I just finished reading for the 1-1/2th time Geoff Sirc's English Composition as a Happening (Utah State University Press, 2002). Yeah, I didn't make it through the first time, but I grunted it out this time because I was intrigued.
The book is alternately compelling, fascinating, maddening, and annoying. And I don't think Sirc would mind any of those adjectives. In 294 pages, he basically trashes the development of the field of Composition since 1968. We are a bunch of heartless, soulless, unimaginative, sniveling, corporate lap dogs who flail the life out of students with our stultifying academic jargon and stiff, prescriptive prose formalism and have "an incredible propensity for turning something-- a good idea, compelling material, an interesting medium, a student's life-- into nothing" (245).
The whole book boils down to a play-by-play of a fistfight between David Bartholomae and Marcel Duchamp with a soundtrack by the Sex Pistols. In Sirc's world, Duchamp wins with a knockout, but, alas, in the hopelessly entrenched Modernist project that masquerades as contemporary Composition, Bartholomae is crowned champ on a technicality.
And if you don't find all of that maddening and annoying-- and, actually, I don't--well, there's always the untranslated French text thrown in to let you know you aren't part of Sirc's club anyway (unless your high school French is much better than mine).
All that being said, Sirc has a point (or several), and it's one that I've been circling for a while now. The traditional conventions of academic writing are dead; and the only reason they don't know they are dead is because we conjure them like zombies into our classrooms over and over again and they eat all of our brains. To behead the zombies, we have to change our classroom practice because we've changed the writing that we want to encourage, to teach, to expect.
Our new heroes are not the gods of professionalized Composition as a discipline, but compositionists like Jackson Pollock and Tupac Shakur.
So, put that in your pipe and smoke it . . .
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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1 comments:
You have circled around the idea that traditional academic writing, especially the research paper, is dead. Why don't you expand on that some? I'm not sure it won't continue to be resurrected by the same folks who refused to let go of MLA style but hate Wikipedia.
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