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6 c U Lt U r a L s t U D i e s a n D c o m P o s i t i o n Teachers in the social strand of the critical thinking and writing have attempted to fill the putatively empty rhetorical situation of required writing classes by making culture the object of study. The trajectory of this strand moved from the early writing-about-literature phase through writing-about-self to writing-about culture.1 The first phase was a natural outgrowth of the field’s origin within literature departments—the graduate students teaching the course assumed that “writing” meant writing about literature, as they had been trained to do. “Real” writing was the writing they were writing about—and the people who wrote “real” writing were literary figures. So they imagined their task, as many writing teachers still do, as one of helping their students become “writers”— or at least writers who write about writers, biding their time, perhaps, until their own novels would sell. The missionary and inevitably disappointed zeal with which the writing-about-literature graduate students approached their task led in the early 70s through the mid 80s to a writing -about-self pedagogy, inherited by a misreading of James Britton et al.’s (1978) The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18).2 The expressivist tradition focused on student writers learning how to get in touch with themselves as writers, turning inward the belletristic tradition out of which rhetoric and composition grew. Students first learned how to write for themselves and then moved outward to write for others, a model popularized by Britton et al. (1978) and James Moffett (1968) in Teaching the Universe of Discourse. The personal essay in the expressivist tradition was the privileged genre at the postsecondary 1. And more lately, writing about writing—a phase that is outside the scope of this book (Downs and Wardle 2007; Miles et al. 2008; Bird, Downs, and Wardle 2008). 2. Both Britton et al. and Moffett promoted instruction in the full range of genres. In Britton et al.’s construct, expressive writing is only one of four supra-genres. The others are transactional, poetic, and “additional” (primarily different categories of school writing). Cultural Studies and Composition 87 level. In Critical Thinking and Writing, Thomas Newkirk (1989) promoted the personal essay as an answer to the perennial problem of disembodied writing in required writing classes (Britton et al. [1978] called this kind of writing “perfunctory,” 8; Ken Macrorie [(1968) 1976] called it “Engfish,” 4); Newkirk claimed that the personal essay was also the necessary link to teaching students how to think critically. According to this tradition, writing is a way of seeing anew (S is a CT in X if S can do X by imagining ~E or ~any subset of E), of learning more about oneself and one’s culture—a way of getting in touch with deeper and generally obscured truths. In the personal essay, the writer invites readers to see the inner workings of the writer’s mind as it wanders in a Montaignesque fashion to a revision of whatever subject the writer had set out to explore. In 1993, Kurt Spellmeyer published Common Ground, a thoughtful exploration of the purposes of education and the personal essay’s function in achieving them. Both Newkirk’s and Spellmeyer’s interpretations of our purposes in teaching writing draw on the Arnoldian “legacy of liberal culture” (Berlin 2003, 35). As Berlin describes it, liberal culture is rooted in an elitist tradition of training upper crust students in the liberal arts so that they will know how to govern by inheriting “the best that is known and thought in the world” (Arnold 1913). Newkirk and Spellmeyer democratize the Brahminical tradition, spreading liberal thought outward through required writing programs. Spellmeyer wants writing teachers to encourage students to push against the edges, abandon the security of what has been known and plunge like Lord Jim into the darkness. Exploring the limits of thought about self and culture seems for Spellmeyer to be the dominant purpose of writing. Drawing heavily on Foucault’s “Discourse on Language,” Spellmeyer positions his argument within an Institution/Intuition dichotomy. Institution represents rules; Intuition represents impulse, the unregulated. Framed within Bakhtin’s theory of language and culture, Institution is aligned with the centripetal force giving utterances shared meanings, and Intuition is aligned with the centrifugal force pulling old language apart, creating a space for new meaning. Language is...

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