Mining the Gaps: Toward a Theory of Multigenre Writing and Pedagogy

Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts. By Julie Jung. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

I discovered the work of Julie Jung as a first-year graduate student at the University of Houston in the fall of 2003 while doing research for a seminar designed for new teaching assistants. Her article "Revision Hope: Writing Disruption in Composition Studies" (1997) was one of the first to spark my interest in feminist composition theory, particularly conflict pedagogy, and it shaped the way I thought of my classroom, my students, and my identity as a teacher. Revision, Jung proposed, is not only something we do to written texts but also something readers and writers experience beyond the page. To revision is to resee—a text, a person, a situation, the world—in such a way that we risk surrendering previously held assumptions and beliefs in order to move toward richer, more complicated understandings of ourselves and others. As opposed to product-driven theories of writing that value revision insofar as it smoothes over the bumps, clarifies meaning, and substantiates transactional relationships between readers and writers, Jung insisted that we focus on the silences and disruptions in our classrooms, our texts, and our lives as locations for revision. For Jung, revision suggests possibility—hope—because it delays closure and resists certainty. Her focus on disruption challenges teachers and scholars in rhetoric and composition to recognize the silences in our classrooms and in student writing not as instances of failed pedagogy but as potential spaces for investigation, inquiry, reflection, and change.

In Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Mulitgenre Texts, Jung returns to the intersection of revision theory and feminist pedagogy in order to "contribute to an ongoing project of retheorizing what it might mean to practice revision in various related contexts—the academic essay, the discipline of rhetoric and composition studies, the subfield of feminist composition, and the English studies classroom" (xii). Jung dedicates a chapter to each of these sites in order to "rethink revision as both a political ideology and a textual practice," using her introductory chapter to first "define a feminist inspired revisionary rhetoric of relationship" (13). Drawing on feminist ideas of conflict and border crossing, Jung attempts to disrupt traditional theories and recast revision as a "process of disrupting textual clarity and thereby delaying consensus so that differences and conflicts within discourse communities can be identified, sustained, contended with, and perhaps understood" (xii). Revisionary rhetoric becomes a way of engaging with writers, readers, texts, and ideas that delays, rather than seeks out, convergence and makes way for productive, thoughtful dialogue.

According to Jung, multigenre texts represent ideal versions of revisionary rhetoric because they force readers and writers in the field of rhetoric and composition to "dis-identify" with fixed notions of authors, texts, and their own disciplinary identities in order to disrupt static conventions and create "fuller, more complex definitions of what it means to be 'in' RhetComp" (30). Jung focuses on the contrast between multigenre writing and traditional scholarly texts, suggesting that we frequently fail to listen carefully to one another when we read, often falling back on dangerous binaries—fear/confidence (149–50), feminist/man (85), mother/bitch (145–46), student/teacher (130–31), writer/reader (30)—as well as professional or theoretical allegiances that prevent us from experiencing our own revisionary moments. Multigenre texts can productively disrupt our linear, argumentative systems of reading and understanding, she proposes, by creating more productive relationships between readers, writers, and texts.

Multigenre texts can function similarly in English studies classrooms. Calling on Kenneth Burke's metaphor of "putting the wrong words together," Jung demonstrates how multigenre assignments helped her students mine their conflicting subjectivities as English majors by urging them to recognize and investigate "unexplored revisionary moments" in their drafts (56–57). Moreover, Jung suggests that moments of self-reflection and revisioning can and should take place through the interaction of teachers and students...