David Wallace argues that any understanding of writing studies must include the conception of discourse as an embodied force with real consequences for real people. Informed in important ways by queer theory, Wallace calls to account users of dominant discourses and at the same time articulates a theory base from which to interpret "alternative rhetoric."
To examine the practice of writing from varied margins of society, Compelled to Write offers careful readings of four exemplar American writers, each of whom felt compelled within their own time and place to write in response to systemic injustices in American society.
Sarah Grimké, a privileged white woman advocating for abolition, is forced to defend her right to speak as a woman; Frederick Douglass begins his public career almost as a curiosity (the articulate ex-slave) and ends it as one of the most important rhetors in American history; Gloria Anzaldúa writes not only in multiple languages and dialects but from marginalized positions related to gender, race, class, sexual identity, and physical abled-ness; David Sedaris uses his privileged position as a middle-class white male humorist to speak unabashedly of his sexuality, his addictions, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Through these writers, Wallace explores a range of strategies that comprise alternative rhetorical practice, and demonstrates how such practice is inflected by social constraints on rhetorical agency and by how writers employ alternative discourses to resist those constraints. Grounding and personalizing Compelled to Write with rich material from his own teaching and his own experience, Wallace considers a number of implications for teachers of writing.
COMPELLED TO WRITE
Alternative Rhetoric in Theory and Practice By DAVID L. WALLACE UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87421-812-1Contents
Acknowledgments......................................................................................11 Defining Alternative Rhetoric: Embracing Intersectionality and Owning Opacity.....................3Interchapter: Piano Lessons..........................................................................392 Sarah Grimké: Breaking the Bonds of Womanhood................................................42Interchapter: Jumper Cables and Double Consciousness as a Habit of Mind..............................673 Frederick Douglass: Taking an Ell to Claim Humanity...............................................72Interchapter: Pickles................................................................................1154 Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands and Fences; Literacy and Rhetoric...............................118Interchapter: The Light of the World.................................................................1595 David Sedaris: Expanding Epideictic—A Rhetoric of Indirection...............................162Interchapter: Day Four in Paris......................................................................2026 Alternative Rhetoric and Marked Writing...........................................................205Interchapter: God Abhors You.........................................................................242References...........................................................................................244Index................................................................................................250About the Author.....................................................................................256
Chapter One
DEFINING ALTERNATIVE RHETORIC Embracing Intersectionality and Owning Opacity A central insight to keep fully present in our thinking, rather than on the periphery, is the necessity of resisting a tendency to view discourse (language in particular use) as a disembodied force within which we are inevitably, inescapably, innocently swept along. Royster, 2002
The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine. Butler, 2005
Could it be that we just don't know ourselves? That the very words we use to speak ourselves to others obscure as much as they elucidate? That we emerge only in the cracks when words fail to perform as we have come to expect them to?
Could it be that we fail words by forgetting they are not/can never be disembodied but continue to exist only as we speak/write/display them? That we suffer from the illusion that when we speak we have not already been spoken?
Some of us are compelled to write because we cannot escape daily reminders that words define us as different, as other. Some of us are swept along, free to speak, write, text, sing, shout, live with invisible words that allow us to lie with the herd.
This book is about those who are compelled to write: those who don't need Jacqueline Jones Royster's reminder that words are not innocent neutral tools, those who do not need Judith Butler to tell them that words they cannot control are used to label them as freaks, queers, others—dismissible. I explore what it means to speak with cracked voices, to use words, language, and rhetoric in cries and rants, teases and taunts that refuse to accept the status quo.
But this book is for all of us, too—all of us who are willing to look at the limits of our own knowing and accept that we have responsibility for what falls outside our experience, all of us who are willing to reject the myth of objectivity and embrace our subjectivities, all of us who are willing to see language as discourse and to own the implications of that insight.
Of course, I am hardly the first to note the need for a different understanding of rhetorical agency and its implications. At least since we began reading de De Saussure, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Foucault, and others, rhetoric and composition scholars have understood that language is not a set, value-free tool. By consequence then, neither is rhetoric. Rather both language and rhetoric are always socially, culturally, and historically situated and dependent on actual practice for their continued existence. The underlying principle here is that language and rhetoric are both constitutive in that meaning making is based on the existence of these sociocultural systems that serve as the basis for shared understanding, but also in that these systems themselves have no existence independent of actual practice. Indeed, language and rhetoric are in a very real sense themselves reconstituted with each communicative interaction.
One of our field's chief problems has been how to translate our understanding of the theoretical complexities amongst language, culture, rhetoric, and individual identity into rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy that moves substantively beyond the presumptions of current traditional rhetoric that language and rhetoric are largely neutral tools and that, once mastered, they can be wielded equally by all as the means to economic and other kinds of power. I bring a queer twist to this problem, proposing that the concepts of intersectionality and opacity used in queer theory can help us sort out the knotty problem of negotiating identity in rhetorical theory and pedagogical practice.
As Royster argues in the opening epigraph, the discursive nature of language and rhetoric must be at the center of any understanding of rhetoric and composition that takes postmodernism seriously, and discourse must be understood as an embodied force that has real consequences for real people. My most basic argument in this book is that defining some kinds of semiotic exchanges as alternative rhetoric can help us sort out both the ways members of some groups have been systematically marginalized by dominant discourse practices that pretend neutrality and the means those who have been so marginalized have used to challenge the discourses of power. In this regard, I begin with two critical assumptions: (1) personal identity is intimately bound up in the practice and pedagogy of rhetoric, even if that identity is not always immediately apparent to all involved, and (2) fundamental components of culture, language, and rhetoric are complicit in systemic inequities in our society in ways that have real and daily consequences for those they marginalize.
Of course, at some level, defining alternative rhetoric is dependent on understanding what it is an alternative to, and defining rhetoric is a task that has kept scholars debating for 2,500 years. Rather than reviewing that long history, I explore in the first section of this chapter more recent attempts in our field to sort out the problem of accounting for the social identity of the writer as a means of illustrating the need for alternative rhetoric as I define it. In doing so, I begin with the assumption that rhetoric becomes alternative when it engages the individual's subjectivity rather than attempting to erase it and accounts for the positioning of that subjectivity within the discourse of power that enfranchise some and marginalize others. In this sense, I argue that alternative rhetoric is a meaningful term only if it is grounded both...
