Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies

2. Experimental Writing and the Politics of Academic Discourse: Composition’s Institutions

45 Experimental Writing and the Politics of Academic Discourse Composition’s Institutions As I showed in the previous chapter, while expressivists who argue for the teaching of experimental writing often critique academic discourse (not only in the forms of current traditionalism but also in the newer cultural studies or rhetorical versions), they are more concerned with the student as individual, his or her honest or authentic writing/self, and therefore relegate social or ideological concerns to the background. Compositionists who advocate experimental writing in service of multicultural, social constructionist, or postmodern pedagogies similarly challenge the hegemonic ideologies associated with academic writing. But they tend to foreground the ways in which alternative forms of writing represent social groups and situate individual students within larger social structures and discourses. In doing so, they attempt not only to help the individual student , but also to change larger social, political, and institutional structures , including the field of composition. In this chapter, I examine some key arguments for teaching experimental writing by this second group of compositionists. Many of these ar2 46  Experimental Writing and the Politics of Academic Discourse guments claim that experimental writing (reading it, teaching it, writing it) is inherently political, both in the context of the classroom and in the context of larger institutions (for example, the field of composition). To address these claims, I examine historical and theoretical debates about the politics of the avant-garde as a way to shed some light on, and problematize , assumptions made by this second group of compositionists about the progressive politics of experimental writing, the category of innovation, and the degree to which experimental writing is an attempt to critique, reform , or destroy the field of composition, particularly as it identifies itself with the teaching of academic writing. Diversity, Critique, and Transformation Critics of traditional academic discourse link it with objectivity, rationality , and the conventions of academic prose most in evidence in the characteristics of the essay form as listed by Derek Owens: “Introductions and conclusions, primary theses, repeated premises, linear progression, obligatorycitation,orderlyand incremental dialectic,supportiveanecdotes, professional vocabulary, ‘standard’ usage, footnotes and endnotes, bibliographies and appendices: these are the capital ingredients of our academic language, all spun together with the interrelated rhythms of the sentence and the paragraph” (Resisting Writings 29).1 While Owens here helps us see many of the formal and structural aspects of academic prose, other proponents of alternative academic discourses help us identify academic values or ideologies more broadly. Patricia Bizzell, for example, describes the dominant worldview of those in power in academic communities: This worldview speaks through an academic persona who is objective, trying to prevent any emotions or prejudices from influencing the ideas in the writing. The persona is skeptical, responding with doubt and questions to any claim that something is true or good or beautiful. Not surprisingly, the persona is argumentative, favoring debate, believing that if we are going to find out whether something is true or good or beautiful, the only way we do that is by arguing for opposing views of it, to see who wins. In this view, only debate can produce knowledge. Knowledge is not something immediately available to experience, nor is it revealed from transcendent sources. Additionally, the persona is precise, exacting, rigorous—if debate is going to generate knowledge, all participants must use language carefully, demonstrate their knowledge of earlier scholarly work, argue logically and fairly, use sound evidence, and so on. (“Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms” 2) Experimental Writing and the Politics of Academic Discourse  47 Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki take a slightly different approach in their study of academic and alternative discourses, Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life. They acknowledge that descriptions and definitions of academic writing are often abstract, and understandably there is no one definition. Yet, as they studied actual academics and their writing, as well as actual students and their writing, they came up with three broad categories of characteristics of academic discourse, “regardless of differences among disciplines and individual teachers” (5): 1. Clear evidence in writing that the writer(s) have been persistent, openminded , and disciplined in study. 2. The dominance of reason over emotion or sensual perception. 3. An imagined reader who is coolly rational, reading for information, and intending to formulate a reasoned response. (Thaiss and Zawacki 5–7) Thaiss and Zawacki go on to elaborate, qualify, complicate, and discuss examples and exceptions...