Nike, one of the all-time masters of marketing rhetoric, has certainly transformed the personal woes of Tiger Woods--with a little dash of intimate words from his dead father--into an amazing case for buying shoes and gear. This certainly is a great, if not slightly sleazy, use of the personal to make an argument. (Reading the comments of this ad on YouTube, the ad is successful in selling its message.)
Peter Elbow discusses why he uses the personal in his first-year composition classroom. He asks himself, "Whether I should invite my first year students to be self-absorbed and see themselves at the center of the discourse--in a sense, credulous; or whether I should invite them to be personally modest and intellectually scrupulous and to see themselves as at the periphery--in a sense, skeptical and distrustful." He opts for the more self-focused approach, shrugging off the usual complaints that personal writing is self-indulgent and overly sentimental. He encourages students to plop themselves in the center of their writing, rather than merely summarizing the wise words of published people.
Elbow is advocating for writing that is relevent to students' lives. He recognizes the irony of asking students to write "up" to teachers who possess broader knowledge of the topic than the student writer does. It creates a phony rhetorical situation and, as Elbow points out, it creates timid emerging writers. On the other hand, there are some topics that the student does know more than the teacher. Thus, when students write about their own lives, they have an intrinsic authority on the topic. Elbow writes, "Unless we can set things up so that our first year students are often telling us about things that they know better than we do, we are sabotaging the essential dynamic of writers."
Since memory is one of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric, it is interesting to consider this tension between the academic and the personal within a context of memory. Academic writing priviledges external memory--the kind that can be found in books, on library shelves and separate from the writer. Elbow-esque writing values internal memory--the kind that be can found in the fleshy, gray crinkles of each writer's brain. When you considers these rhetorical connections, it becomes easier to see the personal as more than extracurricular but as part of the classroom.
Despite these notions of memory, Bartholomae contends that Elbow desires "an open space, free from the past." While Elbow doesn't necessarily seek this, I think Tiger Woods would welcome a world free from his past . . . or at the very least, the authorial opportunity to control the story.
Well said, Dawn. Elbow says that he wants his "first year students to feel themselves as writers and feel themselves as academics." Before they can write academically, writing from a place of authority - theirs - is a good place to begin.
ReplyDeleteThe personal is what academic discourse is all about, isn't it? The most brilliant, now legendary thinkers and their theories are simply very credible opinions. We tend to forget that the texts we read are thoughts of another human being since we handle the intangible, disembodied words and thoughts of another.
ReplyDeleteI think the key to integrating new students into those debates and into a new way of thinking about and writing about writing is to allow them access to the discourse: get them thinking and writing about writing. The challenge is to get their voices heard by getting their writing to improve so they may keep up with the giants whose shoulders the students aim to stand on.
I think the personal in rhetoric, in literature, in text existsm jjust as much as I believe that the author is not really dead. Perelman put the personal back into the rhetoricl argument process, along with personal responsibility and that is a very contemporary theme in the world today, whether ecology, global warming, population control or some other aspect of politics. Memory writing is a legitamite form of writing period. As Lad Tobin points out in his ? or her article on "Process Pedagogy," there was overlap in approaches to theory in the seventies and eighties and expressive theorists did borrow from cognitive and cultural approaches, as well as "pay careful attention to audience and to the ways in which response shapes revision, as well as invention"(Tate, Rupiper & Schick 10). While there have been criticisms of expressivist theory and process pedagogy that are relevant, the author is saying the differences have been overstated. Lad Tobin suggests in the same artice on "Process Pedagogy" that "no matter how much [he ? or she] draw[s] on current-traditional rhetoricd or postprocess theroy,[he ? or she] still strive to keep [his ? or her] students' evolving drafts and their sense of themselves as evolving writers at the very center of the course" (Tate et al 16.
ReplyDeleteTate, Gary, Amy Rupiper & Kurt Schick. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxford University Press 2001. Print. 1-18.
I see I have a couple of spelling typos but I don't think I can get back to correct them. Mea culpa. Linda Daly
ReplyDeleteAlso mea cupla for my citation which should be:
ReplyDeleteTobin, Lad. "Process Pedagogy." Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper & Kurt Schick. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxford University Press 2001. Print. 1-18. I am in a hotel in Minnesota at a conference on Jungian based Sandplay and do not see a key for italics on this Hewlett Packer machine and I am used to a Mac. Sorry.
Both sides of this argument make valid points. I prefer page 481 where Bartholomae says, "Students write in a space defined by all the writing that his preceded them, writing the academy insistently draws together: in the library, in the reading list, in the curriculum." Should we add "in the journal, and in the personal narrative" as well? They are writing based on their exposure to literature of all levels -- the focus of the pedagogue on this argument should be based on the aims of their course.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of us apply this type of personal writing in our blogs, something that has yet to be mentioned. The easiest way to do a blog is to take something from the reading and apply it to something you directly understand, something you are comfortable with. Blogs are a great way to combine the personal and academic in a great way, from this maybe we can bring it more and more into our formal papers. Who wants to start?
ReplyDeleteHey i think this was a very interesting blog. I like the new idea of global positioning it is a great idea i can now track my phone, call it from a computer,track my family through my phone, activate GPS, tracks my road trips find locations near me, weather and so on all just because of the global positioning system.
ReplyDelete