In Personal Effects, Holdstein and Bleich compile a volume that cuts across the grain of current orthodoxy. These editors and contributors argue that it is fundamental in humanistic scholarship to take account of the personal and collective experiences of scholars, researchers, critics, and teachers. They contend that humanistic inquiry cannot develop successfully at this time without reference to the varieties of subjective, intersubjective, and collective experience of teachers and researchers. In composition studies, they point out, an important strand of theory has continuously mined the personal experience of individual writers ("where they stand" even in a destabilized sense of that idea). "[Such substantive accounts of the 'inner' academic life provide appropriate and rich contexts for further study and analysis." With this volume, then, these scholars move us to explore the intersections of the social with subjectivity, with voice, ideology, and culture, and to consider the roles of these in the work of academics who study writing and literature. Taken together, the essays in this collection carry forward the idea that the personal, the candidly subjective and intersubjective, must be part of the subject of study in humanities scholarship. They propose an understanding of the personal in scholarship that is more helpful because more clearly anchored in human experience.
PERSONAL EFFECTS
The Social Character of Scholarly WritingUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-429-1Contents
Introduction: Recognizing the Human in the Humanities David Bleich and Deborah H. Holdstein.......................................11 Scholarly Memoir: An Un-"Professional" Practice Margaret Willard-Traub.........................................................272 In the Name of the Subject: Some Recent Versions of the Personal Jeffrey Gray..................................................513 Radical Introspection: The Personal in Scholarship and Teaching Brenda Daly....................................................794 Loss, Memory, and the Work of Learning: Lessons From the Teaching Life of Anne Sexton Paula M. Salvio..........................935 "Knowledge Has a Face": The Jewish, The Personal, and the Pedagogical Susan Handelman..........................................1216 Who Was that Masked Author? The Faces of Academic Editing Louise Z. Smith......................................................1457 Autobiography: The Mixed Genre of Public and Private Madeleine R. Grumet.......................................................1658 The Social Construction of Expressivist Pedagogy Karen Surman Paley............................................................1789 The Scope of Personal Writing in Postsecondary English Pedagogy Diane P. Freedman..............................................19910 Personal Experience Paper Rachel Brownstein....................................................................................22011 "The World Never Ends": Professional Judgments at Home, Abroad Joycelyn K. Moody...............................................23212 Learning to Take it Personally Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly..............................................................25313 Cuentos de mi Historia: An Art of Memory Victor Villanueva.....................................................................26714 Personal Landmarks on Pedagogical Landscapes Katya Gibel Azoulay...............................................................27715 The Anxiety and Nostalgia of Literacy: A Narrative about Race, Language, and a Teaching Life Morris Young......................29616 Where I'm Coming From: Memory, Location, and the (Un)making of National Subjectivity Christopher Castiglia.....................31717 The Personal as History Richard Ohmann.........................................................................................335References.........................................................................................................................357Contributors.......................................................................................................................377Index..............................................................................................................................381
Chapter One
SCHOLARLY MEMOIR
An Un-"Professional" Practice Margaret Willard-Traub
The figure of the solitary thinker comprises a most powerful and enduring representation of scholarly life. This is the figure of the autonomous scholar-teacher, whose intellectual sovereignty and productivity, both in and out of the classroom, seemingly rests as much if not more upon untold hours of secluded reading and writing as it does upon building relationships with others-even those others who eventually may comprise important audiences for the scholar's writing and teaching.
Those of us whose experiences inside the institution readily challenge the usefulness of unqualified autonomy as an ideal, simultaneously recognize its appeal. Despite (or, ironically, perhaps sometimes because of) influences such as the political and bureaucratic constraints on scholarship and teaching that scholars like Michael Brub, Cary Nelson, and Richard E. Miller have explored; feminist theories and practices examining the role of the 'personal' in professional work; widely accepted educational approaches stressing collaboration and dialogue in learning and teaching; and seemingly daily calls in the media for scholar-teachers to communicate rationales for their work with the public more often and in ways deemed more "accountable," the ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, much of whose most important labor occurs outside of collaborative (or competitive) relationships, continues to circulate as a symbol of professional success.
This ideal of autonomy endures perhaps because the vision of relative (if not absolute) autonomy provides academics with what Richard E. Miller would call a "felt sense of distinction" (26); perhaps it endures as well because it comprises, at least for some, part of a legacy and a link to a common, professional past. In any case, at the very least such an ideal operates within the institution like other "subterranean text(s)" (e.g., the text which Linda Brodkey argues leads composition to "abet middle-class illusions of meritocracy" [234]) that "insinuate rather than argue (their) claims" (215). That such an ideal figures strongly in others' and our own perceptions of the profession is evidenced, for example, by the frequency with which "autonomy" is cited by tenured faculty members as one reason for high satisfaction in their jobs (Schneider par. 8).
This text of scholarly autonomy also is powerfully sustained by traditional forms of academic writing that privilege a stance of 'objectivity,' and the development of argument that ostensibly stands outside the shaping influences of social or rhetorical conditions (Gee 63). Such writing follows what both David Olson and James Gee have called an "autonomous model of literacy"-a set of conventions traditionally privileging a writer's explication of logical connections between ideas, while neglecting (or at least de-emphasizing) an examination of the relationship between a writer's subject position and those ideas, or his or her relationships to various audiences.
In recent years, however, a proliferation of scholarly memoirs and other examples of autobiographically inflected scholarship across diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences suggests a shifting away in the U.S. academy from scholars' privileging exclusively, in their practices and assessments of writing, this "autonomous" model. Such a trend perhaps also suggests a shifting away from the view that scholars are of necessity professional 'loners,' engaged in work that is optimally solitary. In contrast to traditional forms of academic writing, examples of what I will call more "reflective," academic practice like scholarly memoirs, ethnographies that are 'situated' with regard to the subject position of the writer/researcher, and teaching portfolios, at least in part define themselves against traditional expectations for 'objectivity' that require, for instance, a scholar to adopt a personal detachment from his or her object of study or to maintain a certain distance from potential audiences.
Specifically, I would suggest that such reflective, academic texts emphasize the ways in which relationships between writers and their diverse audiences (both those who are scholars and those who are not) are established. Not surprisingly, these texts align themselves with postmodern epistemologies that affirm the multiplicity and contingency of the writing 'self'-acknowledging the 'everydayness' of people's lives (as that is defined by realities of emotion and psychology as well as by material exigencies), and the personal realities of writers and...
