Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies

Introduction

1 Introduction Aesthetics and Pedagogies In Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, I critically examine the role that theories of “aesthetics” (variously defined) play in major composition pedagogies. Scholars in composition and rhetoric such as Peter Elbow, Wendy Bishop, Winston Weathers, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, Patricia Bizzell, Geoffrey Sirc, Gregory Ulmer, Cynthia Selfe, and Jeffrey Rice (among others) argue for the importance of teaching experimental and alternative styles of writing—including mixed genres, fragmented texts, collages, experiments in grammar, and various multimedia texts—alongside or instead of the traditional forms and genres employed in college composition classes, such as five-paragraph themes, personal essays, literary essays, argument essays, and research papers. Arguments for experimental writing, whatever pedagogical project they serve (for example, expressivist, multicultural, postmodern), 2  introduction claim to critique the limits of normative forms of writing associated with academic discourse by invoking the liberating and critical power of art. Though the lines dividing different pedagogical projects can be blurry and shifting, in general these arguments claim that through the “freer” aesthetic space created by experimental and alternative discourses, students may be allowed to express their unique individualities, articulate marginal or underrepresented social realities, and/or critique the limits of dominant sociopolitical discourses and the institutions that perpetuate these discourses. Historically, scholarship that addresses innovative or alternative forms, styles, or discourses has tended to argue why and how such innovative or alternative texts should be taught in undergraduate writing classrooms. These arguments and the pedagogies that follow from them suggest explicitly or implicitly not only that our pedagogical practices should be changed, but also that the values and goals of the field of composition and rhetoric need to be revised. In addressing these claims about practices and goals, I do not argue for teaching experimental writing in composition classrooms; nor do I aim to explain how to teach such texts (though I do reflect on how my experiences teaching such texts have come to inform my current thinking about composition pedagogy). Instead, I use aesthetic theories, particularly those of various avant-gardes, to critically examine those arguments in composition and rhetoric in order to reflect on how the field articulates the dialectics that shape it: between individual autonomy and alienation, the individual and the social (whether represented by social groups or institutions), freedom and social determinism , knowledge and art, determinate and indeterminate judgment, tradition and innovation, and between school and the “real world.” I also share lessons learned from histories of the avant-garde: the current viability of concepts of avant-garde art; the story of its successes and failures in its attempt to bring together art and everyday praxis; its claims (and the historical limits of those claims) to employ innovation for sociopolitical critique and transformation; and finally, the ways in which avant-garde art has challenged, or significantly altered or been absorbed by, art institutions and commodity culture. While the discourses of aesthetics underlying pedagogies of experimental writing may generate new possibilities, they also generate new problems (and refigure old ones) for the field of composition and rhetoric and the teaching of writing. These problems involve the way we construct and position our students, the forms and modes we teach, the ways in introduction  3 which we evaluate the work of student writers, the roles that we imagine writing might play in relation to other media, and how we construct the field’s ongoing struggle with its institutional and disciplinary locations. Thus, Experimental Writing in Composition is as much an investigation of conventional composition as it is an investigation of unconventional composition. When I suggest that we reflect on the dialectics that shape the field of composition and rhetoric, I mean by “dialectic” the rhetorical structure created by the construction of a hierarchical relationship of mutually defining terms understood to be oppositional. In the classical tradition, the point of reference here is the sophistical concept of dissoi logoi: two (contrasting ) words. The rhetorical technique of dissoi logoi entailed producing contrary arguments on an issue, with the victor often demonstrating his or her rhetorical prowess by proving the weaker term or argument to be the stronger. Thus, one might argue, for example, that when art is opposed to knowledge in the context of education, art should be the goal, not knowledge. In this rhetorical opposition, knowledge is more commonly understood as the dominant term; therefore, an argument for art takes up the challenge of making the weaker...