Sometimes it seems like Sirc is the only stuff I can stomach. When everything else is ringing of the ridiculous — saying the same thing over and over again only with a new terminology or with a slightly different slant to make it seem more student-centered and more egalitarian — Sirc at least is in your face, refreshing, and says “fuck” a time or two. I guess I’m looking for transgression. When you’re fighting all the time, you want to read shit the stirs things up.
In his essay “Composition’s Eye/Orpheus’s Gaze/Cobain’s Journals,” Sirc makes a pretty strong case, I think, for journal writing, of the icky raw kind that notices your own life and what’s going on in it. I mean, this isn’t that new, I guess — Compositionists have been arguing for student journaling sincing the 1960s, as Sirc notes. But Sirc argues for this with style. Like, you know, being an ass.
Sirc’s major complaint seems to be that Composition is now taught as a reading course (this echoes Elbow’s complains, though Sirc never seems to cite Elbow). This Composition as reading course, as evidenced by Robert Atwan’s textbook Convergences and Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, “one taking a reading-based, cultural studies approach, involves viewing writing as a series of conceptual exercises designed to produce critical media consumption. The concern, then, isn’t really with optics, but rather analytics; not ways of seeing, but ways of reading. Rather than see, students are asked to re-see” (12).
Sirc is in favor of writing that is “work that has not immediate pay-off other than indulging desire” (14), that is, to quote Maurice Blanchot, “the work…is neither finsihed nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively that: that it is — and nothing more…. [It] belongs to the solitude of something that expersses only the word being” (qtd in 21). This work will offer not just “understanding” or “comprehension,” which seems to be what Composition often strives for; it will be “writing that offers revelations about the ordinary” (24).
Sirc notes that
What Composition needs most, perhaps, is a bad attitude. Cobain wrote like a pissed-off Orphenus, feeling (and this is an oft-recurring lin the Journals) “as if Godd had fucked me.” Compositionists need to feel fucked, too; they need to sit around their living rooms, rip up about 250 shitty “classic” essays in our complimentary copies of reader-based textbooks, and move on, cleansed and revitalized. Instead of students writing about the sort of essays we talk about when we talk with our colleagues, how about letting them write on how they don’t want to read them? (23)
I’m not sure how much I agree with Sirc. I certainly agree with his spunk. 🙂 I certainly agree that I want my students to journal just to journal, just to notice life and the small things in life. But part of me wants to teach ways of reading as well, ways of noticing and re-reading, ways to reading culture. I don’t trust language so much as Sirc seems to want me to (I am reminded of Elbow’s description of the reader as someone who doesn’t trust language, as the writer as someone who must trust language). I like cultural studies. I want students to be critics, kind of like Bartholomae does. But I guess I want them transgressing, too, more than the transgressions I seem to get from Bartholomae’s work.
I guess one transgression I like about Sirc is his use of [who was it who termed this?] “outlaw emotions” like anger. And his celebration of such, like in Cobain and in punk and hip-hop. Hmmm…
Sirc, Geoffrey. “Composition’s Eye/Orpheus’s Gaze/Cobain’s Journals.” Composition Studies 33.1 (Spring 2005): 11-30.
