only act of rebellion left is analysis. Adorno argues that to rebel, we can only think; the system is so totalitarian that even our actions are co-opted by it and support it.
Where this is going, I am uncertain.
Where is this going? I am certain
It must be going somewhere…
It comes down to being tired of this tune; I am tired of the myths we are old; I must not relent.
Seminar topics abound…I could read forever on any topic and never be fulfilled. I feel so much like Anne French Dalke feels when she writes:
College next. Freshman writing. We’re reading a Hemmingway short story; the prof is criticizing the staccato dialogue between husband and wife. When I defend it as appropriate to this exchange, Professro Fehrenbach responds, “ALL of Hemingway’s characters talk that way.“ And the world suddenly opens up for me into a maze of texts. I realize that, to speak with authority about this one story, I need to read them all. (Teaching to Learn / Learning to Teach, 119)
So, sooner than later (and hopefully much sooner this quarter), I must come to a conclusion of what part of the whole I will want to focus on for my seminar project. Here are ideas that are bouncing in my head right now:
1. Something to do with the ethics of argument – polemics, irenics
2. Hypertext and hypertext theory
3. Queer theory as related to composition theory
4. Punk pedagogy
5. Rebellion/critique – the possibilities for
6. Social Epistemic classrooms – social action and critique in the classroom
7. A mixture of two or more of the above
I have exhausted myself by writing this.
Thank you for listening,
Michael Faris
