Networked Process. Helen Foster
and Writing Process(es)
4 Situating Networked Subjectivity
Discursive Relations
Multiple Epistemologies/Multiple Subjectivities
Multiple Literacies/Classroom
5 Textbooks, Writing Program Reforms, Institutionality, and the Public
Audience, Self, and Alterity
Understanding
Language/Discourse
Context and Horizon
Purpose: Addressivity and Answerability
Introduction to “Basic Work and Material Acts: The Ironies, Discrepancies, and Disjunctures of Basic Writing and Mainstreaming”
6 Networked Process and the Long Revolution
Institutional Place(ment)
The Writing Major
Re-visioning Rhetoric and Composition
Disciplinarity
Illustrations
Figure 1. Early Process/Post-Process/
Radical Post-Process Continuum
Figure 2. Networked Subjectivity
Figure 3. Space/Time/History
Figure 4. Language/Discourse
Figure 5. Self
Figure 6. Space of the Self
Figure 7. Alterity/Other/Horizon
Figure 8. Addressivity/Answerability
Figure 9. Networked Subjectivity
Figure 10. Multiple Epistemologies /
Multiple Subjectivities
Figure 11. Multiple Literacies/Classroom
Acknowledgments
As any book is, this one is likewise thoroughly intertextual, for every graduate professor I’ve studied with along with some intellectually formidable colleagues has influenced the scholarly journey that culminated in this book. My thanks go to all for the challenges and discussions. However, special consideration goes to the interlocutor who inspired the dissonance of this inquiry. Although he was gone before I had the chance to study with him, his passion, inspiration, and keen intellect live on in his work. Thank you Jim Berlin, wherever you are.
Without the patience and good humor of David Blakesley at Parlor Press, this book would literally not have been possible. Dave is a terrifically hard-working editor, whom I’m convinced rarely sleeps. And to Lauer Series’ editors Catherine Hobbs and Patricia Sullivan go my appreciation for careful readings and insightful comments.
For material support of my work, I am indebted to the University of Texas El Paso for a research grant, as well as to the English department for a course release.
My thanks extend to Claudia Rojas for contributing her talents in graphic design and to Scott Lunsford and Paul Lynch for their skills in manuscript editing. Thanks, too, for the thoughtful manuscript reading and questioning offered by Brian McNely. Although he’s convinced me that we use the notion intertextuality to our own detriment, I’m consigned to using it until he coins a more appropriate term, an event I eagerly anticipate in the not so distant future.
My love and appreciation go to my family who have never quite understood why I want to do this but who support and encourage me, nevertheless. To my children—Katy, Blair, and Hailey—thank you for tolerating me and my scholarly baggage. To my five-year old grand-daughter Kaitlyn, who recently asked me to read aloud a scholarly article only to stop me mid-sentence after about three pages to announce that “I know stuff, too!” thank you for the concrete reminder that all “stuff” has value. Finally, for the inexhaustible encouragement and inspiration, along with the occasional timely reminder that this line of work was my choice, I can never accurately measure my gratitude for the tolerance and understanding of my husband and best friend, Don.
Introduction
Rhetoric and composition emerged some forty years ago in response to a variety of institutional and cultural pressures occasioned by perceived crises in student writing and the inadequacy of prevalent writing curricula to successfully address them. As the teaching and learning of writing became the focus of study, the term writing process came to represent not only a material, curricular approach to the teaching of writing, but also a significant, symbolic representation of the field itself.
Dedicated faculty lines, thriving graduate programs, and field-specific scholarly journals and books have since created a dynamic knowledge base of writing studies that continues to benefit from and to be challenged by poststructuralist, feminist, critical, and postmodern theories. In the wake of these productive challenges, writing process has become increasingly suspect as a curricular approach and, particularly, as a symbolic representation of the field whose disciplinary interests now far exceed the boundaries of the traditional first-year composition course.
This turn has come to be labeled post-process, and, although not well defined as a position or school of thought, its general sentiment is gaining currency with those discontented with process. Many, however, do not comfortably identify with either position. Process today is not the process of the 1970s and early 1980s on which our disciplinary identity was based and post-process remains for many a nebulous concept that equally misses the mark. Thus, a tension ensues that either can polarize or productively challenge us to rethink our disciplinary identity and mission.
A prerequisite to meeting this challenge, however, is an engagement of dialogue among the process and post-process positions, as well as with the many who do not comfortably identify with the extremes of either position. A potential mutual point of departure for a dialogue between the two discourses can be identified using the classical theory of stasis. As a heuristic, stasis would pose questions regarding existence, quality, and procedure/policy as a method by which to assess the point of departure at which an ensuing conversation between process and post-process could commence.1 Effectively, these questions would address the issues of “what is,” “what is good,” and “what is possible.” It is obvious that stasis would be located at the level of existence or the issue of “what is.” However, given that post-process posits itself in definitional opposition to process, it is considerably less clear what value the two positions share at this level that could serve as the actual point of stasis, that is, the point at which productive dialogue could commence. It is not hyperbolic, I believe, to say that in the absence of productive dialogue between the two, each might increasingly exhibit its own will to power, which would then hold potentially negative repercussions for students, for us, for the spaces of teaching writing, for the larger culture, and for the very nature of our disciplinary identity.
Thus, the goal of this book is to explore process and post-process for the point of stasis from which we might begin, anew, a conversation that would honor our past, recognize the exigencies of our present, and anticipate the future to which the conversation could lead us. An equally important goal is a conceptualization