Vincent Casaregola
Department of English
Saint Louis University
It is one of the ironies of academic life that only those perceived to be either the most accomplished or the least accomplished writers are usually permitted the opportunity to write in "the personal voice." In college writing curricula, "personal narratives" and essays written from "personal experience" traditionally serve as warm-up exercises in a general composition course, and sometimes they may account for almost a third of the work in a basic writing course. As writers advance through the curriculum, they are asked to engage in the more academically authoritative pursuits of analysis, research, and argument. Yet the association between basic writing and personal writing is not made on the assumption that either is valued. Rather, personal writing is considered simplistic, easy, and academically unimportant, and so it is treated as a useful means of introducing students to college. In a sense personal writing is considered "basic" largely because of the negative qualities just mentioned, and it has been used with those students that the academy has traditionally wished it did not have to teach. Frequently, institutions of higher learning have made it quite evident that they wish both basic writing students, and their personal writing, would just go away.
As student writers advance beyond the "basic" level (even within the basic course), they are expected to develop their ability to "think critically," a traditional term for academically enfranchised patterns of intellectual inquiry. Likewise, in some contemporary composition classrooms, student writers are expected to develop a "critical consciousness," a more current term for academically enfranchised inquiry that reflects the influence of one or more favored contemporary cultural theories and/or ideological stances. In almost all instances, the writing pedagogy associated with both the traditional and more contemporary values of academic discourse work from a similar assumption about students: they must be weaned from their personal experience and individual perspective in order to be effective and accepted in the discourse of the academy. Like those entering the traditional religious novitiate (which may still be an underlying paradigm that academic institutions would like to construct for undergraduates), these students must sacrifice personal identity to become part of the institution, regardless whether the particular writing program and/or instructors conceive of that institution in more conservative or more radical terms.
Of course, only after many years in the academy can even those in the professoriate usually risk the entry into personal discourse because the institutional ideology of the academy, whether interpreted from right or left, undervalues the personal as a cultural site from which to encounter the world and engage in discourse.2 Faculty may write in this way, even publish personal essays, but it is rare that their colleagues would consider such events worthy of any professional note. Only those most fully enfranchised within the system can usually adopt a more personal stance in work that they wish to have taken seriously within their profession. Even then, that work will probably be considered "insignificant" and evidence that an accomplished scholar is "no longer really productive."
The underlying bias against personal writing comes from a fundamental assumption in the academic world: "intellectual" life is impersonal and should stay that way. Persons may learn and use their learning in their daily lives, but intellectuals are dedicated to what they believe is a transcendent position of valorized knowledge, knowledge enfranchised within the academic system. Academic intellectuals, whose cultural authority and economic position derive this system, demand that it be treated not only with respect but with near-religious awe. Knowledge is viewed as transcendent and impersonal, and the teaching which initiates individuals into the process of pursuing knowledge should not only be impersonal but should be a rigorous process of depersonalization. For many students that process begins in the basic writing classroom, where their desire for personal expression is indulged briefly only so it might be more fully subverted.
The consistent bias against the personal in academic settings becomes more ironic as personal writing increasingly becomes the subject of academic scrutiny. As works of autobiography, memoir, and the personal essay begin to take their place on the reading lists of college courses (along with more traditionally acknowledged literary forms of poetry, drama, and fiction), it seems odd that we are so slow to acknowledge how personal writing might have a more valued place in our composition pedagogy. Likewise, the humanistic and even some social science disciplines have begun to recognize the range of different knowledge-making practices that grow from diverse cultural sites, often leading to discourse that does not draw an essential separation between the personal and the authoritative, we might reasonably expect our writing pedagogy to grow more accepting of discourse which blends personal experience with academic inquiry and allows the personal voice to speak regarding intellectual issues. Yet despite some efforts in that direction, the dominant pattern of composition pedagogy, shared by some of the most conservative and the most radical of teachers, still works to eliminate personal experience, the personal voice, and the personal essay from the repertoire of student writers.
Perhaps the irony I have just described grows from a more general love-hate relationship with personal writing. On the practical level, it lacks the traditional authority of theoretical, scientific, or factual discourse (being far more anecdotal), so academics find it difficult to take seriously. In addition, the often tentative and exploratory nature of the personal essay leaves some academics dissatisfied as they search for its central, focused point. It is not that personal essays are either literally or figuratively "pointless," but that, as Edward Hoagland has noted, "the point couldn't be uttered in fewer words than the essayist has used" (Hoagland 305). In a culture of sound bites and "factoids," such extravagance with words may seem a useless luxury to readers anxious to derive their data, collect their information, and then stop reading (and this reading practice may be equally common among intellectuals as among the general public). In contrast, the personal essay tries to invite readers to continue their reading and consideration, not to stop when "the facts" have been obtained. Therefore, the personal essay is not a data base, and perhaps, no form of genuine discourse should ever try to be. The personal essay resists easy categorization, resists reduction to a place in a schema or system, and thus threatens many academics with its destabilizing potential.
Despite our impatience with it, we also seem to have an insatiable appetite for the personal essay. It not only fills the anthologies used in all types of college writing courses, but it also attracts a wide popular audience in its various incarnations as newspaper column, magazine feature, or book-length collection. As we read our daily round of memoranda, correspondence, and reports that often seem to drone on with a mechanistic hum (like fluorescent lights or a computer), we long for that sense of a personal voice that would engage us directly in the flow of thought. Interestingly, some of the strongest evidence for the power of personal writing comes from medicine and from the "hard sciences," whose writing we usually associate with factual data and rigorous formal constraints. Yet an increasing number of scientists and physicians have turned to the personal essay as a vehicle for exploring issues and ideas of considerable weight (e.g., Richard Selzer, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas, Harold Morowitz, and Robert Coles, to name but a few). Still, we hesitate to grant ourselves the right to engage in this form of writing for our own "scholarly discourse" in the humanities. Woe to that academic who would seek tenure with publications that would dare sound "personal." Likewise, we attempt to wean our students away from this form of writing, allegedly because we seek to prepare them for the "rigors" of advanced study and of the workplace.
A further irony derives from the fact that, in the discipline of composition studies, the personal essay seems to be under increasing attack even as it gains some measure of popular acceptance outside the classroom. On the one hand, the "current-traditional" instructors, for whom personal writing has always seemed uncomfortably difficult to categorize, emphasize the "business-like" writing needed for "global competitiveness" (Berlin 187ff). In contrast to this essentially capitalist view, some social constructionist theorists of writing pedagogy see "personal writing" as part of the illusion of independence that underlies bourgeois culture, preventing recognition and critique of the social, economic, and ideological forces that shape discourse (Berlin, Haefner). Others such as David Bartholomae have argued against the use of personal experience as a ground from which to teach writing because it fails to prepare students to confront the rigors of genuine academic and scholarly discourse.3 Regardless of the claimed ideology of the particular composition specialist, the argument reveals a more fundamental set of values that see the academy as a controlling authority of the discursive practices of its students.
Criticism from all sectors seems to ignore (or perhaps oppose) the fundamentally empowering experience that personal writing can become for incoming students, especially for those on the margins of the academic world. Whether we advocate writing as a marketplace skill, as a tool of revolution, as process of discovery and learning, or as an activity directed at an altogether different end, we still need to recognize that many student writers feel speechless and voiceless before the institutions and cultural forces that confront them. So much of our institutional writing, in academe and elsewhere, seems a deliberate attempt to de-personalize relationships, to obscure responsibility and accountability, and to deaden students' awareness of language and discourse. Far from being exponents of a "romanticized, unitary self," many of these students are often quite willing to accept knowledge as a "social construction" that is presented to them by the often intimidating and powerful institutional structures of academe, and by the impressive economic structures that surround and support academic institutions. However, that acceptance does not lead to empowerment for those students. Rather, they acknowledge that sacrificing their own agendas and adopting the discourse of those in power is a necessary aspect of academic life just as it is a necessary aspect of institutional life in general. Questioning and critiquing such powerful forces demands both a sense of individual identity and a sense of genuine community. Personal writing can reassure students that they still have voices and that they may be heard, but personal writing can be more than a comforting initiation into the writing classroom, prior to confronting the allegedly "serious" need for "academic" writing. Rather, personal writing can become a process of constructing individual authority, while also reaffirming interpersonal relationships and communal responsibility, all in the face of an increasingly formulaic and impersonal mass culture which our institutions, even the academic ones, help to create. Personal writing need not be viewed as an opposite to critical consciousness or critical discourse, but as intensified dialogue amongst individuals and communities, ultimately enhancing public discourse.
Before proceeding with an advanced education in any kind of discourse, students need to feel that their individual voices and their particular communities of discourse have power and value. Personal writing is an essential element of basic writing, not because it is either simple or unimportant, nor because it less challenging than other kinds of writing, but because it is fundamental to a student's understanding of herself or himself as an active, vocal member of a genuine community of discourse. In fact, rather than limiting the use of the personal essay to early portions of the "basic" writing course, we should foster its use throughout the writing curriculum and the whole college curriculum.
However, before I continue with what may seem extravagant claims, let me propose a reconsideration and redefinition of our concept of the "personal." Much of the hostility to personal writing grows from an incomplete understanding of the term. Many composition instructors (including some who are advocates of personal writing) incorrectly assume that "personal" must necessarily be synonymous with "private." From this viewpoint, personal writing must necessarily reveal intimate secrets of an individual's life, or be derived from highly idiosyncratic aspects of individual experience. Defined in this manner, the personal essay can seem essentially solipsistic and self-indulgent, and thus writing instructors often view it as more of a barrier to genuine communication than as a means of engaging in discourse.
In addition, "personal writing" has been associated, for some time, with an "expressivist" approach to composition pedagogy. This approach often asks students to consider their unique, individual experiences, and encourages them to use "personal writing" to express their own particular thoughts and feelings in reaction to those experiences. In this way, personal writing can seem limited to the mere beginnings of discourse it allows students to react to their experiences and express their reactions before they begin to interact with an audience. Expressivist pedagogy has been most strongly linked with the work of James Britton, though in practice the more questionable extremes of expressivist pedagogy tend to be misapplications of Britton's work. But the connection has been alleged enough times to make it firm in many people's minds. Supposedly, expressivist pedagogy indulges in a Neo-romantic notion of the "expressive self," and the principal vehicle for that expression has been the personal essay. By associating personal writing exclusively with extreme forms of expressivist pedagogy, traditional instructors can dismiss personal writing as mere unformed expression, at best a kind of "pre-writing" exercise. Likewise, instructors who are specifically concerned with cognitive development and/or rhetorical sophistication may dismiss personal writing as insufficiently concerned either with the needs of audience or the demands of context. Finally, many social constructionists will dismiss personal writing as too narrowly focused on the self, to the exclusion of the community, which is for them the "locus of knowledge" (cf. Bruffee).
Another criticism of personal writing derives from the above-
mentioned assumption that it means "private" writing.
Here we enter into what I call the "property line debate,"
in which discourse is seen essentially as property, and that property
is fought over by those seeking to make it private (essentially
a capitalist perspective) against those who seek to make it public
(perhaps a socialist, Marxist, or Marxian perspective). What we
have unquestioningly assumed is that anything personal cannot
also be public, and anything that is private must essentially
be personal, but this is hardly the case. The "personal"
is a concept tied to identity, not to ownership. The mere revelation
of private experience and memory is not necessarily personal at
all. Every day, on talk show after talk show, pathetic individuals
reveal intimate details of their private lives in a manner as
impersonal as an autopsy. The audience for such revelations seeks
no personal contact but rather a kind of pornographic distance,
from which they can delight in probing the private reaches of
someone's life. But to do so, the talk show's host and its audience
must engage in intense depersonalization of the "guest,"
who becomes a mere object of scrutiny.
No, the private is not necessarily personal.
Nor is the public necessarily impersonal, though unfortunately it can be at times. Often the most effective and engaging discourse on matters of public policy and public affairs occurs when writers present issues in the light of personal consideration, and invite their readers into similar consideration through use of personal essays. Magazines such as Harper's and Atlantic are amongst the best known of the many journals that encourage personal writing on public affairs. Writers such as Lewis Lapham or James Fallows invite readers to consider not only the ideas and information presented, but the highly personal voice which has presented them. Likewise, the best of our editorial pages resonate daily with a chorus of distinctive personal voices engaged in discussion of public issues. It is quite obvious that there is no absolute or necessary connection between personal writing and the realm of private experience. Nonetheless, the false association has spurred critics to attack the pedagogy of the personal essay as caught up in the romanticized sense of the self which is characteristic of bourgeois liberalism and ultimately opposed to genuine social change. But once again these attacks assume that personal writing necessarily represents a view of the self as unitary and divorced from the effects of social constructions. Arguing that all language and all discourse are socially constructed, and that "selves" are so constructed as well, these theorists have looked at the personal essay as an atavistic phenomenon in the writing classroom, to be held in suspicion at best, to be kept in check, and to be brushed aside if possible (cf. Haefner).
Still other critics have attacked personal writing in composition pedagogy as an uninformed and unwarranted intrusion into the private lives individual students (cf. Swartzlander, Pace, and Stamler for a characteristic example).4 I wish to address this critique in some detail because it has tended to spread significant misunderstanding of personal writing pedagogy. Unlike the more theoretical and ideological critics mentioned above, these attack what they see as real or potential abuse of an individual's privacy, especially coming from the forced revelation of personal trauma. While it may be true that, in some extreme cases, writing instructors have engaged in such a misguided substitution of group therapy for a writing workshop session, this is certainly not the norm nor is it the aim of a writing pedagogy that draws on personal experience and encourages the use of a personal voice. Trained therapists sometimes use writing as a tool in either individual or group therapy, but their goal is therapy, not pedagogy. Writing instructors should definitely not confuse their pedagogical work with the efforts of such therapists, and few writing instructors make such an error.
In addition, as I have already noted, the revelation of the details of private life is not in any way the essence of personal writing. No writing instructor should ever demand or even encourage students to reveal private trauma. The whole point of writing pedagogy based on personal experience is greater empowerment of students, particularly in their selection of subject matter and tone, so that they feel free to draw upon their personal insights and integrate these with their academic training. To demand the revelation of trauma would violate the central purpose of this kind of pedagogy. Certainly most students have a wide range of personal experience from which to draw besides that which could be classified as traumatic, in either a popular or a clinical sense of the word. Personal writing develops from attempting to bridge the distance between private and public realms, but it does not, and should not, require students to write about any subject which they feel would be an unwarranted violation of their privacy. Writing instructors may reasonably and responsibly ask students to reflect on their personal experience, take personal stands, and write in a personal voice, and none of these activities need be considered intrusive in any way.
If a student does select traumatic personal experience as subject matter, he or she must do so as an individual choice and not as the response to an explicit or implicit demand from an instructor. When students make such a choice, instructors must be careful in advising the student about what revelations might be problematic in a classroom setting. Students who seem to be using the activity of personal writing in a composition classroom as a substitute for counseling (or who wish to use instructor or fellow students as surrogate counselors) should be advised to seek the professional therapy which is usually available in campus counseling centers.5 While a personal writing pedagogy may seem more likely to bring out such events, it has been my experience that students who are experiencing a severe personal crisis are as likely to reveal it in a writing conference about an abstract subject as about a personal one.6 A writing pedagogy that draws on personal experience is, therefore, quite distinct from the ill-informed group therapy some imagine it to be. To assert that a pedagogy might be misused by some who misunderstand it does not offer valid critique of its methods and purposes. Any form of pedagogy, and any human activity for that matter, may be subject to misuse, and I would argue that a personal writing pedagogy is no more likely to be abused and to cause damage than any other pedagogy.
The varied types of criticism described above represent extreme over- reaction to a misinterpretation of the role of personal writing in composition pedagogy, especially as found in expressivist classrooms. It is true that some expressivist instructors have pushed their approach to a romanticized extreme, but relatively few. As I have noted above, the pragmatic objections to personal writing, on the grounds of intrusiveness, are unjustified. On the other hand, the theoretical attack on personal writing is based on a false either/or proposition either language and discourse conforms to a romantic model of individualism and thus forms a vehicle for the expression of a central unitary self, or language is entirely a social construction, and all forms of discourse are social phenomena, wherein the individualized or the personal have little use and no value. There is no necessity for this conflict, which has split composition studies for the past several years, at least no necessity in the nature of discourse and in pedagogy that would foster discourse. Individuals and communities are not mutually exclusive. We are not, have never been, could never become human individuals by existing in complete, individual isolation, and the image of an isolated self is an illusory extreme that flies in the face of our common experience. Likewise, our communities are not colonies of one-celled organisms nor amorphous collections of protoplasm; they are groups of individuals in relationship with one another and with the group as a whole, and with other groups. Discourse always exists in communities, yet it always involves individuals.
Some would still argue that any concept of individual agency is theoretically unjustified. Certainly our individual consciousness is dynamic and reflective of multiple influences, and I am not suggesting that "individuality" is a simplistic condition of monologic consciousness. The mind of any one individual person reflects much experience and a multiplicity of affective and cognitive patterns. Still, in all its complexity, we recognize a sense of self, a sense of identity that encompasses the range of our conscious and unconscious experience and the breadth of our emotional and intellectual life. In the patterns of consideration and reflection leading to conscious choice, as well as in the activities of dialogue through which we reach consensus with others, our sense of individual identity becomes apparent. It is through such dialogic interaction interiorized in the mind as well as expressed through interpersonal relationships that we discover our strongest sense of ourselves as individuals.
As individuals, we are not static, but evolving and changing, as are the communities in and through which we engage in discourse. From this standpoint, genuine personal writing is that written discourse through which individuals engage each other in the process of constructing identity and community at the same time. It is also the process through which both the individual and the group attempt to create mutual authority and exercise mutual responsibility. These four qualities are the essence of personal writing identity and community, authority and responsibility. Personal writing is basic writing because it is basic to all written discourse. In its most general sense, "personal writing" is any writing that invites readers to consider the text as generated from, and perhaps even spoken by, a particular individual. That doesn't mean that the individual is the sole authority (or author) of that text, for the language in and through which the text has been constructed is common environment of discourse, and the process of interpreting texts is interactive. Yet personal writing engages readers with its sense of an individual "voice," a voice that suggests a specific personality addressing them through the text.
Of course, this suggested personality is constructed through the text, and the actual human being who puts pen to paper or hands to keyboard in the formation of that text has already been influenced by numerous social and cultural patterns that shape everything from the writer's syntactical structures to his or her choice of sensory images or of references to other texts. But within these limits, the writer does make choices, and those choices take shape in relationship to others whom the writer seeks to engage. The social texture of language and discourse does not eliminate the individual nature of the choices made. Readers also make choices in receiving, interpreting, and responding to texts. All discourse, written or spoken, is the enactment of relationships, and those relationships involve individual persons as they construct their identities through discourse and as they shape the shared understanding we can think of as a community. "Personal authority," the sense of "having a voice" or "having an influence," evolves through this shared understanding. Likewise, the evolution of authority (both individual and collective) is, at the same time, an evocation of mutual responsibility literally the awareness of an ability to respond, to interact, and to be part of the ongoing process of shaping knowledge and understanding within a community.
Personal writing suggests itself as written by persons and for persons. It suggests how readers should imagine the writer, and it further suggests how the writer had imagined individual readers. It implies, offers, or invites some kind of relationship (be that positive or negative), and it presents the text as emerging from the implied dialogue of that relationship. It ultimately invites response, interchange, and the continuing discourse of relationship. Any writing that embodies a sense of "voice" may be thought of as personal, regardless of the subject matter or issues involved. Depending on the context, this voice may seem formal and ceremonial, it may be dramatic and stagy, it may present itself through highly stylized conventions, or it may be more conversational and intimate. But whether its voice be suggestive of the public or private areas of experience, whether it implies a close or more distant relationship between writer and reader, and whether or not its voice is ceremonial or intimate, "personal writing" is always writing that evokes a strong sense of personality through the text. In this sense it is somewhat parallel to the Aristotelian concept of ethos i.e., "the character of the speaker" as experienced "through the speech." Likewise the personal voice suggests the character of the writer as configured and represented through the text. Of course, much of what we commonly consider to be personal writing comes in the form of personal essays or personal narratives, particularly those that suggest a "familiar" relationship between the narrative voice and the implied reader in the text. Personal writing of this kind often makes reference to the individual experience of the writer as a ground from which to engage discourse. Yet "personal writing" in its broadest sense is any writing that evokes a clear sense of a personality speaking through that text. Writing pedagogy that focuses on personal writing may choose to work either from the narrower or through the broader definition of personal. In either case, both become meaningful because they are understood as elements in the fabric of social discourse in and through which individuals experience, define, and continually reconstruct their sense of identity, community, authority, and responsibility.
Our discipline is currently split by those who argue either that the "locus of knowledge is in the individual" or that the "locus of knowledge" is in the social group. Why need there be only one locus of knowledge? Why must knowledge be exclusively individual or social? I believe that knowledge can be considered to be both individual and social. Where individuals experience extreme alienation from social groups, knowledge and understanding are not possible. Where social groups decay into mere regimentation, into collections of de-personalized, voiceless members, without a sense of individual identity or authority, the same is true. Personal writing engages people in discourse that heightens both the sense of individual identity and the sense of community involvement. Personal writing merges the processes of individual reflection and shared understanding, and it is only by bringing these processes together that individuals learn and communities grow and evolve.
I do not wish to disparage the work of those who would like to see the composition classroom become a place for addressing social and political problems. In fact, I would hope that the personal stance of a writing course would encourage a political dialogue on such problems. However, I do not think that these problems will be solved through a process of systematically denying the individuality of the students in those classrooms. Once and for all we need to separate the concept of moral and political individuality from the image of entrepreneurial independence. The students in basic and introductory writing classrooms (and all other students as well) need to be encouraged to speak as individuals, as well as members of a community, but that does not mean we are attempting to turn them into entrepreneurial capitalists. (Oddly enough, it is academics, despite their incessant chatter about critiquing power structures, who behave like venture capitalists in the managing of their own careers, which is one reason why publishing articles about composition studies will advance one's career far more than teaching composition.)
It has been a false notion, particularly American, that we are a nation of rugged individualists, independent of each other and of larger social responsibility. This kind of Ayn Rand-like extreme has little value, yet it is perpetuated through many of our economic (and academic) institutions. To deny our basic interdependence, cultural as well as economic, is destructive. Yet we also need to avoid the opposite extreme, which suggests that no possibility of individual consideration or choice even exists. It is possible, through the discourse of personal writing, to strive for and sometimes achieve both moral integrity and psychological diversity, both political individuality and socio-economic and cultural community.
Much of our discussion of these issues is motivated by a concern for those who have been oppressed and marginalized in our culture, and that is a valid motive. We should remind ourselves, however, that even as groups may be the objects of oppression, it is individuals who suffer the losses and bear the scars. To deny even further the potential power of a personal voice to a person already marginalized is to engage in further oppression. In a sense, this constitutes just one more act of blaming the victim. By considering our own individual vulnerability, our own individual suffering, we can begin to understand that of others as well, not as sentimentality but as genuine concern and as responsible action. Our sense of individual vulnerability, if left silent, can become the fear that divides us, but if given a voice, as in personal writing, it can become the means of overcoming fear and division, and fulfilling our social responsibility. It is by joining together with others that we become ourselves most fully, and yet it is through our awareness of individuality that we can act most responsibly. Identity and community, authority and responsibility, are irrevocably joined together, and we can experience the balance of these qualities through personal writing.
I recall the closing passage of Alice Walker's essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self." Her young child, suddenly becomes aware of the bluish-white scar-tissue on Walker's eye (injured in her own childhood, and a perennial source of shame and embarrassment). But the child, having just seen an picture of the globe says: " 'Mommy, there's a world in your eye.' . . . 'where did you get that world in your eye?'" Later, Walker dreams of dancing with herself, in a celebration of unity and wholeness. This image captures some essential qualities of personal writing: our world of vision and the vision of our world delicately and inevitably connected; our old wounds and scars becoming the source of new understanding; and our relationships with other individuals, and with communities, teaching us to reconsider and re-evaluate our "selves" as involved in the world that is involved in us. Personal writing is the enactment of relationships through texts, realizing that we each may have the world in our eye, and that our dance with ourselves is also part of a common dance.
Notes
1This article has been developed from a paper that
was originally presented at the 4th National Basic Writing Conference:
1992/Critical Issues in Basic Writing (University of Maryland
at College Park).
2During the past several years, some efforts have been
made to allow more personal voices into the discourse of academic
life. The efforts have come from a variety of communities, often
those at the institutional or disciplinary margins where norms
of institutional practice break down. Today, in academic journals,
the occasional article appears in which personal experience is
integrated with theoretical and institutional authority as a site
from which discourse may begin. Sometimes a more personal voice
may emerge in writing that addresses what might otherwise be considered
"academic" material. Yet these instances, while interesting,
represent only a tiny portion of academic discourse practices.
The values of the composition classroom, basic or advanced, still
derive from the assumption that personal discourse is inferior
discourse, and so students must be led, by means gentle or harsh,
to abandon their personal voice in order to participate in the
life of the intellectual.
3Bartholomae's work on the subject of basic writing
has been quite influential, especially as his former graduate
students and current colleagues spread his message even further.
I have listened to several of Bartholomae's public presentations
on this subject, in particular his debate with Peter Elbow at
the 1991 Conference on College Composition and Communication Convention
in Boston, as well as his keynote address to the 4th National
Basic Writing Conference in 1992. In one respect Bartholomae is
correct, we should not treat basic writing as separate from the
whole academic enterprise. I would argue that we must learn from
what fragments of personal discourse remain at this academic margin,
and begin to change the academic structure by accepting a wider
range of discursive and epistemological practices, including those
we label as personal.
4These three writers attacked personal writing as intrusive
and dangerous in a jointly written article in the Chronicle of
Higher Education, February 17, 1993. See full citation below.
Notably, only one of the three, Swartzlander, teaches writing
(at Grand Valley State). The other two are psychologists from
the university's counseling center. I would argue that their experience
does not adequately reflect the broad range of pedagogical practices
regarding personal writing.
5I have found that some campus counseling centers are
quite willing to help train faculty and graduate students the
proper ways of making referrals without causing further anxiety
to an already troubled student.
6A student might also break into a personal revelation
when discussing failing grade on a calculus exam; it's not a question
of subject matter but of the level of stress and the level of
trust in the listener.
7I believe that this particular understanding the relationship between individual agency and social interaction parallels the sense of "the act" as examined by Mikhail Bakhtin in Toward a Philosophy of the Act. For a thorough discussion of this point, see Morson and Emerson below (particularly chapters 1 and 5). Bakhtin's consideration of the relationship between individual responsibility and the social construction of discourse may offer a great deal to those in composition studies, but it will require a careful and detailed examination for which there is not room in this article.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Trans. Vadim
Liapunov.
Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1993.
Berlin, James. "Writing Instruction in School and College
English." A Short
History of Writing Instruction. Ed. James J. Murphy. Dav is, CA:
Hermagoras P,
1990. 183- 220.
Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Social Construction, Language, and the
Authority of
Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay." College English 48 (1986):
773-790.
Haefner, Joel. "The Personal Essay in Perspective."
College English 54 (1992):
127-137.
Hoagland, Edward. "What I Think, Who I Am." In Depth:
Essayists for Our
Time. Second edition.
Ed. Carl Klaus, Chris Anderson, and Rebecca Faery. Fort Worth,
TX: Harcourt,
1993. 305-307.
Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation
of a Prosaics.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
Swartzlander, Susan, Diana Pace, and Virginia Lee Stamler. "The
Ethics of
Requiring Students to Write about Their Personal Lives."
Chronicle of Higher Education
17 Feb. 1993: B1-B2.
Walker, Alice. "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self."
In Depth: Essayists
for Our Time.
Ed. Carl Klaus, Chris Anderson, and Rebecca Faery. Fort Worth,
TX: Harcourt,
1993. 675-681.
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