Personal Effects: The Social Character Of Scholarly Writing

ISBN 10: 0874214297 / ISBN 13: 9780874214291

Published by Utah State University Press, 2002

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Synopsis:

In Personal Effects, Holdstein and Bleich compile a volume that cuts across the grain of current orthodoxy. These editors and contributors argue that it is fundamental in humanistic scholarship to take account of the personal and collective experiences of scholars, researchers, critics, and teachers. They contend that humanistic inquiry cannot develop successfully at this time without reference to the varieties of subjective, intersubjective, and collective experience of teachers and researchers. In composition studies, they point out, an important strand of theory has continuously mined the personal experience of individual writers ("where they stand" even in a destabilized sense of that idea). "[Such substantive accounts of the 'inner' academic life provide appropriate and rich contexts for further study and analysis." With this volume, then, these scholars move us to explore the intersections of the social with subjectivity, with voice, ideology, and culture, and to consider the roles of these in the work of academics who study writing and literature. Taken together, the essays in this collection carry forward the idea that the personal, the candidly subjective and intersubjective, must be part of the subject of study in humanities scholarship. They propose an understanding of the personal in scholarship that is more helpful because more clearly anchored in human experience.

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PERSONAL EFFECTS

The Social Character of Scholarly Writing

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-429-1

Contents

Introduction: Recognizing the Human in the Humanities David Bleich and Deborah H. Holdstein.......................................11 Scholarly Memoir: An Un-"Professional" Practice Margaret Willard-Traub.........................................................272 In the Name of the Subject: Some Recent Versions of the Personal Jeffrey Gray..................................................513 Radical Introspection: The Personal in Scholarship and Teaching Brenda Daly....................................................794 Loss, Memory, and the Work of Learning: Lessons From the Teaching Life of Anne Sexton Paula M. Salvio..........................935 "Knowledge Has a Face": The Jewish, The Personal, and the Pedagogical Susan Handelman..........................................1216 Who Was that Masked Author? The Faces of Academic Editing Louise Z. Smith......................................................1457 Autobiography: The Mixed Genre of Public and Private Madeleine R. Grumet.......................................................1658 The Social Construction of Expressivist Pedagogy Karen Surman Paley............................................................1789 The Scope of Personal Writing in Postsecondary English Pedagogy Diane P. Freedman..............................................19910 Personal Experience Paper Rachel Brownstein....................................................................................22011 "The World Never Ends": Professional Judgments at Home, Abroad Joycelyn K. Moody...............................................23212 Learning to Take it Personally Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly..............................................................25313 Cuentos de mi Historia: An Art of Memory Victor Villanueva.....................................................................26714 Personal Landmarks on Pedagogical Landscapes Katya Gibel Azoulay...............................................................27715 The Anxiety and Nostalgia of Literacy: A Narrative about Race, Language, and a Teaching Life Morris Young......................29616 Where I'm Coming From: Memory, Location, and the (Un)making of National Subjectivity Christopher Castiglia.....................31717 The Personal as History Richard Ohmann.........................................................................................335References.........................................................................................................................357Contributors.......................................................................................................................377Index..............................................................................................................................381

Chapter One

SCHOLARLY MEMOIR An Un-"Professional" Practice

Margaret Willard-Traub

The figure of the solitary thinker comprises a most powerful and enduring representation of scholarly life. This is the figure of the autonomous scholar-teacher, whose intellectual sovereignty and productivity, both in and out of the classroom, seemingly rests as much if not more upon untold hours of secluded reading and writing as it does upon building relationships with others-even those others who eventually may comprise important audiences for the scholar's writing and teaching.

Those of us whose experiences inside the institution readily challenge the usefulness of unqualified autonomy as an ideal, simultaneously recognize its appeal. Despite (or, ironically, perhaps sometimes because of) influences such as the political and bureaucratic constraints on scholarship and teaching that scholars like Michael Brub, Cary Nelson, and Richard E. Miller have explored; feminist theories and practices examining the role of the 'personal' in professional work; widely accepted educational approaches stressing collaboration and dialogue in learning and teaching; and seemingly daily calls in the media for scholar-teachers to communicate rationales for their work with the public more often and in ways deemed more "accountable," the ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, much of whose most important labor occurs outside of collaborative (or competitive) relationships, continues to circulate as a symbol of professional success.

This ideal of autonomy endures perhaps because the vision of relative (if not absolute) autonomy provides academics with what Richard E. Miller would call a "felt sense of distinction" (26); perhaps it endures as well because it comprises, at least for some, part of a legacy and a link to a common, professional past. In any case, at the very least such an ideal operates within the institution like other "subterranean text(s)" (e.g., the text which Linda Brodkey argues leads composition to "abet middle-class illusions of meritocracy" [234]) that "insinuate rather than argue (their) claims" (215). That such an ideal figures strongly in others' and our own perceptions of the profession is evidenced, for example, by the frequency with which "autonomy" is cited by tenured faculty members as one reason for high satisfaction in their jobs (Schneider par. 8).

This text of scholarly autonomy also is powerfully sustained by traditional forms of academic writing that privilege a stance of 'objectivity,' and the development of argument that ostensibly stands outside the shaping influences of social or rhetorical conditions (Gee 63). Such writing follows what both David Olson and James Gee have called an "autonomous model of literacy"-a set of conventions traditionally privileging a writer's explication of logical connections between ideas, while neglecting (or at least de-emphasizing) an examination of the relationship between a writer's subject position and those ideas, or his or her relationships to various audiences.

In recent years, however, a proliferation of scholarly memoirs and other examples of autobiographically inflected scholarship across diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences suggests a shifting away in the U.S. academy from scholars' privileging exclusively, in their practices and assessments of writing, this "autonomous" model. Such a trend perhaps also suggests a shifting away from the view that scholars are of necessity professional 'loners,' engaged in work that is optimally solitary. In contrast to traditional forms of academic writing, examples of what I will call more "reflective," academic practice like scholarly memoirs, ethnographies that are 'situated' with regard to the subject position of the writer/researcher, and teaching portfolios, at least in part define themselves against traditional expectations for 'objectivity' that require, for instance, a scholar to adopt a personal detachment from his or her object of study or to maintain a certain distance from potential audiences.

Specifically, I would suggest that such reflective, academic texts emphasize the ways in which relationships between writers and their diverse audiences (both those who are scholars and those who are not) are established. Not surprisingly, these texts align themselves with postmodern epistemologies that affirm the multiplicity and contingency of the writing 'self'-acknowledging the 'everydayness' of people's lives (as that is defined by realities of emotion and psychology as well as by material exigencies), and the personal realities of writers and readers in relationship. In this essay I would suggest not that the practice of writing "reflectively" threatens to supplant (or should supplant) more traditional approaches to scholarly writing, however. Rather, I would offer that its most thoughtful examples illustrate how such practice is situated more broadly within an array of causes and effects involved in the current "crisis of representation" endemic to the academy and western culture; and that such practice has the potential for being responsive to history and to the diversity of experience within the current moment in ways more difficult for traditional forms. (George Marcus and Michael Fisher, focusing on the origins and implications of cultural "transition(s)," also argue that broad, historical forces have helped to contribute to a shift in the purposes of academic writing in anthropology specifically, prompting this writing to move away from "explaining changes within broad encompassing frameworks of theory," and toward "exploring innovative ways of describing at a microscopic level the process of change itself" (Marcus 15). As in the case of many of the scholarly memoirs I examine in this essay, this "microscopic" level is often at the level of individual lives and the specific communities and contexts which shape and are shaped by those lives.)

In her collection of autobiographical essays entitled Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter, Duke scholar Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, for example, theorizes the 'everyday' sources for her authority and knowledge as a scholar, examining what her family history and her childhood growing up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn has meant for her intellectual work. For Torgovnick, Bensonhurst is not only the home of her childhood. It is a place she recognizes as both "choking and nutritive" (11), a place that is also the New York of newspaper headlines, where in the summer of 1989 Yusuf Hawkins is set upon and killed by a group of angry whites. Like Howard Beach before it and Crown Heights after it, this public Bensonhurst will come to signify for much of the rest of the country the intersection of urban violence and racial hatred-a place with a distinct yet terrible 'voice,' othered by its own ability to other a young African American man and the two friends walking with him through the neighborhood that night. Torgovnick herself describes the ways in which her own gender is the basis of an othering within Bensonhurst's Italian American community, and how her hometown becomes for her an object of scholarly-as well as personal-inquiry:

What has Bensonhurst to do with what I teach today and write? Why did I need to write about this killing in Bensonhurst, but not in the manner of a news account or a statistical sociological analysis? Within days of hearing the news, I began to plan this essay, to tell the world what I knew, though I stopped midway, worried that my parents or their neighbors would hear about it.... Now, much to my surprise, Bensonhurst-the antipodes of the intellectual life I sought, the least interesting of places-had become a respectable intellectual topic. People would be willing to hear about Bensonhurst-and all by the dubious virtue of a racial killing in the streets. (9-10)

Even though Torgovnick's Bensonhurst presents itself as a "respectable intellectual topic" because of Hawkins's killing, she resists writing about it as such-at least not in the manner in which she has been trained professionally. Instead, she gives us a hybrid text: she briefly provides us with, in the words of my colleague Anne Reeves, a "phantom" treatment of the event as she might have written it, and then goes on to give her audience what she apparently thinks they need to hear, or perhaps at least what she feels she needs to say: "Now, as I write about 'the neighborhood,' I recognize that although I've come far in physical and material distance, the emotional distance is harder to gauge. Bensonhurst has everything to do with who I am and even with what I write" (11).

In this way, Torgovnick's text accomplishes some of what Michael Brub identifies as cultural studies' work of "talking back"-talking back to dominant paradigms, "raid(ing) and unsettl(ing) the compartmentalized disciplines of traditional academic study" (138), by replacing a more traditionally framed academic treatment of the events in Bensonhurst with an explanation of the "emotional distance" she has traveled, and the connections between that distance and her intellectual work. This hybrid text not only talks back to assumptions about what constitutes appropriate academic writing, however; it also talks back to assumptions about who constitutes an appropriate-or perhaps inevitable-audience for that writing. For while Torgovnick expresses the fear that her parents and neighbors will react badly to her essay, her anxiety suggests she is inscribing in that essay multiple audiences-composed not only of her academic peers, but of her family and community, as well.

Torgovnick's text, as one example of what I would identify as the most engaging and productive autobiographical writing being produced by scholars today, is also characterized by an inscription and explicit analysis of multiple 'voices' within the text. Such a multiply-voiced text often comprises what Torgovnick herself has called "crossover writing" (PMLA, 282), for its ability to establish relationships with diverse, disciplinary audiences within the institution. "Crossover writing" may be a useful term, as well, for thinking through the ability of reflective texts like memoirs also to reach extra-academic audiences. Providing scholars with a means for communicating with audiences beyond the academy's walls, as well as with a means for communicating with audiences inhabiting other academic disciplines and various positions of power within the institution, makes it possible for them to enact an ethics of accountability, for example, to diverse individuals and constituencies both within and outside institutions of higher education.

In the case of scholarly memoir and other 'reflective' academic texts-that is, texts which explicitly examine the subject position of the writer and implications of that writerly position-such communication is achieved through the kind of "heteroglossia" (324) that M.M. Bakhtin describes. Scholarly memoirs thus might be said to comprise an alternative intellectual practice, while also varying (as does all discourse) in the ways in which and degree to which they nurture the "roiling mass of languages" (Holquist 69) and voices of which they are comprised. As a group, these memoirs might be said to privilege the establishing of relationships not only between different voices within the text, but also between the text and diverse audiences without, a practice that enacts both an accountability to and a "responsive understanding" (Bakhtin 280) of the social world.

SITUATING 'PERSONAL' VOICES WITHIN THE INSTITUTION

Such an intellectual practice is embodied in much of the work of feminist scholars across the disciplines. Gesa Kirsch introduces her study of the writing experiences of women scholars in Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority and Transformation in part by exploring the relation between gender and speaking with an "academic" voice:

Women who write academic discourse have a different point of departure than men: they first have to establish a place of authority before they can begin to speak and write with confidence. In establishing such a place, women have to challenge old norms and establish new ones; they have to create a space for themselves in an institution that has not always provided space for them.... Furthermore, feminist scholars have pointed out that women's authority is easily undermined because they have to speak-and write-the "language of patriarchy," a language that places men in superior and women in subordinate positions in its vocabularies and representations of everyday phenomena and social relationships. (20-21)

Scholars such as bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Nancy K. Miller and Ruth Behar, among others, also have demonstrated in their scholarly work, much of which draws on examples from personal experience, how academic and professional languages function to place women, people of color, and the poor in subordinate positions both outside and within the academy, albeit in different ways and with different consequences.

Though still too frequently excluded, the voices of these 'others' represented in such scholarly work nevertheless have contributed significantly to a "heightening of debates and stakes involved in writing that is perceived as theoretical" (Lutz 261)-that is, the very writing that is given the highest currency in the institution. At the same time, Catherine Lutz writes that "one effect of the struggle (of women, and men and women of color in the academy) for institutional space and respect may have been an inflation of theory's value even as questions are raised about the dualisms and individualism on which its existence is based" (261). Such an inflation suggests that the heteroglossia of voices emanating from those whose discourses are different from the traditional, "masculinized" (Lutz 249), theoretical discourse of the academy may be as hard as ever for us as scholars to hear.

The kind of "responsive understanding" of the social world which such hearing encourages, however-an understanding that acknowledges the legitimacy and 'logic' of multiple voices striving for equity and defining excellence in multiple ways-is what drives much research in both feminist composition and feminist literary studies. Both fields take as one of their points of departure the (im)possibility of a mix of voices-especially the voices of women, people of color, and working-class people-being both heard and valued within the institution. In her essay "Me and My Shadow," Jane Tompkins articulates this (im)possibility as she identifies herself as, in fact, double-voiced. Tompkins suggests that, by possessing (at least) two 'voices,' the voice of a "critic"-self, and that of a "person who wants to write about her feelings," women academics have a more difficult time achieving speech at all, at least within a professional context.

While Tompkins argues that such diverse voices sound within contexts which are necessarily exclusive of each other because of the hierarchies which inhere in academic discourse and theory, Nancy K. Miller challenges Tompkins's dichotomy by responding, "Do you have to turn your back on theory in order to speak with a non-academic voice?" (5) The very language of even Miller's question, however, suggests the power of dichotomies as she posits two voices, one which is academic and "theoretical," and the other which is not.

(Continues...)

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Bibliographic Details

Title: Personal Effects: The Social Character Of ...
Publisher: Utah State University Press
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good