Postpostmodern Compositionist

The blog is now ten posts old. Here's hoping for many more posts to come!   Today I thought I would talk a little bit about pedagogy. Like many other writing instructors before me, bell hooks has influenced my approach to teaching and I do consider myself a critical pedagogue. I have read her books  Teaching to Transgress (1994) and Teaching Community (2003), and there are two quotes from these texts that I want to analyze. While these two quotes are scattered across both texts, for me they have always worked together to form a certain theory of free speech that informs my bearing in the classroom. However, after rereading these quotes in preparation for this post, I realize that my original interpretation might not reflect what bell hooks was actually trying to say. I am worried now that I am potentially cherrypicking her ideas to support a preconceived opinion. Let's investigate.  I will provide the two quotes here and offer an analysis:  Quote 1 , from Teachi...

This post is a continuation of my post from last week, which you can find here . I will finish discussing the three influences from my "Theories of Writing & Literacy" seminar in 2021, which led me to becoming the compositionist I am today.  1. The first influence would be the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, also known as the DALN. You can find the website for the DALN here . When I was first doing research for the course final project, I remember initially being confused about why the DALN existed in the first place. Why would anyone want to collect student literacy narratives? (1)   My brain made the connection soon enough. As an English major I was (and still am) very interested in narratology and folklore studies, and in the same way that folklorists go out and collect folk tales to put into archives for future research, I see now that the DALN serves a similar purpose. Unfortunately, the DALN's search engine isn't great (I don't think they have th...

A LITERACY NARRATIVE ABOUT LITERACY NARRATIVES By Casey Manogue This blog post is the first of a two-post literacy narrative, which details a pivotal moment in my transformative journey from English major to compositionist. During the spring semester of 2021, I was finishing up my M.A. in English at CSULB, where I was specializing in 20th century American literature. It was my last semester before graduation and I was only signed up for two courses, until it came to my attention that I needed to take a third to have enough units to graduate. I was looking forward to a chill semester, so the prospect of taking another class was more than a little annoying. I reluctantly signed up for a course titled "Theories of Writing and Literacy," which worked well with my schedule, however, I was disinterested because I knew this was a rhetoric and composition course and not a literature course. Since I was working as an embedded tutor at a local community college, I figured that the know...

Apropos to my post about literacy narratives this morning, I was looking through my files and found a bibliography of scholarship about literacy narratives that I compiled during my first quarter (Fall 2024) at UC Davis. I mentioned that my next post would involve a new and improved literacy narrative, and while that is definitely still coming, I thought I would share this bibliography with the Internet in hope that it may be useful to someone someday.  While by no means comprehensive, this 28-source bibliography offers a solid sense of the directions that research on the literacy narrative genre has taken. Keep in mind that the bibliography does not consider sources that may have been published since the fall of 2024. Looking at the publication dates of the different articles, one can see that interest in the literacy narrative seems to have peaked around the early 2010s, though a steady stream of articles have been published continuing into the 2020s. See the histogram below:...

For today's post, I want to feature a literacy narrative that I wrote in 2021, which I just submitted to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). You can read my literacy narrative at this link . The literacy narrative genre has had a long presence within the field and for this reason I think the post is relevant enough to the subject matter of this blog.  To give some context, around 2021 I was finishing up my master's degree in literature at CSULB, and while most of my master's coursework pertained to American literature, I completed this literacy narrative as part of an assignment for a rhetoric and composition seminar. As I wrote this literacy narrative over five years ago, while I think I have significantly improved as a writer since then, today I am mostly happy with the quality of the piece other than the fact that I think it contains too many commas. It is also important to note that this is the only literacy narrative I have ever written. Another scene fr...

In my last blog post , I briefly discussed my scholarly forays into the historical conversation around composition and abolitionism, which included a revisiting of Sharon Crowley's concept of "composition's ethic of service." Last quarter, when I was researching and writing my seminar paper about the New Abolitionists, I stumbled across a 1999 essay from Rebecca Moore Howard titled "The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism," which was published in the edited collection Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World . For anyone following this blog, one already knows that a pre-2010 book with the word "postmodern" in its title is always a prime candidate for a blog post. Due to a lack of time, I was not able to include Howard's essay into my seminar paper, however upon reading it yesterday I find that it offers a dynamic argument that not only portrays the New Abolitionist conversation in a new light, but also offers ...

In my last blog post I discussed the 1996 collection  Composition in the Twenty-First Century , and it looks like I am not quite done writing about it yet!  A  segment of text from David Bartholomae's paper caught my eye, where Bartholomae offers an interesting and lengthy definition of the enterprise we call composition. I found the first part of this definition thought provoking and it is reproduced below:  "It is, rather, a set of problems produced by a wider, more diffuse set of practices and desires, usually brought into play by instances of language change or variety (or by the possibility that writing might change or be various). In a sense, the history of composition has been the record of institutional and professional responses to challenged standards, challenges to a standard of writing produced by writers who were said to be unprepared. Composition marked the people and places charged to prepare those students and/or defend and rationalize their "un...