Inflection, Sequence, and the Subject of First-Year Composition
Abstract
Rebecca Moore Howard
Syracuse University
The classicist Catherine Atherton has established that the grammarians of ancient Rome were tainted by their contact with the animal bodies of the children they taught. That taint still attaches to compositionists, and in an attempt to shake it, we pursue "theory-hope": the elusive assertion that our pedagogy derives from our theory. Working from a Foucaudian notion of the discursive construction of the subject combined with a traditional historical sense of causal sequence, we strive to craft our own identity, to redefine it for the institutions in which we work, to offer an irrefutable, respectable identity-product that will counteract lay constructions of our work. We keep searching for a causal, sequential relationship that will establish terms for our discipline that approximate those of colleagues in other departments.
This presentation will describe the Saussurian theory of kinetic subjectivity offered by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth—the subject not as a discursive construction, not as realization, but as inflected potential—and apply this approach to the collective identity of composition studies, especially as that identity emerges in first-year composition curricula. Just as the "sum of speakers both contains and exceeds the language," so the sum of first-year curricula contains and exceeds the theories of its teachers. As evidence for this assertion, I will show video clips from the archives of the Syracuse University Writing Program of composition scholars talking about first-year pedagogy. In place of causal historical explanation of the place of theory in first-year composition, I will offer kinetic snapshots demonstrating that the collective identity of first-year composition "exists in sequences which have little to do with the cumulative forms of history."
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