Art and writing: box logic

This is my video blog for my teaching class on the use of visual art in teaching composition.

Composition Experiments List

In the spirit of Charles Bernstein and Bernadette Mayer and their poetic experiments list, this is the beginning of my Composition Experiments List. Feel free to borrow from and add to this list and tell me about it!

*Do an exquisite corpse on the theme of “your experience with college” or another nonfiction topic. Since this is nonfiction, a topic should be chosen to direct the paper.

*If Conceptualist Artists could just write about the art object they intended to make without having to actually make it, what it would mean for them to "not write" a paper.

*Do a research/brainstorming exquisite corpse – write a topic on a piece of paper and pass it around the room, with everyone contributing an idea for that topic.

*Chance operations – bring in a previous paper they have written or a draft of one. Use a chance operation such as a roll of the dice, to determine the order of the paragraphs. How does that change the paper? Does it make a difference what order it is written in? (Encourages rewriting and revisiting a paper.)

*Write with your eyes closed. (Forces you to keep writing and not stop in brainstorming.)

*Spontaneous research: choose a book or an article. Close your eyes and point to a passage. Write that down. Do this repeatedly five or more additional times. String those together to see what you get.

*Pick a short passage from a book or research article and do a 3-5 minute freewrite about it.

*Do an example of the most pretentious writing you can

*Try writing a piece with as many clichés as you can.

*Try writing with predominantly figurative language.

*Try writing straightforward with no figurative language, metaphors, or similes.

*Try writing a thesis sentence or an opening paragraph using text language. (This is good for helping students to see that there are all kinds of grammars that are good in many different settings.)

Teaching English Composition with Surrealism

This is a paper that I did while at the University of Minnesota. I have been using many of these techniques in my own composition classes with some success and I am also presenting some of this at the SW/TX PCA Conference in Albuquerque this February (2015).


Surrealist Applications for Composition-Related Activities


These are just a few potential applications of Surrealism to composition. These are some that I have produced and practiced myself and some that are classic Surrealist techniques. There are many more.

I. Exquisite Corpse, Group Processes and Brainstorming

The most famous of Surrealist writing techniques is the exquisite corpse, which got its name from a line of poetry. “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” In the exquisite corpse, a sheet of paper is passed around. Every person contributes to it one line at a time and sees only the line written right before theirs. I have also seen artists contribute to an artistic exquisite corpse, adding to a drawing bit by bit. There are several ways that this could be put to work as a method for brainstorming.
As a brainstorming session or a free write, everyone passes around a sheet of paper, folded or unfolded, writing suggestions on it. Alternatively, each person can take turns putting his or her potential topic in the center of a group and everyone in the group writes down suggestions on that particular topic, and then move on to the next student’s idea. Group work in that case would take on the valence of shared knowledge. Often we tell students during a brainstorming session to write down everything they know about a topic. What if they could be inspired by what their classmates also know about a topic? In this way, brainstorming becomes not a solitary act, but an act of shared knowledge, in which student remind one another of what they already know or help to point one another in various fruitful directions for their research.

II. Chance Operations as a Form of Organization


Is there only one way to organize a paper? Chance operations, most notably rolling dice or drawing cards that relate to certain sections or paragraphs, have been used by a number of writers like William S. Burroughs, musicians like John Cage, and choreographers such as Merce Cunningham. This technique can also work for students of composition, in this case to determine paragraph topic order in their papers. In doing so, it can teach students that there are any number of ways to organize their texts that can produce different results for the reader. Sometimes students organize their papers in the way that is most obvious – such as chronological – but may not be the most effective or even the most interesting. At other times, students may be writing about a series of three subtopics (the most common number in composition) in such a way that it does not matter which one goes first. By playing with the order of their subtopics and paragraphs, they become accustomed to doing rewriting and see it as a form of experimenting with their texts. It also adds an element of play, and therefore of fun, that might encourage more rewriting from students.

III. The Many Uses of Collage Techniques in Writing


A. Collage as Brainstorming and Research

The technique of collage, which the Surrealists borrowed (stole) from the Dadaists, lends itself very well to “spontaneous research.” Having chosen a book or an article to cite, students can close their eyes and point to a passage. Have the student free write on what that passage may mean. Have them do that several times throughout the article or book. Then, to make it a true collage, students may string together what they have written to create a whole, spontaneous text from the day’s class, to see how it all of their writing fits together. This exercise will stimulate their thinking and may also make them more enthusiastic to go back and read the whole article. At the same time, it will help students to generate thoughts and ideas to react to small parts of the text before they respond to the text as a whole. It often helps students if they can jump into a text in the middle, where they might find something that catches their attention, and then go back and read it from the beginning. rather than seeing a book or article as something they have to get through from beginning to end, which may or may not hold any interest for them. In this age of Internet, Twitter, etc., in which most people have very divided attention, it also corresponds to the way that many people actually do read. At the same time, once they respond to a portion of the article, students are encouraged to go back through and see how their understanding of the excerpt that they wrote about corresponds to the overall text, which can also teach them about the pitfalls of quoting part of a text out of context.
B. A Variation on Collage Techniques as a Way to Respond to Texts

This technique can also be used during in-class writings as a way to respond to texts. When a text has been assigned, have everyone point to a passage quickly (don’t think about it) and write for five minutes about that passage. They can do a free association or write directly on the passage. Again the point is for the students to be engaging with what they have read, and also be able to engage with any part of a text.
C. Collage as a Form of Sentence Combining

Many instructors still advocate sentence combining to teach style or to eliminate wordiness. A different form of collage is one where the student/writer literally cuts up a passage and then puts different parts or different sheets of papers together. Beat writer William S. Burroughs is best known for developing this technique as a way to (re)generate texts, but it originated with the Surrealists. This exercise is fun and may give students some energy to do more “traditional” and straightforward sentence-combining to achieve sentence variety. It can also be done with a little more direction, taking a small section of the paper for example, or even cutting apart sentences and then combining them.
A more literal form of artistic collage can also be used, such as cutting apart sentences and then gluing them onto a sheet of paper either in a different order or with sentences overlapping. Theoretically students can do this with a computer, but takes on a different feel and function when it’s done using paper and glue and can shake students out of their usual way of writing and editing. As with a number of other exercises, these can be done as individual or group projects.

The Manifesto as a Form of Argumentation and Group Work

A. The Manifesto Form

In some of my class assignments, I have students work up to writing a research paper by writing a complaint letter, a letter to the editor of a paper, and writing to a the company. This scaffolds learning and teaches the students about writing they do in their everyday life. The manifesto is another form of persuasive writing, a bombastic form of expressing opinions and can be done as a group or individual activity. Mary Ann Caws, in the introduction to Manifesto: A Century of Isms, says that the manifesto “generally proclaims what it wants to oppose to leave, to defend, to change” (xxii). Many students have a strong sense of injustice or at least indignation for what they consider to be unfair. The manifesto, as a form, allows them to express their own opinions, with no need to defend that opinion with research. “Generally the manifesto stands alone, does not need to lean on anything else, demands no other text than itself. Its rules are self-contained, included in its own body” (Caws xxv). As both a text to respond to as well as a text to be produced, it is particularly fruitful in helping students to write their initial ideas out and present them to one another. In addition, the manifesto has a sense of flair unlike any other form of writing and is fun for students to write.

B. The Manifesto as a Step Toward Argumentation

Writing a manifesto can be a good intermediate step, where students think about and state explicitly what their position is on a given subject. Students can then start thinking about social context that this issue fits into. Was this situation merely a one-time slight or oversight, or does it point to a more general problem within society? Having written out their complaint with society or their idea on how things ought to work, students can begin to think about what kind of support they will need down the line for their arguments. Their peers will be able to comment upon their manifestos and argue with them, thereby showing the holes in their arguments through friendly discussion and debate.
C. The Manifesto and Group Work

Generally speaking, manifestos are the expression of a group, although examples can be found of individually-written manifestos, such as those written by the Unabomber or the Discovery Channel Gunman. This can work, then, as either an individual project or as a group project. As a group project, I would recommend small groups of three students, which is a little better than just a pair, but not so big and unwieldy as to create insurmountable problems or disagreements. Ask the students to present potential paper topics to their group and have the group decide on which project they will write a manifesto. If they are really fortunate (or crafty) it might be possible for students to combine their topics of concern into one manifesto. Other techniques described above, like an exquisite corpse or collage techniques, can be used to generate the initial text. D. The Manifesto and Critical Reading

For those who want to teach an aspect of critical reading in their classroom and to introduce alternative texts to students, the manifesto is an outstanding form. Whereas many people think of manifestos in terms of artistic movements, they were also employed extensively by AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s as well as those in the environmental movement, the women’s movement, etc. Allowing students to read such texts, to examine the claims made in the texts and the way those claims are embedded and expressed, and to agree or disagree with them encourages them to read critically. Because the manifesto’s style is so “in your face,” manifestos can be good beginning texts to help students begin to examine and test the claims made.

Rhetoric and Reality: Formative Writing Experiences

Prologue

This is largely a free write, a meditation or sorts, which I engage in often these days, but which never counts as legitimate scholarly writing. “Where is the rigor?” one professor once asked me, as if the criterion of rigor were a self-evident one that I should have reflexively understood. So I am welcoming the invitation to write something messy and avant garde without concern for the academic value of “rigor” which I am still not entirely sure I understand.

One of the most important things I ever learned from an assignment was how to write to discover things. My teacher never intended it. It was a paper I did for an American history class and I had to write about the effect of something (I chose the effect of the economy on cinema) before WWII and in the years after. I didn’t know until 4:00 the morning that it was due if I would be able to prove my thesis or if I would have to say that there was no effect. At 4:00 in the morning, low and behold, I found that the worse the economy was, the more lighthearted the films were, by and large. Of course there were many other contributing factors, but at that moment, in my junior year of college, I learned that you could write without an end point in site, trust the process, and still have something to say. I had learned, ostensibly, to think through writing.

As a graduate student and like many others before me, I am a little bored and burned out on academic writing, yet I still trust that process. For right now, drawing on my experience more than 25 years ago, I still write to discover what I really think about a subject as well as engaging with a text. Does that mean that I favor an expressivist pedagogy as James Berlin describes it, “the anarchists, arguing for complete and uninhibited writing, including the intentional flouting of all convention . . . call[ing] forth imaginative, intuitive empathetic responses” (145)? I do not. And I do not not. In the same way that Richard Schechner, theorist of performance, says that the actor who plays Hamlet is not Hamlet and he is not not Hamlet.

A Second Prologue Masquerading As an Introduction

Writing is not mechanics, any more than learning to count is math. It may be pre-writing or a writing-related activity. But writing it is not. 1 + 1 = 2. That is math. But 1 is . . . well, 1. It’s what math is built on, but in itself, it is just elemental. Writing may include all of those things, just as math includes numbers, is built upon them, but is not those things.

Therefore, I am not including learning cursive handwriting (which I almost never use anymore), diagramming sentences (although I keep thinking that some day I’ll use that skill to write avant garde poetry), where I put my commas (which my friends tell me is somewhat arbitrary, but I do not tend to write comma splice sentences, so I figure it’s my prerogative), use punctuation (which Robert Coover did quite well without in his story The Brother and which is an addition to writing from oh, 500 years ago or so) or spelling (which I excelled in). It may include the length of my sentences (too long), the lengths of my paragraphs (often too short), my style of writing (at times too bombastic, which comes from spending too much time reading and writing manifestos).

The truth is that my struggles as a writer still parallel my students’ struggle as writers, but for different reasons and at a different level than my students. Being aware of that has made me a better instructor of writing and reflecting on it has made me more aware of my own struggles with graduate writing.

Some of this is tangential, I realize. But it is to a point (and is also a variation on the style of writing that I have developed – the glorious tangent, through which I hope to return to my main point and which has developed over years of creative writing, blog writing, reviewing, and performance studies which seeks an embodied writing and through which I consequently embody and perform the manic energy of the pseudo-academic genius and which also results from writing to my own specifications rather than writing for a grade for nearly 20 years before returning to school).

First, as teachers we need to remember what it is like to be beginning writers (possibly an act of imagination as much as memory) and consequently to be flexible with what we teach and how we teach it. Second, some types of writing will stay with us as we go through school and some will fall away, and those things will be different for different students. Third is the fact that one can write expressively and still get a point across to an external audience.

Engagement with the Text I

So where does James Berlin come into play? Everywhere. (Sentence fragment.) In fact, before I address specific parts of the text, I must say that I found his book to be rather confusing in its desire to set up categories of the teaching of writing. It is like when I took advanced algebra in my freshman year of college. I thought I had understood everything perfectly when it was explained in class. Every problem worked out perfectly and I followed everything my professor said. Then I took the take home exam. I scored a 45 out of 105. That’s how I feel about Berlin. It makes perfect sense when you read it, and then you walk away from it and say, what, wait a minute. I thought this approach was from that school. Or was it that one? What was that called again? Objectivist. Current-traditional. The subjectivist-expressivist school. The current-traditional-objective-behaviorialist-epistemic approach, the transactional which could include classical rhetoric, not to be confused with the current-traditional approach. (Multiple sentence fragments. My grammar check is going crazy.)

But wait, you can teach from an expressivist paradigm by also talking about “the dialectic between writer . . . the manifestation of the identity in language through the consideration of the reactions of others” yet still not be “genuinely epistemic in their approach (153).” So much for integration of approaches.

Engagement with the Text II

Is it any wonder that our students are confused about what we’re teaching them? Or alternatively, why aren’t they? Our students don’t really seem to question very much the reason why they’re taking composition. They just accept that they have to. It seems more important to the field of composition itself to set out the parameters of the field and to differentiate itself. And for that reason, this history of the major themes of composition is useful. It is helpful to see where we’ve come and what we might borrow from. I am interested as a writer and theatre artist in incomplete revolutions, in movements that didn’t come to full fruition the first time. It seems to me that is the point of history. What worked and what didn’t and why? At least from the point of view of those who sought to make change. I have also learned to question histories, teleologies and most importantly historical categories as things that do not exist in themselves, but are manufactured so that they can be made intelligible. What Berlin wants to make intelligible, it seems, two self-contained polar opposites, which are full of extremes: the traditional academic approach, with its dry denial of the self and the expressivist ethos which found its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing students to search within, to establish his or her relation the world and which denies any kind of objective truth. He sets up these two straw men so that you will readily accept the third path. Thus, interwoven among the objective and subjective approaches throughout this history of composition, the transactional approach, which he appears to support, rears its head time and time again, like a groundhog popping out, checking to see if its time is fully here or if should go back in and sleep for another historical pedagogical equivalent of six weeks.

But what is helpful is not the categories that Berlin attempts, with varying degrees of success, to make intelligible to his readers. It’s the history itself. Had he told that history with somewhat less effort to force it into the categories he made for himself, it would have been easier to read and to write about.


Engagement with the Assignment at Last

So I do not consider pre-writing, para-writing activities like grammar and spelling and mechanics and all that to be writing. Then what are my memories of being taught writing? What has informed my writing, up to this moment, as a 46 year-old graduate student, teacher, aspiring teacher, and life long writer?

I’ve already mentioned a few of them. The history paper in which I learned to trust the process. I was not writing to learn to write, but writing for a discipline. Yet without explicitly saying so, but setting up that assignment, describe the effect of X on X during the period 1930 – 1941 and 1945 – 1950, my professor was trying to teach us something about how to set up an argument. A current-traditional approach as Berlin might describe it yet you could say it had an expressivist outcome on my writing.

My composition class at community college stands out in my mind for two reasons. One is the professor, who was very amiable and my fondness for him must surely have increased my fondness for the subject matter, although I was a good writer and had an inherent proclivity toward composition anyway. But one incident in particular stands out to me. I was always the student who was furiously writing my drafts the day we had in-class consultations with him. As such, I usually went close the end and let other students go ahead of me. One day, I brought my draft in, fully done and very proud of myself. We looked it over, it went through peer review and rewrites, like all of my other drafts. I got a C on that paper, whereas all my other papers were As. We both laughed and he told me to go back to my original process, as it obviously worked for me.

As an adult, learning about Surrealist techniques of automatic writing as well as reading and writing manifestos taught me so much about writing. Through manifestos I mastered the authoritative voice, full of conviction and bombast, supporting my argument without footnotes of any of the traps of academia necessarily (although Breton uses a fair number of citations in his Manifestoes of Surrealism), but through assertion of “the obvious.” This is expressivistic in many ways—the expression of my inner vision. But it was my vision as it interacted with the world. And wasn’t that what Guy Debord had done in Society of the Spectacle and even to some extent, Howard Zinn in writing alternative histories of ordinary people? Aren’t those in some way expressions of inner values, inner visions?

Here I would like to once again go on a tangent and say that I vehemently disagreed with Berlin’s assertion that the surrealist influence on expressive writing was “the original expression of a unique vision” (147). I much prefer Helene Lewis’s version, that “their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious” (Dada Turns Red 173). It’s a small footnote in this book, but it’s an important point to me, having been influenced by Surrealism. It is not, at its best, an expression of the internal, but an attempt to prove that everyone could be an artist through tools that the Surrealists had uncovered (and would continue to uncover). Thus it could not only be revolutionary, but could be taught to anyone. It sounds a little like the goals of composition through the years of progressive education, through feminism, cultural studies, etc., doesn’t it?

There are many others. There are many many moments that influence us as writers, throughout school, throughout our whole lives, whether we see them or not. I could write a book on what has influenced me as a writer. I could write another book providing a count by count engagement with Berlin’s text – all the things I agree with and the things that I don’t.

Engagement with the Text III

So given the diversity of my experiences with writing in school and out, it is no surprise that I was drawn to the kind of integrated approaches that Berlin describes in the later pages of the book. He describes Harold Martin who in 1958 asserted that “[s]ince thought is language . . . students will learn to write in order to improve their thinking” (168). (Again, I think of Andre Breton who said in his First Manifesto of Surrealism, “whoever speaks of expression speaks of language first and foremost.”) “Writing thereby becomes a way of thinking and not simply a way of recording thought” (Berlin 168). For the college student who proved her thesis 4 hours before her paper was due, I believe in that principle. It was the moment of discovery that came out of several long nights of writing, which whether I knew it or not, was also a process of thinking. It was the moment the lightbulb went off. And that would not have happened for me if I had not been struggling to write the paper.

Berlin describes a dialectical approach taken by Young, Becker and Pike in their book Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. In this approach, as Berlin describes it, “[k]nowledge is not outside in the material world or inside in the spiritual world or located in a perfect correspondence of the two. It is the product of a complicated dialectic” (172). The ground of the dialectic is language, which is in turn “a dialectic between the writer and the discourse community in which the writer is taking part” (172). In The Bald Soprano, Eugene Ionesco sets up a ridiculous set of opposites only so one of his characters can absurdly suggest “The truth lies between the two.” Very often people express that very thing, as if the truth is exactly the middle point between the objective and the subjective, between the internal and the external. The dialectic, which resolves the contradiction, which discovers where the truth might be located, within the context of a community that is likewise seeking the truth, is the ultimate goal that many writers eventually come to if not actively seek out. Perhaps marketing and advertising people, business people, politicians and lawyers use language to make reality, or to at least give the image of making reality. For our students and for the rest of us, the task is to find out what the nature of reality is in history, in literature, in physics, etc., and to write about it, to share our findings and beliefs. It seems to me that the story, the history of composition at its best intentions, whether through the ideals of progressive education or through a transactional approach as Berlin calls it includes that struggle. Perhaps the real problem in defining composition as a field is that we cannot locate the basis of truth. In the end, it’s all epistemic.

Conclusion

Hmmm . . . Despite my avant garde leanings, I just couldn’t resist the temptation to put it all into a neat and tidy conclusion. I guess there are some parts of composition training you just can’t shake, even after all those years.