Genre And The Invention Of The Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition - Softcover

Bawarshi, Anis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874215544 ISBN 13: 9780874215540

Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Genre and the Invention of the Writer will be of interest not only to genre theorists, but also to the teacher of undergraduate writing, the WPA, and to those involved with WID/WAC programs.

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GENRE AND THE INVENTION OF THE WRITER

Reconsidering the Place of Invention in CompositionBy ANIS S. BAWARSHI

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-554-0

Contents

Preface.................................................................................ix1 Introduction: A Meditation on Beginnings..............................................12 The Genre Function....................................................................163 Inventing the Writer in Composition Studies...........................................494 Constructing Desire: Genre and the Invention of Writing Subjects......................785 Sites of Invention: Genre and the Enactment of First-Year Writing.....................1126 Re-Placing Invention in Composition: Reflections and Implications.....................145Notes...................................................................................171References..............................................................................186Index...................................................................................203

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

A Meditation on Beginnings

A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. ARISTOTLE, Poetics My way is to begin with the beginning. LORD BYRON, Don Juan The speaker is not the biblical Adam, dealing only with virgin and still unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time. M. M. BAKHTIN, Speech Genres Writers are ... different from the subjects of the composing processes we often describe, for they do not generate, transcribe, and fix meanings independently from the systems of language and cultural history that equally participate in these processes. SUSAN MILLER, Rescuing the Subject

Perhaps the most appropriate way to begin this book is by asking what it means to begin, because in many ways this book is about beginnings, about why and how writers begin to write, and about the ways we in composition studies imagine, study, and teach how, why, and where writing begins-the subject of invention. It attempts to locate and describe where invention takes place and what happens to writers when they begin to write. In so doing, this book extends the question, "what do writers do when they write?" by asking, "what happens to writers that motivates them to do what they do?" Framed in this way, the question invites us to examine invention not only as a site for the writer's articulation of desire, but also as a site for the writer's acquisition of desire. Recent scholarship in genre theory can contribute a great deal to such an understanding of invention, and in the chapters that follow, I will describe that contribution and explore what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention in this way.

But how can we begin to write about beginnings? Where do we begin? We could, as Byron suggests, begin with the beginning, the scene of origin that, according to Aristotle, "does not itself follow anything by causal necessity." Rejecting the in medias res (the "into the midst of things") strategy with which traditional epic poems begin, Byron announces that he will begin his epic poem, Don Juan, at the beginning, with the birth of his hero. Don Juan was born in Seville, Byron tells us; his father "traced his source/Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain," while his mother's "memory was a mine." Yet the fact that Don Juan is born in Seville, the fact of his father's lineage and his mother's memory-all these preclude any sense of a beginning unpreceded by "causal necessity." As soon as Byron announces his intention to begin with the beginning, he (perhaps unwittingly but more likely satirically) reveals the impossibility of beginning as such. The beginning of Don Juan is, in a very real sense, already in medias res, already taking place in the midst of things.

Such is the ironic nature of beginnings, performing at once an act of initiation and an act of continuation. This introduction-this beginning of the book-is a case in point. It initiates the book that follows, but it is also what Edward Said calls an "effort on behalf of discursive continuity" (1975, 69). That is, it sets up what is to follow at the same time as it situates what follows in the midst of what already exists, the "systems of language and cultural history" represented in part by the texts of Aristotle, Byron, Bakhtin, Miller, and the countless other texts that precede, flank, and make possible my own text. Beginnings are acts of departure, but always departures from something, in relation to something, so that, as Bakhtin reminds us, every beginning is a response to a prior beginning (1986). Along with Bakhtin, Said describes beginnings as gestures of continuation, nuanced repetitions, which emerge not linearly but in adjacency to other texts, such that a "text stands to the side of, next to or between the bulk of all other works-not in a line with them, not in a line of descent from them" (1975, 10). Beginnings take place in the midst of things.

To describe beginnings as situated and textured is to describe them in what Said calls secular terms, terms that oppose a view of beginnings as divine or magical acts of unpreceded origination. Such a secular view of beginnings upsets a powerful desire for ultimate origins, what David Bartholomae calls the "desire for an open space, free from the past ... deployed throughout the discourses of modern life, including the discourses of education" (1995, 64). This desire is particularly strong in the discourses of writing instruction, in which the blank page or computer screen stands symbolic of the open space, the frontier space, from which writers begin. The blank page is mythologized as an unmarked space waiting to be marked, its physical blankness masking the fact of its specification in discursive and ideological conventions, including genres, which already situate it, already mark it.

By and large, the way we imagine invention in writing reflects and enacts this desire for unpreceded beginnings. This desire finds expression in the dozens of self-help writing guides currently lining bookstore shelves that assume the writer as the point of origin for writing, and that purport to teach the aspiring writer how to unleash his or her ideas, voice, and untapped creativity. This desire also finds expression in the countless composition textbooks scattered around writing program offices, some of which are not unlike Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford's Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers (a textbook in its third edition by 1998). In it, the authors tell students that writing is an inward journey, a "process of discovering what resides within your mind and your spirit" (8). They go on to write:

Many people find it difficult to begin, wondering, perhaps, how they will be able to untangle all of their thoughts and feelings, how they will finally decide on the most accurate words and sentence patterns to make their statements clear and compelling. You may feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of all that is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0874215544
• ISBN 13: 9780874215540
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 207
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland