I have been so busy and stressed lately that I am completely behind in everything, and worst of all, have found such little time to write and journal! So, I am demanding of myself some time to write tonight on this blog, even if it is for such a short time. In Current Composition Theory we read David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” and I’d like to write a bit in response to it. It’s full of great ideas, and some issues that really torqued me (perhaps more on that later). Tonight I’d really like to focus the idea of “what is good writing?” in relation to some of what I read in Bartholomae’s essay. In particular, he writes two key lines that have really got me thinking about what good writing is (as much as we can define good writing):
Writing “is an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity” (629).
“The more advanced essays for me, then, are those that are set against the ‘naive’ codes of ‘everyday’ life. (I put the terms ‘naive’ and ‘everyday’ in quotation marks because they are, of course, arbitrary terms.)” (645).
I’ve journaled about this for class (and perhaps I’ll post that journal here later as well), but I wanted to briefly discuss these two ideas. First, that writing is aggression is nothing new to me: I’ve blogged here and written about a feminist critic who argues that any attempt at convincing is an act of violence. I particular like that Bartholomae notes that writing is “disguised as an act of charity”—and I begin to wonder if writing can work well if it is not disguised as charity, if it is full out aggression with no pretenses (or is that even possible?).
I’ve always struggled with defining what “good writing” is, or what “art” is. In the past, I’ve tried to define it in my head as something that is beautiful (though I couldn’t quite define that), and later as something that is struggling against the dominant culture (though then, I wondered, how something that, for the most part, conformed, acted as art or not). Is a sculpture art if it doesn’t act against dominant culture? But this new definition of a good essay, writing “set against the ‘naive’ codes of ‘everyday’ life,” makes sense to me. A good essay doesn’t just argue something well—and since it can’t really fully say something new—it must be set against ‘naive’ notions, either ones of dominant culture or ones that the writer once held. I don’t yet know how this applies to, say a painting or sculpture that is beautiful, and if I can truly apply this definition to other art, but I am looking forward to playing with that in my mind.
Bartholome, David. “Inventing the University.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva. 2nd ed. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 623-653.
