It Takes a Village (a Village with Authors)

In my last blog post, I considered the possibilities of moving away from eulogizing the author and instead breathing life back into that position by suggesting an analogy of authorship based on an author-parent/text-child dynamic. In a couple of the readings since, most recently “Rhetoric in  New Key: Women and Collaboration,” I’ve seen how dangerously close this proposal nears the problematic “model of the author as God the Father of the Text” (274), which is how Toril Moi puts it. The problems with this type of model are easily discernible to anyone looking for how women or collaborative authors take part in this tradition, as Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede discuss, or anyone who recognizes more abstract and universalized modes of understanding (at least in academia and other intellectual bodies) that stress the social, the contextual, and the dialogic over the individualist monolith of prior authorship constructs. I do think, though, in abandoning that holy and patriarchal analogy, that an author-parent analogy freer from such phallic and absolutist description may be too quickly dismissed.

      First, most of us have heard or read authors consider a work “my baby.” Some of us may even feel that way about our own writing, recognizing what at least looks like invention or creation. This perspective, of course, can lead to a view that reduces creation to its most immediate, overlooking the necessary presence of a multitude of other factors, working collaboratively, in that creation. In terms of textual authorship, this involves the teachers who teach writers that language, the literary tradition, the readers who read that text, the printers who print it, the social, cultural, and historical moment offering exigence, and so forth.

     However, in recognizing that popular practice of conflating authorship/creation/ownership, as well as some of the ways the author-function works, I do think the parent analogy works. In fact, if we agree that authorship is collaborative and social, there may not be a better analogy for that process than human reproduction, one of the more basic and popular forms of human interaction. Fundamentally, human reproduction is collaborative: the process can only happen with at least two people, despite all of the advancements in modern science; similarly, our language is only our language in the way it connects us as humans (at least two), or symbol-using animals. And if we shift our focus, we can clearly see the presence of other factors (and people) at play, from something as physically basic as the ground we stand on and the air we breathe, to something social and biochemical like sexual or reproductive drive and the food we need to eat, or to something more cultural and social like maternity/paternity leave, the opportunity for daycare, the safety of communities, etc. The old quote, “It takes a village to raise a child,” comes to mind here, and emphasizes the presence and necessity of the community or the social, though it should be recognized that villages take just as much part in creating that child.

     Further, we can acknowledge the ways parents are used like the author-function. Authors offer categories we use to understand texts, to the point that we expect similarities, just as parents offer others the means through which to see children (assumptions about values, intelligence, etc.; someone to call in case of an emergency). To go further, consider the similarities in how extramarital children (described pejoratively as bastards--I've been reading A Song of Fire and Ice) and anonymous texts have traditionally been treated: is there anything more pressing than finding origins? Doesn't that lack of history suggest a lack of identity, or something cut off from tradition and history? Is it not often read negatively, the obvious example being that an anonymous text is dangerous or false?).

     Foucault also notes how the author-function is used to assign responsibility, just as parents take responsibility for their children until those children reach a point of maturity where they are expected to take responsibility for themselves, just as we come to see how texts operate separate from what their authors may have wanted or intended (though, if we consider the ways parents of criminals are treated, we know that this never occurs completely). Essentially, both the creators and the created are given agency—parents and authors, children and text—but we do not lose sight of the human influence that brought that text into discursive circulation.

     Why do I need to use this type of analogy? I’m not sure. It may be an issue of a propensity toward seeing and valuing the individual, which could very well and ironically be a result of my environment; or an issue of philosophy—Humanism, for instance—or asserting the humanness of human behaviors, like our language;  or something else entirely. But it is an analogy that, I think, both helps and limits my understanding of the principles of our class and readings. My questions for you, then, are as follows:

1. Do you see a movement away from the human in contemporary authorship studies? If not, do you think some (i.e. me) are conflating the human with the individual? Or the human with the patriarchal human?

2. Does the author as a parent, with the qualification that we avoid supernatural or patriarchal constructs, work as an analogy? What are the problems with such an analogy?

3. If you find yourself using an analogy to understand authorship, what is yours, and why do you think find it useful or appropriate?

*P.S. Late is late, but I apologize for limiting the time all of you had to read this post with it being as late as it is, especially after this issue was brought up in class last week. My schedule is being changed.

Whose house is it, anyway? Lunsford and Ede decide.

This week’s reading brought the old “master’s tools” argument to fore once more. In thinking about the hierarchical versus the dialogic, it seems to me that these readings once again claim that our rules, our very genres, are stifling the students we are supposed to inspire to find their “voice,” whatever that word might turn out to be. In “Crimes of Writing and Reading,” Lunsford and Ede start off with a veritable who’s who of women in rhetoric. This seems very hierarchical. They aim to examine the righteous stance of “right” writing and reading and tear it down, ending their argument with questions. Perhaps most importantly, they write that “we cannot know how students will experience various rhetorics” (313). In other words, as Audrey Lorde told us before, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. Lunsford and Ede bait us to bait our students to play with language, reminding us that some will find this as intimidating as others do strict rules and rubrics. We no more can give writers a rubric than we can give them no tools at all. Somehow, we must give them the tools to create their own tools.

Of the two examples of writing “criminals,” I find Smith to be the worse criminal, despite her acclaim. Acker is using the forms of others, true, but Smith is using the voice of others—going so far as to become her victims on stage. At least she admits it’s stealing (317). If she were but putting others’ stories down, if, as the Pulitzer committee said, others could act out what she had created (created? Or scribed?), it would seem more like a collaboration. The work is apparently powerful, so something must be working right.

In learning poetry, we are told that you have to learn the rules before you break them. In charting a tradition of women in rhetoric, Lunsford and Ede seem to be making an attempt to build the master’s house. Yet at the end of the essay they claim “it is possible to trace the forces surrounding this particular debate all the way back to the many struggles over use of vernacular experience in the West, and certainly to the beginnings of American experience” (323). That’s a lot of history not covered, for their who’s who starts in 1990. There are many rules, many voices, unaccounted for. And just how we are to learn the rules or break them remains unclear.

Questions:

1.If Smith is the only one who can perform her pieces, who is the master of the house?

2.Lunsford and Ede cite the Ya-Ya Sisterhood phenomenon and the Oprah book club as examples of readers being scripted upon. Others believe that any time people pick up a book, it is good, no matter how good the book. Is it all a matter of where you find your indoctrination?

Of puppeteers and midwives

At the risk of focusing on a very small piece of this week's readings (and sidestepping the theme of the week), I'd like to discuss Lunsford & Ede's quotation of Lawrence Rosenfield in chapter 16. I couldn't resist making some connections that are self-serving in my own research.They use Rosenfield's work to argue that misreadings of Aristotelian rhetoric have caused misrepresentations of classical rhetoric, and thereby constructing misinformed new rhetorics. Rosenfield's article, according to Lundsford & Ede, "explores the relationship between Aristotle's concept of process, or 'the way in which an object acquires characteristics or properties,' and his concept of animism. Basic to Rosenfield's argument is his assertion that 'the essential contrubution of the concept of animism to Aristotle's notion of process is that of dynamic interaction between an agent and an object undergoing change'" (265).

An agent and an object, eh? Now to a Latourian, this animism (attributing a "soul" to a nonhuman) might be interesting, but I want to go in a slightly different direction here.

Most interestingly, Rosenfield questions the role of the communicator (or rhetor, or composer, or author) according to Aristotle as more akin to a mid-wife than a puppeteer. In other words, Rosenfield interprets Aristotelian rhetoric as embracing dialogic rather than sheer manipulation. This is interesting as we continue to consider the role and nature of the author, especially in an author's relationship to her audience, medium, and context.

Brian Eno recently gave a talk about composers of music being more analogous to gardeners than architects, which seems to echo Rosenfield's argument and illustration. Eno describes the two authorship paradigms in music as

"An architect, at least in the traditional sense, is somebody who has an in-detail concept of the final result in their head, and their task is to control the rest of nature sufficiently to get that built.  Nature being things like bricks and sites and builders and so on.  Everything outside has to be subject to an effort of control...

A gardener doesn't really work like that... I suppose my feeling about gardening, and I suppose most people's feeling about gardening now, is that what one is doing is working in collaboration with the complex and unpredictable processes of nature.  And trying to insert into that some inputs that will take advantage of those processes, and as Stafford Beers said, take you in the direction that you wanted to go."

It is refreshing to this Latourian that people, from Eno to Aristotle, have all along been thinking about authorship as an event that places composers not in dominion over ideas, tools, and would-be collaborators, but rather places them in relationship with them, or perhaps part of the ecology of authorship. To me, this is how Latour and ANT can (and in many ways has) emerge as a valuable tool in exploring authorship and composition, from electronic music to FYC courses. While ANT continues to draw criticism in the humanities for it's decentralization of the human and seeming abandonment of value systems, there are ways to circumvent these concerns, notably by a rediscovery of the awe in ecologies, the genius in the unplanned, and the creative in the collective.

A possible model of such a rediscovery exists in John Angus Campbell's 1974 article Charles Darwin and the Crisis of Ecology: A Rhetorical Perspective, in which he argues that The Origin of Species was not a nihilistic, anti-humanist, awe-abandoning work, but rather that it was a "moral and humane response to the competition and violence in nature" (444). Further, Campbell argues that Darwin "retains an attitude of wonder and awe" but that these feelings are not attributed to a God, rather to the natural phenomena themselves (445).

And so I beg a few questions:

If the romantic author is dead (Barthes) in a similar way that God is dead (Nietzsche), that is to say that both constructions of authority and divinity are obsolete, can we retain a sense of wonder, awe, and even genius in the production of art? How can we talk about that as scholars and as teachers?

Are we gardeners or architects? Mid-wives or puppeteers? What do we do? What do we teach? And why the metaphors? Are they useful? Important? What other metaphors can we generate?

Lunsford and Ede

Lunsford and Ede’s discussion on women and collaboration was short albeit very enlightening. They bring up the terms “hierarchical” and “dialogic” as types of collaboration.  They describe dialogic collaboration as, “loosely structured” and “roles enacted within it are fluid; one ‘person’ may occupy multiple and shifting roles as the project progresses” (275). I as I read the description I asked, what’s so wrong with that? It sounds like great way to collaborate. Lunsford and Ede talked to two professional groups on how they viewed collaboration and women were much more likely to describe a dialogic collaboration. They therefore deem it the “other” and that it is “predominantly feminine.” As for hierarchical, those who responded said they felt it that this type of collaborative writing was “efficient and productive if sometimes unsatisfying” and they called it “’the way things are’” (227). This brings up a question we have already discussed in class before, but I think it begs more attention, why do people shy away from dialogic collaboration? Why is it viewed as not scholarly and not legitimate work? Lunsford and Ede clearly wanted readers to take collaboration more seriously, and to take dialogic collaboration as a legitimate writing strategy.

What really got my mind turning were the examples on page 277 which showed the stand-by singular author construct is what our minds are stuck on. I found myself outraged and even writing “WTF!?” in the margin next to the stories. These anecdotes were ridiculous, they were punishing collaboration as if it were illegal or immoral. The first one, regarding the poem written by three students, did not make sense; you would think out of all the departments at a university, an English department would respect the concept of collaboration. If the three students each wrote their own poems, would they have been as good as the one they wrote together? What if each person brought different things to the poem that made it so great that caused them to win the contest?

Lunsford and Ede also bring women writers in the discussion, mentioning that women writers are more likely to write collaboratively. In a patriarchal society, women writing collaboratively must look like they need “help” to write. Other than that, I cannot give an explanation as to why women are called “writers” and not authors and collaborative writing is seen as less authorial.

Questions:

            Is collaborative writing considered lesser than individually written texts because women prefer it? Is there a stigma attached to collaborative writing that makes it undesirable?

            In what ways could collaborative authors help to make this type of writing to be considered more valuable?

Romantic and collaborative authorship--Rhetoric in a New Key

Though I am typically not a collaborative writer in the way one typically views collaboration (two or more people working on a singular document), I do collaborate on an indirect level (using sources to “enter a conversation” and bringing bits of conversation or people I know into a piece of prose, just to name a couple examples), so Lunsford and Ede’s essay “Rhetoric in a New Key: Women and Collaboration” struck me with the unfair practices of punishing collaboration.

As a creative writer, no one tells a story alone. Writers write what they know and often use instances gained from other writers through workshops or in social situations. Writers often use real life situations or people to help flesh out characters and situations in a story, whether that story is fiction or nonfiction. In this sense, I see a model of collaboration, though less direct than the commonly identified model of collaboration that stands up in opposition against the “romantic writer.”

In this essay, we again encounter the dialogic (loosely structured) and hierarchical (firmly structured) models of collaboration. We are also told that when surveyed (and this time women in the MLA were surveyed), most responded that much of their writing was done alone and most collaborative writing involved grants (277). In their research, Lunsford and Ede uncovered those collaborative practices in writing lacked a connection to theoretical or pedagogical issues (277). To combat this idea, the authors gave a number of examples of collaborative writing and how these instances were punished for being collaborative. The essay also discusses how the dialogic model of collaboration is often enacted in subtle ways, which may explain the tendency to view writing as originating from a singular authorship.

I have to admit, however, that as a creative writer and a person who prefers to work alone, leaving the romantic writer image is difficult. At times I try to explain to myself that this model has been taken to the extreme in some instances since I firmly believe those 19^th century writers, and everyone before and after, have collaborated on some level. I look at how the creative writing workshop tends to predominantly function where collaboration occurs as writers exchange ideas in attempts to make a piece of writing better. With these examples, I almost want to argue that the “romantic writer” has always been a myth, albeit a potentially productive one, as it has helped to articulate the idea of a creative genius and helped creativity become valued in industrialized societies that tend to value production over people. And I do believe in the potential of human creativity and originality, even in a society that may prefer to scoff at such an idealistic notion where “every idea has been taken”. So I do think there are some benefits to having the notion of singular artists and authorship, even if it is not completely realistic.

Questions:

·      Do you feel the focus on just women in this essay creates an overly “feminized” approach to writing where collaboration would more quickly be understood and valued? And do you think this feminized view of collaboration is reductive in some way? (I’m thinking of Geoff Sirc’s recent article in CCC that was briefly discussed in class where he responded to peer review in what we would term an aggressive and masculine way. I’m also thinking about how composition is often feminized and if/how this is reductive. But I also may not be explaining myself very well.)

·      Can you think of an instance where collaborative writing was either punished or perhaps valued less when compared to another piece that was written with sole authorship?

Pen 15

As I read Gilbert and Gubar’s article from The Madwoman in the Closet, I was struck by how I’ve never thought of a pen as a penis, which is probably healthy in many ways but I can see how that was the male in me not seeing the pen for what the pen is. 

However, according to Gilbert and Gubar, that is far too reductive. They preface their argument by citing the actual references to the pen as a penis and the many allusions made by male authors ranging in time from medieval philosophers to the Romantics (not surprising) and then to Freud (again, not surprising). The argument they are making is that in a very real way the pen, like the penis, has the ability to not only “generate life”, but to “ create a posterity to which he [the author] lays claim” (154). This spilling of the authorial ink onto the paper is an act of creation where, and these are telling metaphors, the author is said to have a “penetrating imagination” or a “piercing” quality. Women then, are unable of true creation but are thought of as kind of carriers.

They add that for male artists there is an “anxiety of influence” stemming from the achievements of their predecessors. Female authors, rather, are under an “anxiety of authorship” which they define as a “radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (157).

This anxiety is further followed by other anxieties that the literary forefathers will subdue her voice and identity as a writer escape the dilemma she faces in defining her subjectivity and potentials. Bloom claims that a young poet suffers from the anxiety of belatedness, thereby being unable to successfully rival his literary fathers. But Gilbert and Gubar revised Bloom’s male centered model to make into account the experience of literary daughters. They argue that women writers like Jane Austin, Emile Dickinson do not fit into Bloom’s theory, as there are no material precursors under the male literary tradition. So the literary daughters have the anxiety of authorship imposed by the pervasive view of writings as only male activity- the pen as a metaphorical phallus.

It seems then, that unlike the literary sons who suffer from anxiety of influence, the literary daughters’ anxiety of authorship is positive, and creative, offering them less competition and more grateful connection to their foremothers. However, the literary daughters’ deep sense of insecurity of writing can be found in their infected sentences of uneasiness and repression. But their creativity free from the anxiety of influence helps them to begin new and unique women writing tradition with freshness, novelty, radically making distinct from male writing. They create their own poetics because of the anxiety of authorship.

I wonder how this applies to today’s female writers. There seems to be a number of successful foremothers to rely on. Where does the 21st century woman writer fit into this theory? I guess there are now mothers of the 20th century, grandmothers of the 19th century, great grandmothers of the 18th century, maybe some great-great grandmothers. Their work may not date back to ancient Rome, but still it is an impressive congregation of a female tradition. Do today’s women have enough material to “revise”? Does that mean they now experience the “anxiety of influence”?

Mary Queen's "Genders and Authors" discusses the important issue of gender and authorship.  She retells a story that concerned a student who would refer to the female author she was reading at the time, as "he".  This story sets-up the narrative behind the article and how the masculine dominant culture has run institutions while largely ignoring the female perspective.  The account given by Queen showcases the deep rooted problems of a male dominant society and through her student, everyday individuals partake and without thought, support a male-oriented society.

I cannot exclaim that I have confused gender pronouns.  Though, I have referred to a group of people which consisted of both males and females as "guys".  I try to avoid such terms, especially in circumstances mentioned afore.  This example should demonstrate how a single term can shade the lines of gender.  As the lines of gender are diminished, one's identity is also diminished.  I have also heard individuals greet each other by saying "hello people".  This is an overt attempt to generalize one's audience, without noting one gender over another.  Non-gender neutral language exists within daily conversation.  This speaks to the larger idea that masculine attitudes have been imbedded into our thoughts and actions with few people raising it to be a critical issue.          

The reasons for such rhetoric as Queen explains stems from much deeper roots.  "These larger relationships are mediated by historical, economic, political, educational, religious, and social conceptions of authority, which in turn, authorizes the author(s) (102).

Queen mentions the Declaration of Independence and states the importance it carries for colonial America.  Its rhetoric states the integral role that an equal role for all men could have on society.  The faults of such lines appear notably today, but these words are only reflecting a time period that agreed upon certain attitudes not commonly shared as they once were.  Queen continues to describe how authorship has been shaped and modeled by white-male individuals.  These ideals have not only influenced the thought process of future writers, but also young minds who wish to learn and appreciate literature.  It is these ideals that have allowed individuals to unintentionally view the texts from a male lens.

As most people read texts, their relationship with the author is non-existent.  They do not correlate the story with the author, and therefore the shape of the conversation regarding the text does not include one shaped by the author.  This point is crucial, for individuals who wish to examine a text, cannot thoroughly do so without also considering the role the author has had in shaping the story, along with what the author considers to be the essential points behind the text.  This allows for a deeper understanding and appreciation for the text.  The counter point of course would be Barthes; as an author publishes their work, they are no longer relevant to that particular piece.  Though, when taking gender into perspective, an author's background and life experiences should be noted.  Especially, if one has struggled to tell their story because of their race, gender and/or economic background.  Furthermore, a study on pure minority writers would only support the notion of the struggles a certain group has faced.  Therefore, a study of a mixed group of texts might better represent the situation better by demonstrating that the white, male orientated perspective has overpowered all other perspectives in a historical point of view.      


After reading a particular text, does viewing it from a feminist point of view change the significance of the text?

Eliot/Evans and Queen's "Genders and Authors"

In Mary Queen’s article “Genders and Authors,” she discusses how the masculinized notions of publishing and authorship affected women in the early nineteenth century to the extent that they had to use male pen names “in order to authorize themselves into being.” In other words “women often had to become complicit” in their own denial of being an “authority.” Since I had taken Dr. Miriam Mara’s British fiction class last spring, this section of the reading resonated with me.

In her class, she assigned George Eliot’s “A Mill on the Floss.” At the time I had neither read nor knew anything of the work of Eliot, and so was shocked to learn that Eliot was the pen name for a woman named Mary Anne (or Mary Ann, or sometimes Marian) Evans. Needless to say, this revelation changed the way I felt about the book. Once I knew the truth, I recall feeling like Evans had had an opportunity to showcase women differently, and in a way other than what the strict (read: repressed) Victorian attitudes suggested were socially acceptable, but squandered that chance. I felt a queer sense of betrayal; the women publishing at the time were trailblazing, being subversive, and I couldn’t (and truthfully still cant) why they didn’t push the boundaries with their characterizations of women. True, the Victorians weren’t going to publish anything with even a whiff of scandalous behavior, and I suppose I really can’t judge since I wasn’t there, but that still rankles to this day.

The in class discussion led to my questioning why they (the publishers) were still using her male pen name instead of her given female name. There are many cases, i.e. the Bronte sisters, where previous male pen names have been replaced by the correct female author’s name. But that was apparently not the case with Evans, as her true name appeared nowhere on my copy, or any other student’s copy, of the text. Dr. Mara suggested that perhaps it had to do with the slight mystery of her true name, or at least the spelling of her true name, as mentioned above. I remember googling it when I got home, thinking I would find an answer fairly quickly, but it didn’t work out that way. It’s still a mystery, especially since she has been dead long enough for aspects of copyright with regards to author name to have lapsed. Conundrum.

Now, having read Queen’s article and having done some reflection on my thoughts from Dr. Mara’s class, its possible Evans, despite being both motivated or passionate about writing to dedicate herself to it and being a good enough writer to be published, still clung to the ideals of her time, backwards though they are.

MK on Mary Queen: "Genders and Authors"

While reading Mary Queen’s account of a troubling student conference in “Genders and Authors,” I found my incredulity rising each time the female student referred to a female author as “he”—this despite repeated on-the-spot corrections.  Queen narrates:  “[The female student] smiled somewhat sheepishly, nodded, and said: ‘Oh!  Okay’—and then promptly did it again” (102).  I wrote, in my purple-ink NDSU Forward pen, a single word in marginalia response: “Dude!”  It took me a few moments to realize I’d chosen a gendered term to express my disbelief with a student’s gendered assumptions. 

So I must step off my high horse and admit that, like Queen’s student, I find it difficult to avoid masculine terminology as part of my “natural” responses.  Even in the classroom, I occasionally catch myself referring to a mixed-gendered group as “guys” or throwing around terms like “manpower,” and though this does in part reflect my own personal failings, I think it likewise reflects the importance of Queen’s pedagogical focus, the importance of discussing the implications of gendered constructs of authorship.  As I asked my Business and Professional Writing students during a conversation about biased language:  is it a coincidence that dominant terminology so heavily favors the masculine construct?

With regards to authorship, Queen argues that “to fix authority as a noun, a thing, is to mask the ways in which authority is actively constructed in social relations, especially the social relations of power and force” (103).  She uses the Declaration of Independence as an example of a document whose authorship encapsulates the social values of a very specific time and place—a fitting choice of examples in light of the way the Declaration is often used in an ethos-dropping manner to garner political capital.  How many “founding fathers” references do we hear when Politician X is looking to support (or attack) a recently authored piece of legislation?   

Speaking of recent legislation battles, I was struck by a parallel between Queen’s Declaration example and a recent event on Capital Hill.  A visual parallel, to be specific. 

Here is a famous painting of the signing of the Declaration.       

And here is a photograph taken last week during a hearing on President Obama’s healthcare proposal.  This specific panel is testifying in regards to the birth control benefit portion of the plan. 

 

And here is the frame Queen provides in “Genders and Authors” for both pictures: 

Just as the male response to women’s inherent power over life (through giving birth) has been to constrain and circumscribe that power by deprecating women, so these commentaries suggest fears and anxieties about the power manifested by women who mount their own productions without the aid of men.  (398)

As a pedagogical response, Queen suggests “examining historical texts from a variety of traditionally marginalized authors” as a way to subvert and/or challenge dominant ideological patterns (115).  But according to Susan M. Adams, attempting to do so can potentially backfire.  As she writes in “The Erotics of Authorship,” composition textbooks often anthologize female and minority authors whose writing speaks to some common social trope, one heavily crafted by existing power structures.  For example, essays (or rather, personal narratives, as the case often is) written by minority women tend to reinforce their position as a victimized member of society, a misunderstood outsider.  I wonder if Queen’s plan to explore marginalized authors might translate into better praxis via a different selection of texts.  The records of the Friday Club, for example (excerpted in Anne Ruggles Gere’s “Common Properties of Pleasure”) might make for an interesting pedagogical choice. 

Question for Class

(Note: I apologize for presenting a mismatched blog and question.  There were so many topics to think about this week, I thought I might cover more ground by using the Question portion of my blog for a different topic).  

In “Common Properties of Pleasure,” Anne Ruggles Gere refers to a women’s club production of Antigone, which generated thousands of dollars for charity.  Gere argues that “in valuing pleasure over economic profit, and emphasizing aesthetics over functional concerns, they posited texts as communal property rather than economic commodities”  (397).

Can we think of any modern-day groups, artists, writers, musicians, etc., whom similarly place value on collaborative textual pleasure over economic gain? 

Materiality, Authorship, and Networks

Susan Adams' The Erotics of Authorship examines Authorship, language, and composition instruction in relation to her assumption that materiality pervades non-Authors, language, and discourse. She first argues that Authorship, as deployed in recent and ancient history, is contingent upon a divorce of the material (bodily, physical humanness) from the immaterial (author-function). From Plato to Foucault, theorists have understood/articulated Authorship as a disembodied experience; we might even argue that the Romantic conception placed the genius not in the material body but in some higher-level functioning of the "self" (or wherever genius happens to be located). Adams seeks to reveal the material nature of Authorship and to remind readers (in a familiar way, if we consider the last couple of weeks of class) that if the contradictions in composition theory/practice are to be overcome, we ought to take corrective measures at the level of instruction.

Adams' argument is largely rooted in familiar soil: Foucault's author-function, Barthes' author death, yet she also introduces us to some new (and refreshing) ideas. Namely instead of focusing on what the Author is, she focuses on what the non-Author is. Adams argues that if the author function is indeed discursive and removed from the body of the person who wrote the text, Authored texts become immaterial. And so what do we make of texts that are not produced by Authors? Adams suggests that these writers (students, marginalized populations) become rooted in the material, in the body, in the person. She extends this argument quite well, venturing into queer theory and talking about specific practices, implications, and possibilities of composition that might usefully disrupt the old guard of composition.

Yet for purposes here I'd like to explore a useful expansion of her work that borrows from new media scholars and....you guessed it, Bruno Latour. Adams' analysis, while thorough in examining the material author, fails to embellish on the consequences of textual immateriality, or, what happens when the system, author, values, and production of a text are hidden, or in Latour's words, "black boxed." In other words, most media we consume (and here I'm speaking to the medium of transmission rather than the "content," if you can make a distinction) are packaged in a way that obscures the network of structures (comprised, of course, of both human and nonhuman actors) that underlie and contribute to their production and proliferation. Anne Wysocki, in Writing New Media, defines new media not in terms of whether or not the media are "online," but whether they were made by composers who highlight the materiality of their own texts. So if we extended Adams' argument, calling on Latour's "black boxes" and Wysocki's "materiality," we might articulate implications of current notions of authorship (rather than provide alternatives, which of course is needed). I'll frame these implications in the form of questions for discussion:

1. Think of a text, any text. How is it packaged to hide, or black box, its production and values? How does this affect your reading? What happens to your reading once you begin to un-black box it?
2. What does it mean when we remove the body from the text, and replace it with a name (or author function)? What good comes of it? Bad?
3. How can we talk to students about the materiality of language, of texts, of authorship? I use Google as an example. How would you illustrate it?

A Question about Satire, Intent, and the Dead Author

As many of the readings have reiterated, especially the first six chapters of Authorship in Composition Studies, contemporary literary and composition theory has generally agreed that the author is dead. Foucault famously predicted/suggested it, Barthes announced it, and scholars since have primarily either accepted that pronouncement or repeated it after searching for the pulse themselves. In just the first few chapters of Authorship in Composition Studies, Barthes and Foucault (and Eliot—though he seems to have been more concerned with lionizing or deifying authors and the literary tradition) are foundational to the arguments and methodologies of each essay. Rebecca Moore Howard uses the two to illuminate the distinction between author, writer, and student; Paul Butler draws from their texts in problematizing the distinctions between copyright infringement and plagiarism, as well as the apparent contradictions or hypocrisy in thought among some writing instructors; and so forth. This all makes sense in the poststructuralist, destabilized scholarship of contemporary scholarship, and this methodology reveals and has revealed much about the relationships between people, language, and texts; however, the author’s death is problematic for me—a relatively new observer of these conversations, and one who grew up being fascinated by my understanding of genius and auteur—because it does seem to overlook many of the ways we rely on our knowledge of authors to guide our understanding of texts; and in my interests, this may be no more apparent than satire.

      To better demonstrate what I mean, I’ll refer to a humorous case from the past month. On February 6^th of this year, a year-old story from The Onion concerning an $8 billion Planned Parenthood “Abortionplex” was posted to the official Facebook page for John Fleming, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, by Fleming or a staffer, along with the comment, “More on Planned Parenthood, abortion by the wholesale.” The story, as most know or expect, was satirical, poking fun at the contentious and politicized issue of abortion, publicly-funded healthcare, and publicly-funded abortion. The post was quickly removed, though not before it was recorded, and the situation has become funnier than the original Onion news story, if even in the most cynical of ways. Fleming has since been characterized as an idiot, moronic, foolish, and several other adjectives and nouns either highlighting his lack of intelligence, reading skills, or cultural awareness.

     It is not my intention to defend Fleming, so I won’t; but I bring up the story because I think it does show how knowledge of the author, however broadly defined (in this case a group author, as The Onion doesn’t provide bylines in its “news” articles), can be essential to our understanding of a text or the interactions between texts and other cultural bodies. The absurdity of The Onion story itself, along with other textual cues, may have offered enough of an indication that the story was false or exaggerated; however, if this reader whose reading was apparently distorted by politics and ideology had been familiarized with The Onion, if the reader had understood the author’s intent (which was to exaggerate/defamiliarize/lie with satirical comedy for the purpose of eliciting laughter, and perhaps changing attitudes), this probably would not have happened.

      I’m only beginning to dig into my understanding of the event, and the dead author, so forgive the holes or fogginess of my logic, and I do realize that many could point to those textual cues in the story, or the body of work produced by The Onion, as more important than any notion of authorial intent. However, I think this example, among others (Why do we assume Swift never meant to eat children?), does show how certain modes of writing problematize our understanding of the dead author or author-function, especially when the roots of these texts involve people trying to connect with other people, traversing the general confines of time and space, in this case one person or group trying to make others laugh.

     So, my questions are as follows: 1) Are all genres, modes, and styles of writing subject to the same conceptions of the author or author-function? 2) If the exodus from authorial intent has occurred for the sake of highlighting and understanding the complex ways texts and language and people interact, could it be more appropriate to move away from eulogizing the author and instead focus on the life of the text, perhaps using the analogy of the author-parent/text-child? 

     This is the link for The Onion story: http://www.theonion.com/articles/planned-parenthood-opens-8-billion-abortionplex,20476/

"The Binaries of Authorship"

Rebecca Moore Howard’s chapter “The Binaries of Authorship” argues that the terms “writer,” “author,” and “student,” are, at the same time, both very similar and very different in meaning. Howard goes on to define authors as having four qualities – originality, autonomy, morality, and proprietorship (1). Howard goes on to say that merely writing does not create an author without these qualities. She also points out that a student does not practice originality because they are given assignments and they are assessed by how well they meet the standards of the assignments. After this she brings in Foucault and his concept of the author-function. With this idea she mentions that western cultural has arranged these terms hierarchically, with author on the top and student on the bottom, or “least respected.” At the end of the chapter, Howard suggests that both composition teachers and students would benefit from understanding the concept of authorship.

            I have to disagree with the idea that the author needs to be autonomous. After last week’s discussion, it is clear that writing collaboratively does not make the writers lesser authors. Howard mentions that composition teachers “worry” letting students write collaboratively. No explanation is given as to why this is. Is it because teachers believe they are more likely to plagiarize? Do they believe there would not be a balance of the work load between collaborators? Is the idea of writing collaboratively too “original”? Do they believe the quality of work would be subpar? These are the reasons I thought of, but I do not find them valid, since all of these issues are possible with autonomous writing. Additionally, the chapter mentions the practice of teachers “borrowing” former students’ work, removing the name and making it available as an example for their current students. When I have seen this practice in place, the teacher makes it clear that it is student work. Since the teacher removes the name from the writing sample and they make it clear that it is a student’s writing, is the instructor really taking ownership of the piece of writing? They are certainly in physical possession of the writing, but they push the authorship to an anonymous student. Furthermore, when students look at a sample writing provided by the teacher, they assume that it is the standard they are expected to meet, but what if it isn’t the standards the instructor is looking for? What if it is just an example to show what the assignment looks like?

            I think about this chapter and then about my teaching. My students are learning to do things that conflict with what they will do beyond school. Writing collaboratively is seldom used and some teachers find it to be a bad idea, despite the fact that writing collaboratively will most likely be a part of their future careers. I also found it interesting that the chapter described teachers as assuming their students plagiarize and that it is their job to fix this problem. When I read student papers, I am not assuming they stole the writing, if it sounds unlike them, I check to see if it came from somewhere else. But going in with the mindset that students are plagiarizing doesn’t show trust in your students.

Questions:

Howard identifies four qualities that an author has originality, autonomy, morality, and proprietorship. What are other qualities that are missing here? Any you would alter or omit?

Would teaching our students theories on authorship be helpful or hurtful to their education? Why?

Ede's "Writing as a Social Process"

Lisa Ede in “Writing as a Social Process” opens with the idea that theory and practice must be joined for one’s professional life to come together gracefully and with a sense of grounding. To exemplify this, she writes of her struggles balancing her scholarship with her role as the director of her university’s writing center. Later in the essay, she asserts that this problem of theory and practice is a common one for writing center directors. These individuals are so busy with the writing center director role that it is hard to find time to take theorize on their work. As a result, Ede gives some areas for research that writing center directors can begin to work on theorize about, such as the role of collaborative writing within the writing center.  In this sense, Ede’s essay becomes a call to action for writing center directors who know that their scholarship must match their practice.

Though this may be a stretch, reading Ede’s essay was interesting for me since I come from multiple academic backgrounds, though all have been related to English (creative writing, literature, composition/writing studies). The problem is that though all these areas fall within English studies, the ideologies do not always correspond. Since I have background in literature and creative writing, I have been working on finding ways to bring these fields together with what I am learning in my studies on rhetoric and writing so that I can incorporate previous knowledge into my dissertation. For example, (and I’m taking this whole discussion from my own limited understanding) within postmodern rhetoric the concept of “authorial voice” does not exist. I assume postmodern rhetoricians believe this because of the idea of multiplicities and the idea that nothing is stable, and voice, once established, creates a sense of stability and unity for a grouping of text by an individual author. But once one places the idea that voice does not exist within creative writing pedagogy, that pedagogy falls apart because so much instruction hinges upon the creation and finding of one’s voice. I also feel that such an argument has the potential to devalue literature since voice is also a common construct to discuss literary works. We can use common tropes and experiences of the author to link all their works, but it is important to note that the construction of authorial voice plays a role as well.

             So one of my challenges as a graduate student here has been to find ways to make previous knowledge applicable to what I am doing now and to work to find intersections amongst all the differing ideologies. In many ways, I think this is also what Ede and Lunsford are attempting to do throughout their book.

Questions:

1.                    For those who have worked in writing centers: what are some other ways of bringing theory and practice together?

2.                    Do you think there is another way the academic system could help out writing center directors with the problem of making scholarship and practice intersect and even making more space for it?

3.                    Can you think of other areas where a similar problem happens between making theory applicable to practice? (haha, graduate students? ;) ) 

Collaborative Group Work

The task of writing and the assumption that it is either a solitary and/or a colloborative effort are explored in part two of the book Writing Together, entitled "On Collaboration".   Though, the latter is examined thoroughly as questions of how often and in what capacity does coauthorship take place?

According to Lunsford and Ede's initial results, participants in their study viewed the process of writing as a solo and/or collaborative act.  Some individuals perceived writing as strictly a solitary venture, despite exerting energy "...on the mental and procedural activities which precede and co-occur with the act of writing, as well as on the construction of the text" (71).

The researchers continue to establish the modes of collaborative work by distinguishing among members who plan, draft and then compile as a group.  Another option includes a single person drafts, it is then given to another person who then looks it over.  The final option features an individual who directs writing tasks, as each member figures out their own duties, and then one person compiles the information together.      

The discussion at hand looks to confirm if collaborative work is not only productive but a useful tool in assessing one's writing.  Further discussion includes but is not limited to creating a complete document for the group's intended users.  The benefits of group work is weighed out against the disadvantages of non-collaborative work.   As noted by some of the professionals interviewed, most individuals prefer to work in a colloborative environment.  This is due to the conscious effort that the writer puts in towards not only their audience, but also the one's they work with in a group setting.  As the first drafts are set in place, ideas are expressed openly in a constructive environment.  Group members look to everyone's input, and thus all ideas are tapped into, and only the best are expressed in the document.  More perspectives are essential in order for all important issues to be addressed within a piece of work.  Along with this, in order for group work to be productive, motivation is a key factor for optimal participation.  If an group member's ideas are acknowledged and appreciated, then one receives value for their own work and input.  In addition, there are checks and balances that allow individuals to overcome their inabilities when writing.  When there are more heads involved, this will naturally reduce the amount of errors within the document.  It can also lead to a more clearer document when involving different scopes of people.

The disadvantages are outnumbered by the advantages of group work.  Varying styles and writing abilities are issues of concern when working in a group.  People must manage these styles and ensure that they are producing a fluid, coherent document.  Along with this issue, a sense of ownership is lost when sharing credit for a document.

I am writing in this blog alone, but my thoughts and ideas have been influenced by the reading I have done for this class.  As I submit this blog, it might be commented on and critiqued for further evaluation of my arguments.  This will then improve my blog, along with my writing skills because of the feedback I receive in return.   Thus providing another argument for collaborative group.

Question:

Are there any other limitations or disadvantages to working in a collaborative group other than the ones expressed by Lunsford and Ede?