Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching (review)

In recent years, a growing number of scholars in feminist rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and participants in the “affective turn” continue to work against the emotion-reason binary by charting the extent to which emotion both shapes and is shaped by a myriad of embodied literacy practices. In her valuable entry into this discourse, Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, Laura Micciche argues that emotion is a rich, untapped resource that can mobilize composition scholarship, pedagogies, and practices. Emotions are a binding force for everything we are and everything that we do; they are “part of the ‘stickiness’ (Ahmed) that generates attachments to others, to world views, and to a whole array of sources and objects” (1). Therefore, Micciche’s project is to render the role of emotion intelligible in, and integral to, multiple settings; she responds to the ways that compositionists either take emotion for granted, utilize it in the classroom in limited ways, or both.

It should be noted, though, that this book is relevant not only for an audience conversant in composition theory. Micciche’s interdisciplinary theory of emotion makes this book immediately accessible for a wider readership in English Studies—namely those invested in questions of identity, difference, and experience, and in the way these issues relate to scholarship, disciplinary formation, and pedagogy. To this end, the greatest contribution Micciche makes in this book involves her commitment to the classroom, as she reflects on what a multifaceted definition of emotion—as performative, as constitutive, as rhetorical—can do to bring about social change. While recent scholarship on emotion assesses its presence in the form of teacher-student relationships and labor conditions, for example, little work directly takes on the challenge of how to make emotion a teachable concept. Micciche indicates that the material conditions of the classroom—as saturated with emotion—afford students opportunities for an embodied way of thinking. It is her hope that these conditions will not only alter ways of thinking, but will significantly alter ways of being—an impetus that runs through her book.

In the first chapter, “On Terms and Context,” Micciche emphasizes the social and rhetorical components of emotion, and identifies compositionists’ turn towards emotions as involving a myriad of exigencies. She works against predominant ideas of emotion, as residing in an individual, picturing it instead as taking place between individuals and enacted in rhetorical and historicized contexts. Further, Micchiche argues for a conception of “emotion” that emphasizes its connection to action; “it best evokes the potential to enact and construct, name and defile, become and undo—to perform meanings and to stand as a marker for meanings that get performed” (14). This shift calls attention to the role of individuals as active agents who have choices in adhering to the status quo, or significantly altering it.

In chapter two, “Sticky Emotions and Identity Metaphors,” Micciche uses emotion as an analytic to reveal how compositionists are attached to metaphors, which may reify their subordinate status because they form a negative affective standpoint as “emotional residue” (27–31). Therefore, she suggests that compositionists should actively resist these metaphors, and draw from their creative capacities to actively bring about change in the discipline. She uses this chapter not only to delineate a method of analysis, but additionally, to argue for a critical rhetorical consciousness that is attentive to the effects and consequences of language use.

In order to discuss relationships between performance theory and pedagogy, and to emphasize the value of movement, enactment, play, reflection and analysis, Micciche creates a series of illustrations and reflections connected to her writing courses in “Emotion Performed and Embodied in the Writing Classroom.” These points are brought to life through analyses of her classroom practices, as she emphasizes that students’ bodies should be positioned at the center of knowledge production. For example, she discusses an activity where students are asked to explore emotions connected to writers or characters introduced in the course. They identify and perform a portion of a text, collaborate on their...