WRITING WITH ELBOW

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Foreword Ann E. Berthoff................................................................................................................................................................ixPreface: To Our Readers Pat Belanoff, Marcia Dickson, Sheryl I. Fontaine, Charles Moran.................................................................................................xiA Precise Machine for Thinkers Ken Macrorie.............................................................................................................................................xivVision: A Poem for Peter Lucile Burt....................................................................................................................................................xviIntersection Pat Belanoff...............................................................................................................................................................31 Writing Without Teachers, Writing Against the Past? Richard Boyd......................................................................................................................72 Sentimental Journeys: Anti-Romanticism and Academic Identity Thomas Newkirk...........................................................................................................213 Elbow's Radical and Postmodern Politics Elizabeth A. Flynn............................................................................................................................344 Elbow as Icon Edward M. White and Shane Borrowman.....................................................................................................................................41Intersection Charles Moran..............................................................................................................................................................615 Pedagogy for the Bamboozled C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon...........................................................................................................................656 New Uses for Doubting Thomas G. O'Donnell.............................................................................................................................................847 Believing is Not a Game: Elbow's Uneasy Debt to Michael Polanyi M. Elizabeth Sargent..................................................................................................958 East Meets West: Peter Elbow's "Embracing" of "Contraries" Across Cultures George Kalamaras...........................................................................................114Intersection Sheryl I. Fontaine.........................................................................................................................................................1279 Re-Imagining "Frontier" Pedagogy: Inside Peter Elbow's Composition Classroom Kathleen J. Cassity......................................................................................13310 Dissolving Contraries Keith Hjortshoj................................................................................................................................................14411 Pleasure, Politics, Fear, and the Field of Composition: Elbow's Influence on My Theorizing and Teaching Irene Papoulis...............................................................15912 Spoken Response: Space, Time, and Movies of the Mind Jeff Sommers....................................................................................................................17213 An Inquiry into Writing Assessment: Defining the Elbovian Legacy Kathleen Blake Yancey...............................................................................................187Intersection Marcia Dickson.............................................................................................................................................................20514 Embodied Voice: Peter Elbow's Physical Rhetoric Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly...................................................................................................21015 Gone Fishin': Rendering and the Uses of Personal Experience in Writing Anne J. Herrington............................................................................................22316 My Favorite Balancing Act Wendy Bishop...............................................................................................................................................23917 Dear Peter: A Collage in Several Voices Sondra Perl..................................................................................................................................25318 Collage: A Coda Bruce Penniman, James Harstad, Erika Scheurer, Jane Danielewicz, Mary Teresa Hall, Duane Roen, Fran Zak, Ron Overton, Pat Perry, Carolyn McGrath.....................268References...............................................................................................................................................................................277Contributors.............................................................................................................................................................................288Index....................................................................................................................................................................................295

Chapter One

I began to work in the field of composition studies at a time when it seemed that the label of "expressivist" was something to be avoided rather than embraced. During the late 1980s, it often appeared to me that texts like Writing Without Teachers (1973) and Writing with Power (1981) would eventually be read only as relics of a bygone era or forever regarded as politically suspect for their uncritical endorsement of the unencumbered self. I must confess that the term evoked for me images of an out-of-fashion romanticism that had been revealed by critics like James Berlin and James Catano to be irretrievably "co-opted by the very capitalist forces it opposes" (Berlin, "Rhetoric and Ideology" 487). While my firsthand experiences of Peter Elbow's graciousness and generosity should have prompted caution about such harsh conclusions, Berlin's argument seemed to me a powerful one, and I happily placed myself within that "social-epistemic" camp of writing teachers dedicated to progressive values and genuinely liberatory education.

Of course, those who style themselves as critical intellectuals are wise to at some point interrogate their own most favored axioms, and the past years have taught me that my judgment about the professional and political meaning of Elbow's early work might very well be one of those conclusions most in need of reassessment. Sherrie L. Gradin's revisionist study of what she terms the "social expressivist" school (which claims Elbow as a leading figure) has shown us that we need not accept without question Berlin's account of an "expressionistic" rhetoric so focused on the individual that it cuts short any possibility of collective action against "corporate-sponsored thought" and instead often works "to reinforce the entrepreneurial virtues capitalism most values" (486-87). Even more significantly for my own thinking, the historicist orientation I try to foreground in my own scholarship has taught me to be wary of any easy conclusions or quick assumptions about the...