A Prison of One's Own.
Here I am at 2am on a Friday night, and I am finding myself truly in a crisis of faith. For the past few weeks, I've embarked upon a project to lift the idea of a first year writing course AS an introduction to writing studies from the theoretical floor into an actual working class.
But, after hours and hours of pouring over historical documents, old text books, magazine articles, and the like, I find myself moving nowhere near where I want to be with this project.
The state I find myself in is one in which I feel I am imprisoned by not what my rationality tells me (that is, there IS something worth looking at when we talk about what "writing" is and how we learn to write), and what the culture of academia keeps whispering in my ear (that is, writing is just a skill and nothing more).
When I get frustrated, sometimes I find myself wondering just what the point is? What are the big questions we should look at when we talk about writing? Is there anything worth studying here? If we are to form an area of academic inquiry around the idea of 'writing,' then from where are we to depart? and for what reasons?
This is the crisis of faith I'm finding myself stuck in. I can enumerate questions easily; questions such as:
* How has "writing" been interpreted differently by different groups?
* What can "writing" tell us about the world we live in?
* In what ways have people sought to control "writing," and for what reasons?
* How does writing fit into our current models of power?
* What is the purpose of learning to write?
* Is writing a skill, a craft, or an art?
* How do these questions relate back to questions of ideology, politics, and morality?
Such questions, at least to me, go beyond the mere "how to write for an audience" and begin to question why we would even ask those questions. Or, even more pertinent to my own areas of interest, what forms of rhetoric have been employed to justify teaching writing in various ways?
But, then there is this nagging whisper in my ear...that none of this really matters...that writing is just something people do, and that's all there is to it.
Can writing studies as a field of inquiry truly stand on its own? Or will we always be relegated to the miserable status of being mere transmitters of technical craft and skill?
Current work being done by others in the same area as I offers little help. While I share the same starting points as others such as Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, I am not at all impressed by their quasi-positivistic attempts to turn writing studies into a quasi-scientific endeavor in which students read "research" into writing. Such "research" itself is heavily ideologically driven by various disciplines who seek to demystify the act of writing by turning to near quantitative research methodologies that more closely resemble early attempts to distill aesthetics to functional systems rather than something more closely aligned to philosophy.
To me, the question of writing is first and foremost a theoretical, philosophical, and rhetorical issue. Theoretical because any conception of writing is at best grounded in abstract terms that cannot be reduced to statistics. Philosophical because it foregrounds itself in questions that lead directly to larger questions of ethics, morality, politics, and the nature of humans. Rhetorical because, as a whole, there is no way to reduce any two different viewpoints on writing to a common level, consequently meaning all conceptions of writing are tied to various forms of persuasion over things to which there can be no ultimate agreement.
But, then, if this is the case, where in the hell do we even start? Plato? Foucault? Derrida? And...Derrida in a freshman level course? get real!
Maybe Bakhtin? At this point, I really don't know. My original conception was to stick to how we can relate issues back to the educational question of writing; that is, how is writing taught in schools and what can this teach us about writing in general? But even this, as a field, is scant with readable documents that can help lead the way through the mess that is writing pedagogy. Besides, I don't want to teach intro level linguistics. There has to be a difference there somewhere.
Which, again, leads me back to the question that I agonize and lose sleep over: just what is the point of it all??