Composition Studies As A Creative Art
Publication Year: 1998
Published by: Utah State University Press
Contents
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pp. vii-viii
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-x
When I'm writing, the books and journals migrate from the shelves and cupboards that line my sunny study and end up in heaps on the floor, around the desk, under the worktable-on which still more are stacked-and in the storage closet and the furnace room that catch the overflow. Although the result is a decorator's disaster, I know exactly where ...
Introduction: Composition Studies as a Creative Art
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pp. 1-12
This semester my undergraduate writing class meets in a slightly dilapidated 150-year-old farmhouse, a Designated Historic Site, across the road from the central campus's swath of lush lawns and venerable oaks. Out of the line of devastation from the bulldozers, cranes, and other heavy machinery employed in (re)building the university from the underground up, we are on the flight path of the Canada geese and the blue heron that ...
I. Teaching Writing and Teaching Writing Teachers
1. Finding a Family, Finding a Voice: A Writing Teacher Teaches Writing Teachers
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pp. 15-24
A paradigm shift, says Thomas Kuhn, arises in response to a crisis. Old ways don't work, old explanations don't fit, and a crisis makes apparent the need for a new paradigm that fits better. This is the story of how three crises (two new, one of long standing) converged to precipitate a paradigm shift in the way I teach writing teachers to teach writing. In the twinkling of an eye, the class metamorphosed from students in the process ...
2. Teaching My Class
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pp. 25-32
I was born to teach. I knew this without a doubt from the moment I learned to read and write. Maybe earlier-I can remember trying to teach my baby sister how to crawl, and my younger brother how to dial the telephone. That my pretty flapper mother had taught eight grades concurrently ...
3. Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise
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pp. 33-53
I used to go to parties in hopes of meeting new people, but now we live in a small town and everyone knows I'm an English teacher. Therefore I lack, shall we say, je ne sais quoi. No one ever says, "How wonderful that you are introducing my children to the discourse community to which they aspire." No one ever says, "I myself always looked forward to those sessions on critical thinking." No one ever says, "I was empowered by the ....
4. Textual Terror, Textual Power: Teaching Literature Through Writing Literature
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pp. 54-63
Revolutionary principles often look like common sense, especially from the familiar comfort of retrospect. In Textual Power, Robert Scholes offers the revolutionary, but highly common-sensical principle that the best way to understand a text is to produce a text in response to it: "Our job is not to produce 'readings' for our students, but to give them the tools for producing their own." He amplifies, "Our job is not to intimidate students ...
5. American Autobiography and the Politics of Genre
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pp. 64-75
That the personal is political is never truer than in relation to autobiography. American autobiography, what we write, read, teach, study, and critique, is inseparably intertwined with political concerns. Indeed, autobiography has throughout our national history been a conspicuously political genre. Political concerns strongly influence who writes (or tells) their stories, the themes and masterplots of these stories. Politics influence ...
II. Teaching and Writing Creative Nonfiction
6. Teaching College English as a Woman
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pp. 79-87
During my first year of doctoral work I spent all my savings on a life time membership in NCTE. Already, in my first year as a TA, I knew I loved to teach. Nothing less than a lifetime commitment to the profession I was preparing to join could express that love. It has taken thirty years to find the voice, the place in the profession, to tell the stories that follow. When the events occurred, I would never discuss ...
7. Creative Nonfiction, Is There Any Other Kind?
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pp. 88-103
"Works of nonfiction can be coherent and crafted works of literature;' observes Annie Dillard, in explaining her own work in this "misunderstood genre, literary nonfiction": It's not simply that they're carefully written, or vivid and serious and pleasing, like Boswell's Life of Johnson or St. Exupery's wonderful memoir of early aviation, Wind, Sand, and Stars. It's not even that they may contain ...
8. Reading, Writing, Teaching Essays as Jazz
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pp. 104-117
Essays are the jazz of literature, fluid and flexible in form. Essays mix rhythms, modes, tones; they break rules, blend genres, blur distinctions between author, subject, and discipline. Because essays speak in conspicuous, personal-sounding styles, they're engaging to students and to "common readers" and writers alike. But the jazz-like elements that make essays accessible to readers, and worth the risk for writers-their ...
9. Why Don’t We Write What We Teach? And Publish It?
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pp. 118-129
We teachers of writing should write literary nonfiction, assuming that that is what we teach, and we should publish what we write. That's the thesis of this chapter. That not enough of us do this is the subtext. Writing regularly should be as much a part of the teacher's activity as meeting class, and as unremarkable. If that were actually the case, I wouldn't need to write this. Although what I advocate is appropriate ...
10. Subverting the Academic Masterplot
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pp. 130-140
Teachers' tales out of school, the stories we love to hear, seem to have two basic masterplots, both with happy endings. Plot One shows the teacher-as-practitioner playing the role of what North calls "television doctor:' In this "miracle-cure scenario" (46) the teacher is confronted with a new, or chronic, problem that defies solution. This mystery malady infects ...
III. Creative Scholarship and Publication in Composition Studies
11. Coming of Age in the Field That Had No Name
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pp. 143-157
From the moment I heard the call of stories, seduced at the age of six by the siren song of Dr. Seuss, I wanted to tell stories of my own. I would become a Great Writer. So I turned, naturally, to their biographies. If I could figure out how great writers wrote I could learn to do it myself. University of New Hampshire-where my ambition was to read all the books. If I could be surrounded by the works of Great Writers twenty-four ...
12. Anxious Writers in Context
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pp. 158-183
An anxious writer out of context may be neither anxious nor writer. The fundamental premise of social psychologist Kurt Lewin's classic Field Theory in Social Science is that behavior is the function of the interaction between the individual and his or her environment rather than a function of one or the other acting alone (see application in M. Bloom). And in "Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind?" Elliott G. Mishler ...
13. “I Write for Myself and Strangers”: Private Diaries as Public Documents
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pp. 171-185
Contrary to popular perception, not all diaries are written -ultimately or exclusively- for private consumption. Very often, in either the process of composition over time, or in the revision and editing that some of the most engaging diaries undergo, these superficially private writings become unmistakably public documents, intended for an external readership. The author of such a work writes, as Gertrude Stein says of her ...
14. Making Essay Connections: Editing Readers for First-Year Writers
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pp. 186-197
It is fitting that the rationale for reading should come from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's patron saint of self-reliance. While Emerson asserts that reading is essential for success in general, contemporary American composition teachers assert that reading well is essential for writing well. The rationale of Donald Hall, himself a distinguished essayist ...
15. The Importance of External Reviews in Composition Studies
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pp. 198-206
A tenure review, as Sam Johnson observed of an impending hanging, wonderfully focuses the mind. During one particularly interesting period in my life, in the course of several moves to accommodate a dual-career marriage, I underwent four tenure reviews in seven years. In recent years, comfortably tenured, I routinely serve as an external evaluator ...
IV. Writing Program Administration as a Creative Enterprise
16. I Want a Writing Director
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pp. 209-211
I belong to that classification of academics known as writing directors. I am a Writing Director. And, not altogether incidentally, I am an untenured female assistant professor.* Not too long ago a male colleague appeared on the scene fresh from a recent tenure review. He has never taught freshman English since leaving graduate school, and now that he is safely tenured he can refuse to do so if ever asked. I thought about his situation ...
17. Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades
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pp. 212-222
When I was but a sprig on the family tree, growing up in the New Hampshire college town where my father, Professor Zimmerman, taught chemistry and chemical engineering, an emblematic cartoon by William Steig appeared in The New Yorker. It depicted a downcast youth glancing surreptitiously at a report card held with distaste by a man in a suit looming bulbously from his armchair. The caption, "B-plus isn't ...
18. Initiation Rites, Initiation Rights
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pp. 223-228
Last fall, as newcomers to the University of Connecticut ourselves, we taught the indoctrination course to some twenty beginning TAs. Many were new to graduate work, most were new to the university, all were new to teaching, and nearly all were unfamiliar with the rhetorical theory on which we were basing the course. Tom, the new Writing Director, had taught English in American and Japanese universities for ...
19. Making a Difference: Writing Program Administration as a Creative Process
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pp. 229-237
A classic Steinberg cartoon shows a small girl speaking in arabesques of fanciful, gloriously colored butterflies, to which a grey father-figure responds with slashes of dark straight lines. This visual dialogue emblematically depicts the difference between creative and literal approaches to, among other things, life, liberty, and the pursuit of writing For administration of writing programs, as of any other complicated ...
20. Bloom’s Laws
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pp. 238-240
Long ago and far away, in a moment of weakness (I was actually close to meltdown and didn't know it) I accepted a new administrative post. Some have greatness thrust upon them, I thought in my delirium, and this was a rare opportunity. So I decided, as any self-respecting (read desperate) academic would, to prepare for this status nouveau by reading up on how to do it. Book after book, article after article on administration ...
Afterword: Free Play: A Prologue to Work in Progress
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pp. 241-247
I've become a pain at parties these days. like Diogenes with his lantern in search of the bright face of honesty, I wander about, buttonholing the folks we know at these gatherings, academics and other teachers mostly, along with musicians, painters, a fiber artist, and a lot of writers. "How do you know when you've got a good idea?" I ask. "How do you know when you're being really creative?" To a person, they recoil in shock. Am I asking ...
Works Cited
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pp. 248-259
Index
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pp. 260-267
E-ISBN-13: 9780874213638
Print-ISBN-13: 9780874212464
Publication Year: 1998
