Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
product of “writing” that is, in the end, unchallenging, uninspiring, and uncritical. For me then, and still now, such a thing is not writing. To reverse such a situation is to write with, as Janet Emig put it in “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing” more than forty years ago now, “at least a small obeisance in the direction of the untidy, of the convoluted, of the not-wholly-known" (48). It is to write as if struck by Hélène Cixous' (after Franz Kafka's) "blow on the head," a jarring happening that allows the writer to commune with what she refers to, in her book Three Steps in the Ladder of Writing, as "the unknown," that "lightning region that takes your breath away, where you instantaneously feel at sea and where the moorings are severed with the already-written, the already-known. This 'blow on the head' that Kafka describes is the blow on the head of the deadman/deadwoman we are. And that is the awakening from the dead" (59). What I see Emig and Cixous both trying to describe here is what I believe, looking back now, I had experienced when I wrote about “The King of the Rocks” in the first grade, as well as other times since: writing from, writing with, “wonder.” And my thesis’ investigation of that same sense of “wonder” was inspired by a simple urging directive: “Write with uncertainty.” While I then saw writing with “wonder” and writing with “uncertainty” as existing as the very same thing, I 14
now have my doubts, which is what brings me here: the question of “uncertainty.” The semester before I wrote my graduate thesis, the last semester of my Master’s coursework at Montclair State, I took a course called “Rhetorical Theory and the Teaching of Writing.” It was taught by a professor whom I had heard about many times before from some of my fellow graduate assistants who had already taken this same class. His name was Bob Whitney. When they spoke of him, it was almost with reverence as well as respect, as if he were some sort of religious personage, a yogi or a shaman or some such thing, who had opened their eyes to hitherto untold “truths” about writing or teaching or both. It was not difficult to see why some responded to him as they did, this man who appeared to me more like a hippie lumberjack than a composition professor, as he exhibited a reserved yet roused passion for writing, reading, and, perhaps more than anything else, questioning. And if he did fulfill the role of graduate school “clergyman” for some of my classmates, what we worshipped in that small, windowless room that semester was “uncertainty.” The words “write with uncertainty” became the veritable mantra of the class over the span of that term. Almost everything about the course was intended to offer us a portrait of that “uncertainty,” not only philosophically but pedagogically as well – what it was supposed to “do.” It was at the heart of our 15
- Page 1 and 2: Stony Brook University The official
- Page 3 and 4: Copyright by Leon Marcelo 2011 ii
- Page 5 and 6: Abstract of the Dissertation The Un
- Page 7 and 8: I dedicate this work to my daughter
- Page 9 and 10: Introduction This work is the culmi
- Page 11 and 12: But the way out of this philosophic
- Page 13 and 14: through experiences in the writing
- Page 15 and 16: the same old thing all over again.
- Page 17 and 18: theory and research permeating thro
- Page 19 and 20: I. With no reservations, I call mys
- Page 21: fill in all of the empty variables.
- Page 25 and 26: the invisible, hearing the inaudibl
- Page 27 and 28: “problem-posing education”: a
- Page 29 and 30: “uncertainty.” But when it was
- Page 31 and 32: After the study was finished, Perry
- Page 33 and 34: a vehement belief in “writing wit
- Page 35 and 36: philosophies of teaching. In his bo
- Page 37 and 38: until sometime later - after confro
- Page 39 and 40: eginnings of humanity itself. In th
- Page 41 and 42: conversation and, in its place, pag
- Page 43 and 44: [W]hat happened to rhetoric in Amer
- Page 45 and 46: cannot be discussed because they ar
- Page 47 and 48: States of America in the 1800s for
- Page 49 and 50: making and doing” (6). And for De
- Page 51 and 52: “Allegory of the Cave.” It took
- Page 53 and 54: not a denigration of Christianity,
- Page 55 and 56: severe, black or white: either foll
- Page 57 and 58: easoning behind those words. Early
- Page 59 and 60: transcendent reality and thus satis
- Page 61 and 62: imaginative novelty and creative tr
- Page 63 and 64: eality that the faithful were allow
- Page 65 and 66: with which all other societies were
- Page 67 and 68: field of composition was not, as Co
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product of “writing” that is, in the end, unchallenging,<br />
uninspiring, and uncritical.<br />
For me then, and still now, such a thing is not writing.<br />
To reverse such a situation is to write with, as Janet Emig put<br />
it in “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing” more than forty<br />
years ago now, “at least a small obeisance in the direction of<br />
the untidy, of the convoluted, of the not-wholly-known" (48).<br />
It is to write as if struck by Hélène Cixous' (after Franz<br />
Kafka's) "blow on the head," a jarring happening that allows the<br />
writer to commune with what she refers to, in her book Three<br />
Steps in the Ladder of Writing, as "the unknown," that<br />
"lightning region that takes your breath away, where you<br />
instantaneously feel at sea and where the moorings are severed<br />
with the already-written, the already-known. This 'blow on the<br />
head' that Kafka describes is the blow on the head of the<br />
deadman/deadwoman we are. And that is the awakening from the<br />
dead" (59). What I see Emig and Cixous both trying to describe<br />
here is what I believe, looking back now, I had experienced when<br />
I wrote about “The King of the Rocks” in the first grade, as<br />
well as other times since: writing from, writing with,<br />
“wonder.” And my thesis’ investigation of that same sense of<br />
“wonder” was inspired by a simple urging directive: “Write with<br />
uncertainty.” While I then saw writing with “wonder” and<br />
writing with “uncertainty” as existing as the very same thing, I<br />
14
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