In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

8 s I N G U l A R I T y A N d T H e T e Ac H I N G O f e N G l I s H The single and peculiar life is bound, With all the strength and armour of the mind, To keep itself from noyance. William Shakespeare, Hamlet III.3 The lenses are useless now, there cannot be two eyeballs again like hers, a curious thought in so populous a world. William Gibson, A Mass for the Dead We have been exploring potentiality as a nurturable and sustainable capacity that feeds authoring in many ways, from motivation to creativity , from student five-finger exercises to widely read works of expert hands. For social philosopher Giorgio Agamben, potentiality is more than that. It is the very foundation of a free community and its evolving ethos. In The Coming Community (1993), he advocates a new social kinship of people, united in their willingness to make room for one another ’s potentialities—potentialities that, as a consequence of the nature of human potentiality itself, singly would be distinct one from another. It would be a community where individualism does not exist but where individuals do, a “community without presuppositions and without subjects ” where each person would bear “a singularity without identity” (64). In some ways, the current book argues that it lies within the potential of the discipline of English to be and encourage such a community. Human potentiality remains a psychosocial theory or metaphysical concept, but human singularity is a fact. Singularity is the ontological grist and phenomenological food of potentiality. For English studies , the relationship between the two bears an important difference. Potentiality in discourse is theorized by moving from what is imagined for the future to what is singularly realized. In contrast, singularity of discourse and discourse-making becomes evident by looking not ahead, but back—for writers and readers back to their prior experience, family Singularity and the Teaching of English 109 make-up, habitual language style, or accomplished life work. For the English profession singularity means, among other things, that since the history of each and every student is unique, each and every text and interpretation a student produces is unique. This recognition lends dignity both to the writer engaged in the act of authoring and the reader engaged in the act of reading, as well as to the teaching professional who helps better those acts. As we have seen (Chapter 1), singularity is a given and a motivation for working authors, but currently in the English profession the neglect of singularity runs deep. Sometimes it appears more like an aversion. That is the excuse for the polemical nature of this chapter’s short introduction to the concept. Our chain of argument offers, we hope, a bit of a lifeline in some very turbulent waters. First, in the profession’s thoughtful rejection of writing taken as isolated from society and culture , the profession has unthinkingly conflated the single author with the singular author, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Second, human singularity needs to be re-authorized as a fact—a fact demonstrated in any number of ways and intuitively felt and known by all of us. Third, such knowledge and feelings are a necessary ground for authoring. Consequently and last, teachers who disregard singularity may be withholding from their students one of the primary motivations and privileges of writing. T He M yT H O f T He sI NG le AUT HO R Some words become so tarred with association that they may not be worth the effort to cleanse. We are willing to risk our professional reputations by sticking with “potential” and “voice,” but “individual” we will regretfully leave on the cutting floor of the profession’s history. In English studies “individual” is now linked with “individualism” and a host of fellow travelers: “originality,” “unitary genius,” “personal writing ,” “autonomous writer,” “isolated author,” and—the most familiar expression, and the one we will take as generic—”the single author.” The trouble is that all of these terms have been implicated with behaviors and institutions well deserving of critique: oppressive patriarchy, relentless materialism, capitalistic ownership, agonistic argumentation , egocentric illusions about discourse production of many stripes. At the same time, the terms have been employed in ways that unfortunately sever the connection between authoring and singularity. It is assumed that a single author means a singular author, and if the first [18.117.73.214] Project MUSE...

Share