I realized that I haven’t been keeping enough notes about what I read, which later causes me to think, “Where did I read that again?” I used to be better at this, so I’m going to try to keep some notes for more of what I read. Here’s what I read yesterday:
Thompson, Roger. “’Habit of Heat’: Emerson, Belletristic Rhetoric, and the Role of the Imagination.“ College English 69.3 (January 2007): 260-282.
Thompson argues that Emerson repudiated the formalism of nineteenth century belletristic American rhetoric, instead promoting a rhetoric with imagination at its center, an imagination that calls for civic duty. Emerson was concerned with the stifling nature of formalistic rhetoric and wanted rhetoric that “links language with divine ecstasy“ (268). According to Thompson, Emerson’s rhetoric is Platonic, in that it “is aligned with soul making“ (274), and although it is, using Frederick Antczak’s term, “a ‘rhetoric of identification’ in that the individual’s goal in communication is identification with self and audience,“ Emerson’s rhetoric is not divorced from civic life as Antczak’s rhetoric is (270). Thompson concludes, “Emerson’s concern with building an imaginative and revelatory rhetoric, then, is as much a concern with discarding authoritative, rationalistic, and empiricist dicta for action and the ways of knowing that they communicated to their audience as it is a simple formulation of a new rhetoric. […] What Emerson ultimately argues for is the centrality of the imagination in transforming an entire society“ (277).
Heilker, Paul. “Twenty Years In: An Essay in Two Parts.“ CCC 58.2 (December 2006): 182-212.
Heilker’s essay discusses his journey through understanding the essay, from a view that it is “an antigenre, as a place where anything goes,“ to a view that it is exploratory writing that is the polar opposite of expository writing, to a “final“ stage that saw “’the essay’ and ‘the article’ as abstract ideals marking out the far ends of a continuum of possibilities for analytical nonfiction,“ so that all real nonfictional writing falls somewhere in between these two extremes (183). This shift in thinking allows him to change from prescribing the essay as something that “must“ do certain things (in opposition to the article), to a description that an essay “may“ do certain things (193, which includes a great list of what the essay “may“ do). In the second part of his essay, Heilker explores his reasons for wanting to teach the essay, as well as an exploration of his purpose for the paper (which answers the “so what?“ of the essay). He assigns the essay, he says, because he cares greatly about his students (199) and sees their identities and the construction of their identities as “the most important texts they will ever read and write“ (200). Noting that “there are simply too many things we want to accomplish“ in first year composition (“to honor and do justice to rhetoric, poetic, and electronic; written, oral, digital, and multimodal composition; literary, popular, and technical discourse; personal, academic, and civic discourse; individual and collaborative composition; syntactic and paratactic organization; critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking, and listening“ [206]), Heilker concludes his essay with a call for an extended undergraduate composition program that would allow for the exploration of all these things and for respect beyond being a “service“ department (206-208).
I’m left wanting to read:
Bloom, Lynn Z. “The Essay Canon.“ College English 61.4 (1999): 401-30.
—. “The Essayist In — And Beyond — The Essay: Vested Writers, Invested Readers.“ The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric. Eds. Barbara Couture and Thomas Kent. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 94-111.
Haefner, Joel. “Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay.“ College English 54.2 (1992): 127-137.
Harris, Daniel R. “Effeminancy.“ The Writer’s Presence: A Pool of Essays. Eds. Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. Boston: Bedford, 1994. 265-72.
Ratcliffe, Krista. “Cultural Autobiographics: Complicating the ‘Personal Turns’ in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.“ The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric. Eds. Barbara Couture and Thomas Kent. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 198-215.
Spellmeyer, Kurt. “Foucault and the Freshman Writer: Considering the Self in Discourse.“ College English 51.7 (1989): 715-29.
Vielstimming, Myka. [Michael Spooner and Kathleen Blake Yancey.] “Petals on a Wet, Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration, and the New Essay.“ Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1998. 89-114.
Zeiger, William. “The Exploratory Essay: Enfranchising the Spirit of Inquiry in College Composition.“ College English 47.5 (1985): 454-466.
