Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times

By Lynn Z. Bloom

In Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times, Lynn Z. Bloom presents groundbreaking research on the nature of essays and on the political, philosophical, ethical, and pragmatic considerations that influence how we read, write, and teach them in times troubled by terrorism, transgressive students, and uses and abuses of the Internet. Writers Without Borders reinforces Bloom’s reputation for presenting innovative and sophisticated research with a writer’s art and a teacher’s heart. Each of the eleven essays addresses in its own way the essay itself as one way to live and learn with others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jul 2, 2008
• ISBN: 9781602356832

Lynn Z. Bloom

Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut. She has authored or edited numerous books, including Composition Studies as a Creative Art (1998), The Seven Deadly Virtues (2008), The Arlington Reader (2008), The Essay Connection (9th ed. forthcoming), and two volumes of Composition Studies in the 21st Century (1996). Her many essays have appeared in College English, Writing on the Edge, Pedagogy, and elsewhere.

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Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition

Series Editors: Catherine Hobbs, Patricia Sullivan, Thomas Rickert, and Jennifer Bay

The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions Janice Lauer Hutton has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written literacy theory and research.

Other Books in the Series

1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition, by Brent Henze, Jack Selzer, and Wendy Sharer (2008)

The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration, edited by Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman (2008)

Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics, edited by Debra Frank Dew and Alice Horning (2007)

Networked Process: Dissolving Boundaries of Process and Post-Process, by Helen Foster (2007)

Composing a Community: A History of Writing Across the Curriculum, edited by Susan H. McLeod and Margot Soven (2006)

Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, edited by Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo (2004). Winner of the WPA Best Book Award for 2004-2005.

Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (Expanded Edition) by James A. Berlin (2003)

Writers Without Borders

Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times

Lynn Z. Bloom

Parlor Press

West Lafayette, Indiana

www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906

© 2008 by Parlor Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bloom, Lynn Z., 1934-

Writers without borders : writing and teaching writing in troubled times / Lynn Z. Bloom.

p. cm. -- (Lauer series in rhetoric and composition)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60235-059-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-060-1 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-061-8 (adobe ebook)

1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching. 2. Essay--Authorship--Study and teaching. 3. Report writing--Study and teaching. I. Title.

PE1471.B54 2008

808’.042071--dc22

                                      008019682

Cover image: World Wide Web XXL © 2007 by Kativ. Used by permission.

Cover design by David Blakesley.

Printed on acid-free paper.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].

To writers worldwide in this universe unbounded, especially Martin Bloom

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Academic Essays and the Vertical Pronoun

2 The Essay Canon

3 The Essayist in—and behind—the Essay: Vested Writers, Invested Readers

4 Compression­—When Less Says More

5 Writing Textbooks in/for Times of Trauma

6 The Great Process Paradigm and Its Legacy for the Twenty-First Century

7 The Ineluctable Elitism of Essays and Why They Prevail in First-Year Composition Courses

8 Good Enough Writing

9 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Ethical Principles for Dealing with Students and Student Writing in Teachers’ Publications—and in the Abyss Beyond

10 Insider Writing: Plagiarism-Proof Assignments

11 Negotiating the Grading Contract: No More Lobbying, Bullying or Crying

Appendix 1 (Ch. 2, The Essay Canon) Shortened Version of Bibliography of Canonical Readers

Appendix 2 (Ch. 2) Table 1. The Essay Canon

Appendix 3 (Ch. 10) Writing in the Manner of Thoreau (and Other Nature Writers)

Appendix 4 (Ch. 11) The Grading Contract Itself

Notes

Works Cited

About the Author

Index to the Print Edition

Acknowledgments

One of the acknowledgments that composition studies has changed from a narrowly bounded field to one without borders was the creation of the Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut, which has been my privilege to hold since its inception in 1988. I have enjoyed particular support from UConn colleagues and administrators, among them Veronica Makowsky, Ross MacKinnon, Robert Tilton, and Thomas Deans. Penelope Pelizzon read the manuscript with a keen eye and generous spirit.

The Aetna Endowment, the English department, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Connecticut have provided a series of superb research assistants during the decade of work on this book: Kathrine Aydelott, Denise M. Lovett, Matthew Simpson, Valerie Smith, and Jenny Spinner. Their exacting work, including unerring research accuracy, unsparing critical sense, and their own experience as teachers and writers, has made my work infinitely easier and much better. Lori Corsini-Nelson, Writing Programs Specialist, has helped throughout the decade of this research in compiling and refining the essay canon data, keeping the paper flow on target and on time, and the intricate nuances of computer usage up to date. The essay canon research was partially funded by a research grant from the National Council of Teachers of English.

Editors of journals and books in which many of these essays have appeared include Elizabeth Blackburn-Brockman, Shane Borrowman, John Boe, Barbara Couture, Robert Con Davis, Donald A. Daiker, Caroline Eisner, Patricia M. Gantt, Thomas Kent, Lynn Langer Meeks, Louise Z. Smith, Patrick Sullivan, John Paul Tassoni, William H. Thelin, Howard Tinberg, Martha Vicinus, and Edward M. White. Several have been friends and collaborators over the ever-changing course of our professional lives; all have enlarged the range of the field, and perspectives on it.

Parlor Press has been a pleasure to work with. David Blakesley, Catherine Hobbs, and Tracy Clark managed the various stages of editing with perspicacity, precision, and wit.

Martin Bloom, social psychologist, professor, and now artist, has been my best critic and best friend even before we married at the beginning of our doctoral work. That he has remained so for the fifty happy years that have followed indicates not a marriage of true minds but a recognition that debate and dissension are the basis not only of a humanistic dialogue but of conversation exhilarating enough to last a lifetime.

University of Connecticut

November 2007

Credits

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint or adapt essays in this book from these sources:

Compression--When Less Says More. appeared originally in Pedagogy 4.2 (Spring): 300-304. © 2004 by Duke University Press. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Academic Essays and the Vertical Pronoun appeared originally in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 16.4 (2005): 417-30. © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group. Used by permission.

The Essay Canon appeared originally in College English 61.4 (Mar. 1999): 401-30. © 1999 by NCTE. Used by permission.

Good Enough Writing appeared originally in What Is ‘College Level Writing? Ed. Patrick Sullivan and Howard Tinberg. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2006. 71-91. © 2006 by NCTE. Used by permission.

The Great Process Paradigm and Its Legacy for the Twenty-First Century originally appeared in Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future. Ed. Bloom, Daiker, and White. © by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University; reproduced by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.

Writing Textbooks in/for Times of Trauma is reprinted by permission from Trauma and the Teaching of Writing edited by Shane Borrowman, the State University of New York Press. © 2005 State University of New York. All rights reserved.

The Essayist In—and Behind—The Essay: Vested Writers, Invested Readers originally appeared in The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric. Ed. Barbara Couture and Thomas Kent. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2004. 94-111. © Utah State University Press. Reprinted by permission.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Ethical Principles for (Re)Presenting Students and Student Writing in Teachers’ Publications was originally published in Writing on the Edge 13.2 (Spring 2003): 67-82. Used by permission.

The Ineluctable Elitism of Essays and Why They Prevail in First-Year Composition Courses originally appeared in Open Words: Access and English Studies 1.2 (Spring 2007).

Insider Writing: Plagiarism-Proof Assignments originally appeared in Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age. Ed. Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2008. © 2008 by the University of Michagan Press. Used by permission.

Negotiating the Grading Contract: No More Lobbying, Bullying or Crying appeared originally in Teaching Ideas for University English: What Really Works. Ed. Patricia M. Gantt and Lynn L. Meeks. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon, 2004. 93-103. Used by permission.

Introduction

For the survivor, writing is . . . a duty. Camus calls it ‘an honor.’ . . . Not to transmit an experience is to betray it. . . . I write to help the dead vanquish death.

—Elie Wiesel, Why I Write

A word on the title. Writers Without Borders can be conceived of in many senses. Creative writers, the writers whose work we read, remember, quote, and read again, set the agenda and determine the arena—the entire world, the universe unbounded to be created ever anew. In this respect, writers without borders—you guessed it—are analogous to Doctors Without Borders—free-spirited, principled risk takers willing to send their edgy writing to the most remote or dangerous parts of the world in order to end suffering and promote justice and human understanding, independent of vested political, economic, or religious interests (Doctors without Borders). In a similar spirit, the phenomenon of writing in a digital age means that writing itself is never permanent, never finished; it is a fluid medium without and beyond the borders of conventional print documents.

The literary canon, too, is destabilized and reshaped by political and social issues, as well as concerns of ethics, aesthetics, and pedagogy. What we teach and write and how we perform these most meaningful endeavors assume very different dimensions in today’s world dominated by post 9/11 politics and the Internet than they did in the previous quarter-century. For the survivor, writing is, indeed, as Wiesel says, a duty, and ‘an honor.’ The book’s eleven chapters provide a contemporary dialogue—and the basis for debate—on the nature of essays, and on the political, philosophical, ethical, and pragmatic considerations that influence how we read, write, and teach them.

Part I. On Essays and Other Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Genius

Never lose a holy curiosity, said Einstein, and indeed we in the academy take little for granted. For instance, we continually question the premises underlying our work. What is an essay, anyway? How do we ourselves write? What is it we’re teaching, exactly? What do we want our students to know and learn and be able to do? The essays in Part 1—and indeed throughout this book—address these interrelated issues.

Chapter 1, Academic Essays and the Vertical Pronoun, explains how academic writing is currently transcending its conventional boundaries, as writers in many disciplines have begun in the past two decades to write academic prose in what Scott Russell Sanders calls the singular first person, with a distinctive human voice and individual personality. This engaging writing is particularly important when the prevailing alternative is voiceless, faceless academic prose born, as essayist William H. Gass says, for immediate burial in a Journal (26). As my analysis reveals, lightening up in style does, however, not mean lightening up in thought or in seriousness of purpose or subject; only that the writing is accessible to a much wider audience, and more memorable. Indeed, as I elaborate in Chapter 3, The Essayist in—and Behind—the Essay, even though the personae and voices of superstar essayists, such as Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, seem individual and intimate does not mean they are necessarily either autobiographical or confessional. The intensely felt presence of the distinctive essayist within the essay is under the writer’s firm control, as is any aspect of an exceptional artistic production—an ethos comprised of the author’s ethical and intellectual stance toward the subject and perhaps the world, manifested in the essayist’s characteristic voice and literary style.

Writers whose work presents the voices and personae we remember have a shot at becoming canonical. Chapter 2, The Essay Canon, addresses my identification and analysis of the essay canon. Essays are reprinted primarily in college textbooks. Thus, the essay canon is a pedagogical canon, empirically derived, consisting of the 175 essays most frequently reprinted in America’s most widely used textbooks; Readers 1946–1996 covers the fifty-year span extending from the end of World War II to the beginning of the widespread use of the Internet. Here I identify the canon and its superstars, including E. B. White, Joan Didion, Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I explore the attributes that make these writers the textbook editors’ and teachers’ perennial favorites because their work is not only memorable in subject and distinctive in style, but eminently teachable to the millions of American college students exposed to this core of a liberal education. In Chapter 4, Compression, I analyze a 252-word section of one of my own essays, compressed from the original twenty-one pages of preliminary writing, to demonstrate to students one way to attain authorial command—and power. Saying less trusts readers to understand more.

Part II. Teaching Writing In—and Out of—Troubled Times

Anything can happen, the tallest things

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,

Those overlooked esteemed.

—Seamus Heaney, Horace and the Thunder

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

—Joan Didion

Canonical boundaries, no matter how eclectic, how elastic, can never contain the subject matter of composition courses, which indeed encompass the world. Chapter 5, Writing Textbooks in/for Times of Trauma discusses the rationale for expecting students to read and write about inescapable issues of international terrorism, leavened by commentary on international peace, as exemplified in Nobel Peace Prize speeches. We tell ourselves stories of cataclysmic events such as the events of 9/11, and now of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Israel, and Iran to make sense of things that don’t make sense, to bring, as Joan Didion implies, order from chaos. As time passes we are still trying to figure out what stories to tell, for the narratives of that fateful day and its aftermath remain stories-in-progress, stories seen through a glass darkly with complicated beginnings, muddled middles, and ambiguous trails that are not really endings. The sense of destabilization persists, as Seamus Heaney’s Horace and the Thunder, written as a commentary on 9/11, continues to remind us.

Even as we write on this freighted topic, as teachers we must necessarily address new language and new ideas, strive to avoid polarizing attitudes, and consider ethical issues embedded in concepts which themselves need continual definition: patriotism, freedom, humanitarianism, justice, and creativity. For irrespective of subject matter, composition teachers’ primary concern is now, as it has been throughout the past two centuries, how to help students write better. And better. And better still. In Chapter 6, The Great Paradigm Shift and Its Legacy for the Twenty-First Century, I explain why the process paradigm developed in the 1960s remains the default model for teaching writing: invent-write-revise, with recursive opportunities at any stage until the final edit is reached. This model pervades the textbooks, and has generated some of the most ground breaking research, including that of Elbow, Flower, Murray, and Rose. No matter what theoretical language we use to label our current era, we are still wedded to process. Chapter 7, The Ineluctable Elitism of Essays and Why They Prevail in First-Year Composition Courses, explains why the academy favors elitist reading matter, literature of intellectual complexity and fine art aesthetics, in freshman composition, as in more advanced courses. The belletristic essays that constitute the essay canon, actual or prospective, are an elusive, elitist genre difficult to write and nearly impossible to imitate. Although, as Patricia A. Sullivan has observed, Class is academe’s dirty little secret, its last taboo, that about which we dare not speak (239), there is considerable counter-pressure to interpret these essays, even those that discuss working class life, in terms of middle class values and experiences. Given the conservatism of many curricula, this pervasive split-level practice, using elitist material to teach middle class writing and style, seems likely to remain normative in American college composition courses for the foreseeable future. There is no viable literary alternative in an academic culture that reinforces the upwardly mobile aspirations and values of students and faculty alike, although real-world writing assignments embedded in service learning and other community, national, even international venues provide appropriate experiential balance.

Writers Without Borders interrogates how we teach, as well as what we read. As English teachers, we often conceive of ourselves as the ultimate defenders of the standards that our professional literature endorses: critical thinking, adequate development, Standard English, conventional grammar, expression appropriate to context and audience. Yet, as analyzed in Chapter 8, Good Enough Writing, we may be deceiving ourselves. Evidence from normative grades and grading practices nationwide indicates that, on pragmatic grounds, most teachers will settle for Good Enough Writing, student essays sufficiently normative in substance and style to warrant B grades. These papers, often dull and conformist, are characterized by a clutch of Academic Virtues, among them Rationality, Conventionality, Order, Cleanliness, and Modesty in form and style; we reward them, as well, for Punctuality, another Virtue. If we accept these norms, have we reconceived what it means to write acceptably? Have we caved on quality? Have we stopped encouraging our students to take risks, in substance or in style? Given up trying to help students see the possibilities for humanistic understanding, social action in their writing? Are we simply taking the easy way out in an academic universe where lawsuits for higher grades lurk at the drop of a GPA?

Part III. Ethical Issues of Teaching and Writing

There are no sure-fire solutions, either, for the complicated ethical issues embedded in teaching and writing know no borders—and have no fail-safe solutions. If these are not new, then they are certainly newly-configured in contemporary times. Questions of intellectual property, for instance, have been with us since writing became a paying profession in the eighteenth century. But what does it mean to write today, in the pervasive presence of electronic media, with their ever-changing capability? Who owns the words, the literature, the images that circulate so rapidly and freely on the Internet? Often, these have no identifiable authors, multiple authors with indistinct identity, or pseudonyms. Who should be acknowledged? Under what circumstances? What if a source website gets taken down—can student authors prove its existence? How do the questions themselves, and their innumerable and complicated answers, bear on how we teach writing in the twenty-first century? Student, and perhaps faculty, understanding of the nature of writing, including use and citation of sources, have undergone changes that I address in Chapter 10, Insider Writing: Plagiarism-Proof Assignments, and Chapter 11, Negotiating the Grading Contract. Both provide innovative ways to enable students to concentrate on tasks essential to any writing class—thinking, writing, revising—and free the teacher to focus on these, as well, instead of becoming a plagiarism sleuth.

The contemporary climate of media candor, from confessional talk shows to blogs, Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, and other popular forms of instant self-representation, create possibilities for a classroom climate that is open to self-revelation. As I explain in Chapter 9, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Ethical Principles for Representing Students and Student Writing in Teachers’ Publications—and in The Abyss Beyond, most teachers know most of the time how to deal appropriately with most student papers. We understand the good and the bad; these (we hope, more good than bad) comprise most of the papers we see throughout most academic terms, year in and year out. But those truly ugly papers—transgressive writings in which students confess to self- and substance abuse, or horrendous anti-social acts (assault, rape, even murder) without a sense of ethical responsibility or acknowledgment of community (if not legal) standards—present their teachers with an ethical morass. We can’t restrict our comments to organization, development, and grammar. For teachers have ethical and legal obligations to deal with troublesome confession, misrepresentation, deceit, and other deadly serious issues, even though current professional guidelines, such as those provided by CCCC, are inadequate to the task. I offer ethical principles here to address these grave matters, though particularly in light of Seung-Hui Cho’s massacre at Virginia Tech in April 2007, there is no closure on the subject.

And so this Introduction remains open-ended, like the subject itself. Writers Without Borders, actual writers as well as the title of this book, will continue to confront the conventional, to transcend the predictable. In the spirit of Elie Wiesel, writers retain this obligation to speak out, not for the sake of nonconformity but for the sake of humanity.

Part I

On Essays and Other Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Genius

1 Academic Essays and the Vertical Pronoun

Welcome

A bunch of us were sitting around on the porch of the House of Theory, enjoying the cool breeze, a glass of Pinot Grigio, and swapping stories in actual words—neither langue, nor parole—of the good old, bad old days. Cathy and Jane and Marianna and Alice. Phyllis, Nancy, Sandra, Susan . . . . Carolyn would’ve come, but she was busy being Amanda. And many more, men too, coming out from the shadows now, into the sun. We had been laboring for long years in that stuffy house, trying to untangle miles of syntax, to define complex abstractions with other abstractions, tired of defending ourselves against interpellation, hegemony, erasure. We were missing Julia; hoping Gayatri, and Judith too, would come out, but they remained inside. After our eyes, accustomed to the interior darkness, got used to the light that flooded the porch we realized—quelle horreur—that every last one of us was wearing black. As we tore off the turtlenecks, replacing them with pastels, prints, even plaids, in a swirl of fabrics (vive la difference!) we began to talk of the novels, poetry, nonfiction, not texts, we would read, the essays we would write. I could swear that Virginia, a mote in the middle distance, was proffering a platter of raspberries and angel food cake, sweetness and light.

On Academic Essays of the Future

Welcome illustrates what I predict will be the ethos for scholarly writing in the foreseeable years of the twenty-first century. It depicts some of the reasons for the movement that is already underway in academia, as more and more people turn to writing essays with persona, voice, wit, panache, intelligence, and grace. In so doing, they move away from writing conventional academic articles, particularly those bearing a heavy burden of esoteric theoretical language, their dry dull voice . . . born, as William H. Gass says, for immediate burial in a Journal (Emerson 26), to more lively works. These may be published in academic journals, to be sure, but because they are accessible and interesting to a potentially wide readership, they may and do appear in a host of magazines little and big, niche and more general, and in newspaper op-ed pages as well.

This essay will explain why, in addition to sheer theory fatigue, personal-sounding academic essays are coming into the light. Today’s essays—I am referring here primarily to short works of literary criticism—reflect a literary climate in which changes beginning in the late 1970s-early 1980s have converged in the early twenty-first century. These include: the disappearance of the New Critical ethos, whose views on the depersonalization of the author reinforced deconstruction’s death of the author; the blurring of literary genres in various fields; the stylistic influences of New Journalism; the powerful presence of the personal in the mass media, including the Internet that, coupled with an argument for clarity, has carried over into the personal presence of either superstar critics or personal publication in prestigious journals. If the tastemakers can come out in the first person, so can everyone else. But, make