Ahhh...the beginning of another academic year. As promised, we invited John Trimbur back (OK, just his article) to the first meeting of the CRG this semester. I'll go out on a limb here and say that I think Trimbur was pleased to join us in our little academic outpost in the far north of Kutztown's campus.
It didn't take long to get into a lengthy discussion of Trimbur's "Composition and the Circulation of Writing" and his emphasis on the importance of paying attention to circulation and delivery in the teaching of writing. Here's a little sample of how Trimbur set up his argument:
To my mind, delivery can no longer be thought of simply as a technical aspect of public discourse. It must be seen also as ethical and political--a democratic aspiration to devise delivery systems that circulate ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge and thereby expand the public forums in whihc people can deliberate of issues of the day (Trimbur 190).Trimbur suggests that the contributions of cultural studies--in particular Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson (as representatives of two poles of cultural studies research--to progressive composition pedagogies, while important, do not pay enough attention to the circulation of commication. Not paying enough attention to circulation carries an unintended consequence:
the tendency...to identify students mainly as readers, consumers, viewers, and spectators in need of training to resist the onslaughts of mass culture (198).What Trimbur suggests is that we return to Marx's notion of circulation in the Marx's Grundrisse--"notebooks" representing an "extending process of exploratory writing" (207)--to aid in a concept of circulation that pays attention to "the rhetorical transformation that occur" as a cultural product, text, discourse circulates through different moments in the circuts of communication. In particular, Trimbur draws attention to how a research finding, for example, as it is first conceived as a "scientific study," then presented in an academic journal, and then reported in The New York Times, does not only go through a shift in genre, but also a "passage of forms" (213). That is, the shift in discourse is more than a "translation." The shift also does work of reproducing a historically specific process of production and relations of production--in particular, the "distribution and authorization of expertise" (213) as THE model of who has access to and who is authorized to produce socially useful knowledge.
As you may guess, we spent quite a bit of time working through what Trimbur means by circulation, "passage of forms," and a range of other concepts in his text. But we also raised many questions about how divisions between tenured, tenure-track, and temporary faculty also participates in a process of circulation, what it might mean to enact a pedagogy of circulation, Trimbur's "expert" discourse, the magic of writing, and Trimbur's examples of Breast Cancer and AIDS activists work "intervening in the process of production and changing the way science gets done" (215).
We talked about how PMS was not recognized as "real" in official medical discourse until fairly recently, and how this lack of recognition contributed to women being labled "crazy," "over-emotional," and "irrational," reproducing a patriarchal power structure. We grappled with whether or not Trimbur's suggestions were realizable. We laughed. We told anecdotes. And we talked about where we want to go from here.
And we decided to read Richard Miller's “On Asking Impertinent Questions,” in College Composition and Communication, 57.1 (2005): 142-159. The article is in the Composing binder in the mail room and on eReserve under English Department>Composing Group. Our next meeting will be October 5th in Lytle 207.
So enough of me...anyone else?
