Somaesthetics, Composition, and the Ritual of Writing

William Butler Yeats ends his famous poem “Among School Children” on, I think, one of the most profound couplets in English verse: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” In these reflective lines, Yeats presents the performer and performance as essentially one being—there is no distinguishing between what is done and who does it. The dancer embodies the dance, so the two are inseparable. In short, what is emotive about an act is not some essential quality of the act itself but the harmonious blending of act and actor. In a similar vein, as composition instructors, we must not solely concern ourselves with composition’s dance but instead adopt a Yeatsian perspective on writing, one where the composer and the composition are parts of an organic whole, a viewpoint suggested by even Socrates himself when he argues that “every speech must be put together like a living creature, with a body of its own; it must be neither without head nor without legs; and it must have a middle and extremities that are fitting both to one another and to the whole work” (Plato 1997: 264c). In constituting good composition as a somatic and organic whole, Socrates intrinsically connects the body to writing, a traditional topos in rhetoric but long lost in modern pedagogy. To the end of recultivating this focus on the body, in this article I argue that the application of Richard Shusterman’s concept of somaesthetics can assist composition instructors in placing a greater emphasis not just on the text itself but on individual students’ body-mind nexus that underwrites the entire composition process.

Conceived in the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, somaesthetics is meant to embody both theory and practice and, as Shusterman (2000: 267) defines it, prompt the “meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning.” For Shusterman, our bodily and mental dimensions are inseparable, and thus attention to body is as necessary as cultivation of the mind. Somatic care, he argues, “integrat[es] theory and practice,” foregrounding the concept of embodiment, quintessential to emotive writing (2012a: 3). Turning to Shusterman’s philosophy in composition pedagogy helps foster a greater appreciation for the dancer behind the dance, the individual writer whose experience with the writing process can, at times, be overshadowed by a greater concern over the writing produced. Somaesthetics will not only avoid a sort of dualistic approach to composition pedagogy, solely instructing the mind and locating its inchoate voice, but also reevaluate the body and bodily experience within the writing process itself. Besides reorienting the instructor’s focus, compositional somaesthetics may also help alleviate student phobias associated with writing that often have built up over years of negative experiences with the composition process.

Let’s face it—the act of writing has been traumatic for our students, all the more incisively so for those whose home discourses are far removed from that of our composition classrooms. The obstacles middle and high school teachers face, including large class sizes, inadequate planning time, impossible course loads, and performance pay initiatives linked to standardized test scores, have encouraged the teaching of a writing process in which there is a “no-exit cognition” (Rose 2008: 159) of formulaic thesis creation and essay writing. Years of such mechanical writing, underpinned by federal and state testing, as well as high school graduation requirements, have ossified writing rituals that have reduced the compositional process to five-paragraph essays, three-pronged theses, bubble brainstorming maps, and timed writings. These experiences have not only negatively affected our students, again to use Mike Rose’s term, in a “psychodynamic” manner, but have also wholly negated the somatic aspect of writing and contributed to a sort of physical trepidation associated with the composition process (160). Yet writing is, at its core, a bodily function—sans hand, what words would be inscribed on a page or typed into a keyboard? Sans brain, what formless electrical signals would become concrete expressions of thought? Previous approaches to writing, including those...