Dissonance Blog

In March of 2003, while studying systems engineering at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, I read Mark Doty’s poem “A Green Crab’s Shell” in Bill Moyer’s book Fooling With Words In his interview prefacing the poem, Doty attributes one of its lines to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” I read that poem next. Its final line, “You must change your life,” seemed so overdramatic, so very unnecessary in light of the thirteen lines that came before. Yet, I kept reading Rilke’s poetry, and Doty’s poetry, and other poetry that their work led me to. By June, I had withdrawn from Olin College and was searching for an undergraduate creative writing program to start at the following year.

I graduated with a B.A. in English with an emphasis on poetry writing in May 2007. By that point in my academic career, I had written lab reports, plays, business proposals, poems, literary analysis, short stories, reader responses, sociological analyses and any number of other kinds of writing. Ironically, given my degree, I knew that the only genres I felt uncomfortable writing in were the creative: prose and poetry. Cue several years of floundering, and here I am now, working towards a Ph.D. in English and soaking up rhetoric and composition scholarship.

Although the creative side of writing drew me away from engineering, I’m starting to realize that it was really just the power of the language to influence me at all that got me hooked. When I teach composition, one of my main goals is to share this sense of language’s extraordinary capabilities with students. No, wait, that sounds far too much like an inspirational movie about a teacher. What I really aim for is to have conversations with students that help them recognize what a complicated business writing really is. That starts with breaking down monolithic ideas about language and writing, especially the idea that there can ever be such a thing as “good writing” in a context-less vacuum. Context, the way in which all the things around the writing that aren’t written influence the things that are written, is a touchstone in my comp classes. At least, I try to make it one. My hunch is that this makes life a little more difficult, as context seems to be a concept with which many students struggle.

This struggle makes me wish I knew how I had come to my own understanding of context and its relationship to texts. I do know that as an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time writing things I thought were “good” that, when I read them now, feel stilted and even inappropriate. Reading old papers from English lit classes is a particularly humbling experience. So often, those old papers reveal exactly the kind of trying on process Bartholomae describes in “Inventing the University.” I tried on being a literary critic, a scientist, an engineer, a sociologist. No one ever told me to try these roles on. It just seemed like the thing to do, to please the teacher and make the grade. But without an understanding of the context that gives rise to certain voices and conventions, my trying on of those voices and conventions couldn’t rise above the level of playacting.

When my students now ask me what I want them to write, I hear them asking me the question I never asked: How do you want me to write? The how encompasses the voice and conventions appropriate to any given writing situation. “What,” they are asking, “is this finished piece supposed to look like? How impressive should my vocabulary be? How technical? Can I use headings? Where should my thesis go? Do I even need a thesis?” These questions, largely, are questions about genre, which to my mind is a shorthand way of talking about voice, conventions, interpretive schemes, topoi, and audience, among other rhetorical elements. Every which way I look at it, genre seems to be a nexus to which all rhetorical conversations can be traced.

I know I’m on thin ice when I say that. Reading broadly in rhetorical studies has convinced me that just about everything connects to everything else: ethos to audience, audience to occasion, occasion to context, context to audience, and so on, ad infinitum. Discussions of genre necessarily lend themselves to discussions of these other elements, however, even if only to describe the genre. I’m polishing up a paper for CCCC that muses on a bit about how to adapt Bakhtin’s concept of speech genres to writing pedagogy, with particular attention paid to how people become familiar and comfortable with genres in the first place. Plain old exposure is a big part of the process (I argue), which carries the implication that we need to make more considered choices (here at UNLV in particular) about the kinds of reading we assign 101 students.

That paper and study got me started on this interest in genre, which has been spreading well beyond pedagogy. I now think about genre every time I read an Onion article or watch the Daily Show, and consider questions like what basic amount of knowledge is necessary to “get” a parody. Genre pops up any time I discuss new technologies with old engineering friends. It’s the way in which I explain why I can do Facebook, but can’t do Twitter. It has become the lens through which I’m considering all texts these days, particularly those I produced and ask to be produced in my comp classroom.

Given all of this lead-up, I’m sure it’s clear that I plan to focus my research and final paper on genre theory. The questions I keep coming up with though don’t lend themselves to answering through secondary research or on a short timeline. I want to get started investigating this potential engineering WAC topic, but the sorts of questions I want answered now are things like “What have other people done?” and “What sort of research questions would I ask about that program?” These are not suitable research questions for conference papers (although they might be for a public airing on a blog). When I failed to come up with a research question that suited that interest, I considered turning back to genre and more general comp pedagogy. There, my thoughts kept turning back to the CCCC paper that I’ve already written, so that’s largely a non-starter.

At this point, I’m still feeling very unsure about research questions. The direction (genre theory) is a sure thing, but where to aim beyond that? My concern is spending time researching and writing something that doesn’t serve my larger, long-term goals. I’m reaching a point in the graduate school process at which I no longer want to wallow about in all the interesting things literature and writing have to offer. I’m ready to get down to business. The business is genre and some kind of related dissertation, but what that realization means for this paper, I have yet to figure out.