[Teaching_Composition] Adventures in style

[Kathy Fitch]

<<I see a great deal of connection between this module and the previous 
one, because it seems to me that an 'alternative style' can be either 
just a playful subset of the general style--messing with fragments or 
long jumbled paragraphs to convey an urgency or breathlessness and a 
playful ethos but an ethos nevertheless that is not challenging the 
status quo--OR it can be a subversive move.>>

Seems to me that playfulness challenges the heck out of the status quo as
some folks define it.  (Oh, and I should pause to defend the book from which
I drew the example--playfulness is only one of the many moods and moves it
offers to answer its title question.) That's why questions like "Do we dare
to teach this in a serious academic course?" and "Will we still be serving
the real/right/important etc. purpose of moving students toward mastery of
academic writing if we spend time on this stuff?" always crop up in such
discussions.  Few things, as it turns out, are more efficiently subversive
than play.  In the twenty plus years since the students encountered that
breathless paragraph, the field seems to have acknowledged play, embraced
play, insisted on play, grown suspicious of play, barred play, and then
started missing it all over again.  
  
<<I'd be curious to hear what others think of this direction?  How might we
demonstrate to students which kinds of stylistic moves might be playful and
which might be subversive--and also to allow them to see the opportunity to
be subversive (to define the rhetorical situation in ways that some readers 
might consider 'inappropriate'?)

My first thought was that if the opportunity is allowed, then there's
nothing subversive about it anymore, but then I reread and did a better job,
I think, of seeing where you're headed.  I think that it's certainly
possible to teach students how to approach assignments from various angles.
("Make the assignment your own."  Isn't that how Murray put it?) Whether or
not they choose to subvert the assignments' perceived values is another
thing.  Then, you're into discussions of ethics and risk--both things
certainly proper to think about together in a writing course, but not arenas
in which I'd be willing to suggest specific decisions or techniques, I don't
think.  In any case, seems like there's two sorts of subversion.  One sort
gets positive attention (this isn't what teacher asked for, maybe, but then
again it's something better and more), another sort is far more likely to
garner negative attention (this isn't what teacher asked for, and suggests,
fairly stridently, that what teacher asked for is staid, boring,
hierarchical, gender biased bs).  Always a bit of a toss of the dice, there.


Kathy



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