Beyond Argument. Sarah Addison Allen
group became specialists in composition pedagogy in different eras in the field, when what it meant to be a writing teacher and specialist was decidedly different.
Whenever I find myself avoiding such departmental conversations or when I leave them feeling frustrated and depleted, I wonder: why does it feel like such “differences” function more like fundamentalism in their polarization, in the isolation and the silencing that occurs on and from both sides? Why is it that “taking a position” has become so mired, so bogged down, in individual identities and social categories (e.g., liberal vs. conservative, junior vs. senior) that we have no means to speak, to debate and explore, across their boundaries—without shouting?
Deborah Tannen has been famously writing about our “argument culture” for decades; despite her warnings and others’, the field of Rhetoric and Composition emphatically embraced the mantra that “everything is an argument.” No doubt, there is a certain idealizing of the Ancient world that is driving that mantra: we have hoped that if we could teach our students that claims are profuse and negotiable, if we could teach them to be aware of such claims’ contexts and implications, then we could also teach them to argue responsibly and effectively, to participate in a world of their own making—one that they could revise, if they were careful and responsible enough. The hope has been that if we could do all of this, then we could help communities to negotiate effectively within and outside themselves. As some of my colleagues who are historians like to remind me, though, this is not Ancient Greece.
Despite this fact, there are those who would argue that we should not give up on trying to make negotiations, public and private debates, function more like the debates in the agora, that we (academics) just need to try harder, be smarter. There’s a part of me that agrees. I think, though, that the problem isn’t necessarily in argument, itself. The problem is in the modern, Western world’s common conceptions of subjectivity, and argument only amplifies the worst aspects of those conceptions. Essentially, we have been trying to teach and use a method of negotiation that worked in the ancient world because there were very different subjects working in it.
Thus, as I will show throughout this project, we need not try harder in teaching argument, but we need to teach and to practice a different notion of subjectivity. We can’t just talk about it (in scholarship and in our classrooms), as we have been doing since the rise of modernism, though. We need to make it, to cultivate it. To my mind, the way to cultivate it is through privileging other kinds of writing—kinds of writing in which writers would be empowered to practice different ways of engaging with ideas, with texts, with each other. At the risk of participating in an incredibly problematic binary, I consequently turn to “the opposite” of argument for an alternative: the personal essay.
This alternative is risky, as I said, because it has traditionally inhabited the position of opposite-to-the-argument in writing studies and, thus, carries with it the byproducts of opposition (e.g., irreconcilability, mutual exclusivity). I acknowledge, too, that even without the framing of the binary, the personal essay comes with another, potentially more pressing set of problems. The very problems to which I refer came into play recently in a professional listserv of which I am a member:
In the spring of 2013, there were a series of arguments on the WPA listserv centering on the values (positive and negative) of “personal writing” in college writing curriculum. Just a few of the concerns expressed about the use of personal writing were as follows: that such writing runs counter to the goals we associate with writing argument; that it allows, if not encourages, students to ignore the sociopolitical contexts of their experiences and of their interpretations of those experiences; and that it invites students to produce work that is often not “reflective” or meditative enough. On the other hand, participants also (and often in the same posts) noted many of the positive values of personal writing: that it is a space within which to explore identities (individual and collective) and that it can create empathy between individuals and groups. By far, though, the most celebrated value of personal writing was also that-which-was-found-lacking in many student works: reflection and/or meditation. To my mind, both terms, taken in their context, denote an intense interest in analysis but with the purpose of exploring an idea or belief. As my colleagues pointed out in the listserv discussion, though, that exploration seems to be neglected in the personal writing produced by students.
There are scholars of the personal essay, too, who argue that the personal essay is one genre of personal writing that is valuable for the reasons I list above. They also argue that its greatest value is in its openness to the exploration and cultivation of connections—e.g., among scholarly ideas and personal beliefs, among community beliefs and personal experiences, and even among academic disciplines whose discourses have become utterly and mutually exclusive. Point being, despite common complaints about personal writing produced by our students, the genre of the personal essay actually does provide a space for student writers to do something other than argue—namely, to reflect and meditate on their experiences. It allows them to do so, even, by considering the sociopolitical contexts of their experiences and of their interpretations of those experiences—scholarly, personal, or otherwise. The question, thus, emerges: why, then, is the personal essay failing to be reflective/meditative enough, when practiced by our students?
Part of the problem with the personal essay’s life in the academy is, no doubt, due to the emphasis on argument that is manifest in writing curricula, as well as in informal, public, and professional conversations. Students have inherited this obsession with argument, though they are, ironically, quick to recognize the damage that arguing-to-win causes. They know that our political “debates” are flighty and impotent, save in further dividing peoples. They know that our current use of argument encourages conflict instead of helping in the effort toward resolution and progress. They know that all of this conflict and impotence makes for a world too fragmented to understand, much less to change.
In another ironic and terrible twist, though, they also don’t see much value in the form of argument that we, teachers of writing, offer them. I think that even the least savvy student recognizes that the standard college English paper taught and produced in a first-year writing course, for example, wouldn’t have any real persuasive power outside of that course (in fact, it doesn’t have any persuasive power in the course, since papers are produced by students to demonstrate skill, not to actually persuade the reader of a position). Are we really surprised by the highly ineffectual sound-bite arguments in presidential debates and short rants in blog posts that are responding to complex, high-stakes sociopolitical issues, when the academy, itself, teaches students to produce the kind of argument that can be captured in single statement (thank you, thesis statement) and that can be mapped out through the listing of evidence, but with very little work done to explore the complexities of any particular stance (thank you, five-paragraph essay)?
As they progress through curriculum, students tell me that they are building on the formula of the thesis-driven, five-paragraph essay by learning how to better explain in an argument why they believe what they believe and, thus, why others should believe the same. Frankly, it’s a weird process. It is based on a series of assumptions that make very little sense in real time, when tested out among real people (e.g., the assumption that a position is more convincing if it can be stated in a single sentence and prior to any other real discussion about the issue). Yet, my students have inherited this version of argument so well that when I ask even my sharpest and advanced undergraduate writing students what the value is in attending to “other sides” of any argument, they always explain that the greatest value is in knowing who “the enemy” is and how to bolster one’s own thesis in the face of that enemy. This belief suggests two primary assumptions: 1. that the argument equals the person (e.g., the enemy is one who argues against me), and 2. that the value of exploring the various sides of an issue is only beneficial when it helps students to better know themselves, to better know their own arguments, and to effectively win their own arguments. When I ask if there might be other pay-offs for such an exploration, I am usually met with baffled expressions and silence.
The problem with my asking my students to explore ideas in a personal essay is that I am asking for a fundamentally different mode of engagement from them—one that may seem entirely alien or, worse, valueless to them. To my mind, the feeling of the essay being alien or valueless is deeply related to (if not caused by) the fact that it doesn’t