Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
eadings, our class discussions, our writings. You could not escape from the word, the concept behind it, and I can only speculate how much of an earsore it must have been for those in the class who would not subscribe to Bob’s theories – and there were indeed some who did refuse, whether peacefully or not. It would seem that for at least some of these particular students in his class, that “uncertainty” was simply too amorphous and too abstract – too theoretical. And it also seemed that there was no little frustration for some with the fact that he did not offer an exact definition of what he meant by “uncertainty” or “writing with uncertainty,” other than the utter necessity of questioning and then questioning some more. But I believe, still, that, if you stood back and looked at the whole of what was being said and written and read in the class, a compelling portrait did indeed appear, albeit somewhat indirectly. For me, this was something that happened most intensely through the books and essays that he put before us. There was, again, French feminist literary critic and writing theorist Hélène Cixous. In her book Three Steps in the Ladder of Writing, she wrote of what she called the “Worst,” “the most unknown and best unknown.” For Cixous, it is this “Worst” that “we are looking for when we write”: We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing 16
the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. (38) Although her words here are a little heady, the whole of Three Steps steeped in that post-structuralist “Derrida-ese,” I can remember being utterly struck by the “truth” of what Cixious had to say about writing. Deep, critical, and “true” writing is born only from the confrontation of what is known and what is unknown, where certainty and that semblance of safety that it offers fall away in the face of the incongruous and the perplexing. To her, it is only from such an experience, in that “lightning region” I referenced earlier, that “writing” worth writing and, therein, “thinking” worth thinking can be done. A similar sentiment was shared by Nobel Prize-winning progressive novelist, Doris Lessing, who went further to express, revealingly for me, the social and cultural consequence of such different ways of seeing and thinking and writing. In Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, her book of philosophical essays that had also been assigned us to read that semester, Lessing wrote about “the other eye,” what she saw as humanity’s capacity to conceive of ourselves, our society and our culture, “not […] how we like to think we behave and function, which is 17
- 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 and 22: fill in all of the empty variables.
- Page 23: now have my doubts, which is what b
- 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
- Page 69 and 70: ecause of its “epistemological su
- Page 71 and 72: proclamation “Cogito Ergo Sum,”
- Page 73 and 74: This power of modern Western scienc
eadings, our class discussions, our writings. You could not<br />
escape from the word, the concept behind it, and I can only<br />
speculate how much of an earsore it must have been for those in<br />
the class who would not subscribe to Bob’s theories – and there<br />
were indeed some who did refuse, whether peacefully or not. It<br />
would seem that for at least some of these particular students<br />
in his class, that “uncertainty” was simply too amorphous and<br />
too abstract – too theoretical. And it also seemed that there<br />
was no little frustration for some with the fact that he did not<br />
offer an exact definition of what he meant by “uncertainty” or<br />
“writing with uncertainty,” other than the utter necessity of<br />
questioning and then questioning some more. But I believe,<br />
still, that, if you stood back and looked at the whole of what<br />
was being said and written and read in the class, a compelling<br />
portrait did indeed appear, albeit somewhat indirectly. For me,<br />
this was something that happened most intensely through the<br />
books and essays that he put before us.<br />
There was, again, French feminist literary critic and<br />
writing theorist Hélène Cixous. In her book Three Steps in the<br />
Ladder of Writing, she wrote of what she called the “Worst,”<br />
“the most unknown and best unknown.” For Cixous, it is this<br />
“Worst” that “we are looking for when we write”:<br />
We go toward the best known unknown thing, where<br />
knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will<br />
know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be<br />
afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing<br />
16
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