Walking Amongst the Pre-Raphaelites

Breuch, Lee-Ann M. Kastman. “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise.”
JAC 22.1 (Winter 2002): 119 – 150. Rpt. in Cross–Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. 2^nd ed. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 97 – 125.

 Breuch separates post-process theory from process pedagogy, exploring what it is rather than what it is in relation to process.  Post-process theory states that writing cannot be taught because we cannot predict the interpretation of our words by another.  As a result there is vast confusion among post-process scholars concerning ways to turn theory into application.  Breuch feels the central issue is the rejection of any application that confers mastery in writing.  She restates three key assumptions formulated by post-process theorists: writing is public, the creation and reception of writing is interpretive, and writing is situated.  Breuch finds two principles of useable pedagogy: rejection of mastery and dialogue vs. monologue in the student-teacher relationship.

            Why am I posting my annotated bibliography for Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch when she is not assigned reading until October 3^rd?  Because this *should be* the space in which my blog showcases the original writing assignment of CCR 601, wherein as a class we situated ourselves in rhetoric and composition.  Instead I have chosen Breuch as the vehicle of my commentary.  There are intersecting reasons for this.  Primus: I have read Immy, Tanya and Trish’s pieces, and I now hate mine.  To my eyes, their essays are far more engaging and better thought-out (more professionally appropriate?).  Secundus: this annotated bibliography is a roadmap of my entry into our discipline.  While it was not the first piece I read concerning the theory of composition, it has been a consistent companion in my education, one of the key voices echoing in my head when I sort theories and draw connections between them. 

I had never heard of process scholarship, much less post-process, when I arrived at Drew University.  I had never heard of composition studies, and rhetoric was the skillful utilization of language (by politicians).  In fact, my “instruction” in writing was the high school model of reading great literature and intuiting (magically, I suppose, though we never questioned something so ingrained in our ideology) how to write from those examples.  I skipped such worries at the university level, attending Moore College of Art and Design, a specialist school for women artists with only occasional forays into Art History and other humanities courses.  Ironically, it was this experience, so different from most of the other Drew graduate students, that opened me to the influence of Sharon Crowley’s Composition in the University.  It was the first assignment for Professor Jamieson’s class in the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition.  Most of my fellows hated her book.  They insisted it was Marxist – as if this naturally made it ghastly and prevented them from seeing anything else in it – as well as rising up in a humanist tide to declare it crap (I could use cleaner language, but then I would not truly be expressing the sentiment). 

Of course not everyone felt that way.  Crowley is my muse.   She is the writer responsible for prompting one of those “aha” moments in me, an epiphany worthy of James Joyce’s young artist.  The conceptualization of writing as learned through practice struck a chord when compared to art.  No self-respecting artist believes art occurs “like magic,” yet we are familiar with its surrounding mystic aura.  People who can’t draw believe art stems from inborn talent; people who do draw (paint, sculpt, design…) know it stems from conscientious practice, that product is the result that creates the myth – much like writing.  As soon as I saw the comparisons, I knew C’s argument “some people can write and some will just never get it” (yes, I am afraid that is an exact quote) was as likely as a grad student with extra reading time.  Most of the others couldn’t comprehend a writing course that did not have, as its axis, the fostering of a love of literature.  To this day, while I am sure there must have been others who felt that putting student texts at the center of writing classrooms is fundamental, I do not know who they are.  S/He who speaks loudest…

Which brings us to tertius: Why Breuch is anchoring my blogsphere.  Blogs shock me.  I know it is a silly fact, but there it is.  They have led me to ask of myself: Where do I locate the concept of “Teacher”?  I have added the minor title “Insubstantial Monoliths” to reflect my mental grappling on the subject – I almost named the blog for it.  Although it does not adequately reflect my real and working relationships with my professors, this exercise (constructing a blog) has initiated the realization that I still have some of that pesky current-traditionalist influence subverting my belief systems.  The teacher is a monolithic idea in my mind – Teacher – one that apparently does not move, breathe, have a functioning personal life, and make blogs.  To me blogs disrupt the “smooth logic of accepted meaning or signification” of the teacher’s body by granting them one outside the university (Avital Ronell).  So imagine the shock when I could venture online and imagine these lives into the space that their blogs created – when the imaginary monolith of THE PROFESSOR became insubstantial as a real person who wrote in a way that was not purely academic (and therefore usually distancing) emerged.  Here are people who write about the commonalities of life.  I can feel I know them better.  Shocking.  Please.

So, thusly we are returned to Breuch.  As she wrote, all writing is public, interpretive, and situated.  My borders and boundaries around the concept of Teacher are imaginary lines.  The space I cleared around it and the distance I saw between kinds of writing don’t operate very effectively.  I will not say they don’t exist – just that they don’t really behave in the conservative way my subconscious insisted.  As one of my favorites, D. Diane Davis wrote, “My sense of writing as performance/spectacle is rooted in my understanding of Derrida. That writing is not a vehicle for ideas. That things happen in writing.”  And so they did – I saw that not only was writing public, so were teachers.