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Student authoring in the American grain
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Content
STUDENT AUTHORING IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN
by
Mark Louis Wiley
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1990
Copyright 1990 Mark Louis Wiley
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL „
UNIVERSITY PARK lA .l X
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089 _
c
>90
SN€7C
This dissertation, written by
. . . . . . . . MARK.LOmS^WKEY. . . . . . . . . .
under the direction of h.is Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DO CTO R OF PH ILO SO PHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
DEDICATION
To all my teachers, especially my committee members
who had the wisdom to know when to challenge, when to
guide, and when to let me go it alone.
To my parents, Beverly and Bob, for their love and
support.
To Jay and Margaret for their trust*
To my children, Marcie, Brett, and Gabrielle who con
tinue to bring me joy and who taught me that good things
come from patience and love.
And to Robin, who never stopped believing and who kept
faith even in those moments when I doubted.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication.............................................. ii
Chapter
1. The Question of a Writer's Authority .... 1
2. The Emersonian Context for Composition . . . 28
Introduction............. 28
Background........... 30
An American Version of Presence ......... 37
Seeing and Saying ....................... 44
Emersonian Implications for
Composition . ......................... 67
3. The Great Divide: Transcendentalism
and Dialogism in Composition.............. 73
The Present S c e n e .......................... 73
P r o c e s s ..................................... 76
Telling Writing ............................ 81
The Journal and the Helping Circle .... 91
4. The Community of Voice and Discourse
Communities: Peter Elbow's and
David Bartholomae's Pedagogies of
Power ............. 109
5. The Ethics of Composing: Transcendental
Dialogues and the Rhetoric of Coopera
tion and Resistance....................... 134
Introduction ................................ 134
The Text as S c e n e ......................... 135
iii
Chapter Page
The Agon of S t y l e ........... 135
Tradition and Originality: The
Duties of the S c h o l a r ................ 146
William Coles, Jr. and the
"Stylized S e l f " ............. 151
Berthoff, Bruffee, and Bizzell:
Dialogue and Dialectic ................ 159
6. Reembracing the Text......................... 180
Introduction ................................ 180
The Acuity of Vision and the Loss
of the O b j e c t .................. 182
The Dilemma of Subjectivity.............. 195
Recovering the Object ..................... 211
Works Cited.............................................. 228
iv
CHAPTER 1
| The Question of a Writer's Authority
The field of composition has matured over the last
i
twenty-five years, and, as a result, our knowledge about
writing has deepened significantly. We value the practice
of writing, particularly in the university, for its trans
formative possibilities. We believe with absolute convic
tion that learning how to write confers intellectual,
social, and economic benefits upon individuals. Indeed,
many of us claim further that writing is personally em
powering. However, up to now, compositionists have not ex-i
tensively reflected upon the cultural and philosophical
implications attending these claims that writing transforms
and empowers the self. A primary reason for the failure to
clarify such claims is that it would involve admitting a
contradiction that we so far have been content to suppress.
Empowering students to write can be translated as giv-
:ing them the authority to write; yet, it is precisely this
!
tissue of "authority" that possesses the greatest difficul
ties for us. On the one hand, we encourage our students to
i
;think for themselves, to reflect critically, to bring their
!opinions to bear upon debates, and not to accept anyone
i
'else's assertions— including their own teachers'— without
I
I
i
! _ i_
.first subjecting those assertions to personal analysis and
I
judgment. On the other hand, in our professional discus
sions we often display our concerns over defining the
sources responsible for this kind of personal authority.
Generally, present debate focuses upon the bases of
authorship as stemming from either the inherent autonomous
powers of individual consciousness or from the writer's
participation in a particular discourse community. The
former view reflects the romantic notion of the creative
genius, struggling heroically against social convention in
order to produce an original text.1 The latter argument
assumes that the developing writer is always working from
within a specific context in which the discourse forms and
jpractices of a given community dictate what can be said,
jand how it is to be understood (Perlman; Porter).
! These, of course, are not the only positions concern-
jing the source of authority. In fact, they represent ex
tremes with most compositionists falling somewhere in
j
between. Cognitivists, like Linda Flower for example,
'assume that individual consciousness is unified and inde
pendent of language and social setting; yet, they also
j
■maintain that decisions made while composing are con-
I
strained by the pragmatic situations influencing writers'
intentions as well as the singular choices made en route to
achieving rhetorically competent texts (Flower and Hayes;
Flower).
| The influence of poststructuralism has/ likewise,
t
jbegun to influence composition theory. The poststructur-
I
lalists' emphasis parallels that of the discourse community
advocates in that control over composing is removed from
individual consciousness and handed over to the disseminat
ing and disruptive powers of language. Since language is
viewed as a tissue of differences, a coherent text is an
impossibility, and writers are left only with the choice of
following out several possible strands of meaning without
ever being able to claim any one of them as superior and
. . 2
logically prior to other subordinate propositions.
Though the cognitivists' and poststructuralists1 views
offer alternatives in explaining the authority involved in
composing acts, neither avoids the basic conflict. The
dividing line essentially still falls between theories
assuming that consciousness is viable apart from language
or any other material determinations and theories assuming
that consciousness is fragmented and itself either textured
i
by language or by particular discourse practices. My claim
here is that this dichotomous conflict doggedly persists in
composition because of certain cultural and philosophical
factors endemic to the American situation. While we value
independence of mind, we simultaneously fear the excesses
that such self-sufficient authority can lead to. Yet, if
composition is to progress in its practical mission of
[helping students achieve authority in their writing, then
we must be able to account for this individual authority
without also undermining it with our theories of what we
think is responsible. Hence, we cannot value independence
of mind while also claiming that this "independence" is
derived from language itself or from the material condi
tions of discourse communities. These explanations trivi
alize the very notion of independent thinking. On the
other hand, naive romantic notions assuming knowledge as
springing forth from within the self render teachers and
pedagogies superfluous.
I do not intend to erect any strawmen here by making
this latter claim. Yet the fact remains that, even though
disguised in less blatant forms, elements of Romanticism
continue to thrive throughout numerous composition peda
gogies (Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality 145-55; Winterowd
"Purification" 257-73). Moreover, serving as the scien
tific counter to romantic conceptions of writing, cogni
tivists do not fare any better in settling this basic
dilemma. They have so far attempted only to formalize the
thinking process individual writers supposedly undergo dur
ing composing. These accounts, however, while insightful
to the degree they explain an important aspect of compos
ing, fail to acknowledge the real problems involved with
language. As a social medium, language always threatens
the developing writer with potential meanings, with unfore
seen possibilities, that contravene everything the writer
A
might consciously intend. Furthermore, students must learn
genre conventions, the ways of thinking, and what counts as
evidence in the various academic disciplines. What compo
sition needs, therefore, is a theory of writing which
recognizes and values the individual writer as an active
autonomous agent, capable of independent thought, but a
writer who must likewise learn to understand and submit to
the real intellectual, ethical, and rhetorical demands made
in any given writing situation.
While I am not attempting here to put forth such a
full-blown integrative theory for composition, I do want to
use this study as a place to begin such necessary research.
The question about a writer's authority cannot be answered
sufficiently without initially coming to terms with our
cultural views, attitudes, and anxieties concerning the
nature of "authority" itself. For until we understand what
we mean by "authority," this central division in composi
tion will only continue to widen and threaten the integrity
of a young, developing discipline before it even has the
chance to set forth a definitive body of theoretical work.
The place to begin any cultural and philosophical
discussion of authority is with America's counterpart to
Plato— Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is Emerson's strenuous
nineteenth century efforts in raising the value of the
individual self to heroic proportions that sets the timbre
for our subsequent cultural valuations of individual acts.
5
The question of student authorship as a significant type of
individual action partakes in fundamental ways in this
cultural milieu. Emerson proclaimed the infinite possibil-
i
I
iities of the expanding self, and composition, as a disci
pline setting out to empower students to become proficient
writers, parallels, in ways I hope to make clear later,
this raising of the status of individual action.
In its early efforts at self-articulation, composi-
tionists raised process over product and selected the acts
of mind occurring in the composing process as the most
fertile area for serious inquiry (Emig, Composing Proc
esses ; Warnock). Yet, even from the beginning, it was
tacitly recognized that composing processes were mediated
by language, and there was a certain ambivalence about
language that made it impossible to decide if it were a
help or a hindrance to students in creating acceptable
I
texts.
In a very real sense, the story of composition is a
story about our relationship— both personal and social— 'to
language and to its discursive forms. It is the story
about our romance with language as well as about our dis
illusionment with its purported powers. In our desire to
raise composition to a status equal to its traditional
departmental partner, English Literature, we have borrowed
some of their claims made for the value of studying liter
ature as well as imported other claims from disciplines
seen as related to composition, such as linguistics and
rhetoric. What we lack in composition is a theory of
authorship that would do justice to the powers of the indi
vidual and that would articulate the attendant responsi-
bilities of a writer in writing any kind of text.
I advocate a view of writing as a complex of inter
related acts in which authorship is based and guided by an
ideal of integrity. I am using "integrity" here to convey
a sense of integration, of wholeness, of appropriate place
ment. Students would be guided to see that their texts are
written toward the goal of remaining as faithful as possi
ble to their view of a given topic, while also taking into
account the views of others as well. The ideal of integ
rity would also include such rhetorical elements as fit
description and representation of the topic, its explica
tion and development according to a logic also fitting the
subject, aesthetic concerns of unity and coherence, and
other contextual matters related to a given community's
i
concerns dealing with specific standards of the text's
acceptability,
The rethinking of student authorship will not be
achieved without a struggle nor will it ever be a project
that is completed. Each new writing of a text by any
student will continually re-enact this personal struggle
for authorship. Likewise, each teacher in enabling stu
dents to achieve this authority, must constantly renew this
istruggle for herself in validating her personal authority
i
jas teacher. Granted, a teacher's authority is, in a legal
i
Isense, conferred on her by the institution, but the insti-
I
tution itself possesses authority only because it symbol
izes a collection of individuals engaged in the valued
activity of freely pursuing knowledge. Though some may
reject this traditional idealistic view of the university,
even those advocating a pragmatic view of texts furthering
the business of the world should help their students de
velop a critical awareness of writing. An education that
is content merely to train students to fit into the system
without the ability to understand its functions, evaluate
its purposes, and articulate one's criticisms of it only
reproduces the unreflective acts, practices, beliefs, and
attitudes of what works now without understanding why it
works or whether it even should continue to work the way it
does.
Hence teachers are responsible for guiding students
toward this goal, and, as authorities themselves, teaching
becomes an act exemplifying the integrity involved in
authorship. As the student writer must understand her
responsibility to her readers, so the teacher must continu
ally monitor her acts as teacher as she advises and helps
shape the developing abilities of her students. Students,
consequently, would be empowered through the transfer of
i
*
authority from benevolent teachers. I see this
8
reconception of classroom authority and power as akin to
how those terms are translated within a feminine psychology
^as described by Carol Gilligan. The emphasis would be on
interdependence, nurturing, and responsibility; where "In
relationships of temporary inequality, such as parent and
child or teacher and student, power ideally is used to
foster the development that removes the initial disparity"
(168) .
By its nature composition is a moral-practical disci
pline (Phelps, esp. 40-80) yet one that also has its ori
gins in the romantic impulse to return acts of creation
back into the hands of the individual. Comley and Scholes
("Literature, Composition") point out that composition as
it is situated within English departments has been tra
ditionally viewed as the production of "pseudononlitera
ture." Literary texts are privileged over nonliterary
texts, with reading, or the consuming of these literary
texts, privileged over their production in creative writing
courses. Composition is at the bottom of this hierarchy
because it is the production of nonliterary texts. Scholes
and Comley would break down this hierarchy, making composi
tion equal with other kinds of reading and writing activi
ties . For them the "... improved mind becomes the goal
and the product of the labor" (100) , and it is achieved
through student writers developing "voice" in their
writing.
9
Comley and Scholes use voice to represent a complex of
rhetorical, ethical, and personally expressive qualities
which can be applied universally to any text. Their use of
"voice" functions in the same capacity as my conception of
authorship, except their's is limited to its purely textual
I
jmanifestations. My view would include isolated texts
jtreated as single individual moments within an ongoing,
t
I
I continuous process of students developing as writers. The
focus is on the students writing with each text serving as
evidence manifesting this growing authority. However, the
achievement of voice is an important aspect of this devel
opment and cannot be ignored. Significantly, "voice"
represents the kind of romanticism which is never absent
from the human scene and which Jacques Barzun says "implies
not only risk, effort, energy; it implies also creation,
diversity, and individual genius" (133).
However "voice," though it possesses a long history in
the Platonic tradition in valuing speaking over writing,
has received little treatment in composition concerning its
epistemological implications. Critiques of expressive
writing (Berlin Writing Instruction 88-92; Faigley) gener
ally focus on the romantic naivete of personal voice and
ignore the real human aspect of individuals coming to
knowledge and expressing that relationship in a language
they understand and feel competent to control. The dilemma
for composition, then, is to reconcile these romantic
10
impulses, to reconcile this emphasis on personal powers in
creating texts with the ethical dimension of writing as a
social act. Our views of language and its relationship to
consciousness are obviously crucial if we ever hope to
Iresolve this dilemma. Yet this hope remains as distant as
ever in that language, for the last several decades, has
been pushed to center stage within the humanities and
social sciences, shouldering aside the individuals who use
it. The onslaught of poststructuralism, particularly the
Derridean variety, has undermined any attempt to ground
authority on essential grounds. Derrida's use of differ
ence is seemingly not used as a term of substance as much
as it is used rhetorically in a given instance to put into
question authoritative claims based on evidence (see Of
Grammatology and Writing and Difference). In literature
and composition, power and authority are increasingly
viewed as generated from strategic uses of language which
persuade because they reinforce our subjective notions of
the way things should be (Adams; Berlin, "Rhetoric and
Ideology").
This turn toward language thus makes authoring texts a
precarious activity as determinate meaning is beyond any
single writer's control and is tethered to understanding
only because of its participation in greater semiotic and
intertextual complexes, sometimes referred to as the "web
of meaning" (Emig, Web, preface; Vygotsky, Thought 100).
1 1 .
We have not worked out the implications of these views for
student writers, especially for the eighteen-year-olds
entering the university who are struggling to achieve inde
pendence from past influential authorities (teachers, par
ents) in striving to develop that independence of mind so
cherished by the academy. In fact, any writer, whether the
student novice or experienced professional, now must face
the constant problem of establishing authoritative grounds
for saying anything while simultaneously also being told
that there really are no grounds.
i
The power of language now competes with the power of
the individual to say something with authority. But this,
too, is not really new. In our new history the American
Transcendentalist movement in. the first half of the nine
teenth century dramatized this struggle to wrest authority
from institutions and from the traditional texts repre
senting that authority in order to return it to its proper
source— the individual (Gura, esp. 75-105). After all,
was not the Declaration of Independence a collective docu
ment which expressed each person's right to be an authority
because that authority was grounded in a transcendental
source? Indeed, important texts in American Literature in
clude those which declare personal independence from social
circumstances, relocating the authority to decide crucial
questions within individual conscience in the service of
higher principles (see Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil
12
Government"; M. L. King's "Letter from the Birmingham
Jail") I single out Emerson primarily because he was so
instrumental in declaring the duties and potential powers
of self-reliance, while also recognizing the need both to
work with as well as to resist cultural forms (Poirier,
Renewal 135-81, passim).
Emersonian self-reliance is channeled by a faith in
spiritual laws which permeate the universe. The duty of
I
I
the scholar, for instance, is to act in such a manner that
these laws would be manifested or expressed, as it were, to
the world. The self is an agency through which the mate
rial world is transformed into spiritual principles.
Action is thus primary for Emerson, yet the details of this
special kind of work remain obscure.
In the twentieth century the transcendental grounds
that Emerson affirms in the nineteenth have been secular
ized so that the individual is now an agency for the power
of language; nonetheless, how language works through us
remains equally obscure. The implications of this secular
ization are crucial, though, in that human acts are trans
lated into material terms. Language works through us, and
exceeds our individual abilities to control its effects.
Hence the effects of language use are measured in terms of
benefits, i.e., power, status, a change in the present per
ception of things. The benefits of reading and writing for
Comley and Scholes--"improved minds"— must be followed with
[____________________________________ _____________ ; ______________13
the question: Improved minds to do what? Evidence of an
improved mind, whether it appears in schools or work, en
hances one's status as a performer within the arena of
i
textuality.
Texts as depositories of meaning are to be acted upon,
their inertness disassembled and put in motion again
(Emerson would say to make them fluid). What is read and
jwhat is written is only the place to begin the primary
[active work of reading and writing. Texts are unstable and
igenres are blurred because it is the performance of a text
within a scene rather than its stability as an artifact of
meaning that is now primary (Geertz 19-35). Action is pri
mary and the thing acted upon is necessary only in order to
propel the actor forward, away from a past meaning which is
to be overcome toward a future meaning that, when reached,
requires further transformative actions.
Emerson is a key transitional figure. He advocates
continual action, except that he sees a lawful relation
i
between individual acts and those things acted upon.
Always the optimist, he stresses progress and perpetual
transformation. Nevertheless, he is dogged by the fear
that, though he maintains faith in a lawful direction to
these continual transitions, he can find no way to explain
how they happen.
In Chapter 2 ' , I will explore this conflict in the
Emersonian tradition and connect it with composition's
14
specific problem of clarifying the nature of authorship.
Emerson is a valuable cultural and philosophical source for
understanding the context of authority and power in their
relationship to the self and the text. The problem I will
focus on in this chapter can be summed up as the conflict
between "seeing" and "saying" or between experience and its
expression. Emerson believes that knowledge must be indi
vidually won through experience, and yet, because of the
interpretive nature of experience, he is unable to explain
how one's subjective experience of an object can ever be
expressed and objectified as a lawful relation between the
me and the not-me.
I self-consciously place my thinking about authorship
within this Emersonian tradition because I believe Emerson
offers us images of the whole person engaged in authentic
acts which can help compositionists understand what is
necessarily and crucially involved in acts of composing
texts. Emerson does not offer us a theory of authorship,
but he offers us dramatic and insightful accounts which
attempt in Jonathan Bishop's interpretation
. . . to identify the sources of valuable
experience, to name and liberate the
springs of admirable action. He opens his
attention to these in all realms of life:
physical, practical, aesthetic, intellec
tual, moral, mystical. He tries to estab
lish the conditions for initiative in each
dimension of experience, to connect these
possibilities one with the other, to rec
ommend each separately and together as po
tential energies for his reader. (8)
As it now stands compositionists have yet to come up
I
jwith a concept of students as authors capable of the com-
iprehensiveness necessary for such a complex act as writing,
a concept that would also recognize and reconcile our
romantic assumptions concerning the self as sovereign
authority with our beliefs regarding the powers of language
to control and direct these sovereign powers. The Emerson
ian tradition emphasizes the powers of perception and the
knowledge won through experience over the constraining and
sedimenting effects of cultural formations. In ways which
I hope to demonstrate in this study, compositionists re
enact a similar struggle. In fact, Emerson's development
as a thinker and writer concerning the grounds for authen
tic action is analogous to composition's development con
cerning our earlier understanding of composing as distinc
tive , productive, and original acts by individual students
and our later realization that these "authentic" acts are
inseparably linguistic and social in nature.
I propose to show that much of what we select to
emphasize in our theories of writing concerning authentic
acts by moral-practical agents is conditioned by a struggle
to work through our romantic origins which consists of
placing power and authority into the hands of our students
and on resisting the imposition of culturally sanctioned
forms upon them. Emerson, then, can be viewed as a Janus
faced cultural figure: He is simultaneously a nineteenth-
16
century child of Romanticism, innocently seeking to realize
an authentic selfhood; and, as an experienced adult, he is
the wary-eyed voyager, uncertainly stepping into the
twentieth, acutely aware that authenticity has become in
creasingly more difficult to imagine. Nonetheless Emerson
never ceases proclaiming the possibilities available to
each person, and, though he speaks and writes in a histori
cal period different from ours, his emphasis on the latent
powers of the active mind are especially relevant to writ
ing theories that claim personally transforming and em
powering effects. Our anxieties about power, control, and
authority; our stress on the influence of language, cul
tural forms, and social institutions; our debates over the
role of personal experience, the students’ right to their
own language, and the role of teachers and peers in shaping
a writer's meaning all resonate with Emersonian concerns.
Hence, although I think Harold Bloom's adoration of Emerson
is often excessive, I, too, share in his following claim;
Starting with Emerson we came to where we
are, and from that impasse, which he proph
esied, we will go by a path that most likely
he marked out also. The mind of Emerson is
the mind of America, for worse and for glory,
and the central concern of that mind was the
American religion, which most memorably was
named "self-reliance." (Ralph Waldo
Emerson 97)
In arguing for a comprehensive concept of authorship
for composition gounded in a culturally resonant philos
ophy , Emerson provides a noteworthy place to begin but also
17
a location from which to depart, as we, in our field in our
time, struggle to understand what is at stake as students
struggle to achieve authority in their writing. Indeed, I
am not alone in using Emerson as a cultural context. The
confusion in our own thinking about the active self engaged
in the meaningful work of writing texts is reflected in the
way Emerson is explicitly used by some current composition
ists. Karen Burke-Lefevre cites Emerson as the American
father of a Platonic, self-expressive rhetoric, perpetuat
ing an ethic of individualism which serves to obstruct the
realization of a social-collaborative form of composing
(12-3). James Berlin, meanwhile, claims Emerson as the
forebearer of an epistemic rhetoric which unites subject
and object, rhetor and audience, through the provocative
use of metaphor (Writing Instruction 42-57). I, too, am
using Emerson as a cultural gauge indicating where we have
been and where we are going as a discipline and practice
attempting to empower other selves through the teaching of
writing. Emerson will not give us a writing theory nor
will he even give us a clarified concept of the self, but
he does offer us fundamental insights about what it means
to be a complete person engaged in any kind of authentic
action. It is our opportunity, then, to translate and
adapt into terms viable for composition whatever insights
we can garner from him.
18
After initially laying out this Emersonian context in
Chapter 2, I will examine how authority is variously con
stituted within prominent strands interweaving the field of
composition. I will set these accounts within this
Emersonian frame, looking at similarities and differences
and evaluating what is gained and lost as I develop my
thesis. What is "prominent" is naturally open to interpre
tation. However, due to the nature of my concern with the
achievement of personal authority in writing, the best way
I can provide coherence and credibility to my study is to
view the field from my perspective as a developing teacher
and scholar as these activities figure centrally in my
growth as a professional within the field of composition.
I identify myself with what Stephen North calls the Prac
titioners, who recognize "the classroom . . . as the com
munity of first importance" (373). Furthermore, I claim
allegiance to the growing movement stressing the teacher's
role as classroom researcher (Goswami and Stillman). It is
this personal experiential base for teaching and research
which I also believe connects what is vital in composition
with what is valuable in the Emersonian tradition.
In Chapter 3, I will predominantly focus on Ken
Macrorie, an early influential figure in the process move
ment in composition. His work has been neglected, though,
because it is not scholarly and because it is personally
reflective and anecdotal. Yet Macrorie is clearly setting
19
composition within an Emersonian American grain.
Macrorie1s influence will be analyzed within a framework
which will translate and differentiate the complementary
pair of terms discussed in the chapter on Emerson. This
translation offers a transition between what is primary for
Emerson and primary for compositionists concerning author
ship. Hence "seeing" and "saying" will translate into the
"transcendental" and the "dialogic," with "transcendental"
focusing on mental acts and their objects involved in com
posing, and "dialogic" emphasizing the rhetorical nature of
"saying."
This translation is necessary because the acts of see
ing and saying as used in Emerson separate throught from
language, with Emerson not necessarily viewing this opposi
tion as inherently antagonistic. In composition, however,
thought and language are typically considered as insepar
able, and this conflating of the two makes our understand
ing of composing, as both a mental and linguistic act,
particularly troublesome. In composition "seeing" as a
transcendental act still retains a sense of its independ
ence from language or from other material determinations.
Thus it is this mental power of seeing that somehow is both
mediated by but also transcendent to language that under
lies the theories and pedagogies of compositionists I am
calling the "transcendentalists."
201
Opposing the transcendentalists are the "dialogists."
As this name implies, the dialogists hold that mental acts
cannot be distinguished from their linguistic embodiment in
texts. They generally emphasize that these texts are in
fluenced by conventions and practices endemic to particular
communities. Yet the dialogists are not any clearer than
the transcendentalists in explaining how students can
achieve individual authority in their writing if writers
cannot separate their thinking from the social context from
within which they write.
In theories of composing a transcendental seeing and a
dialogic saying are always posed in tension. Both camps,
nevertheless, share common fears. They believe--along with
Emerson— that the sociality of language always threatens to
disrupt, or, in extreme versions, to preclude, the tenta
tive integration achieved by mental acts of seeing. Often
the resulting text reveals those acts to be incoherent or
incomplete. This is, of course, the place where writing
teachers characteristically begin with students, seeking to
lead them to integrate what they say with what they see.
This integration is always unfinished, but it becomes (de
pending upon which side one identifies with) either in
creasingly filled in as writers develop over time, causing
an increase in personal power, or it is an act of integra
tion perpetually postponed; in fact, actively resisted.
For it is this resistance that then becomes the source of
21
personal power for writers circumscribed as they are by
their social contexts. The battle lines are usually drawn
separating individual acts of mind from their rhetorical
contexts, privileging one over the other or conflating one
within the other. My view is that they are separate and
that seeing is primary.
In surveying the field I will show how authority is
variously understood— either implicitly or explicitly—
within the relationship of these two terms. Consequently,
in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 I will examine the grounds of
authority as they can be inferred from the discussions of
prominent compositionists influential in the field and
pivotal in my development as well.
Specifically, in Chapter 4, I will begin with two
popular compositionists still actively involved in the
fie Id---Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae. These two are
paradigm cases representing respectively the transcendental
and dialogic positions. I will analyze their work in
detail, examining their claims regarding the nature and the
quality of authority and power achieveable by students in
their writing. In using these two as paradigm cases, I
hope to fill in more concretely the outlines of the tran
scendentalisms and dialogist’s positions.
In Chapter 5, I argue that the transcendentalists and
the dialogists can co-exist because both inevitably end up
locating a writer's authority within a category of actions
22
that stress resistance to conventional forms and to
established usage, and that encourage the renewal of per
ception through the continual reseeing of one's meanings.
Although assumptions concerning the basis for authority and
the purposes texts serve differ for transcendentalists and
dialogists, the emphasis on individual style becomes the
element common to both camps. I claim that this stylistic
emphasis has implicitly evolved into an ethics of compos
ing, with writers who follow this code earning a measure of
personal authority and power. In supporting my argument in
this chapter, I will critique the work of William Coles and
Ann Berthoff, and then treat a contrasting pair of dialo
gists— -Kenneth Bruffee and Patricia Bizzell.
In the final chapter I will offer an overview of both
the transcendentalists* and the dialogists' positions.
Through comparing and contrasting their respective views, I
shall identify what is gained and lost as students struggle
to achieve authority in their writing. I do not argue for
a compromise between the two nor even for a synthesis.
Rather, I believe that we must define what is still viable
in each position but then rethink those valuable elements
in terms that reflect the realities of the classroom as
teachers experience them. In other words, such key terms
as "experience," "authority," and "community" would be
reconceived according to a philosophy stressing the phenom
enological realism of experience as well as the realities
23
of the objects of experience. This is not so much a matter
of moving outside of the Emersonian American context as it
is a deepening and extending of kernel insights embedded
within Emerson's nineteenth century Romanticism.
Many of the accounts of achieving authority in writing
emphasize the assertive, aggressive nature of this develop
ment. These are characteristically masculine versions
where the individual must differentiate himself from the
community, standing simultaneously in it and against it,
always wary of becoming overinfluenced by another. This is
Emerson's fear, too, but he displays feminine elements in
his work as well. He recognizes that knowledge and, as a
result, personal growth, come about through a forgetting of
self and a submitting to laws perhaps not always definable,
but probably always experienceable in some way. Though i
do not develop this aspect to any significant degree here,
I think that composition will benefit in the future from
feminist studies if they augment the predominantly politi
cal focus with an epistemological one.
The design of my dissertation is by necessity general
and synthetic. I am attempting to cover a great deal of
territory, but I believe this justified in that I view this
study as both an ending and a beginning. It is an ending,
or perhaps it is more accurate to say a completing, of a
transition from literary studies begun ten years ago. But
it is also truly a beginning, both in the obvious sense of
24
a change in status and in a not so obvious sense as well.
Synthesizing, evaluating, and criticizing what I have been
taught and what I have learned has forced me to re-examine
what I all too often readily accepted as "truth." Perhaps
this is always the predicament of the naive graduate stu
dent or the condition of being a student generally, yet I
have truly learned some small things in planning and think
ing through this dissertation. I have learned that accept
ing what others say, having an opinion, and believing for
myself what is the truth of the matter at hand are all
different acts on my part. Each is necessary and follows
in sequence, but the sequence must be lived through. Among
others, Emerson has taught me this forcefully. Transitions
are always necessary; to rest content in past accomplish
ments is to cease growing. But those transitions can only
begin from knowing exactly where one is starting out from.
Otherwise, with no sense of beginnings, one drifts aim
lessly.
In arguing for a concept of authorship founded upon
integration, I am also attempting to integrate the warring
forces threatening to fragment a young discipline. I
realize that calls for unity are read as threatening to
some as they are perceived as attempts to impose an arbi
trary order on an interdisciplinary field which thrives on
diversity (Bartholomae, "Freshman English"). However,
understanding the object of one's interests and the
25
commonality of those interests with those of others pursu
ing related projects does not necessarily mean that unity
is tyrannical. Depending upon how such things are defined,
it could also mean that diversity will flourish and like
wise remain coherent. Authorship as integration at the
disciplinary level places personal responsibility on each
to carry out those integrative acts, to work constantly at
bringing together one’s seeing with one's saying in order
to understand how my seeing, for instance, compares with
yours so that we can continue the common enterprise of
understanding the multiple aspects of the matter at hand.
The fear of unity manifesting itself as the fear of
squelching diversity often leads to searching out our dif
ferences as a value in itself and, consequently, then
reifying "difference" as a founding epistemological con
cept. Are we, however, any better off for continually ex
pressing our differences?
In clarifying what it means to be an author composi
tionists will have to clarify our longstanding romance with
language. If language uses us, we will find authority
always out of our control. If we use language, we will
have to understand how to use it responsibly. I shall
argue for the latter and use Emerson as my first guide
toward such an understanding. I now turn to him for
orientation.
26
NOTES
See, for instance, Richard Young, "Arts, Crafts,
Gifts and Knacks: Some Disharmonies in the New Rhetoric,"
Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Aviva Freedman and
Ian Pringle (Ottawa: Canadian Council of Teachers of
English, 1980) 53. For a sustained analysis of the roman
tic image of the "struggling writer" see Linda Brodkey,
"Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing," College English 49
(1987): 396.
2
In the last few years there have been several publi
cations asserting the value of poststructuralism for compo
sition. See, for example, Sharon Crowley, A Teacher's
Introduction to Deconstruction (Urbana: NCTE, 19 89); Jasper
Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing (Carbondale; Southern
Illinois UP, 1988); and, Douglas Atkins and Michael John
son, eds., Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction
and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (Kansas: UP
of Kansas, 1985).
3
Donald Murray is probably the most well known of
process advocates. Yet his work often reveals a wary
attitude toward language. For Murray, the writer must
always struggle to get just the right word. See the repre
sentative article "Teach Writing as a Process not Product,"
Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Richard Graves (New Jersey:
Boynton/Cook, 1984) 89. For an early treatment of the
limiting power of formal conventions on writers see Keith
Fort, "Form, Authority, and the Critical Essay," Contempo
rary Rhetoric: A Conceptual Background with Readings, ed.
W. Ross Winterowd (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1975) 171.
27
CHAPTER 2
The Emersonian Context for Composition
Introduction
When Emerson declared his personal independence from
the Unitarian Church by resigning his pastorate in 1832 and
subsequently embarking on his lecturing and writing career
the following year, he was, in effect, also embarking on
his life-long struggle to find and publicly express the
basis for authentic action. For Emerson the springs of
this action lie within the self. For it is within the self
that, through special kinds of mental acts, which he often
designates as "transitions," the mind can transcend space
and time and merge with objects of experience. In making
these transitions, consciousness integrates the manifold
impressions of nature and is simultaneously aware of itself
in making this integration. Thus objects of nature are
transformed into acts of consciousness, or, to use one of
Emerson's frequent ocular metaphors, the world is turned to
glass. Through vision, the world does not disappear, but
its materiality is penetrated revealing the essential law
fulness of all phenomena.
However, because in these phenomenal acts of seeing
the mind becomes more aware of its own perceptual powers,
28
the object itself seems to drop out of the visionary act.
Thought, too, suffers the same fate, for thoughts likewise
obstruct pure vision and must be overcome by being seen
through. Linguistic expressions, particularly texts as
cultural artifacts, are also objects which must break up
under the penetrating glance of the seer. Texts, however,
possess that peculiar quality of being able to restore
Emersonian vision. The best texts are those which serve as
reservoirs of original insights faithfully recorded by
writers following out the trajectories of their individual
visions. Readers, though, must struggle in recovering
these original insights and must thus enact for themselves
the contours of Emersonian vision.
In raising process over product, Emersonian action
becomes quite relevant to composition. As compositionists
make the inward, subjective turn toward scrutinizing cogni
tive processes, they also turn away from the material
textual object. Yet they do so without fully realizing the
implications for the changed status of the text and for the
changed relationship holding between composers and intended
meanings. Significantly, however, compositionists mimic
Emerson in that the subjective turn toward process elevates
composing to a moral act with personal, social, and cul
tural effects. In this chapter, then, I will examine the
background and specifics of Emersonian action and conclude
by pointing out in more detail its relevance to composition.
29
Background
Emerson is a stalwart believer in the ability of each
person to conduct this special kind of seeing. In fact,
for him it is the only certain way for anyone to be able to
distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic. Yet he
could never adequately express the transition between this
private seeing and its public saying, nor could he account
for the possibility that his "seeing" might differ from
someone else's or that the momentary apprehension of truth
one day might not be the same the next. Hence the early
Emerson's faith in transcendental idealism, which asserts
that the external world can be contained in consciousness
(Chai 334), is not so much a rational belief as much as it
is a necessity to protect against the nagging doubt that
"truth" is relative and hopelessly solipsistic. That
famous Emersonian optimism is more of an idealized possi
bility than an actual condition. Furthermore, Emerson's
emphasis on action follows his attitude toward visionary
experiences in that, since these become the sole criteria
for truth and because they are also only momentary, it is
the duty of each person to pursue those experiences contin
uously and never to rest content in a settled position for
very long. His optimism is located in his belief in the
possibilities of this special kind of seeing and settling
for less is to entertain the nagging doubt.
30
Since Emerson places so much significance upon this
individual form of "seeing," it is no wonder that he so
strongly distrusts any other authority. This distrust of
external authority also extends to rational thought (Chai
333) which separates one from the immediate perception and
simultaneous understanding of an object. This embracing of
experience through action, then, renders any artifacts
resulting from such productive work as secondary to the
activity itself. The truth of our experiences will never
be in the words per se as much as in those experiences. It
is this attitude that the philosopher John McDermott sums
up in a citation from the historian Daniel Boorstin who
claims that
For lack of a better word, we may call this
a leaning toward implicitness, a tendency
to leave ideas embodied in experience and a
belief that the truth somehow arises out of
the experience. (Culture of Experience 14)
Seeing and speaking with the voice of authority is the
crucial problem for Emerson, just as it still is— albeit in
quite specific ways, for compositionists in helping stu
dents say what they mean and mean what they say. But we
have also inherited other elements stemming from this
Emersonian tradition such as an attitude toward experience
as a particular kind of action with both personal and cul
tural implications. Experience is viewed as a source of
knowledge which, if we use it wisely, can lead us to
further possibilities of knowing. Nevertheless, there are
31
also some questionable elements accompanying this tradi
tion: (1) The status of the object in any perceptual act
is always in doubt; and (2) Following from this is the dis
trust of cultural forms and of external authority as well
as a continual transference of meaning. Meanings are, so
to speak, always up in the air.
The individual self is the arbiter and authority for
all meanings, except that, as Emerson recognizes, most of
us spend our entire lives unaware of this seat of authority
and forfeit it to others we deem more worhty than our
selves. Self-reliance is primarily a continuous act of
self-trust, one which must always be re-enacted anew be
cause one is constantly tempted to avoid this duty. Emer
sonian self-reliance is not a reasoned article of faith but
a call to each person to realize the possibilities within.
Though Emerson refused the vested authority of the Unitar
ian ministry, he continued to preach the gospel of self
trust on the public lecture circuit. In these lectures he
did not seek to prove his understanding as much as he
sought to provoke his audience to discover their authority
within themselves. Emersonian rhetoric is provocative in
that "he attempts to startle 'the soul awake'" (Steele 26).
His rhetoric is a calling out to others to return to them
selves; consequently, it is persuasive to the extent that
audiences can accept that this powerful inner self actually
exists and can be tapped into as the primal source for
32
authority. Integral to Emerson's faith is that each person
can find this power for himself, yet this search must be
accomplished individually. To rely on others, to imitate
another's actions or repeat another's thoughts is an act of
self-paralysis. Therefore Emerson cannot tell people how
to find this power because such explanations would violate
the very principle in which he believes. Each person must
discover for himself that he is an inviolable source of
authority. Hence, on this public level, Emerson faces a
problem similar to that in the private sphere of expressing
in words this non-linguistic act of seeing. Emersonian
rhetoric must not explain but show how his audiences could
experience this visionary power in all realms of their
lives.
In setting out to accomplish this end, Emerson seeks
to appeal to our desire to achieve a unified being. This
projected self-unity is represented best by the "soul." To
paraphrase Jonathan Bishop, the "soul" includes the
physical, practical, aesthetic, moral, and mystical dimen
sions of being as well as the intellectual (8). The "soul"
also serves a dual purpose in both the private and public
realms, for it functions as a symbol for a unified self as
well as a symbol for a unified society. In coming to
oneself, in tapping into one's personal powers, each person
is also coming into possession of the common natural re
source available to all and most valuable as the foundation
33
proper for the new American society and its national in
stitutions. This "soul" cannot be an individual ego; it
has to be representative of all people. Thus, in his early
work particularly, Emerson dramatizes his various personae
and offers them as role models to his audiences (Steele
3-4). He projects himself as "the representative demo
cratic man, whose spiritual enlightenment was no special
gnostic gift but a paradigm of what all people could and
ought to achieve" (Duffy and Ryan 155). "The American
Scholar" and "The Poet" are exemplars of collective figures
representing an ideal being acting in one of several possi
ble realms of experience. In this case, the intellectual
and the aesthetic respectively.
For Emerson authority flows from the individual to the
institution and not the other way around. In rejecting any
received tradition, Emerson founds his American religion
upon the substance of the self. This substantial "self"
differs from the individual ego, which offers no guarantee
against solipsism. The substance of the true self is the
soul, and this "soul" functions as a universal essence,
uniting one self with another across time and space. The
soul is a fundamental category serving both as the source
and ultimate goal for all individual action. What Emerson
desires is "soul" and always more "soul." The soul repre
sents the unexplored and the possible both in the personal
and social realms. Finally, it serves as a symbol
34
projecting a unity of both of these domains. Yet, as a
symbol of the new American society, it lacks specific con
tent; hence, it is the responsibility of each person to
fill in the specifics of what this new society will be
like. The soul functions rhetorically in a similar manner
to what Kenneth Burke describes as the function of myths.
I quote this passage at length, not only because of its
relevance to Emersonian rhetoric, but because it also sug
gests a crucial distinction between the rhetorical effects
and the ideal objects presented by those same words. Burke
is arguing explicitly for substituting the phrase "the
people" for "the worker" in propaganda aimed at unifying
American workers.
"Myths" may be wrong, or they may be used
to bad ends— but they cannot be dispensed
with. In the last analysis, they are our
basic psychological tools for working to
gether. A hammer is a carpenter's tool; a
wrench is a mechanic's tool; and a "myth"
is the social tool for welding the sense of
interrelationship by which the carpenter
and the mechanic, though differently occu
pied, can work together for common social
ends. In this sense a myth that works
well is as real as food, tools, and shel
ter are. As compared with the reality of
material objects, however, we might say that
the myth deals with a 1 secondary' order of
reality. Totem, race, godhead, national
ity, class, lodge, guild— all such are the
"myths" that have made various ranges and
kinds of social cooperation possible. They
are not "illusions," since they perform a
very real and necessary social function in
the organizing of the mind. But they may
look illusory when they survive as fossils
from the situations for which they were
adapted into changed situations for which
35
they are not adapted. ("Revolutionary
Symbolism in America" 87-8)
Emerson's reliance on "soul" may seem dated to us; yet
compositionists also require concepts (which some might
consider as actually myths) explaining how students are
capable of conceptualizing and expressing meanings in
writing. We may substitute such explanatory terms for this
process as "schema theory," "ideology," "difference,"
"transaction," or even the much abused terms "voice" and
"imagination," but we still are trying to get at those
"secondary orders of reality" of mind involved in compos
ing, whether we believe those realities to be social or
psychological, material or metaphysical in nature.
The act of saying for Emerson, in addition to its
public rhetorical effects in calling others to themselves,
also exerts a private influence. Public expressions can,
of course, also remain unpublished and experienced in pri
vate thought. The results, nevertheless, in both instances
should lead the individual to further acts because it is
only in transitions between the past fact and the new that
the individual has the potential to expand toward a truth
that possesses both a personal and public dimension. It is
this potential for the presence of truth in both a public
and private sense, as well as its founding upon particular
kinds of mental acts, that distinguishes Emersonian vision
from the metaphysics of presence associated with the clas
sical tradition. Therefore, before getting into the
36
specifics of Emerson's concept of action, it is necessary
to examine more closely this American species of presence.
An American Version of Presence
The book of Scripture is the interpreter
of the book of nature [sic] two ways, viz.,
by declaring to us those spiritual myster
ies that are indeed signified and typified
in the constitution of the natural world;
and secondly, in actually making applica
tion of the signs and types in the book of
nature as representations of those spirit
ual mysteries in many instances. (Jonathan
Edwards from Images or Shadows of Divine
Things 359)
Early in the American experience the word is impli
cated with the landscape as revelatory of the spiritual
possibilities for the new American nation. The implication
is that texts purporting essential truths about the human
condition and its destiny cannot be understood without an
understanding of the things of the world, with texts serv
ing as agencies through which things reveal divine truths.
Moreover, it is only through a disciplined kind of inter
pretation that these truths are revealed. I am making
no claims that reading the "book of nature" is unique to
eighteenth century Puritans. Foucault, in The Order of
Things (Chp. 2), provides a historical overview of reading
nature as a text. There is, however, a distinct difference
in this situation in that the American wilderness presented
no pre-existing order of things from which interpretation
could begin. There was no American culture, only a barren
landscape. This scene offered possibilities for human
37
labor to create virtually any kind of life imaginable.
Consequently, the long-range goal for interpreting and
applying the "book of nature" was to establish a society
never before seen on the face of the earth, yet a society
established through individual vision, not from political
decree. This places great pressure on the interpretive
act, especially upon the individuals performing it. For
instance, what should guide the realization of these in
finite possibilities? And what direction should the devel
opment of this new land take? Moreover, what kind of plan
might organize this new American society that would not end
up perpetuating the same kinds of authoritative abuses from
which these early settlers were escaping? How, finally,
should one read this "text"?
If the landscape would reveal its potentialities for a
new society, then it had to be strictly interpreted. Yet
strict interpretation required authority, but an authority
not derived from any already existing institution or prac
tice. Consequently, though in principle one might have
been free to read nature in any way possible, this "read
ing" was constrained by an ethic insisting that one read
this text according to God's will. What guided many of the
early immigrants across the Atlantic was the divinely-
inspired vision of founding a new Eden. In fact, the roots
of this desire to establish a society realizing this God-
given mandate had long been flourishing in the cultural
tradition of Europe. Nevertheless, these new Americans
also discovered quite early on that their desire for an
ideal social order was continually being obstructed by the
practical problem of realizing it. The historian Michael
Kammen succinctly describes this American predicament in
People of Paradox:
The "idea" of Europe, for example,
emerged historically well after Medieval
Europe had become a recognized reality in
the political, religious, and economic
realms. Whereas the idea of America, as El
Dorado and Paradise, surfaced before the
fact of America, prior to colonization, and
thereby conditioned the form the "facts"
would take, and even what people would make
of them. Sir Thomas More's Utopia, for ex
ample, preceded by more than a century the
utopian schemes of Puritan Boston or Pil
grim Plymouth. There is a sense in which
Americans, from the outset, could not fully
control their own destiny because they had
a mythology before they even had a country.
Moreover, latecomers in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries would then have to
accommodate their expectations to a reality
already out of kilter with earlier assump
tions. (9)
Kammen amplifies this crucial difference between the
European and American scenes. The "idea" of Europe arose
within an already established and developing institutional
context, while within the American context the ideal pulls
the institutions behind it. In a sense, our ideals for our
society always outrun what actually exists at any given
time because they are always to be interpreted from our
experience, and, as our experience is ongoing, the American
"self" is defined as always facing away from the social
39
milieu. Our institutions are never good enough because
experiences yet awaiting us on the infinitely receding
horizon will reveal possibilities that the present order of
things can never satisfy. Out institutions are perceived
as necessary evils, transitory structures only required as
pragmatic agencies to help us on the way to realizing this
distant utopian ideal. But the ideal is to be interpreted
from our experience, and each person bears the responsibil
ity of carrying out this interpretive act. Our national
identity is tied up with our individual identities and
these are defined in a language which we can only derive
from our experience.
For Emerson the place to begin this quest is for each
person to look for that divinity within oneself (Steele
14-20), for it is this God within our souls which must be
realized and expressed to the world. Emersonian self-
reliance as a form of God-reliance serves as the source of
authority from which all genuine human actions must origi
nate and to which these same actions must be held account
able. This American version of presence, then, complicates
the realization of truth with the realization of personal
identity. Such an idealized goal is oriented toward the
future, and it must be realized by living one's life always
remaining alert to the possibilities of truth hiding in
daily experience. The best way to live is to be an inter
preter of the common in order to discover the truth of
40
existence. It is only in this way that a unified, just,
democratic society could come to pass. In composition, Ken
Macrorie's work and Peter Elbow's extension of that early
work resonate particularly with this emphasis on individual
responsibility in interpreting experience.
My account here of this American version of presence
is influenced by Sacvan Bercovitch's study of The Puritan
Origins of the American Self. Bercovitch claims that
Emerson contributes significantly to this hermeneutics of
landscape and selfhood that distinguishes American natural
theology. Bercovitch examines these hermeneutical acts
according to the Emersonian perspective:
The perceiver discovers meaning by over
coming subjectivity. . . . Language, Emer
son insists, is an exercise not in the
powers of the individual imagination but in
the philology of nature. To speak truly is
to use nature's language in its pristine
form. When we "make it plain," we convert
the "outward phenomenon into a type," utter
"perpetual allegories," and, since the
"axioms of physics translate the law of
ethics," convert ourselves into paragons of
virtue. Thus the Me and the Not-Me mirror
one another in the Oversoul, as the exegete
and the biblical Hebrews reflect one another
"in imitatio Christi." The supreme benefit
of a "life in harmony with nature," Emerson
concludes, is that the spirit may "purge
the eyes to understand the text"; the
"fundamental law of criticism is that every
Scripture is to be interpreted by the same
spirit which gave it forth." (159)
What guides interpretation is an ethics of living
whereby individuals live attuned to nature and thus receive
social direction from a source presumably not derived from
41
any previous society. I hope to show that some of our more
prominent writing theories echo this Emersonian tradition,
particularly as these theories pertain to a writer's
authority and her relationship to language, experience, and
meaning. Our beliefs about students finding their own
voices, using their own language, and writing from personal
experience are distinctively Emersonian. In fact, I would
maintain that the often evangelical fervor with which some
of us claim for the empowering effects of literacy are con
nected with our cultural beliefs about the interconnections
between personal and social identity, one's language, and
one's experiences. Seen in this light, E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s
Cultural Literacy makes rhetorical sense in claiming that
national literacy (read "national unity") will follow from
all of us speaking a common language encoding generally
understandable cultural terms.
It is true that Emerson's "seeing" shares affinities
with the classical concept of presence generally attributed
to Plato. For Plato presence is understood as an immediate
experience of truth, especially as this experience is
associated with an intuition of divinity. Jonathan Culler
critiques this view, claiming that the "metaphysics of
presence" expresses a longing "for the truth beyond every
sign: a moment of original plenitude when form and meaning
were simultaneously present to consciousness and not to be
distinguished" (19-20). In the Platonic version (as best
42
represented in Cratylus) language mediates knowledge of the
truth and is always secondary to a direct perception of the
things themselves.
In contrast to a Platonic transcendental realm of
forms intimated by the particulars of the earthly sphere,
the Emersonian tradition emphasizes a personal approach in
that the objective nature of the truth of things cannot be
known without taking into account human involvement. This
also reflects a Kantian influence. Nonetheless, like
Plato, Emerson does hold to the soul as a fixed source
within the self and as the transcendental principle in
volved in acts of knowing. Yet, unlike Plato, though Emer
son continually proclaims the hope of directly perceiving
the truth, he is also dogged by the necessity to interpret
the mind's involvement in acts of perception. Particu
larly troublesome to Emerson is that perception is dis
torted by the social influence of a received language. The
later Emerson focuses less on the visionary aspects of mind
and more upon those obstructions mediating those visions.
But this is to be expected since the possibilities for see
ing depend so heavily upon those opaque objects to be seen
through.
Overall, the American version of presence stresses
individual experience as a source of original knowledge in
defiance of tradition; yet, in this version tradition is
clearly recognized for its strong influence in shaping our
43
understanding. Moreover, the American version harbors an
anti-intellectual attitude toward knowledge as well as a
resistance to rational demonstration. Most significant,
though, is the prophetic element underlying personal inter
pretation and the relevant social consequences following
upon these interpretative acts.
I turn now to Emerson's account of action which
begins in "seeing" and terminates in "saying," although
this terminating fact can then serve to begin another cycle
of action. His account is important for composition
because it parallels in distinctive ways our understanding
of composing as a particular sequence of psychological acts
resulting in cultural artifacts bearing social effects.
Although compositionists deal with much more specific kinds
of mental acts involved in composing texts, we have yet to
come to grips with the moral quality of these acts which is
primary to Emerson's description; nor have we yet worked
through the implications of turning from product to process
bringing with this turn the shift in how we conceive of the
textual object. These implications bode both good and ill
for composition as a discipline.
Seeing and Saying
We can get a hint of the conflict between seeing and
saying by noting the shift in emphasis of Emerson's subject
matter as revealed by the difference in the questions he
asks at the beginning of two of his most famous works.
44
Embarking on his literary career in 1836, Emerson
challenges his audience: "Why should not we also enjoy an
original relation to the universe" (CW 17)? However, when
he publishes his second series of essays eight years later,
he opens "Experience," probably the most moving of all his
essays, by asking in the first sentence: "Where do we find
ourselves" (CW III 27)? From the outward-looking, hopeful
exhuberance of Nature, Emerson has moved to speak in a
brooding, doubting voice about the unsolvable realities of
the inner life experienced by anyone who might naively hope
to form "an original relation to the universe."
There are important reasons for this shift, especially
the loss of his first wife, followed by his brother, and
then most devastatingly by five-year-old Waldo, his first
born son. However, it is not death itself that has caused
this change as much as it is that even in the deepest
throes of anguish experienced in the death of those so
close does Emerson find himself any nearer to experiencing
bedrock reality.
There are moods in which we court suffer
ing, in the hope that here, at least, we
shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of
truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting
and counterfeit. The only thing grief has
taught me, is to know how shallow it is.
That, like all the rest, plays about the sur
face, and never introduces me into the real
ity, for contact with which, we would even
pay the costly price of sons and lovers.
Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies
never come in contact? Well, souls never
touch their objects. An innavigable sea
45
washes with silent waves between us and the
things we aim at and converse with. Grief
too will make us idealists. (CW III 29)
This last line mocking idealism is also a reference to
Nature where Emerson is worried that idealism, which
"acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence
of our own being and the evidence of the world's being,"
will "deny the existence of matter." The idealist will be
left "to wander without end," confined solely to his own
reflections, and left within "the splendid labyrinth of
[his] perceptions." In denying matter idealism "does not
satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of
me" (CW I 37). And if God is left "out of me," then one
will only be left with that "labyrinth of perceptions,"
that phenomenal world where things continually appear and
disappear as they float along our stream of consciousness.
Trapped within our private streams, we never touch other
things or other selves. The distance separating my con
sciousness from yours, indeed, separating one momentary
thought from another is unbridgeable.
The Emerson of "Experience" is so powerful, not only
because of the essay's psychological realism in comparison
to Nature, but because of the dramatic swing in emphasis.
The earlier hope of re-uniting man with himself and of
securing certain knowledge gives way to the painful reali
zation that such a hope might only be a dream. Yet this
turning of vision from nature to the mind itself
46
necessarily followed when Emerson apocalyptically proclaims
at the end of Nature that
The problem of restoring to the world
original and eternal beauty is solved by the
redemption of the soul. The ruin or the
blank that we see when we look at nature, is
in our own eye. The axis of vision is not
coincident with the axis of things, and so
they appear not transparent but opaque. The
reason why the world lacks unity, and lies
broken and in heaps, is because man is dis
united in himself. He cannot be a naturalist
until he satisfies all the demands of the
spirit. (41)
The world is not fallen; rather it is man's vision
which sees a fallen world. Consequently it is only through
a different kind of "seeing" guided by the soul that man
can catch glimpses of the lawful and eternal. Philosophi
cal idealism is rejected in favor of "spirit" (Sealts 81)
which permeates the world and can be known if only we learn
how to discipline ourselves to see it. The soul will find
its lost unity through a perceptual relation with those
"visible things."
Nature is the "Not-Me" and is external to the soul,
the stable, unchangeable substance of the self. This "Not-
Me," however, includes all phenomena including "art, all
other men and my own body" (CW I 8). Furthermore, since
the only thing of substance is the soul, then the ego, too,
must vanish, for it also is a phenomenon classified as the
Not-Me. True seeing is not willed nor is it subject to
rational control. It is spontaneous, arrives unexpectedly,
47
and is possible for anyone to experience. It is an identi
fication with the object that results in a looking through
the object to spirit. Emerson says
Our spontaneous action is always the
best. . . . Our thinking is a pious recep
tion. Our truth of thought is therefore
vitiated as much by too great negligence.
We do not determine what we will think. We
only open our senses, clear away, as we can,
all obstruction from the fact, and suffer
the intellect to see. (CW II 195)
Emersonian action is a willed passiveness. The ego
must submit to the object it contemplates. It cannot pro
ject a form upon the object but must receive those eidetic
outlines from the thing itself. This action is a kind of
"doing" because it obediently follows along in perceiving
whatever aspects the object presents to one's vision. This
is, however, only the preliminary work on the way to ex
tended vision. Emerson does not seek knowledge of the
object but rather the non-sensual experience of one's soul
uniting with the Oversoul which occurs as one's vision
passes through the object to this Universal Spirit. At
this moment one experiences a loss of the isolated ego and
is subsequently reconnected to the world.
Standing on the bare ground-'-my head
bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into
infinite space— all mean egotism vanishes.
I become a transparent eyeball; I am noth
ing; I see all; the currents of the Univer
sal Being circulate through me; I am part or
parcel of God. (CW I 10)
The grossness of this bald, imposing eyeball poses a
problem I will return to, but for now I want to continue to
48
examine the teleology of this special kind of seeing. In
Nature Emerson provides us with an outline and trajectory
of vision's three levels. We begin first in the sensual
world where things are opaque, distinct in their sharp out
lines, and point nowhere beyond themselves. But with "the
first efforts of thought," the senses are made to relax
their grip upon things, and "Reason . . . [then] shows us
nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat." At this second
level the distinctness of individual objects begins to
blur; "to outline and surface are at once added grace and
expression," which "proceed from imagination and affec
tion." The emphasis is now shifting from the object out in
the world to the qualities derived from one's vision of it.
Now, however, it is possible to move on to the highest
level of seeing where,
[I]f the Reason be stimulated to more
earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become
transparent, and are no longer seen; causes
and spirits are seen through them. The best
moments of life are these delicious awaken
ings of the higher .power§, and the reveren
tial withdrawing of nature before its God.
(CW I 30)
Here we have the mechanics of vision necessary in
order to reach pure presence. It is mind working upon
objects, dissolving their opacity under the light of
vision, transforming them to a translucency where no thing
but the "all" of the Universal Spirit is revealed. This
American version of presence has nothing to do with
49
rational knowledge, and it is equally attainable by every
one. Emerson raises this transcendental seeing to a cul
tural ethic of action that would redeem the self, renovate
society, and transform nature into culture. Sherman Paul
defines this kind of seeing as "Democratic vision." It is
the "wider look in which all things [are] alike or equal
ized" (76). The teleology of Emersonian vision finds ulti
mate unity in the far distant look. If things and people
appear different and unequal, it is only because of our
short-sightedness. A more "earnest vision" will integrate
these seeming disparities into a spherical unity.
In the essay "Circles" we find this same emphasis on
sphericity. "The eye is the first circle; the horizon
which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this
primary figure is repeated without end" (CW II 179). Or,
if it does end, we will have reached that most perfect of
all Augustinian circles--God— which, of course, is un
attainable. Since transcendental vision is momentary, it
too, as action, is always incomplete action, and we are
never through acting. For
every action admits of being outdone. Our
life is an apprenticeship to the truth that
around every circle another can be drawn;
that there is no end in nature, but every
end is a beginning; that there is always
another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under
every deep a lower deep opens. (179)
In rendering all opacities into transparencies,
Emersonian seeing dictates the mutability and unreality of
50
all things. "There are no fixtures in nature. The uni
verse is fluid and volatile" (179). Under the powerful
gaze of vision, material facts become fluid, nature is
transformed into spirit and reappears as culture, dominated
by the rule "of an idea which draws after it this train of
cities and institutions" (179). Yet, because seemingly
permanent structures are believed to be temporary, the
present cultural embodiment of an idea only serves as the
opportunity for further action. As the horizon encompassed
by the eye recedes when we march through time and apace,
the present idea gives way to its successor. So, in rising
"into another idea . . . cities and institutions . . . will
disappear."
This is an astonishingly radical power. It is this
kind of provocation that leads Harold Bloom to declare
Emerson "our sweetest and most civilized writer and our
wildest and most primitivistic. . . . Compared to Emerson,
poor Allen Ginsberg is a pallid academic imposter, a
gentle donkey masquerading as an enraged waterbuffalo"
("Emerson: The Glory and Sorrows" 160). Bloom claims that
Emersonian vision is really no mysticism, but the "American
Sublime." It is a "wildness or holistic freedom in which
the spirit, transparent to itself, knows its own splendor,
and by knowing that knows all things. This is not a
mystical reverie . . ., but a rather sober, even mater-of-
fact state" (158). The mystic seeks union with God, while
51
Emerson already knows that God is within and only needs to
be realized through action.
This attitude toward personal vision is double-sided.
On the one hand, it strives to achieve unity; on the other,
it struggles against closure within a unity which will in
evitably prove through further experience to be too con
stricting. Later, I will demonstrate how both aspects of
the visionary are transformed and accented by specific
compositionists in attempting to explain how writers
achieve authority. Ann Berthoff, for instance, weights the
sharpening of perception as primary in a student writer's
development, while Patricia Bizzell values resistance to
established meanings as a necessary stance for any develop
ing writer to establish.
We can see more of this double-sidedness with its
emphasis on unity and resistance manifested in Emerson's
depiction of the relationship between thinking and action.
In "The American Scholar" Emerson values simple living
along with the contemplative life of "Man Thinking." It is
from our daily lives that the material for thought origi
nates. "Without it thought can never ripen into truth"
(CW I 59). Emerson distinguishes between action and
thought, with action preceding thought and serving as its
catalyst. He usually describes it in terms of transitions.
"The preamble of thought, the transition through which it
passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action.
52
Only so much do I know, as I have lived" (CW I 59). In
fact, the key to our personal power is found within these
transitions.
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it
resides in the moment of transition from
a past to a new state, in the shooting of
the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This
one fact the world hates; that the soul
'becomes' .... (CW II 40)
The greatest power that human beings are capable of
possessing resides potentially in our matter-of-fact lives
as they are continuously lived. Emerson is thus consecrat
ing each individual life, proclaiming that, no matter what
we do, what our work is, or what our position in society,
we all have the capability through vision of realizing this
divine power within. "Truth" in the abstract is meaning
less. "Truth" is always truth to the person who recognizes
it; hence its biographical character.
The inward analysis must be corrected by
rough experience. Metaphysics must be per
petually reinforced by life; must be the
observations of a working man on working
men; must be biography,— the record of some
law whose working was surprised by the ob
server in natural action. (W XII 13) ^
The course of action as transition leads to conscious
and directed thinking about a given object which finally
gives way to expression (Sealts 89). For the poet and
scholar this expression is typically a text. But any fact
in nature as a specific embodiment of the Universal Spirit
can function as the starting up of the transitional cycle.
53
Expressions or products of our actions serve as intermedi
ary points linking continuous transitions between these
facts. Since Emerson values possibilities, he favors the
continually moving relations between objects and our per
ceptions of those objects. Hence the status of the object
is always threatened in the visionary act. This problem of
Emersonian vision is aptly represented in the "transparent
eyeball" passage. Note the transitions between these
brief, apocalyptic sentences:
I become a transparent eyeball; I am
nothing; I see all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part and parcel of God.
The self of the seer is completely effaced in the
moment of ultimate vision. Yet, if this is the case, then
who is doing this seeing? And what, exactly, would be this
"all" that one is seeing? The perceiver and the objects of
perception are reduced to the figure of an eyeball. But an
eyeball is a grotesque organ, useless for seeing anything
when it is detached from a human being. This passage marks
the limit of Emersonian thought in trying to express the
unthinkable, for this is "an image for the impossible act
of sight seeing itself" (Pease 225). The Emersonian seer
in the quest for spirit can go in either of two directions:
Looking out toward nature and through it to spirit, and
thus risk losing the world; or turning inward upon oneself
in trying to see the act of seeing, an infinite regress
wherein lies only madness
54
Obviously, neither of these alternatives is attrac
tive. With this single image Emerson is stretching the
concept of "experience" to its breaking point. Common-
sensically, experience is, as Richard Harland defines it,
"precisely the place where objective things make contact
2
with subjective ideas" (76). Either we embrace experi
ence of the world in all its manifoldness and multiplicity
(which a student recently told me was "what life is all
about after all"), or we reflect upon our subjective ex
periences and risk wandering "without end . . . in the
splendid labyrinth of [our] perceptions." Emerson tries
to escape this opposition by making the metaphysical leap
to spirit. However, though I believe Emerson should be
taken at his word with his belief in God, we still need to
know how we might have God, the concrete world, and flesh
and blood people as well without losing the latter two in
a complete effacement before God. Emerson seems to be
aware of this problem as the grotesqueness of the eyeball
metaphor attests to the fact that we can never escape from
our consciousness without ceasing to be human. This opti
mistic Emersonian vision can dissolve many disagreeable
things very quickly, such as "swine, spiders, snakes,
pests, mad-houses, prisons, [and] enemies" (CW I 45), but
if it cannot escape the bald fact of its own presence in
the world, a presence clearly distinct from objects not
55
itself, then it would follow that these other objects
would have to remain in their concrete existence as well.
It is not surprising, then, that the height of
Emersonian vision occurs infrequently and only momentarily.
Consequently, we are left having to account for all of
those innumerable moments in between that make up most of
our ordinary lives (Packer, Emerson's Fall 156). In Emer
son's later works there is a subtle shift in focus. In
"Experience" particularly Emerson becomes the psychological
realist (Greenberg 213) who "makes explicit what is im
plicit throughout the second series: that bracketing ques
tions of noumenality, even of existence— the transcenden-
tality of epistemology— he now wishes to speak solely for
our experience as empirically real" (Van Leer 154). Emer
son unflinchingly faces the experience of the self isolated
within the citadel of its private consciousness, beyond the
realm of the purely sensuous, where "All things swim and
glimmer," and where "Our life is not so much threatened as
our perception" (CW III 2 7). Emerson learns that
It is very unhappy, but too late to be
helped, the discovery we have made, that we
exist. That discovery is called the Fall
of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our
instruments. We have learned that we do
not see directly, but mediately, and that
we have no means of correcting these
colored and distorting lenses which we are,
or of computing the amount of their errors.
Perhaps these subject-lenses have a crea
tive power; perhaps there are no objects.
Once we lived in what we saw; now, the
rapaciousness of this new power, which
56
threatens to absorb all things, engages us.
Nature, art, persons, letters, religions,
— objects, successively tumble in, and God
is but one of its ideas. (CW III 43-4)
The earlier Emerson, especially in Nature, placed
faith in the power of consciousness to see through objects
to spirit. This is also true of language, which, as an
object must likewise be seen through. We can catch
glimpses of the Universal Spirit through our use of lan
guage if we can connect the proper linguistic symbol with
its proper natural object. Connecting our subjective per
ceptions with their proper objects by means of words de
pends upon our virtuous character which enables us to obey
what the object reveals to us and which we can then faith
fully report in language. Distortion of this picture
enters when we fail to follow the moral sentiment.
A man's power to connect his thought
with its proper symbol, and so to utter it,
depends on the simplicity of his character,
that is, upon his love of truth and his
desire to communicate without loss. The
corruption of man is followed by the cor
ruption of language. When simplicity of
character and the sovereignity of ideas is
broken up by the prevalence of secondary
desires,— the desire of riches, of pleasure,
of power, and of praise,— the duplicity and
falsehood take place of simplicity and
truth, the power over nature as an inter
preter of the will is in a degree lost; new
imagery ceases to be created, and old words
are perverted to stand for things which are
not; . . . Hundreds of writers may be found
in every long-civilized nation who for a
short time believe and make others believe
that they see and utter truths, who do not
of themselves clothe one thought in its
natural garment, but who feed unconsciously
5 7
on the language created by the primary
writers of the country, those, namely, who
hold primarily on nature.
But wise men pierce this rotten diction
and fasten words again to visible things
.... (CW I 20)
The circuit connecting self through language to nature
and then through nature to spirit, resulting in an expan
sion of self toward spirit, is broken by the time of
"Experience" because that disunity within the soul had be
come impossible to remedy. Hence one can never be certain
that perception can pierce "rotten diction" in getting to
the object or that in translating nature we can find the
"proper symbol" for it. Instead of a correspondence theory
of truth matching symbol with thing in Nature, Emerson
comes later to discover that nature is in Barbara Packer's
phrase "infinitely polysemous" (Emerson's Fall 190).
Packer explains that the consequence of this shift make
nature no longer a book, but
a process, a flux, a "rushing stream." "Its
smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch
of the cataract. Its permanence is a per
petual inchoation." It is no longer con
ceived of as a veil separating man from
eternity, but as a gigantic trope for
eternity .... (190-91)
The meaning of nature is overdetermined, and, as language
attempts to render nature, it, too, must reflect this over
determination, and the user must then be content to follow
along with this infinite referral.
58
Since nature is now cut off from man, unfolding in
infinite diversity, the writer's task is to represent this
perpetual motion. In commenting on Emerson's poet, Packer
says that "He is to suggest nature's perpetual meta
morphoses by his ceaseless proliferation of tropes; his
chief virtue is what the classical theorists called
'copia'" (192). This "proliferation of tropes" becomes a
liberating activity, and, if the poet can excite the imagi
nation of others, then the use of symbols "has a certain
power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men" (192).
The subtle shift here is from using language as a
medium to get at meaning to using language to change our
current perceptions of what a word might mean now in its
present usage. In "The Divinity School Address" Emerson
had earlier told the graduating students that "Always the
seer is the sayer" (CW I 84). One has to express the
thought arrived at through vision lest it remain mute and
lie "like a burden on the man." If this thought is true,
then it can also be translated into a common language so
that others can share in this truth. In "The American
Scholar" Emerson had boldly proclaimed the power of the
orator to connect with his audience. The scholar first
learns "that he who has mastered any law in his private
thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose lan
guage he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can
be translated" (CW I 63). In speaking and expressing his
59
thought publicly, the scholar becomes the orator who
initially distrusts
. . . the fitness of his frank confessions,
his want of knowledge of the persons he
addresses, until he finds that he is the
complement of his hearers; that they drink
his words because he fulfils for them their
own nature; the deeper he dives into his
privatest, secretest presentiment, to his
wonder he finds this is the most acceptable,
most public, and universally true. The
people delight in it; the better part of
every man feels, This is my music; this is
myself. (CW I 63)
But by the time we get to "The Poet," the essay pre
ceding "Experience" in these essays' published order, the
possibility of expressing universal truths through a common
language gives way to a view of language as transitional.
This use of language allows one to overturn previous
thoughts and thus to become liberated from the prison of
past meanings which are always only partial and constrict
ing. The poet is the seer who revivifies the world through
the proper use of symbols; yet everything is a symbol in
cluding "workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth
and death" (CW III 12). Consequently, the poet is a trans
lator, continually working to make all things speak a new
language. "The poet . . . gives them [things] a power
which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a
tongue into every dumb and inanimate object" (CW III 12).
These new expressions are new thoughts which "enhance the
great and constant fact of life," and, since "thought is
60
multiform," it suggests the manifoldness and metamorphosis
of all things in nature, that "force impelling every
creature . . . to ascend into a higher form." And as these
forms express this great and constant fact of life, so the
poet's "speech flows with the flowing of nature" (12).
All forms are to be read and re-read. One meaning
arrived at is only the temporary resting point to begin the
next transition as all present meanings, facts, and
thoughts become occasions for further revisions.
But the quality of the imagination is to
flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not
stop at the color or the form, but read
their meaning; neither may he rest in this
meaning, but he makes the same objects ex
ponents of his new thought. Here is the
difference betwixt the poet and the mystic,
that the last nails a symbol to one sense,
which was a true sense for a moment, but
soon becomes old and false. For all sym
bols are fluxional; all language is vehic
ular and transitive, and is good, as
ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not
as farms and houses are, for homestead.
(CW III 20)
As conveyances, words take us from somewhere we are
now toward somewhere else, but we never quite arrive at our
destination. For, if we do, that transitive quality of
language ceases as power does "in the instant of repose."
By the time of "The Poet" Emerson can still hear the faint
echoes of language as a kind of "fossil poetry." Neverthe
less, those echoes are heard, less because of the power of
one's mind actually to "pierce this rotten diction" but
more because this piercing is possible as the result of
61
one's ability to turn language against itself. Strong
proponents of Emersonianism specifically emphasize this
dimension of his thought. The literary critic Richard
Poirier, for example, champions this linguistic genius he
finds in Emerson. For Poirier, Emerson, like all geniuses,
is a representative presence influencing cultural— specifi
cally literary— renewal through active resistance toward
existing forms and traditions. The genius' primary action
is troping. Poirier argues that
troping gives evidence of the human in
volvement in the shaping of language, and
it prevents language from imposing itself
upon us with the force and indifference of
a technology. It frees us from pre
determined meanings. Troping is the turn
ing of a word in directions or detours it
seemed destined otherwise to avoid.
(Renewal 131)
We can also note Emerson's own troping of himself as
his view of language shifts from seeing it as "fossil
poetry," an object of lifelessness and decay, to viewing it
as a city. In the late essay "Quotation and Originality,"
Emerson says that
Language is a city to the building of
which every human being brought a stone;
yet he is no more to be credited with the
grand result than the acaleph which adds a
cell to the coral reef which is the basis
of the continent. (W VIII 199)
Barbara Packer insightfully notes that the later emphasis
is on the accretions to language rather than on its decay
and powerlessness ("Origin and Authority" 88-9). We all
62
live in and contribute to the vast collectivity called lan
guage. The power of genius is still present— Emerson never
loses his faith in this primordial power— yet it gets in
creasingly difficult to separate it from its historical
circumstances. Earlier in "The American Scholar," for
instance, genius often sounds as if it is distinguishable
from the cultural forms of its appearance, while in this
late essay Emerson sounds as if genius can only be recog
nized because of these cultural forms. We read this in
"The American Scholar":
Man Thinking must not be subdued by his
instruments. Books are for the scholar's
idle times. When he can read God directly,
the hour is too precious to be wasted in
other men's transcripts of their readings.
(CW I 57)
The one thing in the world, of value, is
the active soul. This every man is en
titled to; this every man contains within
him, although in almost all men obstructed
and as yet unborn. The soul active sees
absolute truth and utters truth, or creates.
(CW I 57)
Contrast this autonomy of the soul and its perception of
truth with this later evaluation:
Our debt to tradition through reading
and conversation is so massive, our protest
or private addition so rare and insignifi
cant,— and this commonly on the ground of
other reading or hearing,— that, in a large
sense, one would say there is no pure
originality. All minds quote. (W VIII 178)
Every individual is only a momentary fixa
tion of what was yesterday another's, is
today his and will belong to a third tomor
row. So it is in thought. Our knowledge
63
is the amassed thought and experience of
innumerable minds; our language, our
science, our religion, our opinions, our
fancies we inherited. (200)
"Quotation and Originality" almost makes Emerson
sound like a nineteenth century intertextualist. I say
"almost" because Emerson refuses to capitulate to social
and historical forces what is a scarcely discernible
essence of being human. The "soul," although reduced to
barrenness by the time of "Experience," still retains God
as "the native of these bleak rocks." And Emerson urges
all of us to "hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous,
and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of
action, possess our axis more firmly" (CW III 46). When in
action, this essence of selfhood is "genius." It is what
Poirier defines as "an idea of the self, even though it is
a self far more shadowy than his [Emerson's] rhetoric of
individualism has led people to suppose" (86-7). For
Poirier, this "self" is not an entity but "an intimation of
presence," which "comes upon us out of the very act of
which the self tries to elude definition." In other words,
those tropings, those turnings of words against themselves,
those topplings of received definitions manifest genius
through these various activities.
Poirier describes genius "as an activity, an influx, a
movement," and "as energy" (88). It is an elusive term
which Poirier advises us not to press Emerson too hard to
64
define (93), for it stands as a term invoking hope for the
possiblities of human life, and, as a non-definable term,
its chief function is to resist all definitions. As a term
of substance, it grounds the self; yet, lacking a content,
it cannot be socialized. It is universal and transpersonal;
yet not reducible to an empirical, psychological ego. As
"activity" genius locates primary importance in action,
which, for Emerson, is transition, "the preamble of
thought," or the just-about-to-become-conscious. It is not
simply giving oneself over to the flow of experience, for
this leads to mindlessness, perpetual drift, and loss of
the self. Rather, it involves some measure of will and
direction of consciousness in apprehending the-about-to-be
object of thought. Poirier describes this mental act as
"an antagonistic movement by which the mind counteracts its
tendency to inertia" (173).
We must accept the influence of the past, even imitate
its forms as Emerson recommends in "The American Scholar,"
but we can never be content to rest in this passive servi
tude. That activating power of genius, potential within
each of us, must show forth in transitional acts which dis
solve the form while at the same time make use of it on the
way to creating newer forms. "Making it new," however, is
never a making of something completely original: it is
always derived from the familiar. One must accept and
begin working within one's cultural and historical
65
situation, but one's fundamental duty is also to work
against that tradition as well. Poirier describes this
activity for writers from one period to the next in "making
it new" as meaning
. . . something like this: please give me
your activating power, your germinating
power; meanwhile keep what you yourself
have done with it, knowing that traces of
it will appear in what will now replace it.
Distinct from what most readers propose to
find in works of the past, distinct from
their meaning, their images, their histori
cal consequentialities, and hidden away
even in works which depict forms of life
wholly unlike anything later generations
recognize as their own, there can be found
evidences of a kind of action, of doing, or
movements that are forever young and yet as
old as creation itself. (Renewal 166)
Emerson preaches perpetual transference. The soul is
always becoming, and genius is the transpersonal agency
through which the soul acts. Genius as agency overcomes
all obstacles and discontinuities; it connects isolated
selves with one another; it binds communities and genera
tions. It is manifested and liberated by readers and
writers, moving from text to text, settling in no single
place for very long. It is a radical, disruptive energy,
blurring distinctions between separate texts and rendering
meanings as transitory. However, on the cultural level
this radical power manifests itself as a national identity
which is always in the process of becoming. Emerson tells
us that as "America is a poem in our eyes" (CW III 22) and
as "poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with
66
which they ought to be made to tally" (CW III 15), then
"America" is a text subject to continual revision and
translation. Our American experience generates a new lan
guage which is not so much derived from the past as it is a
troping or deformation of the old and familiar. It is the
kind of poetic language that Emerson says must be critical
as well as creative (Riddel 905). It is a language in
which one can read the destiny of a nation.
Emersonian Implications for Composition
The Emersonian rhetoric of self-reliance insists on
the primacy and authority of the soul in all matters per
taining to meanings achieved. Driven by this American ver
sion of presence, the twin modes of Emersonian action—
seeing and saying— are early on attempts to see through
articulated meanings. But this kind of action results in
an all-encompassing, devouring power threatening to dis
solve all objects, including texts and the writers and
readers making use of them. Gradually, Emerson comes to
stress the apparent fact that vision increasingly fails to
make texts translucent. With this shift in focus, the
receptive power of soul becomes the more aggressive, con
structive power of genius, which sets texts and accepted
meanings in motion against one another generating a copia
of new meanings. Nonetheless, this is where I leave
Emerson, who by now is beginning to sound less the starry-
eyed romantic and more the de-transcendentalized
67
poststructuralist. But what does all of this portend for
composition?
The turn from product to process in the 1960s really
inaugurated composition as an emergent discipline. Yet
this turn to process also brought along complications par
alleling issues I have raised regarding Emerson. I am not
claiming total or even direct Emersonian influence on com
position; rather, I am using Emerson as a philosophical and
cultural guide who, because he is so extreme, can show us
more clearly the implications of raising process over pro
duct. Moreover, his example also reveals certain cultural
values we have likewise accepted unreflectively in espous
ing the composing process.
Emerson's elevation of action to a moral-cultural
level is similar to our valuing of writing as a moral-
practical activity. In raising process over product, com-
positionists have also elevated the value of the individual
student as a potential writer capable of producing compe
tent prose. "Process" has come to symbolize an inward
turn, away from the external authority of formal modes and
discourse conventions imposed on student writers, toward a
humanistic bias stressing the psychology of writers in the
act of composing. Process makes the text volatile, or,
following Emerson, it dissolves the opacity of the text and
transforms it into a dynamic field revealing human minds
engaged in continual activity. This inward turn taps into
68
that essential human power native to each of us. Neverthe
less, having initially recognized its existence and possi
bilities , we have since been at odds in our understanding
of how to provoke it in our students and how to show them
how it might be harnessed toward productive ends.
In embracing process— a necessary and beneficial act—
we also embrace other elements native to the Emersonian
tradition. Most significant are those linking self, lan
guage, and experience in a complex which has effects on the
personal, social, and cultural levels. Process has made
the text, like the object in Emersonian action, a temporary
location from which to begin further action, or, in the
writer's case, to begin further revisions. However, com
position winds up facing a problem similar to Emerson's
dilemma. We still need to account for the text, the
writer, and the act of writing without losing any of these
3
elements' distinctiveness in an all-encompassing process.
Paralleling Emerson's seeing and saying, we need to account
for the authority of the writer in composing meanings which
eventually get articulated in written texts. We need to
understand how we can reconcile our romantic impulses in
embracing process with the realities of texts as distinct
meanings producing often unforeseeable effects in the
world.
Toward furthering that reconciliation, in the follow
ing two chapters I will examine what I believe to be one of
69
the chief problems dividing the field. This conflict par
allels in significant ways Emerson's dilemma between seeing
and saying and basically comes down to one side regarding
composing as an individual mental act transcending any lin
guistic representations and not necessarily subject to
external control. The other side, though recognizing that
composing is still individual, claims that those mental
acts cannot be distinguished from their being embedded
within linguistic and rhetorical elements. I am calling
the former group the transcendentalists because they are
much closer to Emerson the seer, while I am calling the
latter faction the dialogists because they resemble more
Emerson's later emphasis upon language and textual meanings
as arising from specific contexts.
There is some overlap in these positions; for in
stance, some transcendentalists can value dialogue, but
they usually do so for different reasons than the dialo
gists. I also recognize that categorizing individuals can
distort real differences, so I will attempt to be as true
as possible to the spirit of each person's work, while
still trying to delineate essential differences between the
two groups. I will scrutinize representative figures from
both camps, explaining and critiquing their positions,
while focusing particularly on how they locate and explain
authority in the writing process. I will work chronologi
cally, beginning with positions held in the seventies and
70
moving steadily to the present. Though positions have
changed over the years, I think the basic differences still
hold up. At stake are not just issues concerning pedagogy,
but larger cultural and philosophical issues about which
Emerson is also concerned. At stake in this drama are
questions dealing with authority and resistance, power and
control, and language and its place in the life of the
mind.
71
NOTES
After volume III, all citations from Emerson will be
designated in this text with a W. These citations are
jfrom Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo
iEmerson, with a biographical intro, and notes by Edward
,Waldo Emerson. Centary ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, &
jCo., 190 3-04), 12 vol.
1 2
Although it does appear to be commonsensical that
experience is the point of contact of our ideas with their
objects, explaining the nature of this place of contact as
well as how it happens, opens up a can of philosophical
worms. Nonetheless, it is a crucial problem composition-
ists must face, and I attempt to begin facing up to it in
Chapter 6.
3
The view gaming most prominence now in composition
is that writing and reading are "transactions." See W.
Ross Winterowd, introduction, A Teacher's Introduction to
I Deconstruction, by Sharon Crowley (Urbana, Illinois: NCTE,
1989) ix. Also see Louise M. Rosenblatt, "Viewpoints:
Transaction Versus Interaction— A Terminological Rescue
Operation," Research in the Teaching of English, 19 (1985):
96. Rosenblatt offers a definition for "transaction"
which makes readers and writers and texts elements subsumed
within a larger context. This really does not tell us,
;though, exactly how reading and writing happen, nor does it
escape the problem of explaining whether the elements in
volved in this transaction are really independent of one
another or somehow merged together.
I CHAPTER 3
I
j The Great Divide: Transcendentalism and
I
I Dialogism in Composition
i
!
j The Present Scene
! In Chapter 1, I proposed that there are really two
I
basic positions informing the most influential theories of
writing in composition today. These two views hold that
I
writing either results from cognitive acts independent of
language and material circumstances, or from mental acts
inextricably embedded within particular linguistic and
social practices. As structured along these lines,
Patricia Bizzell in a noteworthy article in PRE/TEXT de
fines these two positions as either "inner-directed" or
'"outer-directed" ("Cognition, Convention" 215). The main
I
difference for Bizzell is that inner-directed theorists
attempt to explain composing by examining thinking pro
cesses and language structures "prior to social influence."
jIn contrast, outer-directed theorists emphasize that think
ing and language-learning are both social in nature.
For whatever reasons, Bizzell does not consider fig
ures in the transcendentalist's camp such as Macrorie,
Elbow, or Ann Berthoff. Instead, she identifies the inner-
directed theorists with cognitivists, specifically, Flower
73
[and Hayes, probably the most well known in composition.
[Because Bizzell neglects the transcendentalists, her anal-
'ysis lacks the cultural context that makes the inner-
^directed view so attractive to many in the field. Further-
»
Smore, the split between these two groups is not as dichoto-
mous as Bizzell describes it.
j From my view, what appears to be an opposition between
individualism and communalism is, if seen within this
Emersonian context, actually a manifestation of two closely
related aspects of any kind of human action. Namely, what,
[is essentially involved in this apparent dichotomy is the
nature of that "authority" authenticating human acts, in
this case, writing. For the way we define this "authority"
authenticating student texts, for instance, will determine
the quality of the power purportedly derived from such
acts.
Within the Emersonian context, the seeming opposition
between the individual and the community can be seen to
stem from a common source located in the conflict between
seeing and saying. Seeing as a kind of intuition into
i
phenomena relevant to our interests becomes for Emerson and
(mutatis mutandi) for compositionists increasingly impli
cated in the social influences of language. Although
Emerson never conflates seeing with saying, composition
ists, on the other hand, generally assume that language
mediates our thinking. Given this assumption, it follows
I
' 74
1 that the transcendentalists must assume that there is a
I
:power behind or working through thought that remains auton-
!
lomo-us. Moreover, if my argument is valid that this
!Emersonian tradition still informs current writing theo
ries* then the dialogists must somehow bring this strange
"power" back into their accounts explaining how writing
!can also be a form of authentic action.
i
i
; I will argue that the transcendentalists do, indeed,
j
assume that a special independent power operates within
and through the writer and that the correct use of this
power will result in an increase of authority. This kind
of action only occurs when writers take on a qualitatively
different kind of orientation toward their experiences. In
this chapter I will analyze the work of Ken Macrorie in
order to understand the particular dynamics of "experience"
and its relevance to authority in student writing. Addi
tionally, though, I want to demonstrate that Macrorie's
j important early work also harbors an ambivalent attitude
toward the community which becomes much more explicit in
the dialogists' accounts of writing. The independent power
I
ithat Macrorie assumes transforms a writer's experiences
i
into valuable texts becomes for the dialogists a form of
resistance manifested by student texts against established
meanings as defined by the community from within which the
writer writes. Hence, we can read into Macrorie's work a
I
key attitude toward power* authority, and experience which,
: 75
though transformed by the dialogists, still retains its
primary impulse toward liberation and independence.
Process
j ----------------------
; The turn to process by compositionists in the late
i
sixties and early seventies shifted emphasis from the text
jto the act of writing. Subsequently, inquiries and re
search have attempted to probe into what goes on in that
"black box" as well as to understand what social conditions
influence the way the mind works when students compose.
^Transforming composition into composing acts privileges
! ■
action over the products resulting from these actions.
J
Indeed, a more typical view now is that a sound, well-
crafted text follows only from a sound and efficient writ
ing process. This strong teleological orientation of the
writing process raises composing as a series of acts to the
isame level of value as the final text itself.
I
j Raising the value of the composing process parallels
Emerson's assertion in "The American Scholar" that action,
though subordinate to thinking, is essential. Merton M.
Sealts, Jr. in an article detailing Emerson's theory of the
jcreative process claims that, though Emerson can be con-
ifusing about the relationship between acting and thinking,
i
a clear pattern emerges. Sealts insightfully explains the
creative process as "a three-fold sequence of 'action,'
'intellection,' and finally 'utterance'" (89). "Action"
'does not possess the same meaning for Emerson that it
76
generally has for us today. Certainly, it does not in
volve social reform (see "New England Reformers," CW III).
;Rather, "action" for Emerson is the transition of the un-
jconscious to the conscious, whereby what is lived experi
ence eventually becomes a source of knowledge. He de-
|scribes it as that "strange process . . . by which 'experi-
jence is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is con-
!
verted into satin'" (qtd. in Sealts 90). True action for
Emerson, like the writing process, is teleological because
it leads into the quality of thinking and successive ex
pression that makes public new insights.
The distinction as well as the interconnection between
thinking and acting is important because in both transcen-
dentalist and dialogist pedagogies action is emphasized
lover that sort of conscious thinking that tries to figure
out what to write in a given instance. So, for example,
transcendentalists like Macrorie and Elbow advocate free-
writing as a technique to bypass that rational critic in
I
each of us which sometimes paralyzes us as we attempt to
compose. On the other side, dialogists such as Bruffee and
Bizzell extend the concept of action to include all phases
of one's writing development. So, as students develop,
they are able to communicate with others in their respec
tive discourse communities, while, simultaneously they also
learn— in ways that often appear to be less than conscious
i
— -how to resist the already accepted meanings in those
communities.
Consequently, I think our valuing of process has thus
carried with it certain tacit assumptions highly visible in
(Emerson. Most significant are those assuming composing to
I
jbe an ethical act, which, if followed out, leads to per
sonal and social transformations. Furthermore, the compos
ing process, coupled with its setting within the educa
tional system, has personalized learning, making the growth i
I
lof knowledge a process wherein its rate and contours of
(development as well as its content are more within the
I
student's control. Hence, typical of Emersonian self-
reliance, students can achieve intellectual independence
while working within the authoritative demands of the
institution.
Process has also shifted attention from the formal
I
jconventions and language of crafted texts to the student's
own language and use of it as she composes. Experience
likewise re-emerges as a valuable source of knowledge both
as content for writing and as an area of inquiry for
teachers and students in developing authority as writers.
Yet, while I do not doubt that these are all valuable ele
ments, we are uncertain about their actual significance and
how they influence one another. For instance, of crucial
!importance in helping students achieve authority is our
junderstanding of how language and experience help shape
78
1 -------------------------------------------------------------------
I thought and how this "thought" eventually gets expressed in
i
;writing. My contention here is that our cultural attitudes
in large measure affect how we understand these elements as
well as how we weight them in our theories of writing.
The transcendentalists in composition generally see
language as capable of being personalized and used as a
heuristic in composing meaning. Thus their theories of
language are not emphasized as mush as the play between
one's mental acts and language as a manipulated object.
j
The transcendentalists strive to overcome the external
I
1 authority of language as a social product, and the rhetoric
they use to discuss composing makes it appear as if all
writing is a moral act. Therefore, I see these composi-
tionists weighting what in Emerson I am calling seeing more
than the product of this vision. The dialogists, on the j
1 I
lother hand, subsume seeing under saying. Yet here I am I
I
I
;using "saying" metaphorically to depict mental acts
jthat are always embedded within a social context. This
i
group is highly diverse, with several of them, on the sur
face at least, seemingly bearing little resemblance to
Emerson. In fact, some of them self-consciously react
against Emersonianism (see Burke-Lefevre, esp. 10-47), per
ceiving self-reliance more as mean egotism, self-assertion,
I
!and as the illusion of believing that thinking originates !
i ' 1
jfrom within the individual. Nonetheless, in the manner in
which dialogists talk about authority, certain Emersonian
attitudes often sneak back into their discussions. Their
attitudes frequently resemble the later Emerson's antag-
jonism toward cultural forms and become what Richard Poirier
icalls "resistance in itself." As a result, language and
experience, essential components for both camps, get
,treated quite differently.
In presenting the similarities and differences between
these two positions I am selecting as representative cases
those figures most prominent and influential in the field,
|but who obviously are clearly more in line with the param
eters of this Emersonian tradition I have been discussing.
1
I am beginning with Ken Macrorie1s Telling Writing because
it is the earliest and most popular textbook (now in its
fourth edition) laying out the transcendentalist position.
In a real sense it is the Ur-text, naive in many ways in
comparison with the state of our present knowledge; yet it
« I
.crystallizes quite succinctly those particular Emersonian !
tensions between seeing and saying. Moreover, Macrorie's
work highlights the attendant cultural values accruing from
this shift to process. I would also argue, and this is
purely opinion at this point, that Macrorie's text set the
jstandard for innovative pedagogies, such as using the ;
t j
journal and working in peer groups. He also set an example-
with the rhetoric he used to address students. Macrorie's
audience is definitely students who he treats as equals and
80
as comrades-in-arms against the hegemony of previous writ
ing instruction under the rule of Departments of English.
In the next chapter I will contrast the transcenden-
talist and dialogist positions by using Peter Elbow and
I
; David Bartholomae as respective paradigm figures, and who
'clearly illustrate the tensions within the Emersonian tra
dition. Both of these compositionists are especially con
cerned with authority and power achievable by students in
their writing. In the subsequent chapter to this con
trastive one, I will fill out both positions with samplings
from figures central to each camp,
j Finally, though, what we must continually bear in mind
is that, even though the field in the eighties has moved to
view composing as social in nature, we still cannot bypass
the essential fact of our discipline. And that fact is
that composing is carried out by an individual having in-
I
\
j tuitions, making judgments, and exploring ideas that early
on during composing only she can really see within her
unique psychological processes and who must then search out
the evidence that will bring those initial insights to the
[
j intelligible light of public scrutiny.
I
Telling Writing
j
Ken Macrorie1s book Telling Writing represents a
major shift in composition instruction. When it came out
I in 19 70, the book galvanized growing sentiment in the
; field, stressing the personal nature of composing as well
81
!as the need for students to reclaim a language through
I
jwhich they could better understand themselves and their
I
{world and express the relationship between the two. The
^book was exceptional not only because of what it empha^
i
sized, but also because of its rhetoric. Written in a
'casual, strightforward, chatty style, Telling Writing was i
i .
{directed at students and utilized copious examples of stu-
I
ident writing interspersed with snippets from professional
'authors in illustrating elements of good writing Macrorie
Iwas attempting to demonstrate. This liberal use of actual
student work carried the implicit message to students that
they, too, were potential authors, and their words, through
skill and practice, could carry equal weight with anyone
else's. Hence the book's egalitarian appeal, uncomplicated
approach, and genuinely sympathetic attitude made it imme
diately popular.
Its popularity, however, was also rooted in the simple
Ifact that it was actually enjoyable to read. After all, as
i
Ross Winterowd remarked in a personal conversation, "Which
would you rather read— Macrorie's Telling Writing or the
l Harcourt Brace Handbook?"
!
During the sixties and early seventies the traditional
model approach to writing was expiring and was gradually
being replaced by rhetorics influenced by work done in com
munications and in General Semantics as well as by the
I revival of classical rhetoric.'*' Still, the vast majority
jof composition textbooks were based upon writing according
[
to general principles. Typically, these textbooks were
[written in a pedantic tone and were prescriptive, often
reciting a body of rules concerning the features of accept
able texts. They emphasized organizing essays according to
I thesis, topic sentence, and supporting detail. They also
contained heavy doses of grammar, punctuation, and mechan
ics and scarcely mentioned how one might actually go about
the process of writing; nor did they even offer any justi
fication for why anyone would want to write something in
the first place except to satisfy an arbitrary requirement.
Macrorie made writing sound exciting, creative, and person
ally meaningful. Thus, what I will develop at length here
i
|is how much its popularity can also be attributed to how
i
["American" it really was, echoing as it did the early
[Emerson's call to self-reliance and raising the value of
I
I common, ordinary experience which all students shared and
jcould tap into as a source for writing material.
Macrorie opens auspiciously with an anecdote about a
college student who has been told by her instructor that
she "can't write" and "therefore . . .shouldn't teach
English" (1). Macrorie leads us to believe that this stu-
I
dent would someday like to teach English, but we quickly
realize that she cannot be the kind of teacher her profes
sor is. Revolution is in the air. The student fights back
by satirizing the professor adapting James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake1s style and coins the word "Engfish." This
jbecomes Macrorie's symbol for everything wrong with school
I generally and with the teaching of writing specifically.
i
,In fact "Engfish" implicitly symbolizes everything wrong
with establishment society. It is "the phony, pretentious
language of the schools . . it is redundant and empty;
;it represents "theme" writing, that species of school writ
ing which serves only as the occasion for the teacher to
mark in blood-red ink all of the grammar, spelling, and
punctuation errors. "Engfish" is what keeps students dis-
junited with themselves because it keeps their private ex
periences out of their writing. And, if students are
forced to use language that is not their own, it is no
wonder that their writing sounds phony and dull. "In it
the student cannot express truths that count for him. He
i
! learns a language that prevents him from working toward
t
jtruths, and then he tells lies" (4).
In the background of Macrorie's anti-establishment
rhetoric one can hear such recent cultural literary heroes
as Holden Caufield from Catcher in the Rye praising
Macrorie's sane pronouncements. Macrorie's rhetoric is
perfectly in tune with the social unrest of the times and
meshes easily with that typical rebellious period of ado
lescence where all authoritative figures are suspect.
Chapter one of Telling Writing cleverly sets the scene of
this American drama being played out in the venerable, but
i
i
< ____________________ 84
decaying institution of the university. Hypothetically, if
Macrorie were to answer Emerson's rhetorical question open
ing Naturie, he would reply that "We can form an original
relation to the universe by overcoming 'Engfish.'" Student
writing suddenly becomes the "way out." But it will be a
"new" kind of writing because it will involve the student
»
j in a purificatory journey that can put the individual back
.in touch with herself via certain pedagogical practices
that would help correct the "axis of vision" of the soul
and allow a restored form of language to emerge, recon
necting the self to experience.
The way for each student writer to establish a claim
to authority is to begin by simply telling the truth; "not
the truth . . ., but some kind of truth— a connection
I between the things written about , the words used in the
writing, and the author's experience in a world she knows
well--whether in fact or dream or imagination" (5). As
i
l
Macrorie explains it, since childhood we have always known
the truth about our experiences with the world, but in
growing up we learn "to tell lies." Consequently, the
difference between the good writer and the bad is that the
good one is "constantly trying to shake the habit [of
lying]," and "she holds herself to the highest standard of
truth telling" (5). Writing as a form of truth telling is
I a pedagogy designed to help students unlearn bad habits
and to develop better ones.
85
Freewriting is the primary activity writers can use to
bypass old language habits. For in freewriting students
tap into their natural, oral use of language. They do not
worry about conventions of form or of grammar and punctua
tion but simply let go and let their minds follow along
with the natural flow of their speech as it relates an
experience. The goal of such an exercise is the possibil
ity of hitting upon a striking image, a surprising fact, or
an honest insight. Here is an extreme pair of examples of
what Macrorie means by "Engfish" and the truth telling
possible in freewriting. The first is by a college stu
dent; the second by a third-grader:
If you are a student who desires assis
tance in order to write effectively and
fluently, then this textbook is written for
you.
I can play huhwayun music on my gettar.
It is like when grandma took a sick spell.
Now she waz up tight as a jar with a lid on.
She gave a scream. When she gave that
scream it was high. But it got lower and
lower. Huhwayun music sounds something
like when she was getting lower. (3)
In Macrorie's opinion the first is written because the
student is writing what she thinks the teacher wants in the
kind of language that is a model for textbooks. In the
second passage, the child speaks in his natural voice,
without pretentiousness and with real words, alive and
speaking to each other. Macrorie frequently idealizes the
naturalness and wild-eyed wonder of childhood, playing it
86
[off against the forced awkwardness and dullness of late
i
adolescence.
I Freewriting in its function simulates that special
;three-fold sequence of the creative process which begins
with that species of Emersonian action attempting to con-
jvert experience into insight. As insights occur in this
! freewriting process, they stimulate and often lead to fur-
I
Ither thinking and, eventually, come to be expressed in more
|
[structured texts. For Macrorie "Engfish" symbolizes the
opacity of textuality— its conventionality, its bombastic
and artificial language, and its reference to experiences
iwhich students find incomprehensible. Freewriting as an
I
authentic act initiated by the student overcomes the
established system of textuality by making it disappear
within the generative flow of the student's language pro
duced during these freewriting sessions. Furthermore, if
the student remains disciplined enough to continue her
freewriting, indeed, if freewriting becomes a new habit in
her life, those occasional insights of truth will eventu-
I
I
!ally show m her writing.
These moments of insight, similar to Emersonian
moments of high seeing, occur infrequently and only because
one remains alert and ready to receive them. But whereas
Emersonian visions could occur spontaneously, freewriting
is a pedagogical technique designed to stimulate the
visionary process into action. The opacity and
steadfastness of the habituated everyday world we normally
dwell in begins to weaken and dissolve. Freewriting by
passes conventionality and allows the words one feels most
comfortable with to merge with the flow of consciousness as
this stream circulates about a selected object. Once in
awhile a new insight is gained because the object is seen
from a fresh perspective. This results in those "telling
facts" which are the significant kernels upon which further
insights are generated in writing longer, more focused
essays. Telling facts arise from our every day experi
ences, and, if we can capture them in just the right way
with our own words, they will speak truths which a more
self-conscious, planned choice of words rarely reveals.
This is Macrorie again explaining and showing us this
simple truth within any writer's grasp:
Telling facts are lying all around you
every minute of your life. Through free
writing you've already seen they are avail
able to you without asking. So let them
come to you. If occasionally they won't,
look for them, run them down.
Instead of saying,
"I found my trip to see my fiance was
marvelous. Being with him was even more
thrilling than I thought it would be. I
think it's real love."
give the reader the fact that drove you to
that generalization,
"He had a two-week leave after Basic,
so I flew to Jersey and we stayed with his
parents on the Shore. It was great being
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with him— even when his whole family
watched us watch television." (32)
These telling facts are certainly not to be mistaken
for Emersonian visions of spiritual laws; nevertheless, the
same principle of beginning with the simple facts of expe
rience and letting the insights they reveal lead the writer
to greater truths is still operative. This recommended
kind of "seeing" for writers on one level is not any dif
ferent than the sorts of defamiliarization promoted as a
critical principle in literature by the Russian formalists
(see Shklovsky). Yet in the Emersonian tradition, this
sort of seeing is the privilege and duty of each of us for
establishing our individual authority as responsible lan
guage users within a system always threatening to curtail
individual powers. Freewriting simultaneously reclaims for
the self both the real life of experience and the language
to express it in; and, as action, it is a gesture exercis
ing personal freedom, a small individual act of rebellion
against the constraints of the systematic and against the
passive acceptance of the already defined. For Macrorie,
though, this attitude of resistance remains less important
and less emphasized than it does for the dialogists.
Macrorie's writing pedagogy is founded upon that
fundamental American principle of experience as a course of
knowledge. The small ordinary experiences when recorded
faithfully can lead to larger truths which transcend the
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personal and idiosyncratic in leading toward universal
meanings with which others can identify. Remaining alert
to the larger meanings hidden in common experience requires
student writers to make a fundamental change in attitude
and in their dealings with the world. Being open to expe
rience and its potential revelations implicitly sanctifies
common life and transforms the writer into a responsive and
trusting person, connected to life and rejoicing in its
infinite possibilities.
Once a writer finds a telling fact and
puts it down, it often pulls from the
depths other telling facts. (35)
Most of us go through each day looking
for what we saw yesterday and we find it,
to our half-realized disappointment. But
the man who daily expects to encounter
fabulous realities runs smack into them
again and again. He keeps his mind open
for his eyes. (38)
But if he keeps faith with himself and
what he is writing about, he makes a small
experience illuminate the nature of similar
or parallel experiences the reader has had.
(44)
If you didn't amaze yourself in free
writing, go back and try more. It's a
guaranteed activity: if you write fast—
without thinking of spelling, grammar,
punctuation, or form— and try to tell
truths, sooner or later you will write
something that moves you and others. Then
you will become more confident and begin
to respect your own experiences because you
realize they are different from every other
person's in the world— and so the ultimate
source of your power as writer. (185)
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A rejuvenated, confident self emerges because
Macrorie's pedagogy preaches self-reliance founded on self
trust that within each person lies a central unique truth
that when it is found and expressed will contribute in some
small measure to our leading richer lives. Yet what is to
prevent this form of self-reliance from degenerating into
self-indulgent, romantic expressivism, the self-trumpeting
of an inflated ego? There is a social ethic informing
Macrorie1s pedagogy which restrains the personal ego and
channels the writer's energies toward implicit socially
meliorative ends. To those two pedagogical elements I now
turn.
The Journal and the Helping Circle
Emerson is always careful to distinguish soul from
ego. Self-reliance is guided by the moral sentiment as
true action is disciplined by faithfulness to experience in
comprehending it and expressing its meaning to others.
What is private and idiosyncratic about experience must be
seen through to what is universal. A favored genre both
for Emerson and other transcendentalists in the nineteenth
century and still for many compositionists today is the
journal. Within the American version of presence I de
scribed in the last chapter, I pointed out the connection
between the destiny of the individual and the destiny of
the country. Individual experience is useless unless it
can reveal those precious inghts, those larger meanings,
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that can then be seen in their universal aspects. Record
ing one's daily observations, then, becomes a social duty
rather than just a mere personal indulgence. Hence the
transcendentalist's journal differs significantly from the
merely personal diary.
Lawrence Buell in a scholarly treatment of Literary
Transcendentalism sees the journal as a genre native to the
American tradition, descending from the Puritan conversion
journals reporting spiritual self-examination and evolving
into the autobiographical tradition so prevalent in Ameri
can literature (Buell chp. 10). Since the transcendental
ists distrusted literary artifice, they rejected the highly
structured conversion narratives such as the Personal
Narrative of Jonathan Edwards. To them spiritual develop
ment was not determined from without according to some a
priori structure. Thus they rejected the conventions of
literary genres and eschewed conducting their lives accord
ing to strict religious formalism. Rather, the transcen
dentalists were too self-conscious and sceptical of the
fictional, plot-oriented nature of conversion narratives.
Thus they sought out "spiritual experience per se, the sig
nificant moment, the intuitive perception" (277). The
field of inquiry for the transcendentalists was not a
supernatural frame of reference but every object in the
world in relation to the self. Buell writes:
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Spiritual health now seems to consist in
perceiving the divinity in as many differ
ent shapes as possible, not in regular en
counters in one's prayer closet. Every cir
cumstance, every emotional nuance was poten
tially of spiritual import. In a sense the
same was true for the Puritans, but the
Transcendentalists differed in at least two
ways. First, they came closer to believing
that all phenomena were of equal relevance
(one recalls Emerson's insistence that a
gnat is as good a metaphor for God as a
Lord of Hosts); second, and more important,
the Transcendentalists felt actively com
pelled to seek out and perceive signifi
cance in phenomena. (2 77-7 8)
Buell goes on to point out that these momentary in
sights happened infrequently; hence, whatever confessions
the transcendentalists made, it was not out of a sense of
guilt for sins committed but for a failure of perception.
Journalizing was viewed as an informal schooling for
authorship, and Emerson's typical method of composition was
to select several journal entries, work them up into
lecture form, and eventually turn them into publishable
essays (57). Journal entries were supposed to avoid the
superficial and the idiosyncratic because authorship was
sanctioned to entail the expression of universal as opposed
to solipsistic "truths," But, of course, one could never
be certain that a seemingly commonplace occurrence today
could not become, after further contemplation, the revela
tion of tomorrow.
First-person writing was naturally encouraged because
each person had to realize the universal for himself, yet
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the "I" of this writing had to be representative of every
one. Buell cites Emerson's "Thoughts on Modern Literature"
concerning this use of "I" as "welcomed or censured accord
ing to whether his work"
. . . leads us to Nature, or to the person
of the writer. The great always introduce
us to facts: small men introduce us always
to themselves. The great man, even whilst
he relates a private fact personal to him,
is really leading us away from him to an
universal experience. (Buell 270)
The journal, then, for the transcendentalists, served
to train would-be authors by first establishing the indi
vidual's unique position in the world regarding experience.
But from there the writer was next to develop those in
sights into universal meanings applicable to all and thus
insuring that the writer was speaking from authority. For
Macrorie the journal is also a pedagogical aid encouraging
authorship. The facts of personal experience are recorded
regularly and, over time, students may begin to see larger
meaningful patterns emerging. The isolated, seemingly
trivial observation recorded today may eventually hook up
with other singular observations and lead to further gen
eralizations. Nevertheless, all journal-writers, according
to Macrorie, must observe one fundamental rule: Journals
should "not speak privately" but "can be read with profit
by other persons than the writer" (131).
To avoid the merely private and to help writers meet
the needs of their audience, Macrorie recommends what he
94
calls the "helping circle." This is a small peer group in
which student writers discuss and critique one another's
drafts. The ideal of this group work is cooperation and
mutual help as each writer is engaged in the common task
of improving writing— whether one's own or someone else's.
"The best writing," Macrorie tells us, is that which
"teaches readers to see better" (71). "Seeing better" is
the community goal, which thus makes writing serve as an
agency of self-improvement. Nowhere in Macrorie, or for
that matter in the work of most of the composition!sts I am
designating as transcendentalists, is there mention of
writing as a pragmatic, communicative activity, used to
maintain the normal course of society's affairs. However
the helping circle and the use of the journal are actually
pedagogical aids supported by a social ethic underlying the
transcendentalists' emphasis on writing as a form of
seeing. Since seeing is privileged over pragmatic communi
cation, the opacity of the text as a set of conventions
making it conform to a specific historical and cultural
context is de-emphasized in favor of valuing the text as a
transitional object used by writers and readers to facili
tate the developing and refining of higher seeing. Latent
here, but nevertheless informing this kind of writing, is
that Emersonian insistence that the only way to improve
society is to improve its individual members. But self-
improvement will come about only through a change in
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perception, stimulated by a shift in the attitude one takes
toward the world.
While Macrorie and other likeminded compositionists,
such as Peter Elbow, have been chastized for being anti-
rhetorical and for focusing exclusively on writing as a
form of individual expression, I believe their pedagogies
remain popular because they are embedded in this particular
cultural matrix echoing a sociality based on what Alexis de
Tocqueville loosely defined as American "mores." It is
precisely these mores that Robert Bellah, et al., in fol
lowing de Tocqueville's lead, say are those "habits of the
heart' or "notions, opinions and ideas that 'shape mental
habits.'" They are "'the sum of moral and intellectual
dispositions of men in society,'" with these mores seem
ingly involving "not only ideas and opinions but habitual
practices with respect to such things as religion, politi
cal participation, and economic life" (Bellah 37).
Although it has never been acknowledged, the latent
sense of community in Macrorie is important. What he is
implying about the quality of a true community possesses a
rich history. In a footnote further explicating this sense
of 'heart,' Bellah comments on Pascal's influence on de
Tocqueville. For Pascal 'heart' is a philosophical con
cept, still used rather vaguely, but indicating an opposi
tion to Cartesian reason. 'Heart' seems to indicate a kind
of practical, day-to-day reasoning. Its roots are
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ultimately biblical where, both in the Old and New Testa
ments, heart is spoken of "as involving intellect, will,
and intention as well as feeling." "Habits of the heart is
possibly linked with the law written in the heart" (n.28,
312) .
Bellah, nevertheless, uncritically accepts the popular
view of Emersonian individualism as a version of Romantic
self-expressivism and thus as working against these habits
of the heart, which form the basis for community responsi
bility. I would argue, contra Bellah, that, as Jonathan
Bishop has pointed out, the Emersonian "soul"— like "heart"
— is the sort of all-inclusive concept involving intellect,
will, intention, and feelings which overcomes self
alienation and allows one to form an original relation to
the universe. Re-inforcing this American version of
presence, establishing an original relation, whether to
nature or to other selves, requires a personal change of
heart. Hence, as one's autobiography is to be read as an
indication of the health of the nation, so it follows that
the destiny of the nation is in the hands of individuals—
whether the farmer, the businessman, the politician, or the
freshman comp student using writing in order to arrive at
new perceptions of self and the world.
Individual action is oriented toward the common good,
yet the common good is not reducible but supercedes effi^-
cient pragmatic ends. The common good is that which will
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spiritually benefit all people. Thus individual actions
must arise from virtue and the sense of duty toward one's
community, and only in this way can this spiritual princi
ple be realized. Emerson strongly voices the necessity of
acting from virtue in "The Divinity School Address."
Virtue issues from the moral sentiment which itself intuits
the universally perfect laws of the soul. Thought is asso
ciated with the intellect, while virtue proceeds from the
heart. Emerson says that
Thought may work cold and intransitive
in things, and find no end or unity; but
the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the
heart, gives and is the assurance that Law
is sovereign over all natures; and the
worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to
break out into joy ....
This sentiment lies at the foundation of
society, and successively creates all forms
of worship. (CW I 79)
Emerson concludes Nature with all things proceeding
from spirit. Similarly, in the "Address" all action, in
cluding perceiving and thinking are grounded in virtue.
Hence the pure reason of the intellect and the practical
reason dealing with the probable are not so much conflated
but subsumed under the moral sentiment. Virtue is less a
demonstrable doctrine and more a state of being. It is a
kind of "duty-in-action" (Van Leer 82-93). A. J. Cascardi
claims that Emerson's insistence on the moral tag involved
in any epistemological act is an attempt to move away from
the idealism of Kant and Coleridge (201). Emerson, like
98
Kant, is responding to skepticism; however, Emerson be
lieves that skepticism will not be overcome by reason
alone. Knowledge of the world must be prefaced with an
understanding of our relationship to the world. For it is
Emerson's belief that, if metaphysics is to possess any
validity, it must be tested "against the demands of actual
experience" (Cascardi 202). Nonetheless such "testing" re
quires that one open oneself up to experience in order to
see what is really there, and then to follow this up by
reporting as faithfully as possible to one's community what
has been seen. This duty of opening to experience and its
accurate reporting is an example of virtue in action, but,
in order for virtue to manifest itself, one must undergo a
change in heart, a shift in one's attitude toward the
world.
Knowledge and action as grounded in one's actual
experience shares affinities with the tradition of the
sensus communis which Gadamer describes in Truth and Method
as "already present in the classical concept of wisdom"
(19). The universal rhetorical principle of "a good man
speaking well" implies not only speaking the truth as
established through reason, but speaking the truth so that
it can be understood by the audience as actually based on
common experience. The best rhetoric is that which pre
sents the matter at hand in such a way that the audience
can see for themselves that the speaker's views are
99
justified. This kind of rhetoric assumes a universal moral
principle operating, motivating all people to act out of
the sense of the general good.
Gadamer traces sensus communis from its roots in
antiquity through Vico, Lord Shaftesbury, Hume, Scottish
"common sense" philosophy, and up to Henri Bergson. Of
particular interest is the Swabian Pietist Oetinger who in
the eighteenth century sought to "delimit the claims of
science" through an appeal to the sensus communis as
established by Shaftesbury. Lord Shaftesbury understood
this concept as a social virtue meaning one's love of com
munity, natural affection for humanity, and obligingness
(Gadamer 24). Oetinger, however, uses the concept more in
line with Emerson in that it is associated with living
knowledge as opposed to abstract dogma--whether of church
or science. Oetinger translates sensus sommunis simply as
heart, and Gadamer explains this concept by citing Oegin-
ger1s work:
The sensus communis is concerned only with
things that all men see daily before them,
things that hold an entire society together,
things that are concerned both with truths
and statements, ways and forms of express
ing the statements. (2 7)
Interestingly, Oetinger bases the sensus communis in
life (vita), life lived within the presence of God. It is
life lived in unity and simplicity, one from which our
present fallen state has deviated but to which we must
100
return. We all possess this potential for return as an
inner stimulus. It is the divine power in the form of an
instinct which causes us "to discover the traces of God and
to recognise what has the greatest connection with human
happiness and life." These are "'sensible1 truths, as
opposed to rational truths. The communal sense is a com
plex of instincts, is a natural drive towards that on which
the true happiness of life depends, and to that extent an
effect of the presence of God" (Gadamer 28).
Gadamer notes that Oetinger distinguishes between the
ratio which can operate according to rules without God, and
the sense which "always operates with God." God works
through the whole of nature, increasing growth and spread
ing it throughout the entirety. The senses imitate nature;
hence they partake of this same holistic principle. Art,
on the other hand, is particular, beginning with the part
and is imitated by reason or ratio. By the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries this "sense" of right action has become
"intuition," with its rich metaphysical foundation occluded
(28-29).
The Emersonian rhetoric of provocation as a call to
self-reliance is an attempt to re-awaken others to this
metaphysical foundation. The moral sentiment issuing from
the soul and manifested in virtuous actions builds and
strengthens community. Emerson preaches perpetual work as
it is man's duty to use nature to build a better world.
101
This is a Christian view of work as opposed to a Marxist
view. Although Emerson and Marx see man's condition as
alienated from nature, Marx sees man as trapped within this
condition and through his work he continually transforms
nature into his own ends, but this merely perpetuates this
essential condition of alienation. For Emerson labor or
action honors God and is an end in itself. Work does not
satisfy man's sensuous needs but his spiritual needs, and
work, like troping for the reader and writer is an activity
of perpetually attempting this return to unity (Casoartdi
208) .
Now all of this I would suggest is implicitly inform
ing writing as process as discussed in Macrorie's Telling
Writing. In order to become better writers, students must
reconnect with their experiences which will only come about
through a change in attitude toward their relationship with
the world. However such a change and re-orientation toward
experience will result in a more powerful use of language
and a rhetoric based upon this principle that the "good
writer writing well" will be she who connects the facts of
her personal experience with the stream of every day events
common to the rest of us, and, by so doing, she restores in
a small way the collective value of our common lives.
I would say generally that this ethical and rhetorical
principle informs the attitude toward writing espoused by
transcendentalists in composition. There is nothing wrong
_______
with viewing any activity, and particularly writing, under
a Christian ethic, but what typically happens is that the
object of this labor becomes trivialized. The danger is
that process is valued solely for the sake of process be
cause it activates our individual powers for making sense
of.the world and thereby reconnects us with our experiences.
The content of those experiences becomes less important
than the fact that these experiences reveal something new—
no matter how trivial that might be. What gets lost in
these compositionists' underlying social ethic, understand
ably so because it is a weak point in Emersonianism, is the
actual public meanings of this "better vision." Hence the
authority the writer achieves is still personal, limited as
it is to one's uniqueness as an experiencing, active agent,
and the texts of these writers usually appeal only to a
small circle of readers who can also identify personally
with the writer's experiences. In fact, students and
teachers generally critique personal essays according to
how well the writing evokes the experience— whether physi
cal or psychological. So you might hear comments like:
"Add more detail because I don't quite see what you are
describing." Or "You're using too many big words. Just
talk like normal people talk." The point is that this kind
of writing and this kind of authorship does not use evi
dence to validate the purported truth of the thing seen but
relies on the suggested truth arising from powerful
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presentations of these individual experiences. Thus meta
phor is valued by Macrorie, and, as we will see in the
next chapter, "word magic" is praised by Peter Elbow.
I think it goes without saying that this is obviously
inadequate for the kind of writing needed to meet the de
mands of the university. Yet, given this fact, the problem
remains concerning how students establish their authority
in academic modes of writing. Emerson insists that author
ity is within, but by that "within" he means the soul and
not the ego. For the soul connects each of us to the rest
of mankind and to the spiritual realm from which man and
nature proceed. As we have seen Emerson distrusts all
authority not originating from within. This makes all
things in the social and cultural worlds suspect and sets
in motion that Emersonian vision which at first tries to
dissolve these opacities in the quest of pure presence or
later to accept these opacities but to neutralize their
authoritative effects by engaging in a perpetual kind of
work upon them, turning their accepted meanings toward
further insights. Emerson preaches continual transition
because the soul is always becoming, expanding toward some
larger meaning. Yet as evidenced in his great essay
"Experience" he could never see how the soul could expand
in relation to an object without that object being lost in
consciousness. If truth is the consciously understood re
lationship between a mind and its object, then the object
104
will always be necessary for the soul's growth. But
Emerson could never explain how that authority within could
establish that relationship while still retaining the
object. His soul could become only at the expense of los
ing the single criteria guiding and disciplining that per
sonal expansion.
In composition this cultural attitude toward authority
is manifested as a distrust of textual authority. The
transcendentalists seek to dissolve the text through an
emphasis on process and a reification of personal meanings
gleaned from this process. The dialogists begin from the
opposite end and neutralize the authority of the textual
product and simultaneously the ego of the personal author
by setting them both within the larger context of the dis
course community. Either way we still have not come to
grips with the kind of authority texts might possess nor
have we understood what the relationship of textual author
ity is to the living knowledge that each of us continually
experiences. What Macrorie's Telling Writing merely hints
at is precisely those human realities symbolized by the
Emersonian soul that in the twentieth century have become
occluded by our turning to language and social practices to
explain human consciousness. What usually happens in these
theories is that basic human "spiritual" needs such as
purposiveness and coherence in one's actions and the need
to see the personal meanings one arrives at as also
105
connecting to larger meanings shared by a wider community,
gets detranscendentalized, so to speak, and translated into
"What can I do in my labor as a writer that will help my
self and possibly others see the untruth of what is
presently believed?"
Actually in attempting to answer this question, we see
ourselves serving community aims and in the process down
playing individual actions, while, ironically, we wind up
being more concerned with how writing can enhance personal
power by questioning established authority. Perhaps it is
a sign of our times that our distrust of authority and
simultaneous insistence on community leads us to view writ
ing as an aggressive, assertive act— masculine in nature—
which is necessary in order to unmask our present illusions
that trap communities within a too narrow, self-serving
vision of reality. What might be criticized as the evils
of Emersonianism, that is a self-reliant individual acting
from self-interest in defiance of community, becomes in the
end a version of the same thing. Individuals in becoming
writers must aggressively establish their authority in
order to convince others of the present falsity of their
ways.
In the next chapter I will consider two paradigm cases
representing the contrastive poles generated over these
issues of authority and power. My belief is that these
issues as they turn up in composition, here exemplified in
106
the work of Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae, replay
similar cultural issues as generated in Emerson's
thinking.
107
NOTES
See Robert J. Connors, "The Rise and Fall of the
Modes of Discourse," The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook, eds.
Gary Tate and Edward P. J. Corbett, 2nd ed. (New York:
Oxford UP, 1988) 24. Also see James Berlin, Rhetoric and
Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-
1985 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987) 134.
108
CHAPTER 4
The Community of Voice and Discourse
Communities: Peter Elbow's and
David Bartholomae1s
Pedagogies of Power
Writing in the American grain is the attempt to see
the world with fresh eyes, "to form an original relation to
the universe" (CW 17), as Emerson insisted. We have seen,
though, that this is far from a simple task and is never
quite accomplished. The writer relies on individual ex
perience as the route to achieve authority, and, even
though the expression of that experience must be translated
into cultural codes, the duty of each writer is to resist
the external authority of those codes in order to make lan
guage one's own again.
In Richard Poirier's remarks concerning what Emerson
means by "making it new," he also acknowledges that Emerson
is well aware of the historical situatedness of all mean
ings. Form in composition is vitally important in order
for the "newness" of those infrequent manifestations of
genius to be made known to individual readers who are,
likewise, always situated within specific cultural contexts
and who approach texts with their own psychological
interests. Poirier says that when, citing Emerson,
109
'we write from aspiration and antagonism,
as well as from experience' he intends this
to be true for all writing of whatever time
and to suggest the 'enabling' as well as
the restrictive influence of particular
social-historical arrangements. (Renewal
149)
Poirier translates this as the discovery "that the
means of expression frustrate the liberating purposes of
expression, that freedom makes us aware of Fate." Always
our best action in such an inevitable situation is abandon
ment. "We abandon one discourse for another," change our
tone of voice, and switch or trope previously useful vocab
ularies. Thus transition, perpetual movement, the abandon
ing of present meanings stands out foremost as the most
valued principles of an active mental life.
In the best tradition of "The American Scholar," which
ironically is the dissatisfaction with tradition, the duty
of the writer is to unsettle current meanings. Hence
writers achieve authority through being able to unsettle
readers' too easy acceptance of what is already known. The
duty of writers in the American grain is to unite personal
and social responsibilities by bringing personal experience
to expression in such a manner that readers can see for
themselves that the way things seemingly are right now for
all of us is perhaps not the way they should be or could
be. The identity of the writer, then, is as an agent who
tries to maintain a precarious balance in fulfilling her
duties toward the community. On the one hand, she should
110
support and contribute toward the achieving of specific
community goals. On the other, she is a member whose con
tributions must likewise work against the status quo and
the perceived norms of that same community.
When compositionists talk about empowering student
writers, they usually mean this as an attempt to resituate
authority within the grasp of the individual. Both Peter
Elbow's and David Bartholomae1s pedagogies seek to empower
the powerless writer, and, though each attempt in different
ways to authorize students to write, both share common
ground in that each relies on experience and resistance to
language as their primary means of empowerment. Each of
them in their respective pedagogies leaves space for the
irruption of that power to break forth and make something
new in the sense that Poirier describes it. In fact, these
two pedagogies, though seemingly diametrically opposed, are
both oriented toward the goal of making this power possible
for each student writer. Elbow is very explicit about
this; Bartholomae highly guarded and hesitant.
Elbow, like Macrorie, resembles the early Emerson's
stress upon breaking down the barriers of opaque language
which prevent individuals from personally earning and
possessing meanings. Bartholomae assumes as a given that
no one can possess any meanings except as they are mediated
by the language of one's discourse community, specifically,
the academic discourse community. One never escapes these
111
barriers by breaking through but by understanding how to
use one discourse against another. The basis of authority
for Elbow is the achieving of "real voice"; for Bartholomae
it is to be able to speak the language of one's discourse
community. Consequently, the authority of any text is
neutralized, and its power transferred either to small
groups of students in service to a community of voice, or
to the individual student who is enabled to speak only be
cause she has submitted to the demands of her particular
community. In either case it is never really clear how
students make this transition to "real voice" or to the
community's voice. Yet, while the means remain problem
atic, the ends are quite clear: in achieving a "voice,"
whether one's real voice or the voice of the community, the
student accrues authority and wields power as a speaker.
A writer's authority, then, is characteristically Emerson
ian in that it is achieved in action, in a resistance to
the accepted and in an anticipation of about-to-be realized
possibilities.
Before examining these issues more carefully, I want
to begin with the problem of authority as it is experienced
daily in our reading and writing classes. Consider a
typical student upon first encountering the text--regard-
less of whether she or someone else is the author. She
reacts as she habitually does in these situations. She
knows that the assigned reading or writing that is the
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focus of today's class discussion will inevitably get away
from her. She will lose whatever tentative control she has
over it because she knows from past experiences that some
one— perhaps the teacher or another student— will point out
aspects of the text that she had not previously noticed.
She knows, too, that she will then be left on her own to
deal with these several alternative views. She is faced
with the prospect of sorting them out, of judging whether
or not they make sense, of weighing their relevances, of
deciding whether or not she will use them to influence her
revisions.
Her choices in these situations will usually come down
to three. She can insist that her text expresses her be
liefs, her experiences, her feelings, her opinions, and
that, just as it is every one's right to have an opinion,
so she has hers, and she will just as soon stick with it
than change it. Or, she has a second choice. She can
seriously consider all other commentaries and compare them
to what she thought she understood about her text, and,
depending upon how far she takes this comparison, she
understands that she risks putting herself right back into
that chaos and confusion from which it took her so frus-
tratingly long to work her way free. Or, finally, a third
choice— avoidance— let the teacher tell me what to do.
None of these choices is easy; each carries certain
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implications and assumes certain givens concerning the
source of authority.
In some classrooms the teacher makes all the deci
sions. He is the visible representation of the invisible
authority of the institution. He tells the student what to
do, and in this seemingly humanitarian gesture he assumes
the burden of responsibility for deciding. However, as
compositionists have generally sought to help students
become producers of texts, we have resisted giving in to
this seemingly humanitarian gesture. We do not want to
decide these questions for our students; instead, we seek
to guide them, to invite them, to decide for themselves.
Yet upon what basis can they decide? Do we provide
them with a set of objective criteria? Or allow completely
subjective responses? Are we aware of how we read their
texts, and do we let them know how we read them? By what
authority do we speak when we must speak to them about
their words? Do we rely on our institutional role as
teachers, letting the power of the position do the dirty
work? Or do we confront our personal insecurities about
our own authority to judge? We certainly do not want any
body telling us how to read our students' essays, and we
expecially do not want to steer our students into merely
writing formally correct papers which pass for competence
in academia. For, if we do, then we have to justify the
necessity for allowing our students to reproduce
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uncritically this institutional discourse and for allowing
them to accept passively the frames of mind accompanying
it. We do not necessarily like imposing anything on our
students. It is, afterall, our cultural heritage to resist
authority. How then do we empower our students to write
with an authority based on anything that we could trust?
Peter Elbow, who is often typified as an expression
ist, and David Bartholomae, who in the past few years has
written about novice writers trying to write their way into
the academic discourse community, place authority and power
at the center of their respective pedagogies. These two
compositionists have written sensitively about the dilemmas
of students as they struggle to achieve authority as
writers. Yet both finally reveal their own uncertainties
about authority as they cannot or, perhaps, will not locate
it anywhere. It is not in the text, in the writer, in the
community, or even in the interaction between or among
these elements. It has to do with achieving a certain kind
of voice, which, ironically, is not so much achieved be
cause of what the individual actually does, but because one
is enabled to speak well due to the writer submitting to a
power partially hers and partially emanating from a tran
scendent source. For Elbow it is that mysterious source
where voice originates; for Bartholomae it is identifying
with the practical, material concerns of one's community.
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Yet neither Elbow nor Bartholomae is very clear about how
this process actually occurs.
In his first book Writing Without Teachers, Peter
Elbow follows in Macrorie1s footsteps except that Elbow
focuses exclusively on writing as process, locating this
action within the cogitations of the individual mind. The
opacity of language as a social product becomes fodder for
the mental process he metaphorically labels "cooking."
"Cooking is the smallest unit of generative action, the
smallest piece of anti-entropy whereby a person spends his
energy to buy new perceptions and insights from himself"
(48). It "is the interaction of contrasting and conflict
ing material,"
. . . the process of one piece of material
(or one process) being transformed by inter
acting with another: one piece of material
being seen through the lens of another,
being dragged through the guts of another,
being reoriented or reorganized in terms of
the other, being mapped onto the other.
(49)
The material metaphors are intriguing here. New ideas
evidently originate in corporeality and are then succes
sively purified through a particular kind of mental pro
cess. This special function of mental acts is strikingly
similar to Emerson's "democratic vision" where the seeming
disparaties of objects are equalized in service of the
long-term vision, synthesizing all into a spherical unity.
It does not seem to matter what the individual objects are;
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rather, it is the actions of the seer which dominate the
scene. Writing as cooking is the smallest unit of action
fitting within the overall action of writing as growing.
This continual expansion reaches its apotheosis in achiev
ing "real voice," the ultimate synthesis where readers will
feel that the words encountered on the page dissolve to
give them the experiences of the things themselves. "The
words so well 'embody' what they express that when readers
encounter the words they feel they are encountering the
objects or ideas themselves, not words: readers get
experiences, nothing is lost in translation" (Writing With
Power 280).
Real voice for Elbow is describable but not definable.
We are all capable of recognizing it when we read it and
just as capable of producing it. Nonetheless, how one
actually achieves this authentic voice is shrouded in
mystery. When one does speak with real voice, one is, by
definition, already speaking authentically. However,
though it is always possible and, indeed, the goal for any
given writing occasion, speaking with this special voice is
achieved infrequently. Real voice is a kind of experience
of the text which transcends the text. It possesses the
drama and presence of speech in intimate contact with one's
experience of the world (see "Shifting Relationships").
When writing with real voice, one has the sense "... of
words carrying experiences . . . ." (Writing With Power
117
361). Elbow maintains that language is assuredly not the
thing; nevertheless, it works its illusions through a kind
of word magic. He says that
Writing with 'real voice1 has the power
to make you pay attention and understand—
the words go deep. . . . For me it is a
matter of hearing resonance rather than
being able to point to things on the page.
I want to say that it has 'nothing' to do
with the words on the page, only with the
relationship of the words to the writer—
. . . . (Writing With Power 299)
Everything in Writing Without Teachers and Writing
With Power is motivated by this goal of achieving real
voice, with real voice metaphorically mixing hearing and
seeing in an attempt to overcome the recalcitrant presence
of language. Free writing and peer response serve as
counters to resist the inertia, the lifelessness of words
that have no weight to them because they only reflect a
world already finished, known, and understood. There is
nothing in these words— words lacking real voice— that lets
readers see with them to aspects of reality never seen
before. A writer achieving real voice renders dimensions
of her experience of the world which she can only see from
her unique perspective.
When seen from this light, James Berlin's criticisms
of Elbow are not accurate. Berlin identifies Elbow's work
as an expressionist rhetoric which attempts to define the
". . . self so as to secure an authentic identity and
voice" (Rhetoric and Reality 153). Yet the writer does not
118
find the self first and then become empowered to speak
authentically. Rather, real voice indicates a world and a
writer in relationship to that world, and indicates a per
petual desire to make contact with that world, to know it,
to possess it, to temporarily efface language in merging
the writer with her experience of things themselves. But,
as with Emerson, this is not knowledge of things but knowl
edge of things as symbols to reveal something about our
selves and our collective social destiny.
Elbow's trope of real voice resonates with the inno
cence of the young Emerson's belief that our words origi
nate from things, that
The use of the outer creation is to give
us language for the beings and changes of
the inward creation. Every word which is
used to express a moral or intellectual
fact, if traced to its root, is found to
be borrowed from some material appearance.
(CW I 18)
The relationship between self and objects in the world
is revealed through the proper use of language. We can get
close to the truth of the object in our perspicacious use
of words. Thus it is the wise man's duty to ". . . pierce
this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible
things" (CW I 20). Emerson claims that this kind of
authentic language arises from "... the blending of ex
perience with the present action of the mind." This
". . .is proper creation" (20-1). He desires the things
themselves to speak through a language generated through
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intellectual acts by individuals focussing on their ex
periences. Language is used by a person to get beyond
words in order to reconnect oneself with the world. Lan
guage is only necessary because we are, in fact, alienated
from each other and from the world. Emerson would probably
just as soon do without language, except that he knows that
man must express himself and that words are signs of
natural facts, and that natural facts are symbols of
spiritual facts (CW I 17). Expressing oneself, or in this
case writing, is the primary action whereby nature or one's
experience of the world is symbolically transformed into
these larger spiritual meanings. Thus the emphasis falls
upon experience and how one intellectually acts upon it.
Elbow as a writer in the American grain would have his
students repossess their authority through getting in touch
with their world by struggling to find a language that
renders the authenticity of experience, including the ex
perience of ideas as well as of things and other persons.
But this "magical view of language" that Elbow discusses is
more readily apparent when words are spoken rather than
written. Writing as a trope for voice loses its material
objectiveness as the voice heard through the words on the
page creates that kind of close-knit community of voice
that Walter Ong associates with orality (Orality and
Literacy).
120
However the recalcitrance of the text is not so easily
overcome. The text as a distinct object with its own
characteristics would cease being a text if transformed
into voice. Readers, obviously, do not literally hear
voices speaking in texts. However, in one of their many
experienceable aspects, texts do manifest the psychological
phenomenon of "voicedness." A beginning student writer,
unfamiliar to this world of the text, typically finds these
initial encounters unsettling. She is not used to her lan
guage being objectified on paper. For seeing her words is
a much different experience from hearing them where, in
such speaking situations, words are usually transparent to
their meanings.
The beginning student writer previously never had to
look at her language but only through it to a world she had
always known. Yet, now, in encountering the text, that
world recedes into the background as the world of the text
appears. The voices in her personal life that she has al
ways heard and recognized, she tries unsuccessfully to hear
in the text— her text or anyone else's. However, no matter
how hard she tries, her experiences of these texts never
measure up to her teacher's. She cannot see the shadings
of words her teachers see that are suggestive of other
meanings. She often cannot comprehend the meanings a text
embodies because those meanings are beyond her experiences.
Furthermore, she typically fails to identify the writer's
121
attitude, particularly as it is manifested in the tone of
the writing: for instance, irony or sarcasm, which evinces
a wry smile from an all-knowing expert reader but which
completely eludes:her.
Elbow's real voice consequently seeks to speak through
this gap in order to overcome this alienation arising from
the student's encounters with the vagaries of textuality.
As the criterion of truth, real voice is the measure of the
text's adequacy, so Elbow must separate "real voice" from
"voice" and from "no voice" (WWP- 291). "No voice" is the
sound of dead, faceless prose, while "voiced" prose creates
the effect of a living person speaking through the text.
"Real voice," on the other hand, echoes with that deeper
resonance of a person in contact with her experiences.
Real voice signifies a special type of social entity. Peer
response groups, in carefully listening for this phenome
non, become, in practice, small, closed communities of
voice. Within this community individual egos must submit
to the labor of reading and writing in the quest for
achieving real voice. It is an individual activity carried
out in a public sphere; hence, it is simultaneously per
sonal and transpersonal, and, in a wide sense, religious in
nature.
Elbow's power originates in his ability to describe a
pedagogy resonating with the ideal American society where
indivisuals work to realize a power within, which, when
122
manifested, transcends the indivisual and unites the group.
Real voice echoes with the Emersonian imperative for each
person to seek "the God within," and this "God within,"
whether one renames it "soul," "the unconscious," or
"instinct," transcends the individual ego yet serves to
reunite the person with the world. Elbow's "real voice"
then, as the voice of authority, is a region where readers
and writers aspire to arrive; however, its location is
mysterious and the route leading to it unmarked.
If Elbow's real voice attempts to recapture a lost
innocence of personal authority, Bartholomae's basic writ
ing pedagogy (with Petrosky, et al.) represented in Facts,
Artifacts, and Counterfacts, along with his views ex
pressed in several related articles, are attempts to com
pensate students for the loss of their voices when they
enter the university. Bartholomae seeks to empower stu
dents but knows that their authority as writers will only
be won through a long struggle to learn and practice the
rituals of the academic discourse community. In fact, this
authority is never finally achieved nor is it localized
within a definable place. Rather it remains suspended
somewhere in the compromise the student eventually might
work out "... between idiosyncracy, a personal history,
on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the
history of a discipline, on the other" ("Inventing the
University" 135). We can see just in this statement itself
123
the same dynamics of the individual pitted against the
larger community and forced to somehow work out his per
sonal identity within this frame.
For Bartholomae the textual landscape is almost in
distinguishable from any other world. Voice is an illu
sion of language,; and language is a heterogenous web of
codes used in various ways by various communities in
getting on with the particular work that they do. The
student's experience is constituted by these codes, and, in
changing to a different code, her experience as she once
knew it now lacks authority. The student text for
Bartholomae becomes evidence of a hybrid discourse lying
somewhere between two hypothetical poles. At one end is
the text the student might write if she were writing about
topics considered important by the university in the lan
guage she knows best. On the other end is that equally
imaginary discourse Bartholomae chooses to call "standard,
official literary criticism" ("Inventing the University
146). Both of these hypothetical discourses are imaginary
because the student is not yet aware of what the academy
believes to be significant topics. She also does not have
any idea how she might talk about them because she has
never had the kind of experiences her teachers have had in
reading the texts which they consider important.
In order for the student to speak and be listened to
by members of the academic community, she must renegotiate
124
her past experiences, reconstituting them in the new lan
guage of the academy. Success is not guaranteed. This
initiation ritual will begin by gently prodding students to
move away from their innocence and by directing them to
look at the text in order for them to say something about
it which they find significant. This gesture enables stu
dents to begin speaking because they can use their experi
ence as doors to enter texts. However, once inside, they
will continually be asked to name what they see. Barthol
omae ' s teacher will then proceed to question students,
pointing out to them that what they see falls short of what
the text is saying. Students are then asked to re-see what
they have previously named, continuing this re-seeing and
re-naming of the text as far as they can take it.
Bartholomae1s pedagogy emphasizes a continual return
ing to the text in order for students to re-envision and
build upon what they have just completed in the recent
past. This process never really ends, but students, if
they succeed, will eventually begin using the language of
the academy in the right kinds of ways recognized by that
community as authoritative. Reflecting the best of "new
criticism," this pedagogy emphasizes close reading and
reader response, as students, under the guidance of expert
teacher-readers, learn not only about the intricacies of
texts, but about how to talk about them as well.
125
These acts of writing, re-seeing, and rewriting form a
movement involving a dialectical action of imitation and
resistance. The student learns to mimic the "phrases,"
"gestures," "habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obliga
tory conclusions and necessary connections that determine
the 'what might be said' and constitute knowledge ..."
(146), while simultaneously resisting complete assimilation
into this new community. The best writers for Bartholomae
are those who establish an insider's position within the
academy, but who also face outward, seeking "out the mar
gins and aggressively" poising "themselves in a hesitant
and tenuous relationship to the language and methods of the
university" (Facts 41) .
Authority for Bartholomae's writers is achieved
through a personal struggle both within and against one's
community. In Bartholomae's pedagogy "experience" is less
of the things themselves than of the authority and influ
ence of others. Since knowledge is conflated with language
and its strategic use, learning to write (becomes less a
development of the intellect and more a psychological
battle— an agon pitting the student against the demands of
the paternalistic institution. Bartholomae has written
about his own development as a writer within academia, and
he describes this process as one of being influenced by
'strong' teachers, a term he borrows from Harold Bloom.
These are individuals "... whose presence, whose
126
sensibility, whose manner of speaking and writing define
almost completely our own historical moment, the context
within which we might think, speak, read, or write"
("Against the Grain" 25). The development of a writer's
authority occurs as the writer "... attempts to take on
and then struggle free from the presence of others" (26).
It is crucial to this development for the student to
take on a project. Within Bartholomae's pedagogy, be
ginning writers start working on themes which are close to
their experiences. In detailing their pedagogy in Facts,
Artifacts, and Counterfacts, Bartholomae and Petrosky
select "Growth and Change in Adolescence" as their focus
and have students begin by reading autobiographical, and
biographical accounts, comparing and contrasting their ex
periences with those which the biographers discuss. As the
course progresses, the students develop their own theory of
adolescent growth until the end of the semester when they
must confront the theoretical discussions by academics.
But at this point the students are disappointed. Their
growing confidence as writers and readers who are able to
speak what they think to one another and who are able to
talk back to professional writers, must now confront the
naivety of their assumptions. Their growing authority as
writers working within the university has been based on a
knowledge inadequate to that of the academy. These stu
dents are now left to work out a relationship with the
127
institution which has really made their work possible.
Bartholomae and Petrosky justify this course by claiming
that
The course we've defined above demon
strates our belief that students can learn
to transform materials, structures and situ
ations that seem fixed or inevitable, and
that in doing so they can move from the
margins of the university to establish a
place for themselves on the inside.
(Facts 41)
If Elbow's community of voice stresses the overcoming
of a kind of textual alienation, Bartholomae's work empha
sizes the inevitability and intractability of the text and
the student's struggle to redefine herself within the terms
of the academy. In a sense Bartholomae casts his pedagogy
in terms of the inevitable loss of innocence students
undergo when coming to the university, symbolized by their
encounters with the initially alienating world of textual-
ity. Peter Elbow, on the other hand, wants to use the text
as the scene where the drama of lost innocence is re
enacted in order to allow for the possibilities of over
coming alienation— both within the self and among other
selves— through finding one's real voice.
Both compositionists, however, really begin and end on
similar grounds. Both recognize the value of individual
experience as a place to begin. Each seeks— albeit in dif
ferent ways— to deepen and extend personal experience, and
each seeks to help students achieve a voice, but a voice
128
capable of speaking with an authoritative power. For Elbow
voice is a power clearly non-textual and simultaneously
personal and transpersonal. It manifests itself through
the text. For Bartholomae voice is historically and cul
turally situated. It is derived through one's activity
within a particular community and is manifested within a
particular textual performance. Nevertheless, the problem
is that, in either case, we lose track of students' experi
ences as they become encoded in texts. Instead of rigor
ously following out what happens to students' experiences
of texts both as they read and write, Elbow and Bartholomae
turn too quickly to explain those experiences in terms of
what language is doing.
Thus both Elbow and Bartholomae emphasize contrastive
strands within Emersonianism. "Making it new" for Emerson
involves the action of an aboriginal power— both personal
and transpersonal— which can only be expressed through cul
tural forms bequeathed to us through tradition and history.
"The American Scholar" is a representative essay rendering
this seeming contradiction. Indeed, in certain ways the
basic writing pedagogy as depicted in Facts, Artifacts, and
Counterfacts parallels the formation of the scholar as
described by Emerson.
The scholar's education begins with experience or
nature, but this must also be accompanied by a gradual un
derstanding of how each person is immersed within culture
129
and history. Learning about these cultural forms through
books is as necessary as learning through experience.
Still, even this is not enough. In the end the scholar
must learn that the mind's habit of unifying and classify
ing the world and the domination of our minds by other
minds in the form of texts must be overcome. So Emerson
tells us that the scholar must come out of this drama will
ing to act because it is in action, a special kind of
action, that this long process of formation, this long edu
cation by nature and by books, can be expressed to the
world. But herein lies the problem. Action is elemental
for Emerson; it is ". . . the resourse 'to live'" (CW I
61). Yet the clearest Emerson ever comes to explaining how
consciousness transforms experience into thought and ulti
mately into truth is the account provided in Nature, which
I described in Chapter 2. In "The American Scholar" we
have another attempt to explain this peculiar mental
action:
The preamble of thought, the transition
through which it passes from the uncon
scious to the conscious, is action. Only
so much do I know, as I have lived. In
stantly we know whose words are loaded with
life, and whose not. (CW I 59)
Evidently thought is the result of experience trans
muted by action. Or experience is trivial until it is re
vitalized by action and raised to conscious thought. In
either case, the key term is "transition," which, to
130
reiterate, is a term Emerson raises to an ethical level,
insisting that power resides in transitions and that repose
can only be temporary, providing a place from which to ven
ture out toward the new. Elbow and Bartholomae require the
authority of the text in order to overcome it. In Elbow's
case the text's authority is reclaimed for one's own in the
finding of real voice. In Bartholomae's situation author-^
ity is achieved through a particular kind of textual per
formance in which the rigidity of texts as artifacts embed
ded within specific contexts initially foreign to students
is gradually dissolved. In this metaphoric sense texts are
made fluid again because students can now identify with
those social practices that make those texts possible and
eventually fully intelligible. However for both Elbow and
Bartholomae this process of achieving authority— whether
succeeding in establishing small communities of voice or in
speaking with a voice recognized by one's larger community
— is an ongoing, perpetual kind of labor. For to speak
about what is already known and accepted by one's community
is to obstruct the possibilities of something "new" (or at
least different) from making an appearance.
To be willing to move on, to be willing to work toward
achieving real voice or a believable textual performance
implies that our students must find something of value in
these activities. Elbow and Bartholomae believe that power
resides in their ways of writing, that this power has
131
persuasive appeal to one's peers or community. But it can
only ever be a temporary power, never finally possessed by
anyone, whether by teachers or students or institutions; it
is always on the move. Texts as cultural artifacts are
necessary in order for students to engage in that agonistic
process of wresting away the text's external authority.
Specific, individual meanings are in themselves important
only because they allow the students locations from which
they must continue these perpetual transitions toward other
meanings. Exactly how these particular meanings direct
these transitions does not seem to be an issue though. The
greater goal of writing would appear to be less the a-
chievement of a clarified meaning for its own sake and more
the achievement of a clarified meaning that is somehow dif
ferent from what has been said previously.
Escaping the limits of previous definitions makes this
American kind of writing compatible with much of post-
strucfuralist thinking. Robert Scholes notes that the
appeal of Derridean thinking in particular is related to
our "cultural reflex of sympathy for the outlaw" ("Decon
struction and Communication" 278). The "law" for Elbow
and Bartholomae is institutionalized meanings, with writers
the outlaws who learn how to subvert socially imposed defi
nitions. The main difference, of course, between Emerson
and our current understanding is that Emerson still be
lieves in universal truths which he hopes can become better
132
known through time. While in our time, we typically do not
allow ourselves this hope.
We insist that our students decide for themselves what
texts mean and what meanings they might compose in their
writing. We also insist that they must continue working in
order that they achieve a power that enables them to write
these meanings with authority. However, if we can not tell
them why this authority is valuable, except that they might
temporarily persuade others or temporarily be freed from
another's influence or continue the work of one's discourse
community, then we will have to be satisfied if they con
clude that texts--whether their own or someone else's— are
simply further opportunities for them individually to
assert their authority.
Texts, then, are necessary artifacts in this trial of
power, for it is only in being used up by readers that
their latent power is released to be redeployed by writers
in this continual struggle. Take the text away as a repre
sentation of established meanings, and we lose the basis
for this kind of power.
133
CHAPTER 5
The Ethics of Composing: Transcendental
Dialogues and the Rhetoric of
Cooperation and Resistance
Introduction
Walt Whitman, the American poet Emerson prophesized,
in An American Primer issues this dictum concerning the
writer and writing:
A perfect writer would make words sing,
dance, kiss, do the male and female act,
bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab,
steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack
cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or
do any thing, that man or woman or the
natural powers can do.
Latent, in a great user of words, must
actually be all passions, crimes, trades,
animals, stars, God, sex, the past, might,
space, metals, and the like— -because these
are the words, and he who is not these,
plays with a foreign tongue, turning help
lessly to dictionaries and authorities.—
How can I tell you?— I put many things on
record that you will not understand at
first— perhaps not in a year— but they must
be (are to be) understood.— The earth, I
see, writes with prodigal clear hands all
summer, forever, and all winter also, con
tent, and certain to be understood in time
— as, doubtless, only the greatest user of
words himself fully enjoys and understands
himself. (16-7)
Whitman also claims that words follow from one's
character (2), that there are many realities within each of
us that as of yet do not have words formed to express them
134
(21); and, finally, that names are a test "of spiritual
ity . --Delicate subtle something there is in the right
name— an undemonstrable nourishment that exhilarates the
soul" (34).
Whitman places tremendous importance upon words. To
him a person's ultimate worth can be gauged by the lan
guage he uses. Whitman is obviously an Emersonian, yet
this same cultural strand in which language is so highly
valued continues to persist in and influence our views of
reading and writing. The basic premise of this chapter is
that there is a vital personal power to be gained from very
special uses of one's language. Hence, authoring in the
Emersonian American grain requires an ethics of composing
so that this power can be tapped into by any writer. I
will analyze this ethics of writing by dramatizing writing
as a struggle with the text serving as the scene of this
agon. "The American Scholar" provides the exemplar of this
ethical action as Emerson delineates the particular duties
involved in reading and writing. Finally, I will show how
this ethical commitment is manifested in representative
works by influential compositionists from both the tran-
scendentalist and dialogist camps.
The Text as Scene
The Agon of Style
Language is crucial to Emerson; it is man's bridge
between the natural and spiritual realms. The chapter on
135
language in Nature focuses on how the incandescence of
Spirit can be intuited from reading the subtleties of the
natural world. Language, thus, partakes of both the empir
ical and the spiritual domains, so, if the individual is to
attain that hidden power, it is imperative that she find
just the right words in expressing herself.
As Whitman and Emerson attest and as Macrorie has
echoed this refrain, the best words will proceed from our
daily activities. These will be words embodying those very
objects and activities deemed so important in our lives,
and, which in naming them, we will discover further revela
tions of who we are and where we are going. To write,
then, is to engage in an extraordinary personal and politi
cal activity. It is a special kind of transformative work
through which the spiritual import of persons, places, and
things is made manifest, work wherein the writer must
struggle in language against the temptation to accept cus
tomary usage and traditional meanings. For to do so is
tantamount to a betrayal of one's potential powers and, by
implication, a diminishing in the general quality and po
tential of society. For Elbow the key to tapping into this
power is to find those words revealing "voice"; for
Bartholomae it is in acting out the dialectic of imitation
and resistance through learning to read and write in one's
particular discourse community.
136
Emerson's emphasis is on the self because he knows
that all society conspires against the individual and that
conformity is the rule with nonconformity the exception.
Yet Emerson recognizes the necessity of society as a con
text within which a person might develop potential genius.
Consequently, Emersonian radicalism is not at all the pit
ting of the individual against existing institutions, as it
appears in some species of European romanticism, but the
insistence that each person struggle to realize her genius
within the existing social conditions. "Radicalism" for
Emerson means finding those roots grounding the individual
to that which is universal. This is not a matter of find
ing something "new" outside the self, but rather of looking
inward in order to discover what has always been eternally
present. Stanley Cavell describes this search for our
roots as exactly what Emerson means by our immigrancy. It
is our individual responsibility to sink roots not as
". . . a matter of finding out where you want to live but
finding what wants to live in you." Our roots— our
origins— ". . . are matters not of the past but precisely
of the present, always, fatally." Immigrancy is ". . . not
something to escape from but something to aspire to, as to
the native human condition" (157-58).
Emerson is, therefore, not after the seeking of the
"new" but after continual renewal. It is not a new lan
guage that is wanted but a renewal of the existing use of
137
words in order to render the potentialities of meanings in
herent in any given experience (see Cox 76-77). The prob
lem Emerson faces, though, is how to distinguish the idio
syncratic from the universal meanings in one's words. To
Emerson's credit, however, he consistently admonishes us to
maintain our faith in the Spirit even though we must con
tinue to live in uncertainty. Thus self-reliance means to
act upon what my experience presents to me knowing full
well that I will never get to the bottom of inexhaustible
nature. Action, though subordinate to thinking, is the
prerequisite for finding the proper language to express our
innermost sentiments, and, if these be true, they will also
manifest that universal power connecting us to our roots.
Emerson, consequently, abandons any reliance upon the
pure reason and instead places his faith in the practical.
Living properly is the best defense against the deadening
effects of conformity, for in living correctly we are en
gaged in a perpetually creative activity. Our lived ex
periences present us with constant opportunities to convert
our actions into creative expressions. These opportunities
are especially enhanced for readers and writers who are
continually engaged with the potentialities of language to
reveal its latent powers. The process of reading and writ
ing, then, becomes another kind of language. Or, as
Charles Feidelson, Jr. aptly characterizes this significant
Emersonian move,
138
To describe all human activities as
"intertranslateable language" was to re
define both reality and speech by putting
both in terms of creative activity. . . .
Meaning was "not 'what,' but 'how,'" or
rather the substance via the manner ....
Speech . . . [was] at once sensation and
idea, [and] could not be reduced to the
status of the arbitrary sign ....
Meaning was the unchangeable potential
ity of a word; what we call meaning was an
alteration of the perceiving mind and the
objective world .... (130-1)
Language use as a continual creative activity forces
one's style to bear the burden of manifesting that latent
universal power. Hence a text representing such a con
ception of style becomes itself a dramatic scene where what
was previously unknown— because never previously expressed
— must struggle to make its appearance intelligible to
readers who are relying upon conventional expectations in
order to comprehend. Using Emerson as his central figure
in A World Elsewhere, Poirier argues that in American Lit
erature
What is centrally important is the evi
dence almost everywhere . . . of an ideal
istic effort to free the heroes' and the
readers' consciousness from categories not
only of conventional moralities but also of
mythopoeic interpretation.
The result is a struggle to create
through language an environment in which
the inner consciousness of the hero-poet
can freely express itself, an environment
in which he can sound publicly what he
privately is. (35)
139
The text serves in a similar capacity to nature. It
is the environment where possibilities for the liberation
of consciousness exists. Therefore, like nature, the text
becomes radically scenic. It is the scene where the strug
gle for independence, for liberation, for the finding of
one's roots is enacted. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic gram
mar (Grammar of Motives xv-20) is applicable here in
noting some of the implications involved in this conflict.
Burke claims that agents are contained within the scene (3)
and that they will also retain certain scenic properties as
well. So, as the text, like Emerson's nature, is both in
exhaustible and processual, then, too, are agents (readers
and writers) caught up in a continuous process of gener
ating and interpreting meanings, carried out in the bound
ary less world of textuality.
This process becomes a struggle to liberate the
readers' consciousness which thus transforms writers them
selves into potential liberators. As this drama unfolds at
the cite of the text, linguistic renewal can occur only as
texts lose their solidity through this generative-
interpretive process. Art is thus no longer the result or
a product of an action but a continual creative activity
itself (A World Elsewhere 21). Poirier designates Emerson
and William James, Sr. as affirming what could be inferred
"from the great American books: An identification of the
writer, idealized as a liberator of consciousness, with the
140
heroes of a more practical, worldly, and physical achieve
ment" (26) .
The writer as liberator of consciousness working
toward the goal of renewal utilizes what Poirier describes
as a "transcendentalist style." This is a style which does
not mediate between the individual and society but which
emanates from within the self, metaphorically as a leaf is
put forth from a tree. This style, then, serves to color
and nourish the world (6). The achieving of a style for a
writer is thus to struggle to create an environment as an
alternative to presently oppressive ones and, in the pro
cess, to overcome prefabricated social styles (27) as well.
Furthermore, style is transcendental in a larger sense,
too, in that it is the synecdoche for something outside of
itself. This "something" Poirier says is a power which
might be represented as "nature," "experience," or "the
things of the heart." The point is that this power is not
dependent upon the creative energies of the writer or de
pendent upon any other artifact for that matter. Similar
to Emersonian "genius," the terms used to designate this
power do not refer to anything of a settled existence (83—
4). What we end up with in this American kind of writing
is a style which enacts a tension between visionary possi
bilities and obligations to conventions of expression
that typically frustrate those possibilities from being
realized (A World Elsewhere 92).
141
Texts as artifacts function as the scene where cul
tural renewal can take place. Emerson, however, is all too
aware that this renewal frequently fails to take place,
continually obstructed as it is by the very means-— the lan
guage and syntax— by which it is to occur. This explains
his remark in "Quotation and Originality" when he observes:
A more subtle and severe criticism might
suggest that some dislocation has befallen
the race; that men are off their centre;
that multitudes of men do not live with
Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go
out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do
not recognize their own, quietly and hap
pily, but know that it is foreign to them.
As they do by books, so they quote the sun
set and the star, and do not make them
theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners
in the world of truth, and quote thoughts,
and thus disown them. Quotation confesses
inferiority. (W VIII 188)
The theme here varies only slightly from that ex
pressed in the early book Nature where Emerson exhorts us
to restore "to the world original and eternal beauty" by
redeeming our souls and by making "the axis of vision" co
incide with "the axis of things." The difference here in
this late essay lies in Emerson's emphasis on the cultural
representations of phenomena. It is all too easy to accept
standard descriptions or formulaic representations of what
we actually do see when viewing a sunset. All one has to
do to verify this is to attend an amatuer art festival and
examine the various depictions of sunsets. Rarely do they
resemble sunsets I have seen, but they do blatantly depict
the conventions of sunset painting.
142
What is wanted by Emerson is, not the dismissal of all
cultural artifacts because they are not the things them
selves, but artifacts which offer us glimpses of this un-
nameable power. Hence we can
. . . learn to prefer imperfect theories,
and sentences, which contain glimpses of
truth, to digested systems which have no
one valuable suggestion. A wise writer
will feel that the ends of study and com
position are best answered by announcing
undiscovered regions of thought, and so
communicating, through hope, new activity
to the torpid spirit. (CW I 41)
This power glimpsed through the text makes it ex
tremely difficult to characterize just what kind of object
a text actually is. Poirier metaphorizes the working of
this power as transforming a solid text into a fluid one
(21). And, just about one hundred years after Emerson's
Nature, William Carlos Williams, working in the same grain
(see Rapp 53-119) , evokes this dynamic of power working
through structure by impressionistically describing the
genre of the essay as a kind of indefinable substance which
somehow remains the same but which generates perpetual
motion. He says that
Whatever passes through it [the essay],
it is never that thing. It remains itself
and continues so, pure motion. . . .
The essay must stand while passion and
interest pass through. The thing must move
to be an engine; this in an essay means the
parts are infinitely related to each other
— not to "unity" however. It is the cross
ing of forces that generates interest. The
dead centers are incidental. But the sheer
143
centrifugal detail of the essay, its erudi
tion, the scope of its trial, its vanity or
love, its force for clarity through change
is not understood except as a force that is
in its essence centripetal. The motion is
from change to the variety of changeless
ness.
. . . Ability in an essay is multiplic
ity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing
of opposed forces establishing any number
of opposed centres of stillness. ("An
Essay on Virginia" 320-21)
Besides the resemblance to Emerson's depiction of the Uni
versal Spirit as a circle whose center is everywhere,
Williams' definition of the essay makes the reader an
observer who can interact with the text, delineating and
then following out the particular but several lines of
force moving through the essay. This description of the
text as a field of force seems to anticipate similar decon
structionist descriptions. Yet Williams' description also
sounds just like Emerson's "transparent eyeball," making
the essay itself an alembicating substance, ultimately not
definable, but a substance nonetheless, that purifies and
redirects power.
Needless to say, in this kind of American writing we
will discover no essay with a "main idea" and support.
This rigidly structured definition of a text is associated
with an institutionalized view of knowledge and its presen
tation where ideas are simply accepted and passed on to
others via the expository essay. The essay dominated by a
main idea with its perfunctory introduction and conclusion
144
is viewed as constricting readers and writers in what and
how they understand the world (see Bartholomae and Petrosky
Facts 4-21; Fort). Emerson's aim, especially in his own
writing, is to rouse the genius latent in each reader.
Donald Pease in commenting on Poirier's study says that in
defining Emerson’s cultural duty as ". . . representing the
genius of language— its appearance, transmission, and per
petuation— Poirier emphasizes an important effect of Emer
son's work: it puts every reader in mind of his own
genius" (211).
Knowing how to compose and read a text that will
reveal "undiscovered regions of thought" is a tall order
for any writer or reader, particularly for students. But
this imperative also imposes on writing and reading a
special kind of social duty which Emerson prescribes in
"The American Scholar." In fact, it is the duty of the
Scholar as a writer and reader to find that genius in the
works of others or to express himself in such a manner that
his readers might have the opportunity to discover for
themselves the workings of that primordial power. Yet this
is obviously an ideal which most of us always fall short of
attaining. This is particularly true when the huge amount
of scholarship accumulating over the centuries defies the
efforts of any single person from knowing it all. One can
not begin to recognize genius until one has sufficiently
steeped oneself in enough of the manifold forms in which it
145
has appeared throughout history. Most of our knowledge
comes to us in the form of texts, interconnected as they
are in a vast system of intertextuality. It takes years to
learn how to navigate in this system, and most of us never
get beyond learning how to imitate what has preceded us.
It is this conflict between the developing scholar and the
dominating presence of this massive tradition of the text
which informs Bartholomae and Petrosky’s pedagogy and which
can be traced directly to Emerson’s depiction of "The
American Scholar."
Tradition and Originality:
The Duties of the Scholar
In the last chapter, when discussing the work of David
Bartholomae I referred briefly to "The American Scholar";
however, in this section I want to examine this essay more
thoroughly. This is necessary because in "The American
Scholar" the transcendentalists1 emphasis on power oper
ating through language and the writer and the dialogists'
insistence upon the dialectic of imitation and resistance
both become interconnected as Emerson specifies the duties
of the scholar.
Epitomizing the entire essay, Emerson says early on
that
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of
genius by over-influence. (CW I 57)
Or, in other words, what has been done so well in the past
146
by others sets the high standards by which we are to
measure our present efforts, which never seem to quite
measure up. Hence we suffer continual anxiety living in
the shadow of the past masters. Emerson knows that books
produce the psychological effect on readers that knowledge
is fixed and reified under the banner of the great writers
which our culture holds up to us as models. It is pre
cisely this hero worship that Emerson seeks to undermine—
not necessarily to overthrow heroes as cultural models but
certainly to show us that we are each capable of achieving
heroic stature. He says that once the creative genius
transfers his thought to the record, it is deemed perfect.
The book and its author tyrannize over the minds of the
multitude, who, once they believe they have understood it,
cling fast to its pronouncements and raise an outcry if the
book is disparaged. Consequently,
Colleges are built on it. Books are written
on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by
men of talent, that is, who start wrong,
who set out from accepted dogmas, not from
their own sight of principles. Meek young
men grow up in libraries, believing it
their duty to accept the views which Cicero,
which Locke, which Bacon have given, for
getful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were
only young men in libraries when they wrote
these books. (CW I 56)
Emerson acknowledges that books are excellent spirit
ual sustenance "for the scholar's idle times," but one must
be on guard against all of the wrong ways to read, for "un
doubtedly there is" only one "right way of reading" lest we
147
be overpowered by those very "instruments" we use to aid
our intellectual and spiritual growth. We cannot simply
fall down in worship before the great author, belittling
ourselves due to our inferiority. On the other hand, we
also can go to the other extreme as we come to understand
the author's thought, identifying with the great ones and
thus thinking ourselves to be great too.
Barbara Packer, whose insightful account concerning
these two kinds of reading I am following here, says that
both of these extremes are versions of narcissism. As she
points out, however, Emerson offers us a third way which
escapes this trap. When we understand the writer's
thoughts, we also feel as if the author is somehow telling
us what we have always known. Accompanying this feeling,
moreover, is also the sense that the writer seems to know
us better than we know ourselves. Hence other minds become
lenses through which we can come to a deeper and clearer
understanding of who we are. But now a greater problem
arises: It would appear that we are composed of two
selves— a smaller, conscious ego we can know through intro
spection; and a greater, seemingly inscrutable Self upon
which our smaller ego rests. Packer cites this journal
entry from Emerson:
A man finds out that there is some one in
him that knows more than he does. . . .
Then he comes presently to the curious
question, who's who? Which of these two is
really me? the one that knows more, or the
148
one that knows less? the little fellow, or
the big fellow? (Emerson's Fall 118-9)
The task, then, is to find out exactly what this "big
fellow" contains. Hence the three main influences shaping
the scholar— nature, action, and books— all serve the goal
of self-knowledge. The world corresponds with the soul
part for part. Thus in coming to know more of the world,
we come to know more of ourselves, or, as Emerson says, "So
much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own
mind does he not yet possess (CW I 55). Through our expe
rience of nature and of texts we are given back an indef
initely expanding sense of who we are. Similarly, in a
refrain frequently echoed in composition, writing helps us
to understand our own thoughts and helps us to clarify a
little bit further our self-identities. Writing provides,
as another Emersonian poet— Robert Frost— describes it, "a
momentary stay against confusion," The scholar's duty "is
to treat himself like an unknown substance in chemistry,
and his life as an experiment to discover its properties"
(Emerson's Fall 119).
This recovery of the self through reading and writing
is not to be mistaken for merely inflating the ego, that
"little fellow." My analysis of Macrorie and Elbow pointed
out how self-reliance upon experience resonates with this
transcendentalist notion that in recovering more of my soul
through interpreting the objects of my experience I am
149
simultaneously understanding more of the Oversoul and the
direction it is taking in the world. Thus, in coming to
know myself, I am also implicitly strengthening the general
social fabric. What is central for Emerson and for compo-
sitionists in this Emersonian grain is that this inter
pretive work must be carried out by each person and carried
out in her own way. Frost succinctly states this ethic in
language clearly echoing "Self-Reliance":
We prate of freedom. We call our
schools free because we are not free to
stay away from them till we are sixteen
years of age. I have given up my ..demo
cratic prejudices and now willingly set
the lower classes free to be completely
taken care of by the upper classes.
Political freedom is nothing to me. I be
stow it right and left. All I would keep
for myself is the freedom of my material—
the condition of body and mind now and
then to summons aptly from the vast chaos
of all I have lived through. ("The Figure
a Poem Makes" 625)
For William Coles, Jr. this Emersonianism assumes the
form of a dialectic between the "little fellow" of the
self, (or what Coles designates as the "stylized self")
and that "big fellow," that latent powerful Self which can
not be recognized except through its representations in
language. For Ann Berthoff the imagination serves as the
power within the self which instigates the dialectical-
dialogic process of auditing meaning. Both transcendental-
ists and dialogists stress the necessity for students to
find their own way within a text. For the
150
transcendentalists the emphasis is on this dialectic
between seeing our meanings as they are represented in
texts and that power within which keeps pushing us to resee
and revise those meanings. The dialogists place their
emphasis on individual resistance to the pull of the text
in maintaining the status quo. Hence, although exactly
what happens in this process remains ambiguous, the indi
vidual evidently must do something with language in order
to open up the text she is working on so that she can
establish personal authority as a writer. For texts to be
revelatory of new insights, there must be, again to cite
Frost on poetry, "... the greatest freedom of the mate
rial to move about in it and to establish relations in it
regardless of time and space, previous relation, and every
thing but affinity" (625).
In the next two sections I will examine how this free
dom in the form of dialogue and a dialectic of imitation
and resistance emerges in four representative composition-
ists/rhetoricians--two whom I am categorizing as transcen
dentalists and two as dialogists.
William Coles, Jr. and the
"Stylized Self"
William Coles, Jr. begins one of his earliest ac
counts of his non-traditional composition course with this
citation from Theodore Baird of Amherst College. Baird is
151
initially quoting and then commenting on Henry David
Thoreau:
"Give me a sentence which no intelli
gence can understand," says Thoreau.
"There must be a kind of life and palpita
tion to it, and under its words a kind of
blood must circulate forever." Perhaps
these strange words open up the possibil
ities for a writer in a way that Unity,
Coherence, and Emphasis can never do. Per
haps writing may be seen as somehow the
expression of the imgination, and imagin
ation itself may be mysterious and wild.
("The Teaching of Writing 111).
Themes of power--of nature, of life--must be intimated
through the language, and coupled with those themes is that
of the wildness and freedom of the mind to find its way in
this strange, new mental landscape, relying on language as
a guide.
In a line of descent, at least extending from Theodore
Baird to William Coles to David Bartholomae, we can see
versions of the Emersonian ethic of learning to exploit
language's transformative and empowering effects, whether
those effects be for clearer understanding of self and
greater control over one's words or in forging an identity
with the university and eventually within an academic dis
cipline. Coles tells us that his course "had its inception
under Theodore Baird" and that its purpose is to intensify
"a student's awareness of the relationship between lan
guage and experience" (111). In Coles' pedagogy writing is
an action whereby a writer extends her being at a particu
lar moment in time (112). Coles assumes that, even though
152
a student might not become a writer, she can at least
imagine how a writer might use language in paying special
attention to how language creates versions of reality.
Bartholomae and Petrosky profess much the same thing in
arguing for their particular writing and reading course.
Bartholomae hopes that students can imagine alternative
ways of reading and writing a text from those habitual ways
to which they are accustomed, for it is through trying to
imagine alternatives that he believes students can learn to
extend themselves into the ways of thinking characteristic
of academia.
In describing and evaluating Baird's course in the
early fifties, James Broderick notes that the course was
originally designed for military personnel who could not
spend much time doing outside reading. Consequently, the
composition course had to include short assignments capable
of being completed during a single class period and which
would draw upon what these students already knew (47). In
the two-semester course sequence, the focus in the first
semester is for students to rely upon their knowledge
gained from experience, while in the second term the empha
sis shifts to what the students have learned from their
teachers. In a sense, Coles and Bartholomae combine in a
single semester what Baird had extended into two; namely,
the students begin with their experience, representing it
in their own language, and then move to consider those
153
special kinds of "experience" as they are encoded in the
language of the various academic disciplines. Broderick's
estimation of Baird's course is, I believe, generally
applicable to Coles and Bartholomae. In Baird's two-
semester course "students learn to write not about things
they know but about their knowledge of things" (53). The
assumption underlying this view is that we never know the
things themselves but only our systematic and structured
ways of ordering and making sense out of our experiences.
In emphasizing how students know, assignment sequenc
ing becomes an integral component within Baird's, Coles',
and Bartholomae's pedagogies. These assignments are
designed to get students to re-examine what they have pre
viously said by looking at the same subject from another
perspective. Teachers do not explain anything, but they
wait, sometimes for embarrassingly long intervals, for stu
dents to respond. Then instructors might question or, in
Coles' case especially, challenge these student responses.
Coles, for instance, has authored two books solely about
his unique writing courses.'*' In The Plural I— and After
Coles begins the semester by asking students to consider
the meaning of "professional" and "amateur." In the next
assignment students must then consider the advantages and
disadvantages of being either a professional or an amateur.
Subsequently the students must describe their aspirations
regarding these two concepts. This is followed up with two
154
more assignments asking students first to describe them
selves as an amateur then as a professional. Finally, stu
dents must try to imagine a world of either all amateurs or
of all professionals. The goal, as Broderick says of
Baird's course, echoes Emersonian self-reliance in that
students, through a variety of novel approaches, are forced
"to think for [themselves] in a radical and honest way"
(47) .
In deviating from Baird, Coles and Bartholomae stress
less how students are actually using their minds and more
how their use of language provides evidence for how and
what they think. Nevertheless, the same theme of knowledge
as self-recognition informs all three of these pedagogies.
Coles, however, is particularly insistent about how the
students represent themselves in the texts they write.
Coles desires
. . . to keep things open, to pursue an
idea in such a way as to allow a student
to have ideas of his own, to find himself
in the act of expression, to become con
scious of himself as becoming through the
use of language or languages. ("The Teach
ing of Writing" 113)
Coles views any kind of writing as an act in which the in
dividual represents a version of himself in relation to
some problem or some discourse. This "self" as repre
sented in language is a "literary self" or a "stylized
self" (Composing; Writing as a Self-Creating Process 2).
No one but the individual writer can know what the relation
155
is between this literary self and one's identity, but that
there is a relation is undeniable ("The Teaching of
Writing" 113). Since there is no content in Coles' course
nor any instruction apart from the immediate and detailed
responses to students' writing, what each gets out of the
course can only be determined by the students themselves.
Coles' pedagogy matches closely the spirit of "The
American Scholar." The writer is himself the subject of
this continual experimenting, with writing serving as the
catalyst. Coles' transcendentalism manifests itself in his
belief in this "larger" self-identity behind any linguistic
representation of it, although he recognizes that this lit
erary persona is necessary in order for aspects of this
larger self to be made known. Hence learning to write in
Coles' composition class will be a "self-creating" and
self-transforming process. Whatever I write about will be
a process of me coming to a new understanding about how I
previously have known or merely blindly accepted some idea.
Writing, then, will be an act of transformation performed
upon what I have previously assimilated "in order to tran
scend" it ("Teaching the Teaching" 268).
For Coles writing is an ethical action serving a
transcendental power. It is a kind of visionary act in
that its twin chief goals are to see something in a new way
and to transcend one's present entrapment in mean egotism.
In commenting to his class upon a specific student's growth
156
and development, Coles says of the student's new level of
awareness that
A "battle with the language" is a matter
of seeing that the old definitions won't
hold any more and that one has to develop
new ones. It's not a place to stay— or
that one can. . . . What the writer's done
here is to turn a key; he's unlocked a
world. And, in the process, he's unlocked
himself as a locker. (The Plural I— and
After 246)
Style for Coles "is not egotism but the expression of ego
tism transcended" ("Teaching and Teaching" 270). And just
as Emerson's scholar works within a particular cultural
tradition in order to develop powers sufficient enough to
begin the perpetual labor of transcending the presently
given, so Coles' concept of the "Plural I" serves a similar
communal purpose. The "Plural I" is a collective of all of
those isolated instances where a literary self appears in a
specific composition. Yet, even this literary self, tran
scendent as it now is to its previous textual incarnations
has been aided by all of the other selves participating in
Coles' class. When a writer achieves a new way of seeing
through his writing, it is not due solely to individual
effort; rather, a larger power is at work which the indi-1
vidual writer— if he is honest— must acknowledge. In re
creating himself as an individual, the writer's
independence1 :is conditioned by its new and
free acknowledgment of its dependence— on
both the self from which it came and on
the rest of us as well. In the formation
of that plural I, each one of us in that
157
class had had a sharing. (The Plural I—
and After 270)
Composing for Coles is a transcendental activity in
which writing is simultaneously a form of self-reliance and
God-reliance with both in the service of advancing the
greater community's self-understanding. His focus on the
"stylized self" without closer scrutiny might make it ap
pear that Coles is Composition's equivalent to Roland
Barthes, the literary and cultural critic— at least this is
what Joseph Harris has recently argued in College English.
Harris, though, inadvertently stumbles early on in his
essay when he observes that, in regards to reading and
writing, Barthes appeals "to an aesthetic of pleasure,"
while Coles' "focus is ethical" (159). Barthes' emphasis
is on individual acts of reading and writing as textual
play in which one can unfix and destabilize established
meanings through manipulating the various systems of lin
guistic codes. Coles, in contrast, views reading and writ
ing as individual acts, yet acts always performed in serv
ice to a higher power. Coles definitely believes in an in
dividual self not ultimately derived from textual codes.
As conclusive proof of Coles' transcendentalism, I shall
end my present discussion of him with a rather lengthy but
significant passage taken from his powerful essay linking
the teaching of writing with his life as a gambler and as a
member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
158
. . . Seeing the activity of writing as
involving the development of the kind of
power that can be an alternative to losing
is what allows me to start to restore an
Emersonian frame to teaching and learning
it. Good writing, good use, using language
well, literacy: this for Emerson, and he
says it again and again, was intimately a
matter of character, involved a vital and
dynamic connection of the human with the
divine. Hence, as he says in Nature, "a
man's power to connect his thought with its
proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends
on the simplicity of his character, that is
upon his love of truth and his desire to
communicate it without loss." Further,
Emerson says, this power "is at once a com
manding certificate that he who employs it
is a man in alliance with truth and God."
It is an equation with which his audi
ence seems to have had no trouble.
And writing that was not so good, the
disheveled use of language, what then was
that a certificate of; with what, by impli
cation, would an inept user of language
have to be in alliance?
. . . I do not mean that we must find a
new way of defining and specifying illiter
acy for our students as a form of Emerson
ian ungodliness, but I do think we have got
to find a way of designating illiteracy both
literally and as a metaphor with terminolo
gies that can for our students have an
equivalent significance and the same kind of
transforming force. ("Writing as Literacy:
An Alternative to Losing"
Berthoff, Bruffee, and
Bizzell: Dialogue
and Dialectic
Before taking up the following influential composi-
tionists/rhetoricians, some qualifications are in order. I
am intentionally blurring the boundary between dialogists
159
and transcendentalists because, as I have been arguing
throughout, they share common attitudes toward texts and
toward authority in general. I do not wish to set up any
rigid division between the two because this does not accu
rately reflect the realities of the field. Various indi
viduals can espouse elements common to each camp, such as
William Coles. There are, nevertheless, clearly crucial
differences separating the two camps as well which have
significant implications for composition pedagogies. Basi
cally, transcendentalists posit a power operating through
language that is not derived from social practices nor from
textual codes; while dialogists argue that all aspects of
writing are social in origin and that students acquire
authority through imitating a particular community's code
but that, most importantly, they also simultaneously work
out for themselves a stance in their writing which either
attempts to challenge or modify in some manner the existing
spistemic configurations relevant to one's community.
Ann Berthoff is another case in point of a composi-
tionist/rhetorician who, though continually reiterating
throughout her work the dialogic-dialectic nature of com
posing, is decidedly a transcendentalist. In contrast,
Kenneth Bruffee and Patricia Bizzell must certainly be
identified with the dialogists. Yet even this distinction
does not necessarily make any of them an Emersonian. What
each of them explicitly claims about writing in their
160
professional publications is far removed from what I have
been describing as specifically Emersonian. Still, despite
these distances, certain values and attitudes toward au
thority, texts, and individual action emerge which I am
arguing make each of them compatible to various degrees
with Emerson. Their proximity to Emerson can be imagined
as a set of concentric circles with Emerson occupying the
center. In the first circle away from Emerson I would
place Macrorie, Elbow, Bartholomae, and Coles. Berthoff
would occupy the next, then Bruffee, and, lastly, Bizzell
would occupy the outer periphery. Nonetheless, since I am
claiming that Emersonianism represents a major strand in
composition and rhetoric (specifically as rhetoricians dis
cuss the value and effects of language use), in viewing
these three through this Emersonian frame I hope to demon
strate further the pervasiveness of certain views regarding
writing. Moreover, in discussing both the significant sim
ilarities and differences among these three, I can also in
dicate in greater detail the conflicts that continue to
plague our understanding about how students become writers
and also indicate those issues which continue to divide
composition and rhetoric as a discipline.
Ann Berthoff self-consciously and emphatically places
herself in a philosophic tradition stretching from Kant to
Coleridge through Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer to I.
A. Richards. She also includes others in this list,
161
especially Kenneth Burke and lately Paulo Friere, because
man is a "symbol-using animal" who must learn how to "name"
the world if he is to become empowered to act more con-i
sciously and conscientiously. Her chief statement concern
ing her own transcendentalism (although she never uses this
term) can be found in her textbook Forming/Thinking/Writ
ing .
I begin with meaning, not with thought
. . . or language . . .; we will never get
the two concepts together unless we begin
with them together. The making of meaning
is the work of the active mind, or what
used to be called the "imagination"— that
power to create, to discover, to respond
to forms of all kinds. My guiding philo
sophical principle is that this form-
finding and form-creating is a natural
activity; the book's central pedagogical
principle is that we teach our students
"how" to form by teaching them "that" they
form. (2)
Berthoff constantly cites I. A. Richards as her mentor who
insisted that we continually "audit" our meaning. Berthoff
interprets this to mean that students must learn to re-see
the meanings emerging in their texts and to follow the im
plications of those emergent forms to further insights.
Since Emerson recognizes that our vision is always partial,
he advocates continual transition from what I presently see
toward what is only dimly perceived on the horizon of my
experience. Hence, in raising re-seeing to an ethical
level, Berthoff and others in the field stand in harmony
with the dynamics of Emersonian vision. But there are
deeper connections as well.
162
Like Emerson, Berthoff stresses self-reliance upon
those visionary powers of mind to steer us through the
sometimes overwhelming, often confusing and chaotic, cul
tural world we inhabit. In "Towards a Pedagogy of Know-
3
mg" Berthoff makes this statement:
If the only thing we can count on these
days is the power of the human mind, then
we should have a theory that can account
for that power in its own terms, not in
those appropriate to the study of snails
and chimpanzees. (57-8)
For anybody familiar with Berthoff's work, it comes as no
surprise that she is not especially fond of scientists.
Where she seems to have the most influence, however, con
cerns this issue of vision and the perpetual re-seeing of
one's meaning. (See the collection of essays in her honor
titled Audits of Meaning, ed. Louise Z. Smith.) The one
sure thing in a world of uncertainty is the power inherent
in our own minds. Consequently, learning to write for
Berthoff is learning how to tap into and control that power
so that we might achieve clearer vision. Her discussion of
"Learning the Uses of Chaos" is remarkably similar to the
dynamics and trajectory of Emersonian vision. Emerson, if
you will remember, says that we initially confront a solid
world, rigid and fixed due to our habitual ways of perceiv
ing reality. But as we push our vision toward greater in
tensity, the hardened boundaries of objects begin to blur
until we can eventually see through this solidity to uni
versal principles: The world becomes glass. Berthoff
____________________________________________ 163
makes chaos a product of personal vision which through the
use of language in the writing process becomes a kind of
heuristic generating greater insight and new order for the
writer. She says
When we teach pre-writing as a phase of the
composing process, what we are teaching is
not how to get a thesis statement but the
generation and uses of chaos; when we teach
revision as a phase of the composing pro
cess, we are teaching just that— reseeing
the ways out of chaos.
Our students, because they are language
animals, because they have the power of
naming, can generate chaos; they can find
ways out of chaos because language creates
them. Language itself is the great
heuristic. (70)
Language, like Emerson's Nature, is the great reposi
tory of meanings. In following Richards' lead, Berthoff
also believes that, as language is the "record" of "human
nature," so by studying language we can learn about the
laws of the mind, which in Richards' terms means that by
studying the interdependencies of meanings in language we
can learn about the "the mind in action" ("I. A. Richards
and the Audit of Meaning" 68). The mind is, after all, the
last bastion of and only hope for order in the world. Thus
in learning how to use it properly we are doing the kind of
supremely valuable labor necessary toward building a better
world for everyone. We see in both Richards and Berthoff
how language itself becomes the scene of a vast experiment
where, through the acts of reading and writing, individuals
164
can improve their visionary capacities with the outcome
being a clearer sense of how to navigate in the world.
Berthoff, the transcendentalist, differs from Bruffee
and Bizzell in that for her dialogue is conflated with
dialectic, which winds up being the mind in action with the
words on the page engaged in that continual "audit of
meaning." For her thought is not derived from the social
context, although our words accrue meaning only because of
that context. I readily admit that Berthoff is not always
clear on the relationship between thought and language.
Perhaps her clearest expression of this relationship is to
be found in a metaphor she employs depicting the growth and
development of language. She compares this process to one
of those little wooden flowers the Japanese place in a dish
of water and which then begins to open and expand, "blos
soming in the shape of a fully articulated flower."
Berthoff notes that in this dialectic the water acts as a
supportive medium and catalyst "to release the form. In my
extended metaphor, the water is our social life, the essen
tial context for the making of meaning" ("Is Teaching Still
Possible?" 752). In this organic metaphor the flower re
mains distinct from its nurturing medium, and its growth is
driven by an internal power connected to but certainly not
solely dependent upon the water itself.
Since language is the chief aid to better vision,
Berthoff's transcendentalist pedagogy focuses upon
165
developing one's perception. How one sees the world is the
result of how one forms it, with language as that specula
tive instrument providing us with both the means and the
substance of forming. Here Berthoff is more Kantian than
Emersonian, except that in her espousal of the power of
vision she advocates the freedom to use one's mind with no
restrictions or limitations imposed by any external aids.
Like Emerson, under the power of vision all boundaries
blur, and science, religion, philosophy, and the practical
wisdom we rely upon in our normal activities all become
one.
Berthoff's vehement protests against any restrictions
imposed upon how we use our minds is best exemplified in
the series of exchanges between her and Janice Lauer over
the definition and place of heuristics in the composing
process. This exchange occurred in the early seventies and
has been collected by Winterowd (Contemporary Rhetoric) to
illustrate what he sees as an anti-intellectual and anti
science bias keeping composition in the "ghetto" (90-1).
Phelps in her recent book extends Winterowd's comments by
reading this debate as threatening to those clinging to a
Romantic strain in composition. Heuristics would introduce
"structure and system" and "abstraction" into the writing ■
process thereby severing the "'natural' relation between an
individual, her discourse, and her community— values that
are vulnerable to the skeptical, rational spirit" (49).
166
While I am not disagreeing with either Phelps' or
Winterowd's judgments, from my Emersonian perspective this
issue of heuristics involves not so much the imposition of
system and abstraction but more the dialectic of resistance
to authority as exemplified in "The American Scholar."
Berthoff does value abstraction (see "Abstraction as a
Speculative Instrument"), but what she does not value is
the imposition of structure that is not discovered by the
individual in the act of shaping one's meaning. Structure
evolves later as meaning emerges, and its too early imposi
tion takes the writer's experience away from her developing
understanding of it and places it under the control of
someone else's experience which has already been systema
tized. The dialectic of resistance here involves the fact
that we are already in a system just by participating in
our culture. The use of chaos is an act of self-reliance
whose goal is to help free the individual from these pre-
established, fixed structures. Berthoff argues that we
must keep our options open as long as possible during the
composing process. We must "keep freedom of choice alive,
especially at first, by writing phrases, images, sets of
oppositions. . . ." We must learn how to generate and use
chaos because that "is the most natural start" ("Response
to Janice Lauer" 102). Chaos is valued by Berthoff in the
same way that Robert Frost values the final poem as a vic
tory over chaos that is only won because the writer has
167
willingly submitted to the disorienting and, eventually,
reorienting dialectic involved in its composition. This is
the only way that a truly new order can be earned which
must come about by transmuting my experience into a subse
quent order that cannot be known and predicted until the
process has been lived through. The process of transmuting
experience into a new ordered meaning requires that the
writer has faith in oneself and that, if she just perse
veres long enough, a good outcome will inevitably follow.
Berthoff's version of dialogue concerns the writer's
continual audit of meaning in reseeing the emerging meaning
and form of the text. In contrast Bruffee and Bizzell
argue that all of our thinking (or auditing of meaning) is
social in origin and can never be anything but social.
Hence, on the surface, these two dialogists would appear to
represent the antithesis of Emersonian individualism.
Bruffee translates the dialogue metaphor into the less
formal one of "conversation"; Bizzell hypostatizes the
metaphor into "rhetoric" as an all-embracing term account
ing for the production, distribution and effects of dis
course. Nevertheless, we can hear asserted in both
Bruffee's use of "conversation" and Bizzell's use of
"rhetoric" distinct Emersonian values regarding texts and
authority. For the text remains the scene of a struggle as
"conversation" and "rhetoric" really become synonymous with
style. Thus writing for each student recapitulates this
168
dialectic of resistance and enacts the agon of achieving an
individualized style.
Admittedly I am skating on thin ice in reading
Emersonianism into the work of Bruffee and Bizzell. In
their recent work both have argued for viewing students
coming into the university as entering a particular dis
course community which requires them to become "reaccultur-
ated." Bruffee advocates collaborative learning as a way
of easing this socialization process and as actually prac-"
ticing what he claims professionals in the disciplines al
ready do in the normal course of their work. While Bruffee
stresses the function of composition courses as excellent
means to help students learn to identify with and partici
pate in the "conversation of the humanities," Bizzell is
more openly militant in her concerns with an overinfluence
of the culture of academia on the native cultures of incom
ing students. Bizzell argues against postulating any cog
nitive universals as the basis for using a general compos-
4
xng process in teaching writing. She sees the problems
that students encounter as centered around learning new
dialects, discourse conventions, and the modes of thinking
they embody ("What Happens When Basic Writers Come to
College" 296).
Both of these dialogists, however, echo Emerson in
that they implicitly place their discussions of writing
within that same pattern of imitation and resistance as
169
that native tradition described in "The American Scholar."
Bruffee evokes the pattern more closely than Bizzell; yet,
in her most recent publication declaiming against E. D.
Hirsch, Jr.'s version of cultural literacy, this dialectic
of resistance emerges quite clearly. Ironically, both
Bruffee and Bizzell see themselves as fighting a common
enemy— individualism— and advocating a common social goal—
creating a sense of community. I will take up Bruffee's
best known essay first, an essay in which he lays out his
position on collaborative learning, and then consider
Bizzell's latest work on literacy. Both essays appeared in
College English.
If Macrorie insists that students must work their way
free from "Engfish," Bruffee insists that students must
first learn the language of the academy before they can
begin to find their voices. In drawing on the work of
Vygotsky, Kuhn, and primarily Richard Rorty, Bruffee main
tains that thought is internalized conversation ("Collabo
rative Learning" 639-40). Consequently, how we think is
causally related to how we converse, and how we converse is
a product of our community life. Since conversation is
Bruffee's term of substance, he winds up giving us a
Platonic model of the spatial relationship between speech
and writing. He says
But because thought is already one step
away from conversation, the position of
writing relative to conversation is more
170
complex than the position of thought rela
tive to conversation. Writing is at least
two steps away from conversation and a
return to conversation. We converse; we
internalize conversation as thought; and
then by writing, we re-immerse conversation
in its external, social medium. (641)
We can speculate what, if anything, transpires as con
versation moves to thought and re-emerges as writing, but
we will not get any detailed answers from Bruffee. In
stead, he qualifies this Platonic model in a footnote by
criticizing the deconstructionist reduction of speech into
writing. Bruffee claims that conversation is not the same
as speech. Speech for the deconstructionists is static and
individual, while conversation is dynamic and a "social
act" integral to interpretive communities. Curiously, what
we get from Bruffee is a term of substance which functions
as an agency rendering the solidity of texts fluid. "Con
versation," like Emersonian genius, is itself an activity
which prevents the authority of writers from settling in
any particular texts and instead keeps it perpetually cir
culating within the boundaries of a specific discourse com
munity. The nature of conversation is ongoing exchange
where ideas are elaborated and modified slightly each time
they exchange partners. Hence conversation serves as a
version of reseeing or continual revision as communities
keep their primary meanings freely moving about from person
to person.
171
Bruffee's account is idealistic and democratic. His
"collaborative learning" creates a classroom context where
students are equal and learn to cooperate on projects. It
is the kind of "community of status equals" that "approxi
mates the one most students must eventually write for in
everyday life, in business, government, and the profes
sions" (642). Yet despite Bruffee's idealism and good in
tentions, he still only has half of the Emersonian dialec
tic enacted between the individual scholar and tradition.
Imitation needs to be counteracted by resistance, so
Bruffee introduces a unique kind of outlaw conversation
called "abnormal discourse." This he borrows directly from
Rorty's description of it in Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature. In staying with Bruffee's account, however, he
says that whereas "normal discourse" upholds what presently
counts for knowledge in one's community, "abnormal dis
course" is the agency for change. It is a discourse which
challenges present consensus and forces debate. Abnormal
discourse actually helps us "resee" (a verb Bruffee finds
distasteful because it reflects Cartesian epistemology but
a verb, nonetheless, that Bruffee also uses) our current
partial views and helps us overcome our habituated per
ceptions .
I quote now some passages from Bruffee, who is also
quoting from Rorty's book, in order to show how Bruffee's
views echo Emersonian values of reseeing, resisting
172
authority, keeping things fluid, enhancing the general com
munity, while, ultimately, like Emerson, he is not able to
account for how this power represented by abnormal dis
course actually works.
The importance of abnormal discourse to
the discussion of collaborative learning is
that abnormal discourse serves the function
of helping us— immersed as we inevitably
are in the everyday normal discourse of our
disciplines and professions— to see [my
italics] the provincial nature of normal
discourse and of the communities defined by
normal discourse. Abnormal discourse sniffs
out stale, unproductive knowledge and chal
lenges its authority, that is, the author
ity of the community which that knowledge
constitutes. Its purpose, Rorty says, is
to undermine "our reliance upon the knowl
edge we have gained" through normal dis
course. We must occasionally undermine
this reliance because normal discourse
tends to "block the flow of conversation
.... (pp..386-387)"
Abnormal discourse is therefore neces
sary to learning. But, ironically, ab
normal discourse cannot be taught directly.
. . . What we can teach are the tools of
normal discourse. . . . To leave openings
for change, however, we must not teach
these tools as universals. We must teach
. . . in such a way that . . . students can
turn to abnormal discourse in order to
undermine their own and other people's re
liance on the canonical conventions and
vocabulary Of normal discourse. We must
teach . . . in such a way that students can
set them aside, if only momentarily, for
the purpose of generating new knowledge,
for the purpose, that is, of reconstituting
knowledge communities in more satisfactory
ways. (648)
Bruffee cites Rorty in acknowledging that abnormal
discourse originates from those who are either ignorant of
173
a particular discourse's conventions or who intentionally
set them aside. Bruffee does not say why or how someone
would do this; evidently it is in the interest of change
and in keeping things open. However, if we substitute
Coles' dialectic of resistance involving the individual and
the stylized self with Bruffee's concept of normal and ab
normal discourse, we again end up with a similar Emersonian
version of the conflict between the scholar and tradition.
For Bruffee this contest between the "little fellow" and
the "big fellow" becomes a contest between authority as it
is manifested in local communities versus a much larger
authority derived from a community of communities— a meta
community which might just as well be the Oversoul. This
is "the community that encompasses all others," and from
which we derive our ultimate authority as teachers. It is
the community whose grand purpose is to contest the estab
lished knowledge of local communities by resisting conserv
ative tendencies. Its interest is to bridge gaps among
knowledge communities and to open them to change (650).
Apparently, in the interests of this larger power we are
driven toward the good of perpetual change by resisting
authority and by probing for openings.
Patricia Bizzell, similar in many ways to the dia-
logism of Bartholomae and Bruffee, is another step removed
from Bruffee's idealism and another from Bartholomae's
literary influence with his emphasis on textual
174
maneuverings. Bizzell leans toward the Marxist stress on
the historical material conditions determining the ideolo
gies which in turn are reproduced in academia. Her con
cerns for the underprepared students entering the univer
sity as well as her critiques of cognitive research on
writing are noteworthy and necessary correctives to the
tendency toward universalization implicit in much of the
composing process work performed in the seventies and early
eighties. This is not the place, however, for me to dis
cuss Bizzell's Marxist influences, but it is necessary to
point out that, like the dialogists, she is interested in
helping students learn to identify with the shared values
of the community without simultaneously submitting to an
overinfluence of authoritative control.
Instead of "conversation," Bizzell's fundamental term
is "rhetoric." For her students can learn to overcome
their tendency to submit to the teacher's authority through
participating in the ongoing process of intellectual life
represented by rhetorical activity. Bruffee's "abnormal"
discourse winds up being what is actually "normal" in
Bizzell's view. Rhetoric becomes the agon whereby one
works out an oppositional discourse or style within a
specific community, and, in developing this style, one
participates in and contributes toward perpetual change in
the community's life. In "Arguing About Literacy," and
175
notably arguing against E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s version of cul
tural literacy, Bizzell says,
I need not advocate, then, the creation
of oppositional discourse within the acad
emy— people working out their relations to
the changing historical circumstances are
creating them all the time. I do advocate,
however, the recognition that this process
constitutes "normal" intellectual life.
The crucial moment in the inculcation of
cultural literacy will be finding ways to
persuade our students to participate in
this life with us. (152)
What has emerged in this chapter examining the ethics
of this Emersonian kind of writing is the concept of writ
ing as a way of conducting oneself whereby one works out a
personal style which both accepts the necessity of sub
mitting to tradition but which also attempts to resist its
overinfluence. The emphasis here has been less on experi
ence of the world per se and more on experience of the
world of knowledge as it is passed on to us through the
system of intertextuality. The transcendentalists and the
dialogists focus upon different aspects of this dialectic.
Both camps, nonetheless, embrace an attitude toward ex
ternal authority, an attitude which is at once aggressive
and which seeks to undermine that authority's perceived
privileged and dominant position. Yet before this kind of
ameliorative work can get under way, "individualism,"
typically associated with Emersonian self-reliance, must be
effectively removed. The "self" as an autonomous entity
is perceived as a threat because it is associated with the
176
same kind of threatening authority possessed by the great
authors of the past and by present teachers who teach these
authors as if they are the only sources of truth. The in
dividual self has been transformed into a community of
selves— a plural I or a discourse community or a partici
pant in the conversation of mankind.
However, though we might feel it necessary to neutral
ize the threat of individualism, many of the accounts dis
cussing how students do achieve authority in their writing
echo the tradition of the Emersonian American scholar. We
have not so much removed the threat of "self-reliance" as
much as we have substituted different entities as the
sources of those threats. Consequently, texts and the in
stitutions and traditions of knowledge that they represent
have become the new corporate identities which must be per
petually resisted. Aiding us in this resistance are con
tinental philosophies which are imported because some of
their accounts of authority and its origins fit comfortably
with this American version that seeks to keep authority
fluid, on the move, and perpetually changing. This is a
pervasive view, one aptly captured by Mariolina Salvatori,
who, perfectly in line with Berthoff, Coles, and
Bartholomae, can cite Gadamerian hermeneutics and decon
struction as primary influences on pedagogical "techniques"
to help students in this struggle with authority:
177
In the congruence of these two critiques
[hermeneutics and deconstruction] I see the
possibility of enacting a process with
which a reader can negotiate her autonomy
as "knower" from the silencing influence of
"uncritically" accepted authority (the
text's/author's/teacher's authority or the
authority of the prejudices that can blind
her to the question a text, an author, a
teacher is trying to raise)— an autonomy,
however, which self-reflexively she must al
ways keep in the making, subject to scru
tiny and revision. (Toward a Hermeneutics
of Difficulty" 81-2)
This pervasive stance toward authority is motivated by
the humanitarian gesture for freedom. But what is it that
we are actually getting free from? And what is it that we
now possess as writers or readers that make us freer than
we were previously? Why is this necessarily better? In my
last chapter I will attempt to sort out, but certainly
without resolving, all of the enormous philosophical and
practical problems compositionists and rhetoricians face in
teaching students how to write.
178
NOTES
The Plural I (New York: Holt, 1978). Another work
describing his pedagogy is Composing: Writing as a Self-
Creating Process (New Jersey: Boynton/Cook, 1983).
2
This essay appears as an appendix to The Plural I—
And After (New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1983). It was pub
lished earlier in Literacy for Life, eds. Richard W. Bailey
and Robin Melanie Fosheira (New York: MLA, 1983) 248-62,
under the title "Literacy for the Eighties: An Alternative
to Losing."
3
John Clifford claims this esSay is the "seminal"
essay in Reclaiming the Imagination, Philosophical Per
spectives for Writers and Teachers of Writing (New Jersey:
Boynton/Cook: 1984). See "Toward Real Philosophic Labora
tories: Ann Berthoff on Writing Theory and Practice," The
Territory of Language: Linguistics, Stylistics, and the
Teaching of Composition, ed. Donald A. McQuade (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1986) 330-39.
4
Articles discussing these problems are "Cognition,
Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about
Writing," PRE/TEXT 3 (1982): 213-43; "Foundationalism and
Anti-Foundationalism in Composition Studies," PRE/TEXT 7
(1986): 37-56; "What Happens When Basic Writers Come to
College?" College Composition and Communication 37 (1986) :
294.
179
CHAPTER 6
Reerabracing the Text
Dynamic objectivity is thus a pursuit of
knowledge that makes use of subjective ex
perience . . . in the interests of a more
effective objectivity. Premised on conti:-.-
nuity, it recognizes difference between
self and other as an .opportunity for a
deeper and more articulated kinship. The
struggle to disentangle self from other is
itself a source of insight— potentially
into the nature of both self and other. It
is a principal means for divining what
Poincare calls "hidden harmonies and rela
tions." To this end, the scientist employs
a form of attention to the natural world
that is like one1s ideal attention to the
human world: it is a form of love. The
capacity for such attention, like the
capacity for love and empathy, requires a
sense of self secure enough to tolerate
both difference and continuity; it pre
supposes the development of dynamic auton
omy. (Keller, Reflections on Gender and
Science 117-8)
Introduction
In this final chapter I do not want to attempt a
rapprochement between the transcendentalists and the dia-
logists. Such a forced unity would be unproductive, and,
because of the underlying philosophical differences con
cerning the nature of writing and the writer, it is impos
sible to bring about anyway. Rather, I want to show that
certain undesirable implications follow from each view that
may counteract their explicit intentions in helping student
180
writers achieve authority. Indicating these problematic
areas does not, needless to say, negate certain specific
Emersonian elements which remain valuable and necessary for
composition but which need to be rethought, developed, and
deepened in order to form a more certain basis for concep
tualizing this issue of authority and composing. In at
tempting this analysis I will elaborate upon key terms cen
tral to my discussion throughout this study, especially
such terms as "experience," "seeing," "dialogue," "commun
ity," and particularly "authority."
In general I want to argue here for a more realistic
view as necessary for composition theory, practice, and
research which would posit the text as a meaningful, sym
bolic object, distinct both from individual psychological
processes and from its synecdochic connections to a spe
cific discourse community. The later distinction, in par
ticular, I am taking from Myron Tuman's recent excellent
discussion of literacy in which he defines synecdochic
verbal communication— the opposite of true literacy— as
"context-bound language used to convey a specific intention
in a specific context" (20). Texts closely tied in with a
particular community's practices are likened by Tuman to
ordinary conversation, while truly literate texts transcend
immediate context and immediate intentions. From my view
as an experienced writing teacher, Tuman's distinction
between a symbolic and synecdochic literacy is especially
181
salient. In achieving the quality of writing necessary to
participate in the intellectual work valued by the uni
versity, students must learn to transcend the situatedness
and immediacy of their idiosyncratic knowledge by expanding
and deepening that knowledge through making connections to
diverse contexts both near and far in space and time. Yet,
though our present knowledge of how that is actually
accomplished is sketchy at best, at stake in this entire
educative process is how students understand knowledge—
its constitution, its value, and its authority for
individuals.
The Acuity of Vision and the
Loss of the Object
I believe that both the transcendentalists and the
dialogists in their respective fashions seek this same goal
of extending the horizons of their students' knowledge.
Writing is a mode of learning whereby students can objec
tify in their texts what they presently think, hold those
objectifications up for scrutiny, and resee them accord
ingly. What is crucial in this entire process of composing
and objectifying meanings, however, is the ability to main
tain the identity of that objectified meaning as it under
goes various transformations in moving from vagueness to
clarity. The emphasis on process recognizes the difficul
ties any writer has in bringing initially fuzzy ideas into
sharp relief. In contrast, in product-oriented pedagogies
students are instructed to begin writing by formulating a
182
thesis which they can then support and fill out in the re
mainder of their essays. Most students have little under
standing of what a thesis is, except that it should be the
last sentence in the first paragraph. Invariably, the
thesis is either too general or so vague as to defy read
ers ' comprehension of what the intended meaning of the text
might be. At the other extreme, while the thesis may be
sound, the writer has little understanding of what implica
tions might logically follow from the main assertion.
Likewise, the judgment of the freshman writer is usually
not mature enough to discern the relevant evidence and its
sufficient explication in warranting an essay's general
claims.
I suspect that both transcendentalists and dialogists
tacitly realize the still little understood developmental
difficulties beginning student writers experience in har
nessing their language to represent intended meanings which
others can recognize and value.^ The world of textuality,
particularly those kinds of texts deemed significant by the
university, does indeed present itself to student writers
as an alien world. Transcendentalists would ease students
gradually into this world by stressing self-reliance upon
inherent mental powers capable of transforming individual
experience into textual forms eventually approximating
academic discourse. Dialogists, on the other hand, recog
nize and grant more determining power to those discourse
183
forms and practices peculiar to specific communities in
constraining from the outset what a student writer may or
may not do in composing a text. The difference between the
two camps is clearly exemplified by locating the sources
from which students begin to write. The transcendentalists
would have students begin with the non-textualized, un
elaborated forms of personal experience immediately recog
nizable by their students. In contrast, dialogists, in
acknowledging greater power to the mediation of experience
by language and practice, would have their students begin
writing from experience as it is already represented in
other texts.
Transcendentalists seek to minimize the gaps between
individual students' experiences and the world of textual-
ity. They start by encouraging students to get in touch
with what they already know in order to comprehend more
consciously what it is they already possess as their knowl
edge. This understanding is then elaborated and systema
tized into textual forms which their teachers hope will
eventually approximate the writing produced in the uni
versity. Transcendentalists thus posit an inherent power
within each student propelling and guiding this movement of
personal experience into publicly acceptable forms. In
comparison, dialogists seize upon those very gaps between
personal experience and its textualized manifestations.
Whereas transcendentalists inadvertently attempt to
184
maintain innocence in the face of encountering new knowl
edge, the dialogists tacitly accept the inevitability and
disorientation accompanying the loss of this naive atti
tude. Dialogists, that is, immediately plunge students in
to the practices of the academic community, hoping students
will grow into this larger social entity which they believe
encompasses any single self. Transcendentalists begin from
within the individual and build outward, insisting upon
retaining some residue of the essential self in all stages
of students' development as writers. Dialogists begin from
outside of the indidual self, as it were, and attempt to
enhance writing development by pulling students toward tar
geted practices endemic to specific communities.
Emersonian strains echo in transcendentalist pedago
gies as authority remains within individuals. However, the
nature of this authority must be qualified since it is not
the authority of an isolated ego but an authority origi
nating from a transcendental source greater than any single
person. Coles serves as the epitome of this view, and, in
fact, his pedagogy exemplifies the blurred boundary between
the two camps as "community" for him accrues transcendental
overtones of spirit generated by the combined efforts of
all participating individual selves.
"Community" for the dialogists is by contrast materi
alistic; its opaqueness is never seen through or dissolved
or spiritualized, as the case may be. Nevertheless,
185
Emersonian chords resonate for them, too, surfacing in the
continual activity of resistance. Writers secure their
sense of individuality by challenging established meanings
and by working against dominant forms. It appears, then,
that writers for the dialogists are never completely so-
2
cialized into their respective communities. Moreover, I
think it fair to conclude that dialogists would also admit
to recognizing this resistance as an ethical duty on the
part of any writer. The maxim might read: "Don't allow
yourself to be completely taken in by your community.
Maintain a respectable distance between you and them."
Hence those initial gaps separating the naive students from
community-specific textualized knowledge are never bridged:
rather, they are qualitatively transformed. At first these
gaps exclude beginning writers from entering academia. Yet
as they gradually understand the peculiar workings of texts
in this special world, those gaps become locations from
within which students can work out a stance of resistance.
Now how this actually happens is unclear. Students would
first have to be able to see some value in taking up this
stance, which implies their ability to transcend their
present immediate context and to imagine a better future.
Yet it is precisely this transformation of the student's
vision through reading and writing which remains ambiguous.
As it now stands, resistance becomes a form of vision
for dialogists--whether it be Bizzell's general
186
characterization, Bruffee's use of abnormal discourse, or
Bartholomae's insistence that students become insiders
while aggressively poised in a tenuous relationship with
the university. Evidently it is in the students' best in
terests to seek out the margins of the institutional dis
courses. It is hoped that through their development as
writers, students will understand how meanings are con
structed and maintained within academia, but it is not
clear whether or not their taking up this hesistant, ques
tioning stance is likewise a construction resulting from
one's participation in the community or whether this stance
is the result of individual vision. The former involves a
circular, self-inclosed process; the latter a more Emerson
ian version of independent judgment skirting solipsism.
Regardless of the verdict, it currently appears that the
value in maintaining such a position secures for the indi
vidual an attitude favoring perpetual change and one wary
of the dominance of any particular discourse.
Moreover, this attitude favoring change and resistance
surpasses the individual student and pervades the entire
field of composition and rhetoric. David Bartholomae, as
Past Chair of the Conference on College Composition and
Communication, delivered the Chair's Address just a few
months ago. I excerpt a few of his telling remarks regard
ing efforts to unify and set up disciplinary boundaries for
composition in which he pleads for keeping the field
187
undefined and open, using language clearly in the grain of
The American Scholar.
I am nervous about our sudden obsession
with disciplinary boundaries. I regret
graduate courses or graduate programs with
reading lists designed to define composi
tion and rhetoric as a set or self-
contained field. (46)
My sense is that the best way to think
of the term "communication," and the best
way to think of its function in our title,
is to think of it as a fortunate device,
a term that keeps us from ever completely
knowing our subject. Because of it, we can
never simply study composition; there is
always also this something else that we
know is there but that we can't define.
The undefinable term is evidence of our
anxiety about composition as a subjectless
activity, to be sure. (45)
And, finally, this dramatic conclusion to his peroration:
As I see it, our central purpose has -
been . . . to imagine a multivocal, dialog-
ical discipline that reflects in its
actions its theoretical opposition to a
unifying, dominant discourse. To propose
a unifying tradition, a canon, disciplinary
boundaries— to do this is to turn our backs
on our most precious legacy, which is a
willed and courageous resistance to the
luxury of order and tradition. The charge
to this generation and the next is to keep
the field open, not to close it; to provide
occasions for talk, not to lecture and
silence; to acknowledge our roots in
English, not deny them; to resist the temp
tations of rank and status; and to offer
the invitation to others to find their work
in CCCC. ("Freshman English, Composition,
and CCCC" 49)
Bartholomae seems to confuse defining a discipline's
object of study with setting up a rigid list of canonic
texts defining a particular tradition and excluding all
188
other versions. There is no necessary relationship between
defining the object of inquiry and excluding divergent
views. A defined object can still remain open to multiple
perspectives, and it need not mean that the object define
its method of study. If compositionists cannot even agree
as to what it is they are studying and arguing about, then
how can we ever convince others outside our discussions
that we are a respectable discipline worthy of equal rank,
in any university? If we accept Bartholomae's position, we
may well be respected for our openness as a discipline
where all are welcome to speak and be heard; but by what
criteria could we ever evaluate the relevance and validity
of such talk? How, for instance, if we followed Bruffee's
distinction, could we ever determine the difference between
"normal" and "abnormal" discourse within our field? That
"undefinable" something in communication might perhaps
serve as a distant horizon toward which our research is
oriented. A discipline that can quickly exhaust its sub
ject matter will obviously not be a discipline in any real
sense of the term. Yet Bartholomae1s anxiety about defin
ing an object of inquiry appears to serve the identical
purpose that Poirier's Emersonian "genius" serves as an un
knowable activity keeping all things unsettled and in per
petual motion.
I admire much of the work Bartholomae has done con
cerning basic writers. He reads their words humanely and
189
intelligently, and his insights into the difficult problems
these students must surmount are exceptional. I single him
out from the other dialogists for criticism here because he
does write so well about student writers and because his
stature and influence in the field has grown substantially
in the last few years. His speech unites all composition-
ists and rhetoricians under the democratic banner of open
ness, all-inclusiveness, and change. Who could object to
such values? I do not accuse Bartholomae, and for that
matter transcendentalists and dialogists alike, of not
valuing whatever knowledge we have gained about composing
in the last twenty-five years or so. But "whatever knowl
edge" is precisely the problem. That "undefinable" some
thing grounding communicative acts inadvertently renders
knowledge about what we do as writing teachers of less im
portance than the simple fact that we are all allowed and
encouraged to communicate with one another. But toward
what end is all of this talk?
For the dialogists conversation and dialogue play as
much of a metaphysical role as individual powers of vision
play for the transcendentalists. Both groups value indi
vidual reseeing but differ on the nature of these visionary
acts. Transcendentalists locate this power within individ
uals which must be activated before any real writing can
take place. This is the kind of writing that transmutes
individual experience into communally viable truths; hence
190
community practices and textual conventions are only neces
sary to provide comprehensible form for an otherwise
inchoate yet dynamic force. Dialogists acknowledge indi
vidual vision only as a result of participating in specific
community practices. Individual genius is thus meaningless
except within a particular context and then only meaningful
within that context and not necessarily transferable to
others.
I have attempted to demonstrate that the existence and
influence of both positions are explainable within an
Emersonian perspective. The idealism of Nature and "Self-
Reliance" informs the views of the transcendentalists,
while the recognition of social, cultural, and linguistic
limitations as described in "The American Scholar," "The
Poet," "Experience," and other later essays are elements
which dialogists have elaborated and emphasized over indi
vidual powers. The conflict is with Emerson from the very
beginning in Nature where he attempts to overcome idealism
by invoking "spirit"--the overriding principle of unity and
truth which prevents one from becoming trapped within the
splendid labyrinth of one's own perceptions, the labyrinth
painfully explored in "Experience." The guest for vision,
however, is sustained at the cost of the loss of the object
which, when viewed appropriately, is metaphorically ren
dered either transparent or fluid. It thus appears that
Emerson can never escape the charge of idealism because he
191
is unable to account for the role played by the object in
the subjective apprehension of truth. Yet, though Barthol
omae is not an idealist in the same manner that Emerson is,
his strenuous reluctance to define an object of study for
composition reflects a general anxiety in the field con
cerning the loss of the freedom of vision in the face of a
clearly defined object of knowledge. This would suggest
that a tacit idealism still underlies our attitude toward
writing.
Primarily, what needs to be accounted for is where
knowledge comes from. The transcendentalists value the
play of the mind in its subjective activity as it continu
ally reshapes personal experience into increasingly more
objectified and publicly accessible texts. They put off
closure of meaning in the text until the deadline to pub
lish forces them to do so* Hence the majority of the
transcendentalists' work in composition has been focused on
the individual's composing process, drawing upon personal
reflection and experience as their main sources of knowl-
3
edge. This stress on.the visionary possibilities of the
writer's mind during the composing process also explains
why transcendentalists pay scant attention to crafting
texts into conventional artifacts. Those in the dialo
gists ' camp locate knowledge in those issues which promote
the greatest activity among all participants sharing common
discourses, practices, and habits of mind. Vision is the
192
effect of this communal activity, and since texts play such
a fundamental role in the shaping and transmission of a
discipline's collective knowledge— let alone in the shaping
of the student's knowledge— reading actually takes prece
dence over writing. Knowledge is gained solely from texts,
and a writer acquires authority through becoming a better
reader. Furthermore, the bulk of the scholarly work
written by dialogists dealing with composing is derived
from interpreting students' texts. Consequently, they are
often attracted to literary theory as a way of explaining
difficulties students experience in composing as well as
4
using those same theories in designing writing pedagogies.
Both transcendentalists and dialogists would share in
Tuman's concern that reading and writing as symbolizing
activities should also be critical practices by which mean
ings are objectified and held up for public scrutiny. Yet
with this Emersonian tradition in composition the emphasis
is less on the making of actual texts and more on the
psychology of the writer in trying to become a member of a
textual community— albeit these two camps possess quite
different notions about the nature of this textual commun
ity. The conflict between seeing and saying as activities
for achieving personal authority and for resisting the im
position of external forms overshadows the text and ignores
its status as an independent symbolic object. For tran
scendentalists texts are manifestations of imaginative
193
activity, or of voice, or of the effort by students to re
claim the language of texts as their own by making words
embody their experiences. For them writing is a highly
ethical activity with consequences possibly affecting the
entire society. Among dialogists texts are traces of
struggles individuals undergo in attempting to fit into a
particular community while simultaneously resisting being
overinfluenced by the dominant discourse. For them writing
is a form of socialization into a specific group whose
activities typically do not transcend general community
concerns.
What we finally end up with from both groups is a
psychology of reading and writing more interested in the
possession and control of textual meanings than in the va
lidity of what is asserted by writers about specific sub
jects. The source of conflict between the two groups,
then, is how this "self" as writer and reader is conceptu
alized. Transcendentalists believe in an autonomous indi
vidual seeking escape from cultural and social conditioning
by positing a non-contingent power acting behind conscious
5
acts. Their views, however, are threatened because it is
never clear how the individual can avoid slipping into
solipsism. In contrast, dialogists escape this threat by
displacing individual consciousness to the ongoing and con
stantly changing dynamic flow of a community's conversa
tions and practices. This view, though, inevitably risks
194
losing the individual entirely to authoritative elements
predominating in a given community: Hence the need to
resist.
The problem concerning individual authority will never
be fully understood if we cannot account for those symbolic
meanings intentionally asserted by writers about specific
objects in the world. If we lose sight of the epistemolog-
ical object represented in a text, reducing it to traces of
cognitive processes or to community practices, then how can
we ever escape the danger of slipping into solipsism
whether or not it manifests itself on the personal or on
the social level?
In order to attempt to answer this question I want to
return once more to Emerson. For to the degree to which we
as compositionists share his concerns with individual
authority, so might we find a possible way out by deepening
our understanding of his lifelong struggle to realize the
God within.
The Dilemma of Subjectivity
As a philosopher Emerson accepts on faith that truth
exists, but he is not interested in establishing the basis
for certainty as much as he is driven to publicize the
countless obstacles which prevent us from realizing that
certainty. As a literary author Emerson does not seek to
persuade his audience but "to invigorate" and "to challenge
and hearten" (Hughes xiii). Emerson does not desire to
195
construct a philosophical system; rather, each of his
essays is an attempt to resee, to explore anew each time
from a different vantage point the extreme difficulties
confronting anyone self-reliant enough to venture the risk
of tapping into "the infinitude of the private man." Thus
Emerson the philosopher writes a form of fiction addressed
to the "active soul" within each one of us and asking us to
reconsider how we live.
Barbara Hughes wisely observes in her innovative study
°f Emerson's Demanding Optimism that Emerson's early chal
lenge to readers of Nature to build their own world becomes
throughout the remainder of Emerson's long, productive
career a recognition of just how strong that world-making,
house-building spirit can be. Certainly, the world we
build can also confine us; yet the strength of this confin
ing structure is likewise evidence of the power of the
spirit to create (18). The essay "Experience" and the
entire book The Conduct of Life (W VI) indicate the inevi
tability of our fate, which Hughes claims are one's truths
or one's perceptions that become one's destiny. Thus
Emerson is forced to move away from his early hope to re
lease the spirit confined in nature and to concentrate in
stead on the inner world where chimeras of the psyche
generated by the psyche itself threaten "to hem in the
life."
196
One of the chief sources of power in the Romantic
movement— boding both good and ill consequences— and which
gathered momentum in the nineteenth century, was the turn
ing of attention toward consciousness itself. As cited
earlier, the quintessence of this shift is perfectly cap
tured in Emerson's dramatically understated announcement
opening the penultimate section of "Experience":
It is very unhappy, but also too late to
be helped, the discovery we have made that
we exist. That discovery is called the
Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect
our instruments. We have learned that we
do not see directly, but mediately, and
that we have no means of correcting these
colored and distorting lenses which we are,
or of computing the amount of their errors.
Perhaps these subject-lenses have a crea
tive power; perhaps there are no objects.
(CW III 43)
As Hughes notes, it is not the fact of our existence
which is significant but the discovery of, or the becoming
g
conscious of, this fact. Emerson's chief virtue is that,
despite the abstractness and ambiguity in much of his
thought, throughout his career he remains faithful to his
belief in certainty; moreover, this unshakeable belief both
provides him with the courage but also the necessity to
pursue the labyrinthine ways of consciousness in those most
human of acts— seeing and saying. To dismiss Emerson as a
Romantic idealist is to miss the importance of what he is
attempting in his work. He is not seeking to elevate mind
over the world in the sort of domination which ends up
197
making the world conform to our theories of it. Instead he
is too aware, sometimes painfully so, of the inadequacies
of all of our theories. He is aware of their artifice as
human constructs, and aware, too, that the "unifying in
stinct" of the mind tyrannizes over nature which would make
all of nature into the image of man. This is precisely the
kind of hubris Emerson must reject, for in raising man over
nature man becomes God, and self-reliance instead of God-
reliance is distorted into a species of "mean egotism."
The implications of this twisted Emersonian strain in
American literature is manifested in Captain Ahab's ego-
maniacal pride and compulsiveness to control all of nature.
The unrestrained ego fears domination. It perceives
anything standing over against it as a threatening limita
tion. Even our theories can be used to dominate objects in
the world by denying their autonomous existence. Hence, it
is not just the individual ego seeking domination that is
dangerous but the ego in the service of an unreflectively
understood theory which, under the illusion of true knowl
edge, provides the subject with the power to control. This
illegitimate authority is especially overwhelming when
these theories are elaborated into vast and intricate
systems which then veil the autonomy of individual things,
confusing our perception with an egoistic need to dominate
and to remain aloof. The victims of such domination and
control might appear like Melville's "Bartleby the
198
Scrivener," Ahab's opposite. Bartleby is a non-entity, a
lowly law clerk toiling anonymously on Wall Street.
Bartleby is Ahab swallowed by the whale which turns out to
be an overarching social system confining everyone, includ
ing those like the lawyers who supposedly have "real"
authority but only because they operate from within that
system.
In composition William Coles, in the service of a
higher power, can rail against succumbing to the conven
tionalities of linguistic practices. While someone like
Bartholomae recognizes that we are all already Bartlebys,
our thinking constrained and channelled by disciplinary
practices, and our authority achieved only after success
fully learning how to function within the system. Coles
and Bartholomae exemplify anxiety concerning the nature of
personal authority and ambiguity concerning its source.
Yet both respond by focusing solely upon the subject, hop
ing to empower their students so that they might evade
being dominated by a system.
The transcendentalists and dialogists both retain the
spirit of Emersonianism because the motivating force in
their pedagogies remains centered on empowering the student
writer. In fact, composition as it emerged in the sixties
focused upon the active nature of the student learner and
opposed passive imitation of dominant discourse forms.
Although compositionists were not using the term then, they
199
were actually developing within the educational institution
writing pedagogies that were moving toward forms of criti
cal literacy. The general thrust of this version of liter
acy sought to enable students to possess their knowledge
more consciously and to use it more critically by teaching
them how to become better readers and writers and thereby
wielding control over how they acquired their knowledge in
the first place. Thus composition as a discipline has had
to deal directly with this problem of individual seeing and
saying because as a critical practice its ethical obliga
tion is to nurture the infinitude of possible ways of know
ing potentially represented by each student who sits in our
writing classes. Hence, despite the advances made in cog
nitive psychology, in learning theory, in linguistics, in
literary criticism, and in a host of other language-related
areas, we must still confront the same psychological and
epistemological problems which Emerson confronted in his
historical situation.
But these "ways of knowing," while certainly impor
tant, are not sufficient because they fail to consider the
object of knowledge. Emerson shares the modern assumption
originating with Kant "that the known is, in some way, a
7
function of the knower" (McDermott, Streams 32). Emer
son's emphasis, however, is on our relations with objects
and upon how our experience of those objects can lead to
knowledge. He does not want to accept the Kantian a priori
200
synthesizing consciousness as the condition of all knowl
edge; rather, knowledge for Emerson can only be possible if
the individual is willing to submit to the relational qual
ity of the knower to the known. Furthermore, the knower
must also be faithful in reporting exactly what is experi
enced in that relation, precisely the formidable task
Emerson sets himself in "Experience." And what he finds in
experience is "Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface,
Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,— these are threads on
the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not
assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them
in my way" (CW III 47).
The object for Emerson, in fact, is seen caught up in
the flow of time as our conscious experience of the world
presents itself in a continuous stream. Emerson can find
no way to verify that any given thing will appear in the
same manner from one instance to the next: "Souls never
touch their objects," and "Our relations to each other are
oblique and casual." We never do perceive nature directly,
but perceive it through the distorting lenses of conscious
ness. Nature does not allow direct access to herself; in
stead, "all our blows glance, all our hits accidents" (CW
III 29). "Experience" traverses the phenomenal terrain of
subjective consciousness. The method Emerson uses here is
to reduce consciousness to its quintessentiality, to pare
away all that is superfluous in order to expose that which
201
is previous underneath (Hughes 37). What remains are the
"bleak rocks" of the soul, revealing a "poverty" which, no
matter how "scandalous," actually becomes our greatest
treasure. For Emerson discovers that the challenge of
self-reliance is to recognize that all of our actions begin
from and return to this barren place of solitude, and it is
only our recognition and acceptance of this fact which
offers us any hope of making any progress in our under
standing of the world.
In confronting the "facts" of experience, Emerson
attempts a reduction of consciousness unlike the Cartesian
doubt: Emerson never doubts the existence of the world.
Instead, this paring away of the layers of conscious expe
rience resembles what Edmund Husserl would attempt, some
decades later, in a much more systematic and scrupulous
fashion by introducing this phenomenological method. The
epoche or bracketing of the world, for Husserl, is neces
sary in order for the individual knower to understand how
we come to know anything. Like Emerson, the Husserlian
epoche is not an attempt to doubt the existence of the
world. In the reduction the world continues to exist as
it always has; yet the crucial difference is that within
the bracket we can no longer rely on our assumptions or
theories to explain what we experience. All of our prior
conceptions of the world are put out of commission so that
we might make the transcendental turn inward in order to
202
see just how objects present themselves to consciousness.
And like the Emersonian genius, the validity of this tran
scendental turn depends upon the veracity of the report.
Thus in our activity of knowing the world, we do not do
anything to it; rather, we submit to recognizing exactly
how the world gives itself to us, and from there we begin
to develop our ideas about it.
This is really the gist of Emersonian vision. Unfor
tunately, Emerson's own descriptions are invariably over
laid with mysticism, understandably so given Emerson's
religious training and the general nineteenth century ro
mantic reaction to the encroachments of empiricism. Emer
son, however, is quite clear regarding the necessity for
passivity involved in any intellectual act. He says,
Our thinking is a pious reception. Our
truth of thought is therefore vitiated as
much by too violent direction given by our
will, as by too great negligence. We do
not determine what we will think. We only
open our senses, clear away as we can all
obstruction from the fact, and suffer the
intellect to see. . . . As far as we can
recall these ecstasies, we carry away in
the ineffaceable memory the result, and all
men and all the ages confirm it. It is
called truth. But the moment we cease to
report and attempt to correct and contrive,
it is not truth. (CW II 195)
Self-reliance is suffering the intellect to see what
presents itself. We all share this capacity to see truly,
yet we are also all threatened by the strong likelihood of
error in reporting what we do see. Our personal
203
insecurities, our assumptions, our grand theories, the
needs of our individual egos (the little fellow) all con
tribute toward obscuring the object of vision. As in "The
American Scholar" the problem of reading involves this pro
cess of clarifying one's reception of the text. How do I
know whether in reading I am only projecting the interests
of my ego or if I am actually glimpsing the thoughts of
another mind? The best reader for Emerson is evidently the
one who can tell the difference, but beyond establishing
reception as the prerequisite intellectual act, Emerson
does not tell us anything further. We are left alone to
discover these truths for ourselves.
However, if we were to pursue the Emersonian challenge
of self-reliance, we would find that in the twentieth cen
tury the lords of life have coalesced into the formidable
lord of language. As all of our individual views are par
tial and fragmented, we must also rely on the vision and
veracity of the reports of others to complement ours. But
it is precisely the language with which we communicate what
we see that today betrays any naive trust in a knowable
world. Emerson's shiftings between a hope for a transpar
ent language perfectly fitting the objects of nature and an
understanding that language is inevitably opaque and never
says exactly what one wants it to say, leads him to resist
the what-has-been-said-already in texts in order to pursue
the infinite task of achieving unitary vision.
204
It is therefore understandable that the necessity to
communicate one's vision, coupled with the inevitability of
language to obscure the object of vision, causes intellec
tual acts of seeing to become eventually conflated with
reading texts. The metaphor of reading the world thus also
works both ways: The world is read as a text, and the text
is read as a special version of the world. Barbara Packer
explains how the young Emerson was severely influenced by
g
the "high Criticism" coming from Germany. The net effect
upon Emerson was to convince him that the sole authority
for the meaning of any text, including the Bible, origi
nated from within the self. In a crucial sense, then,
Emerson's forsaking of the ministry was also an acknowledg
ment of a new source for authority based on individual
judgment, but, perhaps just as crucially, this authority
received its motivation and direction from the reading of
texts. This shift to the literate mentality is monumental.
Today debate over the cognitive and social consequences
of literacy continues. Nevertheless, we still possess
little understanding of the relationship between the
achievement of a critical literacy involving changes in
cognition and the concomitant dramatic shifts in the psy
chology of authority.^ Tuman correctly points out that
people will not achieve a level of literacy beyond that of
decoding if they are content with their present situation.
In order to achieve critical literacy the individual must
205
both see a need for encountering the alien world of texts
as well as develop a secure enough ego capable of risking
estrangement from one's presently known situation.
In the final analysis, the single greatest
obstacle to reading is the students’ fail
ing to acquire a compelling interest in
verbal meanings that differ categorically
from those normally communicated in their
social relations with others. (31)
Tuman argues that reading "involves overcoming the es
trangement of verbal meaning, while writing involves the
intentional creating of meanings which seek to reformulate ;
an existing relationship with the world" (32). In contrast
to conversation which maintains the collective social ex
perience of the group, tribe, or community, writing repre
sents an individual decision to defy the collective ident
ity. In that sense, following the critic George Steiner,
Tuman concludes that "writing is a fundamental act of
social betrayal"; and quoting Steiner, writing "’is the
main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it
is1" (32). In considering the psychology of authority in
volved in achieving literacy, we might read "The American
Scholar" as a commentary on the psychological, social, and
cultural effects of literacy.
Furthermore, connections between the psychology of
authority, the achievement of literacy, and the currents of
Emersonian self-reliance flow into larger philosophical
waters involving what Richard Rorty calls "Transcendentalist
206
culture." Rorty cites Emerson as one of the cultural
figures who, during the nineteenth century, developed a
kind of writing mingling literary criticism, intellectual
history, moral philosophy, epistemology, and social
prophecy.^ Rorty says that this new "genre is often still
called 'literary criticism.1" This occurred primarily be
cause in this century imaginative literature usurped the
function traditionally served by religion and philosophy
"in forming and solacing the agonized conscience of the
young. Novels and poems are now the principal means by
which a bright youth gains a self-image" (Consequences of
Pragmatism 66).
Rorty claims that we now live in a culture where
"putting one's moral sensitivity into words is not clearly
distinguishable from exhibiting one's literary sensibili
ties." Extending Rorty's suggestion here implies that who
we think we are and how we present ourselves is ultimately
a product of texts and interpretative activity. The writ
ing of texts encourages individuals to assume unique per
spectives; likewise, reading encourages multiple interpre
tations to proliferate. What we get in the nineteenth cen
tury, then, is two versions of transcendentalism. Rorty
uses Santayana to distinguish between "transcendentalist
metaphysical systems" and "'transcendentalism proper.'" Of
the latter Santayana says that
207
like romanticism, it is not any particular
set of dogmas about what things exist; it
is not a system of the universe regarded as
a fact. . . . It is a method, a point of
view, from which any work, no matter what
it might contain, could be approached by a
self-conscious observer. . . . It is the
chief contribution made in modern times to
speculation. (Qtd. in Consequences 66-7)
Rorty comments that the transcendentalist viewpoint is
really an "attitude that there is no point in raising ques
tions of truth, goodness, or beauty, because between our
selves and the thing judged there always intervenes mind,
language, a perspective chosen among dozens, one descrip-
tion chosen out of thousands."
In dealing with these interventions Obscuring "the
thing judged" it is necessary to resee or revise continu
ally the present judgment. Yet, if we can never be certain
of what it is we are reseeing from another perspective, how
can we be sure that taking up a different view is still a
view of the same object? Moreover, if we assume that mul
tiplying perspectives will get us no closer to the truth of
our judgments, then what will motivate and guide our shifts
in perspective? Without an object pole orienting these
subjective acts, this sort of production threatens to be
come meaningless or, more charitably, an activity whose
meaningfulness can only be known in hindsight as we suffer
the effects of our actions. Knowledge becomes less about
what can be known and more concerned with the conditions
which make it impossible to know anything with any degree
208
of certainty. The major attitudinal shift from the nine
teenth to the twentieth century is from one of hope to one
of anxiety due inevitably to our being afflicted by a hy
perconsciousness of the inadequacy of any perspective.
As I have attempted to demonstrate, Emersonian resist
ance to the established, to the already formed and accepted
idea, risks becoming an activity seeking to evade limita
tions but doing so without any clue toward what end or in
what direction such activity should take. The only check
on this endless proliferation and, indeed, the sole guaran
tor of truth is the bedrock foundation of the soul (and its
connection with the Oversoul) which alone can judge. How
ever, once we cut away this metaphysical order in nature,
we possess a world where our projected meanings about
things actually reflects how humans in their activities
create meanings and impose them upon the world. We wind up
with the situation which Kenneth Burke speculates reverses
the usual commonsense assumption that "words are the signs
of things" and makes "things the signs of words." Burke
says that
[I]n mediating between the social realm and
the realm of the nonverbal, words communi
cate to things the spirit that the society
imposes upon the words which have come to be'
the "names" for them. The things are in
effect the visible tangible material em
bodiments of the spirit that infuses them
through the medium of words. ("What are
the Signs of What" 362)
209
Burke claims that his approach is the "linguistic
counterpart" to Emerson's transcendentalist views in Nature.
What Burke treats as empirical aspects of language, Emerson
treats in terms of "supernatural 'spirit.'" Although Burke
does not reduce all of reality to poststructuralist argu
ments regarding the force of language, his views concerning
the social nature of meaning are indicative of what is to
day accepted unquestioningly. Emerson is not a linguistic
determinist; yet he recognizes the power of language, as
well as a host of other elements, as strong influences upon
our understanding of the world. He can get no further than
to recognize the force of these influences and to challenge
us to resist their pull. Throughout his work he clings to
his faith that such resistance is possible and necessary
and can thus project a distant unity upon the receding
horizon.
In ways I have previously analyzed, transcendentalists
and dialogists recapitulate in their pedagogies and theo
ries of writing certain Emersonian themes of self-reliance.
In attempting to empower students to become critical
readers and writers, compositionists must come to grips
with the authority enabling any person to know something
and to communicate that knowledge to others. However, the
obstacles in Emerson's challenges to self-reliance have to
day apparently become incontrovertible facts. Transcen
dentalists and dialogists accept that language mediates all
210
of our relations with the world. Thus, though they con
strue this mediatory relationship differently, it remains
the point of origin motivating their enabling pedagogies;
one posits a transcendental power behind language and oper
ating within the individual; the other turns this relation
ship inside out and sees the power functioning in community
practices. Both groups have made genuine contributions in
helping to create a more psychologically valid and humane
theory of composition. But these contributions are not
enough. Our present understanding of the self being medi
ated by language isolates and unfairly skews our. concep
tion of writing toward the problem of individual subjectiv
ity. What is lost in this process is the text itself as an
object with its own particular mode of existence. Until we
can account for both the subjective and objective poles,
our theories of writing and reading will remain ambiguous.
Recovering the Object
The revival of classical rhetoric in the sixties was
not only an attempt to provide historical and theoretical
scope to composition as well as to offer sound principles
of communication as a basis for pedagogies, but it was also
a recognition that writing requires both subjective and
intersubjective processes in order to make an object which
can outlast its immediate communicative context. Paul
Hemardi has argued that in a theory of verbal practice we
are always doing, making, and meaning something. Whether
211
writing or speaking, we do something with words that has an
effect on others. Secondly, particularly when we write, we
make an object; and lastly every communicative act involves
a "quasi-verbal thought" as a thing meant (749). The sub
jective, intersubjective, and objective aspects of the com
municative act are interdependent. Our subjective pro
cesses merge with our social selves as we engage in conver
sations and debates, read others' texts, participate in in
stitutional roles, and cooperate to help solve the special
problems defined by our respective disciplines. Moreover,
when we write, the finished text is released for public
scrutiny, and, as an artifact, it can persist through time,
thus transcending its original situation.
Yet, while this new rhetoric attempted to counteract
what was perceived to be a polarization of writing instruc
tion either into a romantic, vitalistic mode, relying on
intuition and natural ability; or into a current-
traditionalism, which boiled down to students merely imi
tating professional model essays (Berlin, Writing Instruc
tion 58-76; Young, "Arts, Crafts"), the subjective, inter-
subjective, and objective interdependencies quickly col
lapsed into some version of linguistic determinism. Hence
the transcendentalist-dialogist split manifests itself as
further attempts to account for the subjectivity of compos
ing, while still assuming that this process is to various
degrees circumscribed by language.
212
Writing is an individual act involving a complexity of
mental acts. Certainly these acts are influenced by social
circumstances and the constraints imposed on writers by
textual conventions; yet, that most Emersonian of all facts
remains— whatever meanings are objectified in texts, they
are still the meanings as the particular writer "sees"
them. Even collaborative efforts, if they are successful,
result from all participants agreeing that what the text
represents is what they have come to see for themselves.
The central problem for composition as a discipline is thus
twofold: (1) we must understand how individuals do "see"
the world in relationship to their evolving texts; and, (2)
we must understand how the writer's vision as represented
in texts can be elaborated and extended to account for how
others have viewed the world as well as to offer sufficient
evidence that what is meant in a text can be verified by
others. Consequently, what is intersubjective and objec
tive about writing will always remain oriented toward a
subjectivity intending a meaning.
Whether one wants to claim that meanings are either
created from within the self or constructed from elements
in one's discourse community, no one can deny that if
readers and writers really can say that they comprehend a
text, then they will be able to say what the text is about.
Though it may change drastically over time and may require
several passes through a text before meanings are filled
213
out, any single reader or writer will always decide upon a
core meaning before any further transformations will be
12
made. Therefore there can only ever be determinate mean
ings relative to some individual subjectivity. Hence writ
ing pedagogies must help individual students move from
initial positions clinging to subjective, idiosyncratic
meanings to those where meanings objectified in texts are
accessible to other selves and can thus be intersubjec-
tively shared. We need a concept of the text as a real ob
ject in the world not reducible to individual psychological
processes nor to the synedochic practices of one's dis^
course community.
It does not necessarily follow that the text as a
crafted artifact embodying an intended objectivity need
escape into an autonomous realm of pure meaning. The New
Critics in bracketing the subjectivities of readers and
writers perpetuated the dichotomizing of the mind into its
intellectual and sensuous aspects. Texts were intellectual
creations, purified of gross empirical realities through
the alembicating process of the synthetic, Kantian con
sciousness .
There is a gross body of life, of sen
sory and mental experience, which lies be
hind and in some sense causes every poem, '
but can never be and need not be known in
the verbal and hence intellectual composi
tion which is the poem. For all the ob
jects of our manifold experience, for every
unity, there is an action of the mind which
cuts off roots, melts away context— or
214
indeed we should never have objects or
ideas or anything to talk about.
(Wimsatt and Beardsley 1019)
If "objects" and "ideas" are the products of this
special action of the synthetic consciousness, then Emer
son's attempt in "Experience" to describe just how frus-
tratingly distorting this synthesizing action is, serves as
a powerful corrective to an over-reliance on theories when
they are not validated by actual experience. In composi
tion, transcendentalists and dialogists take up the Emer-*
sonian mantle by insisting that composing be reconnected to
individuals as they live through these successive acts.
However, when they explain this process of achieving a co
herent text, this synthesis is believed due to either an
unnameable power operating through language or through
one's identification with and imitation of a particular
discourse community's practices. Consequently they wind up
veering away from the difficulties of explaining this
action and serve, finally, to reconfirm a version of Kant
as the presiding Dean of the Humanities.
In order to retain an Emersonian vitality to composi
tion, we need to understand how what is meant remains the
product of what is seen by an individual in relation to a
real world out there which is likewise capable of being
seen in similar ways by others. Explaining this similarity
as the result of belonging to a common culture, sharing the
same knowledge, language, genre expectations, etc., will
215
still get us no closer to understanding how what we mean is
connected to a real world, separate but capable of being
known to certain degrees. In "Experience" Emerson can not
see how it is possible to identify the same object in con
sciousness, especially since the nature of our mental life
presents itself as a constant stream through time and sub
ject to fluctuations in mood and modes of awareness. Yet
this is only half of the problem; for, if the individual
cannot be certain of the identity of an object through
time, then how can the solitary self be sure that another
self can perceive the same thing as well?
Emerson is honest enough to recognize that if the
world is to be known as it is, then we must be able to know
it through its shifting, seemingly apparitional appear
ances. Objectivity is characterized by identifiableness
(Gurwitsch 139), and identiflability is essential for
writers and readers. If a writer cannot identify the same
intended meaning over time, then she will be unable to pro
duce a coherent text. This does not mean that one's mean
ing will not change from what it is initially; rather,
those changes will follow a structured pattern if we attend
to them closely enough. This is particularly evident in
revising. In moving through successive drafts of an essay
writers generally are trying to bring to fullness what may
at first be only a sketchy, vague generalization about a
subject. Intended meanings may change substantially during
216
revision, but if a writer cannot understand the direction
these transformations are taking nor understand how they
are following logically from the intended object as it is
initially understood, then she will lose track of her sub
ject. Each successive draft will end up becoming the start
of a completely new essay. Coherence is thus a synthesized
unity achieved over time whereby an intended meaning can be
identified and intersubjectively shared. This achieved
synthesis, however, is the result of the congruence of a
writer's perspective on an intended object, i.e., the mean
ing is clear only because of our understanding of the ob^
ject through the writer's perspective.
Louise Phelps defines coherence as
. . . a property of intentional global re
latedness that readers ascribe to textual
meanings when they are able to integrate
a satisfying macrostructure for a text in a
way that they feel to be directly responsi
ble to and closely guided by multiple, con
sistent integrational cues. As a result
they perceive their own integration as
strongly correlated with the intentions
of a writer. (170)
Both Phelps and Winterowd have consistently maintained a
realist perspective viewing texts as intended objects,
structured by writers to cue responses which are played out
by readers.1^ Yet, despite their insights, we still must
correlate the text's coherence with the view of the world
which the text discloses. Phelps admits that
I have not done justice to the role of
reference in testing coherence, because to
217
say that comprehension is basically con
textual is to say that texts make sense of
worlds, not just themselves, and that inte
grations made by readers are not detached
from their own beliefs about the world.
(179)
In order to help students achieve coherence in their
texts, we need to be able to understand how the meanings
they initially intend appear to them. This is an enor
mously difficult task to carry out yet a necessary and
vital one for composition. I cannot go any further now
than to suggest a general direction along lines incorporat
ing what I consider to be the most valuable in the Emerson
ian tradition.
What appears to consciousness during composing must be
anchored to an object capable of being comprehended by
others. What we lack is a concept of the object as in
tended in consciousness. Such a concept is readily at hand
in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. It is Husserl's
important discovery of the "noema" (Gurwitsch 156) which I
think offers compositionists the key to understanding the
process whereby writers can eventually achieve coherent
meanings. Husserl's insight is that consciousness is
always consciousness about something (Ideas Sec. 36) and
that this "something" will always present itself to us in a
definite manner. These appearances are the "noemata," not
the objects themselves but intended objects as they appear
to consciousness. The noema correlates with the real
218
object as it is apprehended through our conscious mental
acts (or noeses). The noema can thus remain constant
throughout the stream of time and through a succession of
mental acts. For instance, I can call to mind the first
four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and whether I do
that now or ten years from now commonsense assures me that
I will be able to identify those four notes in that order
as belonging to the Fifth Symphony. I can ask a friend to
hum those notes and be able to tell whether he knows this
symphony or not. In whatever mood I hear this music, I
also know that I will be able to recognize it for what it
is. Noevertheless if I change one note, I will then be
contemplating a different noema.
The noema thus anchors all intentional acts of con
sciousness as acts directed toward a something meant. Even
such aesthetic feelings as the pleasure experienced in con
templating the unity of a given artwork will have as its
noematic correlate the "pleasing object" as such (Ideas
Sec. 88). Husserl's concept of intentionality, centered as
it is by the noesis-noema doctrine (Gurwitsch 139-40) ,
offers composition a superbly rich category by which we can
rescue the text as both an autonomous object in its own
right as well as uphold the necessity of individual vision
in the process of formulating intentional meanings. We can
ask students to resee their texts without them necessarily
having to begin over again or fear getting sidetracked by
219
the language they use because we can keep re-orienting them
to the meanings they intend. During revision as they work
toward filling out the dim outlines of an initially vaguely
perceived noema, they will have to confront the imprecise
and polysemous nature of language which threatens to change
their intended meanings unintentionally. But with the con
cept of the noema we can avoid the pitfalls of subjectiv
ism, relativism, and scepticism so prevalent today and em
brace optimism as the attitude characterizing composition.
With such an attitude guiding our actions ■ , composition as a
discipline can study the ways students learn to write in
order to help them develop that skill more effectively so
that in the long run they may learn more about themselves
and their worlds.
Instead of viewing writing along mutually incompatible
lines, we can replace the "power" behind language of the
transcendentalists with the concept of intentionality.
Moreover, imitating and resisting community practices as
espoused by the dialogists can be viewed as necessary only
because those practices are understood to lead to insights
which have real significance, not only for individuals
working within specific disciplines but also for others
working outside these limiting frames, because those in
sights will relate to worlds ultimately accessible to all
reflecting minds. And literacy would be the general mode
through which those worlds can be known.
220
A dramatic example--albeit a negative one— showing how
individual vision can function within a specific commun
ity's activities is available in the biography of Barbara
McClintock. This Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, certainly
influenced by and using all of the theories, technologies,
and practices available to her through training in her dis
cipline, nevertheless saw in the chromosomes of growing
corn plants what no one else could see. She could "see"
genetic transposition because she concentrated her vision
upon a reality she believed she could find. Only those
looking over her shoulder in the laboratory and following
her instructions could finally share her vision. Evelyn
Fox Keller, McClintock's biographer, comments that those
sharing Barbara's vision also
needed to share in McClintock's internal
vision. In that sense, "seeing" in science
is not unlike "seeing" in art. Based on
vision, our most public and our most pri
vate sense, it gives rise to a kind of
knowledge that requires more than a shared
practice to be communicable: it requires
a shared subjectivity. (149)^-^
A realist view enhanced by Husserl's theory of in-
tentionality can bolster compositionists in helping stu
dents understand how it is both possible and desirable to
achieve coherence in their texts. Students might learn
that they do indeed possess the power to become authorities
in what they see and say. Yet even this knowledge is not
enough, for without the practical wisdom needed to guide
221
our actions and the courage sometimes needed to proceed,
speaking the unsayable might never occur.
222
NOTES
The arguments concerning development actually break
down roughly along lines paralleling the distinctions I am
making here between the transcendentalists and dialogists.
This conflict is aptly represented in the competing theo
ries of development of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky.
Piaget argues for a genetic stage-model theory in which the
mind develops from concrete to abstract operations. Like
the transcendentalists, for cognitivists generally, the
human mind is an autonomous entity that is also self
regulating. In contrast, Vygotsky’s line of thought empha
sizes the social dimension of all thinking and mental
development. For those sharing Vygotsky's social views,
thought is mediated by language, with mind inseparable from
its social context. In the early eighties M. M. Bakhtin
became popular because he fit in with this growing aware
ness that all thought is mediated by language as it is
practiced in social situations. A few sources for some of
these controversies in development are: Jean Piaget and B.
Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic
Books, 1969) ; L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, ed. and
trans. by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge:
M.I.T. Press, 1984); M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagina
tion , ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and
Holquist (Austin: U of Texas Press, 1981). For an intro
ductory overview of developmental theories in general see
Patricia H. Miller, Theories of Developmental Psychology
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1983).
2
This is my observation, not Bartholomae's. But it
must follow if there is to be any chance of a personal
transformation and the establishing of a stance of resist
ance. Interestingly, in one of the primary sources for the
sociology of knowledge movement, Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (New York:
Anchor Books, 1967) admit that "Socialization is never com
pletely successful," and that "Even among more or less
accredited 'inhabitants,' there will always be idiosyn
cratic variations in the way they conceive of the universe"
(106). However this observation is glossed over because
for Berger and Luckman whatever is idiosyncratic could
never count for knowledge. Such idiosyncracies can never
attain the legitimate status of knowledge because in de
fining knowledge as socially constructed these sociologists
are saying that personal views will be systematically ex
cluded. However this "little" fact seems crucially
223
significant to me as it must for Bartholomae; for we need
to understand precisely what happens to these idiosyncratic
views as they are either eliminated or merged with more
socially viable systems of thought.
3
Stephen North labels this group "Practitioners."
These are teachers who rely both on their own and their
classroom experiences as primary sources of knowledge. See
Stephen M. North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition
(New Jersey: Boynton/Cook, 1987). In the last few years
this Emersonian strand of reliance upon personal experience
has been resurrected in calls for teachers to become re
searchers in their classrooms: Dixie Goswami and Peter R.
Stillman, Reclaiming the Classroom (New Jersey: Boynton/
Cook, 1987) . Also in calls for writers to reflect upon
their own composing processes: see the two volumes edited
by Tom Waldrep, particularly vol. 1: Writers on Writing
(New York: Random House, 1985) . On the disciplinary level
Louise Phelps calls for a dialectical engagement between
theory and practice: Composition as a Human Science (New
York: Oxford UP, 1988), chp. 9.
4 . .
Recent works attempting to merge reading and writing
and in the process Literature with Composition are:
Douglas G. Atkins and Michael L. Johnson, eds., Writing and
Reading Differently (Kansas: U of Kansas Press, 1985);
Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl, Reclaiming Pedagogy
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989); and Winifred
Bryan Horner, ed., Composition and Literature: Bridging
the Gap (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1983). One caveat
here is that in "bridging the gap" writing instruction can
be re-united with Literature departments but on Litera
ture' s terms under the guise of making writing into another
form of reading. Thus business as usual can continue with
composition becoming another tentacle of literary theory.
5
For Emerson this "power" can be located either be
hind and acting through the individual, or it can be within
the self, motivating all actions.
^ See Gertrude Reif Hughes, Emerson's Demanding Opti
mism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984), p. 58, n. 23.
7
McDermott locates Emerson as the precursor to Wil
liam James and John Dewey in drawing our attention to the
liberating symbolism present in our own
experience. We are not to be dependent on
faith hatched elsewhere out of others' ex
periences, nor, above all, are we to rest
on an inherited ethic whose significance is
224
due more to longevity and authority than to
the press of our own experience.
See John McDermott, Stream of Experience (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 31.
g
See Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), chp. 3, sections, 27-32.
Concerning this reduction Husserl explicitly says that it
differs from the Cartesian doubt. The reduction
is also not a transformation into presump
tion, suggestion, indecision doubt. . . .
Rather it is something quite unique. We do
not abandon the thesis [the Natural thesis
of the world existing over against us] we
have adopted, we make no change in our con
viction , which remains in itself what it is
so long as we do not introduce new motives
of judgment, which we precisely refrain
from doing. And yet the thesis undergoes a
modification— whilst remaining in itself
what it is, we set it as it were "out of
action," we "disconnect it," "bracket it"
. . . . In this case . . . we are dealing
with indicators that point to a definite
but unique form of consciousness, which
clamps on to the original simple thesis
. . . and transvalues it in a quite pecu
liar way. This transvaluing is a concern
of our full freedom, and is opposed to all
cognitive attitudes that would set them
selves up as coordinate with the thesis
..... (97-8)
I note here the Emersonian parallels regarding this "unique
form of consciousness" as a special kind of "seeing."
9
Barbara Packer, "Origin and Authority: Emerson and
the Higher Criticism" in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Recon
structing American Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1986), pp. 67-92. Packer's essay is highly suggestive in
positing a relationship between Emerson's search for a
personal authority whereby he could be certain of the
"truth," and the textual investigations then going on con
cerning the legitimacy of Biblical interpretation. Packer
poses questions which Emerson is asking similar to the ones
I am posing in this study. She writes:
■ > . Yet if scribes and prophets are perpet
ually at war, they are also perpetually
225
upon one another. The scribe gives us the
text from which the prophet offers to lib
erate us; the prophet's message of libera
tion, if it is successful, is transmitted
as dogma by the next generation of scribes.
Then what does it mean to speak with
authority? And what kind of authority can
the record of that speaking possess? Can
a text ever possess authority? Or is
authority always out of reach behind the
text it generates, an instant of pure power
whose "sepulchre" is the scripture we mis
takenly revere? (69)
^ For representative perspectives on this issue— but
by no means exhaustive— see Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M.
Kroll, and Mike Rose, eds., Perspectives on Literacy
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988). Also see W. Ross
Winterowd's review in The Writing Instructor (8, Spring,
'89), pp. 138-42.
Lately, Emerson is receiving more attention as a
primary source for later developments in American Pragma
tism. In addition to John McDermott (cited earlier), see
recent works by Vincent G. Potter, ed., Doctrine and Expe
rience: Essays in American Philosophy (New York: Fordham
UP, 1988) ; and Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philos
ophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: U of Wisconsin
Press, 1989).
12
See Graeme Nicholson, Seeing and Reading (New
Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984). Nicholson takes a
Heideggerian phenomenological approach to reading and
argues convincingly that reading involves processes similar
to any act of perception and that any reading must result
in a "material" interpretation which is the core text from
which subsequent "peripheral" interpretations can be de
rived. Nicholson says:
Only where an interpretation is actually
being made can there be a subject matter
and, therefore, its fusion with words or
with an authorial mind. In one and the
same moment, the subject matter becomes in
the text and in the grasp of the inter
preter. This is not a miracle of creation
on his part; it is the event we call
"appearance," unconcealment. It is in this
context that I may explain the word "true"
as it bears upon interpretation. (191)
226
13
Certainly texts can be read m this fashion, and
typically they are. Most of what is written serve as
purely pragmatic instruments involved in conducting the
normal business comprising one's particular sphere of in
terests .
14
See W. Ross Winterowd, "The Rhetorical Transaction
of Reading," and "The Realms of Meaning: Text-Centered
Criticism," in Composition/Rhetoric: A Synthesis (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois, 1986), pp. 265-80. Also see
Winterowd's definition of the text in The Culture and
Politics of Literacy (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), p. 57.
15
Louise Phelps uses McClintock as an example of
tacit structures at work influencing perception. Composi
tion as a Human Science (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) , pp.
14-5. Compare Phelps' account with my colleague's,
Barbara Gleason, who argues in her dissertation that
McClintock's example is evidence for taking a realist view
and that there are knowable objects transcendent to the
observer which exist apart from any intervening action on
the knower's part. "Knowledge in Composition," Disserta
tion (University of Southern California, 1989) . Phelps
acknowledges that she commits herself "to realism" (53),
but it is not clear how her version of realism squares with
her commitment to contextualism. Without carrying this too
far here, let me say that in research a primary considera
tion is to determine whether or not composing processes
are, for instance, generalizable across contexts or only
phenomena manifesting themselves in specific instances be
cause of a unique set of circumstances. I suspect that
Phelps assumes a middle position, holding that each compos
ing episode is unique but can be categorized within general
parameters. Thus, though these parameters might hold
across cases, each instance will employ those parameters
differently.
227
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