I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

"Bartholomae says that to teach writing as an expression of individual thoughts and feelings is to make students 'suckers' and 'powerless' ('Reply' 128; 'Inventing [the University]'). Patricia Bizzell, pursuing a similar line of attack, charges that by failing to teach academic language, expressivists harm students in two ways. One, encouraging students to write in everyday language puts them at a disadvantage when they must write within the academic disciplines. Two, since mastering academic discourse, for Bizzell, is also learning new ways of thinking, expressivists limit students' chances to develop academically valued ways of thinking ('Cognition'; 'What Happens')." (648)

"At the center of these criticisms is the view that, as heirs to romanticism, contemporary expressivists have a naive view of the writer as independent, as possessing innate abilities to discover truth. This charge--that expressivist pedagogy focuses upon personal growth while ignoring the social settings of specified skills and bodies of knowledge--is a familiar one in discussions of American Education." (648)

"To understand romanticism as championing the artist as lonely, spontaneous genius is to adopt too narrow a view of romanticism. On the contrary, an important motive of the romantic movement was finding common ground among individuals, a reaction against the utilitarian and self-serving qualities of late eighteenth-century society." (649)

"My claim is that if we broaden our understanding of romanticism, if we recognize expressivism as rooted historically in the eighteenth-century German effort to find unity through diversity, we improve our chances of assessing Elbow's work fairly." (649)

"Conventionally, romanticism is seen as resisting the Enlightenment's Objectification of nature and separation of nature from human purpose. The Enlightenment world operated smoothly but mechanistically and with out destination, hence with out meaning. The community rested on the notion of a 'social contract,' which, on the positive side, established that institutions are inventions subject to human control. On the negative side, the social contract established that men and women were self-sufficient in the state of nature and only driven to organize themselves to protect property and assure personal safety... ...The contract--the trade of liberty for protection--was simply the best compromise given that people could not trust one another." (649)

"Doctors and lawyers, for example, present a limited aspect of themselves in transactions with patients and clients. They maintain power by guarding their knowledge, erecting barriers around their privileged communities. Likewise, May claims that students come to the university under duress, seeking credentials without which they are unable to compete in the market place. Students see syllabi as contracts, ways to meet their specific objectives--to become an accountant, a biologist, or a philosopher. This is the world we encounter today--professional, contractual, without common purpose, very much like the world eighteenth-century romantics faced." (649)

"In response, they sought, not isolation for the creative artist, but reunification. I argue that Peter Elbow's work reflects similar concerns." (650)

"Just as Elbow, in his advocacy of freewriting, believes we must begin to write without knowing exactly where we are going, so Herder says human expression is both an embodiment and a clarification, an embodiment of a feeling already experienced but whose form is not clarified until the act of expression is complete. Although this concern for embodying and clarifying one's feelings sounds self-absorbed, both Elbow and Herder see expression as more than self-discovery. They also see it as a means of social connection. As we strive to understand our own expressions, we seek insight in the work of others." (650)

"To learn more about self-expressions, we are driven to enter into unfamiliar expressions. And as we sympathetically understand foreign tongues--their ways of thinking, hearing, and feeling--we inevitably enrich our own. I find a similar sense of the socially unifying power of language in Elbow. The reason we write, says Elbow, is to connect with others." (651)

"Further, [Isaiah] Berlin tells us that, for Herder, pandering to the audience, using one's skills without connection to one's inner life, violates the artistic covenant. Likewise, Elbow insists that our public texts must be grounded in our personal writing. In his effort to reinsert the personal into expression, Elbow goes so far as to claim that in order to do so writers must at times forget their audience ('Closing My Eyes'). This emphasis upon reconnecting artists with their work is a reaction against the anonymity of workers in industrial production, the separation of product from producer. If we were to employ the language of Marx, who learned from Herder via Hegel, we would call this a response to the alienation of labor. Unless our expressions testify to our inner lives, we are unable to see ourselves mirrored or clarified by them. And unless we are so mirrored, our opportunities for finding common cause or identifying with others are greatly reduced." (651)

"He [Herder] believes every discourse generates its own ways of hearing and thinking, and from the interaction of these diverse languages an organic unity will emerge, a unity very different from the uniformity achieved by imposing a single discourse." (651)

"Behind Herder's and Elbow's view that social unity can develop from sympathetic interplay among diverse forms of expression is a transformational view of society. Since, for Herder and Elbow, expressions are personal discoveries, when our exchanges with others are based upon self-expression, our exchanges can be transformative, can transform or make clearer who we are to ourselves and others." (652)

"...Elbow is once again in the spirit of Herder, whose Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, written and published between 1784 and 1791, dramatically challenged the Enlightenment view that history is a linear progression culminating in the culture of Western Europe. Herder denied that there was a single standard by which to judge civilizations from the outside. He makes a convincing case that each culture's values and artistic achievements must be assessed by adopting the standpoint of the insider, the native, by sympathetically inserting oneself into what Herder called a culture's 'climate.'" (652,653)

"Although respondents, especially at the later stages of writing, must doubt and criticize, it is only when respondents report their personal experience of the text, and when writers 'believe' them, that writing groups are successful. This way, according to Elbow, writers discover what their words do to their readers, what happens when they send out their 'strings' to others." (653)

"In Elbow's encouragement of multiple languages and the community that emerges from their sympathetic interaction, we hear resonances of Herder's appreciation of diverse cultures and the value of their interplay. In this way, both Herder and Elbow stand against Enlightenment relations based upon distrust and defense of individual rights." (653)

"In his efforts to reinsert the self into writing and interpretation and in his awareness that social unity can emerge from exploring multiple languages, Elbow envisions a more radical sort of communion than contemporary societies easily allow." (653)

"However, from the beginning to the close of the nineteenth century, says [Raymond] Williams, changes in audience led to the professionalization of writing and the isolation of the poet. Instead of a system of patronage, writers became dependent upon reader subscriptions and, later, upon publishing houses. Some writers were successful, but others, estranged from their readership, resented their dependence on market relations. With the treatment of writing as commodity, writers became increasingly isolated in their resistance to the demands of mass production." (653)