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2 w h At c o n s t i t U t e s A g o o d s to ry ? Narrative Knowledge in Process, Postprocess, and PostPostprocess Composition Research Debra Journet To describe composing as a process is to tell a story. Theories of the composing process (including postprocess or post-postprocess theories), that is, are narrative accounts. As narrative explanations, they relate a series of events or episodes (selected out of the myriad things that happened and that were not included in the narrative), and they organize those events in terms of their sequential and causal relations. The result is an interpretation of some part of the real world—a set of linked actions whose meaning derives from the way they extend from the past through the present towards a future. It is this movement towards— towards a text, a position, an identity—that transforms mere sequence into narrative. The act of narrating is thus inherently constructive and interpretive, and this is as true of nonfictional as it is of fictional stories. Composition as a discipline is thoroughly engaged in acts of narration . As such, we can discover process, postprocess, and post-postprocess narratives1 in many venues: classroom documents such as writing assignments or syllabi, accounts of teaching and learning, theoretical discussions. In this chapter, though, I examine one manifestation: published journal articles reporting empirical research. This is an especially compelling form of narration because it formalizes certain disciplinary knowledge claims and thus reflects and enables not only other research but also theory and pedagogy. In particular, I focus on three examples published in Research in the Teaching of English (RTE), a major venue for empirical studies: Sondra Perl’s “The Composing Processes of Unskilled 1. To describe composition as process, postprocess, or post-postprocess is itself to construct a narrative—one that proceeds in a linear way from one clearly defined moment to another. I recognize this construct is not an adequate way to represent the complex phenomena of composition research. However, I believe it provides a useful (if simplified ) perspective from which to view some of the ways research has changed. 42 BeyON D P OST P ROCeSS Writers” (1979), Lucille McCarthy and Stephen Fishman’s “Boundary Conversations” (1991), and Glynda Hull and Mira-Lisa Katz’s “Crafting an Agentive Self” (2006). I chose these articles because they are all by distinguished and influential authors and appear in a high-impact journal . They thus indicate the narrative conventions and representational preferences not only of the authors, but also of a community of scholars , including journal editors, reviewers, and readers. These are not, of course, the only stories that can be told about process, postprocess, or post-postprocess. Nor are they the only kind of stories these researchers have constructed over long and successful careers. Rather they represent specific moments in the history of composition research. They are, however , typical in some respects (but perhaps not others), and analysis of their narrative conventions can illuminate commitments compositionists share about what research does and how it should be written. In its production of narrative knowledge, composition is engaged in disciplinary work similar to that of related fields (such as anthropology or psychology) that examine how people perform narrative-like actions and that represent scholarship in narrative forms. Narrative, that is, exists on two levels: the narrative phenomena that are the subject of the research and the narrative arguments of the research itself. The goals of this scholarship are to present plausible accounts of unique events rather than general laws about invariant phenomena. Such narratives are not generalizable or verifiable in the way research produced by experiments or statistical interpretation is. They are, to use another set of terms, ideographic rather than nomothetic. The epistemological status of narrative knowledge consequently presents specific methodological and rhetorical challenges. If there is no critical experiment or statistical test to establish the veracity of a story, how does the writer convince readers to accept her representation? What, in other words, constitutes a good story? Part of the answer, I argue, lies in the ways disciplinary authors draw on clusters of agreements about theory, epistemology, methodology, and rhetoric; another term for these agreements is genre.2 Narrative researchers further agree about what narratologists call story and discourse— roughly, the “what” of the story and the “how” it is told. Identification of narrative conventions used in research genres thus reveals disciplinary 2. In my contribution to the forerunner of this book (Journet 1999...

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