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January 26, 2006
The materiality of citations
Amy Robillard's most recent College English essay claims to examine the possibilities of compositionists' treating student texts as more than enactments of a pedagogy, instead thinking of them as contributions to disciplinary knowledge. She wants to know how such a shift might affect composition scholars' practices of citing student work. As background to her argument, Robillard offers a taxonomy of citation—or actually, three taxonomies: one of how citation functions for readers; another, of how it functions for the writer who is citing sources; and a third taxonomy of how citation functions for the authors whose work is being cited (258-260). Equipped with this overview, she builds a convincing argument: that citation functions not only on a economic plane but also on an affective one. Having built that argument, she offers two more taxonomies: one, of how scholars' citation of non-anonymous student work functions for the student who is being cited; and another, of how that citation functions for the field of composition studies (266).
Beyond the expository argument, there's something else going on in this article, something extremely interesting. Robillard is enacting her argument about the affect of citation; she makes explicit the affective dimension of her own citations in the article: the warmth of her relationships with authors she is citing, and her sense of delight in texts she is citing. She also speaks of her experience as a student whose work was used in a professor's publication, with a phony name (263). She engages in a dialogue with an anonymous reviewer of her article (265). In short, Robillard moves her own writing out of the "abstract realm" in which scholarship customarily takes place and into the "transient, contextual vicissitudes of our everyday practices and corporeal selves" that compositionists are taught to set aside when they publish (262). It is, I believe, a bold, ground-breaking move.
Robillard, Amy E. "Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices." College English 68.3 (January 2006): 253-270.
Posted by senioritis at January 26, 2006 11:20 PM