"Modeling and Emulating: Rethinking Agency in the Writing Process" Post-Process Theory
"if we reduce writing to either a product or a procedure, we must teach it as a device or tool for doing something that is distinct from the doer, the human agent who gives it design, whose being writing expresses. We need to move both composition theory and pedagogy beyond the dualistic device paradigm that separates our acts from ourselves and begin to understand and teach writing as a design" (31)
"Writing is both will and action, internal agency and external product" (31). Yes? Sure? I mean, it's more than that, and more complex, but that's not the worst way of expressing it...
Huh. Couture aligns Shaughnessy with the beginning of the process movement. I'm not sure what to make of that. I mean, she is, kind of, and she displays important process ideals, but... yeah, not what I originally thought.
Moffett is the key theoretical figure here. He's a consummate teacher, but he's also hyper-aware of the personal and spiritual dimensions of writing.
She also discusses Elbow's processes of growing ("letting one's writing expand, mature, and change into something else"), cooking ("letting one's words and ideas percolate, bubble, or ferment and mix, so that one an draw relationships between them") (37). She points out that these are roles that writers take on.
She points out the separations between Elbow's theory (embracing contraries, a multiplicity of writing processes, dwelling in the "irresolution") and how he's frequently put into practice--that these practices aren't extended to the people who do them.
Couture is rebelling against the skills model of writing instruction--that teaching writing should make students better people. I have a hard time with that, because its inverse is that students without writing instruction (writing ability?) are worse people. I appreciate the human approach to writing, but at the same time... yeah.
Term: the device paradigm. Basically that writing is a tool that can be taught simply and used as a commodity. This is the wrong approach.
Things that have addressed this: feminist criticism (including "women's ways of knowing"), Thomas Kent (and others') work with complex genre theory.
So we should teach students to emulate writers' identities, rather than trying to model product.
She's doing very interesting things with the concept of style, suggesting that it's a kind of "psychic fingerprint" (my term) for the person behind it. She takes Elbow as an example, and while it's true that many writers have excellent writing that sounds distinctly like that writer (somehow, and here I'm thinking of Lanham, Shaughnessy, McLuhan--even Bolter has a distinctive style, must though I hate his theories). But... can we say that? It smells bullshitty to me.
I think I smell the vague positivity of "a better person" without any real definition or theoretical weight behind it. Because being a better Nietzschean person is a very different thing than being a better Augustinian person, which is also fairly different than being a better Platonic person.
"Then subjective expression is the complex task of discovering who we are through articulating our values within the history of values and identities developed by others, thus showing how our presence on this earth makes a difference, a contribution to that history" (47).
