Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
But this is not something afforded by the simple act of writing, the mental and physical process of stringing together words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and so forth, but, perhaps even more so, by the thinking that vivifies it. While you can think without writing, you cannot write without thinking: thinking before you write about what you want or need to write; thinking as you write; thinking about what you wrote after you’ve written it. In a sense, they are inseparable. In Writing Without Teachers, Elbow suggests that, if writers are to free themselves, and their writing, from the control and order that can suffocate the process, they should “[L]et things get out of hand, let things wander and digress” (32-3). I believe that Elbow’s advice, which embraces that freedom found in Uncertainty, applies not simply to what the pen or the keyboard put down upon that blank page but to, again, the thinking that embodies those words, like a soul. That said, I would return to Hélène Cixous and recall something from the first chapter. For Cixous, 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 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. (38) What Cixous is promoting is not only the marriage of writing and thinking but the need for both of Uncertainty: the pursuit of 88
Uncertainty and the prolonging of Uncertainty. What we also have here, which puts this French post-modern/post-structural theorist in agreement with Elbow, is the almost conscious avoidance of Certainty and all that it necessitates: control, order, predictability, stability, authority. Because of the symbiotic relationship between writing and thinking, a conformity to Certainty for what is written upon the blank page means a conformity to Certainty for what is thought – all of the ideas and beliefs and, yes, “truths” that are swarming and surging in the writer’s brain throughout the whole of the writing process. And beyond. But such a thing is contrary to the Uncertainty that is fundamental not simply to this postmodern age but to the very workings of the universe. And because of this, it is, in a word, unnatural. This Uncertainty, which is, as the likes of Bradbury and Elbow and Cixous would have things, indeed very natural to writing - and very well the teaching of writing – is often said to have arrived unto the scene of composition and rhetoric with the dawning of that so-called Post-Modern Age, at least according to the common histories of the field of composition and rhetoric. Such a momentous event is perhaps most famously articulated in the February 1982 issue of College Composition and Communication by Maxine Hairston with her article “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of 89
- Page 45 and 46: cannot be discussed because they ar
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- Page 49 and 50: making and doing” (6). And for De
- Page 51 and 52: “Allegory of the Cave.” It took
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- Page 55 and 56: severe, black or white: either foll
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- Page 63 and 64: eality that the faithful were allow
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- Page 67 and 68: field of composition was not, as Co
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- Page 73 and 74: This power of modern Western scienc
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- Page 81 and 82: as in specific political, ideologic
- Page 83 and 84: Darkness. For Said, it was in the p
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- Page 87 and 88: III. Before I continue any further,
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- Page 91 and 92: Tarnas refers to those “contradic
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- Page 109 and 110: All experiences, even the scientifi
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- Page 119 and 120: attempting to make room for the exc
- Page 121 and 122: said, I would pose another question
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- Page 125 and 126: It was this “technical rhetoric
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- Page 129 and 130: former I will not really pay much a
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Uncertainty and the prolonging of Uncertainty. What we also<br />
have here, which puts this French post-modern/post-structural<br />
theorist in agreement with Elbow, is the almost conscious<br />
avoidance of Certainty and all that it necessitates: control,<br />
order, predictability, stability, authority. Because of the<br />
symbiotic relationship between writing and thinking, a<br />
conformity to Certainty for what is written upon the blank page<br />
means a conformity to Certainty for what is thought – all of the<br />
ideas and beliefs and, yes, “truths” that are swarming and<br />
surging in the writer’s brain throughout the whole of the<br />
writing process. And beyond. But such a thing is contrary to<br />
the Uncertainty that is fundamental not simply to this postmodern<br />
age but to the very workings of the universe. And<br />
because of this, it is, in a word, unnatural.<br />
This Uncertainty, which is, as the likes of Bradbury and<br />
Elbow and Cixous would have things, indeed very natural to<br />
writing - and very well the teaching of writing – is often said<br />
to have arrived unto the scene of composition and rhetoric with<br />
the dawning of that so-called Post-Modern Age, at least<br />
according to the common histories of the field of composition<br />
and rhetoric. Such a momentous event is perhaps most famously<br />
articulated in the February 1982 issue of College Composition<br />
and Communication by Maxine Hairston with her article “The Winds<br />
of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of<br />
89