ENGL 505A

Let me start by saying that reading Welch was a lot like riding a roller coaster: slow going at first, but once it started picking up speed, there were enough twists and turns to keep me hanging on, and some steep drop-offs I didn’t expect. Once or twice, I even thought about closing my eyes; I was afraid all the back and forth, between esoteric theories and pedagogic case studies, was gonna cause me to lose my lunch.

Of course, there’s anything wrong with either approach to composition studies, but I found the abruptness with which Welch sometimes switched from one to the other a bit jarring to say the least. Maybe it was a stylistic choice. That would certainly fit with her ideas about raging against social convention in composition. It’s funny, but at times Welch’s brand of postmodern feminism (or is it feminist postmodernism?) struck me as a kind of radical expressivism. Granted, she's reacting in many ways against the perceived constraints placed upon the individual by social constructivism, which in its extreme form seems to rob us of our agency. But I think she goes a bit too far in imagining that our roles as instructors within the university should be limited to asking students if there is “something missing” from their papers, and then tolerating whatever “excesses” may arise out of that question. In fact, she seems to place a great intellectual burden on teachers when she equates our evaluation of student writing with scholarly evaluations of Joyce or Foucault.

First of all, I couldn’t finish “Ulysses,” and I never got past page one of “Finnegan’s Wake.” If one of my students turned something like that in for a 106 assignment, I don’t think I’d get further than the first paragraph before handing it back with “REVISE” written in “castigating red” (okay, probably "calming green," but you get the point). Secondly, I enjoy Foucault, but I don’t think his “excesses” are in any way, shape, or form comparable to those likely to be indulged by first year composition students. Maybe I'm guilty of overlooking some sparks of brilliance in my students’ assignments from time to time, but I’m pretty sure there’s a difference between “Madness and Civilization” and just plain madness.

Not that I disagree with everything Welch has to say. I think her criticisms of the linear approach to revision (i.e., individual to social; novice to expert) advocated by many cognitivists, expressivists, and social constructivists is valid, and I like her alternative view of “revision as struggle” (I’ve struggled with it many times!). And I don’t know anyone with a passing familiarity with postmodern thought who would disagree with the notion that we need to question academic standards, investigate borders, and push boundaries whenever we get the chance. But to do that, I still believe we need a certain degree of acculturation into the academic community as it is socially constructed before we're able to do that effectively, at least in within our disciplines. And this brings me to my last complaint (well, the last one I’m going to voice here). Welch indicates that her approach can be applied to a range of settings (e.g., the literature classroom) and therefore to a range of associated genres. Yet, all of her examples seem to deal with personal narratives or creative non-fiction. Is this because treating “errors” as “style” only works well with certain types of writing, or is she just expecting us to make the cognitive leap and figure out how to apply this in other domains?