Houses Divided: Processing Composition in a Post-Process Time

Elbow, Peter. 2000. Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. NewYork: Oxford University Press. $45.00 hc. $18.95 sc. xxiv + 475 pp. Finkel, Donald L. 2000. Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. Portsmouth: Heinemann. $22.00 sc. xviii + 180 pp. McComisky, Bruce. 2000. Teaching Composition as a Social Process. Logan: Utah State University Press. $19.95 sc. 147 pp. As the field of composition has come into its own in the past decade, so too has what may come to be known as a classic divide. On one side are the folks who have been cast under the umbrella of expressivism, compositionists who focus primarily on the rhetorical contexts of writing. For expressivists, or those cast as such, writers work within an isolated nexus of language and readers to express their ideas. The subtext of this constellation of positions suggests that writers can, indeed, succeed in this endeavor, usually through a process of drafting and revision, and in the end gain control over language and the ideas they seek to convey. Peter Elbow has been the poster professor for expressivism for more than twenty years, sometimes to his satisfaction and at other times to his bewilderment. His newest collection, Everyone Can Write, weaves together previous essays in a way that lets us see the range of his reactions to the position he has found himself in. On the other side we find those who have self-identified as doing post-- process composition studies. As a theoretical position, post-process argues that the theory of writing developed by the process movement over the past thirty years relied heavily on expressivism and, as such, did not attend to historical, social, and political circumstances of writers, readers, and texts. Moreover, expressivist proponents were criticized for embracing a romantic theory of the writer as the individual, genius creator of his or her work. Unfettered by institutional apparatuses, socio-political conditions, and linguistic constraints, this writer embodied an uncomplicated subjectivity as he or she sought the clear communication of ideas through language. Post-- process thinkers rely heavily on critical theory's and cultural studies' critique of subjectivity to articulate a theory of writing based on discursive conditions.Writing, for the post-process composition scholar, is always social: subjectivity is multi-valenced and multi-voiced; writers and readers are always conditioned and interpolated by networks of social relations; and the goal of composition is in part about raising students' awareness of their own discursive formations. For the social, post-process theorists, expressivist process theory seems at best quaint and at worst deluded and irresponsible. As the post-process movement builds its momentum in distancing itself from expressivist process-oriented approaches to writing, signs of a larger divide loom on the disciplinary horizon. In her important work on constructions of authorship, Rebecca Moore Howard contextualizes the two impulses. Composition scholarship, she notices, accords with the 'new' author emerging in critical theory, the author who neither is nor can be autonomous and originary (52). This is the author construct embraced by post-process theorists in composition. In contrast, composition pedagogy continues to uphold and reproduce the 'old' author inherited from Romantic literary theory, the author that still prevails in lay culture (52). What Howard isolates is, in fact, a radical divide between what happens in composition research (social, post-process) and what happens in composition classrooms (expressivist process). Even Elbow remarks on the difference when he suggests in his introduction that the split between scholars and teachers bears pondering (xvi). Essentially, we're writing about one thing and teaching another. Despite their radical differences in theoretical approach, one feature that connects the work of these three writers is their effort to link effectively their theory with their classroom pedagogy. …