Still not ready. . .set, go!

This class has felt like a contemplative journey; and as we close on the readings, I feel like I am back at the starting line. It was good to end on these articles because they are in many ways a realist stance in the face of the hope for academic awareness of alternate discourse and contact zone rhetoric. Elbow does sum up the sustaining question that always splashes cold water on the fiery passion of those arguing against traditional academic discourse: “how can we change the culture of literacy yet also help all students prosper in the present culture?” (126). When this question continues to arise, I wonder whether the academy really is ready (as the editorial note states on page 175 of Spooner’s article) for alternate discourses (even though it claims to be). I still have this sense that I am some benign actor in the academy attempting to go against established policies that will never truly bend to my wishes (but is more than happy to accommodate my rebellion so that it appears inclusive). I look at these brick buildings on campus and I think of those sturdy structures as the concrete ideologies that I can’t seem to knock down; my thoughts, my rhetoric, are like a tree branch I that keep beating the side of the building with, and (though I am doing nothing but breaking the branch against the building) I keep hearing someone yell out a window of the building, “There you go! You’re doin’ great! You just keep whacking away at the building, you’ll knock it down eventually!” When I graduate, I’ll throw the stick away and get an office on the sixth floor.

That’s how it feels. Jacqueline Jones Royster gets at this when she discusses that we have “naturalized the academy” as a space we must conform to. But, I like what she says about how “current research is compelling us [. . .] to move interpretively (emphasis mine) to alter” preconceived ideologies (Royster 26). In the above paragraph metaphor, I can actually re-interpret the brick building to be a paper building that I can rip through with my baseball bat. That’s why we love ideology—so powerful and so easy to re-imagine!

The response to Elbow’s ubiquitous question is, ‘how then do we see the academy and how can it be re-imagined?’ It can be seen as an exclusive entity that (as Paul says) invites us into it. Hence, why should the academy change? On the other hand, the academy, like language, is dynamic and socially-constructed. New generations of thought and time have and will change the academy. Alternative discourses will find a way; they already have much more than in the past. Paul and I want to discuss this. It’s a good concluding discussion that grounds us in the current constraints that we are dealing with. I’ll let Paul bring up his ideas on this question; I am going to air out my thoughts here (and then in class).

In our discussions this semester, there is a seeming consensus that we in the class agree that alternate discourses should be acknowledged. Further, we want alternate discourses to be practiced in the academy. Bizzell’s article echoes the sentiments of many others we have read over this course: “a diversity of intellectual approaches is exactly what we need. . .we should be welcoming, not resisting, the advent of diverse forms of academic discourse” (9). Nobody said this was an easy transformation, but it is at least comforting to know that some have paved the way for resisting traditional discourse.

On the other hand, I have this weird frustrations that Elbow and Fox are just being academic hypocrites and that argue that alternative discourse is necessary but. . .seriously. . .alt dis cannot be a final product. Fox’s argument for perceiving discourse as an amalgamation of the blurred lines between western and world majority thinking is overshadowed by the fatalistic declaration that “the U.S. university is still based on a powerful, but at the same time, extremely narrow conception of thinking and communicating that has made possible all sorts of scientific explorations and ideas and inventions” (64). Elbow does the same thing when he invites students to play around with alternative discourses in the pre-writing and drafting phase (which I would argue is a phase that the academy doesn’t care about because it is usually not part of the visible final product of writing, it’s just the ‘behind the scenes’), but he still claims that the final product should be in SWE (131). This is the same sort of crap that sometimes academics say about new media composition and texts—that it is all fine and good to screw around with and use for metaphorical purposes, but the final product still needs to be a traditional academic paper. And nothing gets students more excited about reading texts than having to write a paper about it with a minimum of eight sources (internet sources are unacceptable). This is where I get angry: I don’t like it when members of the academy are interested in alternate discourses that they never intent to apply. While alt dis keeps struggling for legitimization, academics will keep these alternative modes of thinking in cages at the academic thinking zoo—where we can look at the specimens through a plate glass window, but we’ll never interact with them. (Alright. . . take a deep breath. Relax, Jim.)

So, Spooner sees this issue in terms of writer v. reader privilege. The privilege of the reader (as Spooner frames it in the context of editing being comparable to writing instruction) maintains the gate keeping function of the writing teacher and the academy as a whole (158). We’ll ask, who is the audience? And the academy will say ‘I am,’ and reinforce that one should write the way the academy wants. The academy wants salience: a thesis, clear points, a conclusion. On the other hand, alternative writing “raises participation to a new level by deliberately disorienting the reader. Alt. style will not be taken for granted, even if that means risking rejection or misunderstanding by its readers” (166). I like when Spooner uses Alexander’s term ‘organic’ to describe how alt dis can facilitate a grasp of context for the reader. Though disorienting, alt dis should be, in a sense, a natural mode of communication; whereas, traditional academic discourse is artificial and, in many ways, not as salient as logic (established by oppressive western ideology) would tell us.

In conclusion, changing the academy is not just a matter of re-interpreting the building, it is also a matter of pushing the limits until modes become legitimized. Today, I will try a tree branch. Tomorrow, I will try baseball bat. The next day I will try something else. Eventually, I will knock that building down.