Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

until sometime later - after confronting those experiences in
the writing classroom and having to confront the questions they
had left me with. At the heart of the issue behind Elbow’s
book’s very title is what Elbow called “cooking,” the “process
of one piece of material (or one process) being transformed by
interacting with another: one piece of material being seen
through the lens of another, being dragged through the guts of
another, being reoriented in terms of the other, being mapped
onto the other” (40-1). For him, this dialectical “cooking”
served a very crucial purpose for not only writing but thinking
as well:
Searching for contradiction and affirming both sides
can allow you to find both the limitations of the
system in which you are working and a way to break
out of it. If you find contradictions and try too
quickly to get rid of them, you are only neatening
up, even straightening, the system you are in. To
actually get beyond that system you need to find the
deepest contradictions and, instead of trying to
reconcile them, heighten them by affirming both
sides. And if you can nurture the contradictions
cleverly enough, you can be led to a new system with
a wider frame of reference, one that includes the two
new elements which were felt as contradictory in the
old frame of reference. (241)
With this, Elbow was establishing a dialectic that was extremely
dialogic, an interaction that was extremely dualistic, wherein
the potential of each contrary can only be realized out of the
extreme implementation of the other. It was an “and/or”-ness
that allows the whole process to be something it would not have
otherwise been. For Elbow, to not “cook” was to do merely one
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