CCR 601. Miller, Chapter Six.

Miller, Susan.

Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition.

Chapter Six, “On Seeing Things for What They Are.”

 

Keywords: Liberalism, separatism, alternative, Stephen North, ghetto, traditional, student writers

 

Summary:

Miller closes the book by refusing to tell a “good story” about composition and its future.  Miller then goes into the three viable options that composition has at this point.  1) Liberalism.  This approach is a way of returning to the English department as part of the team known as “literature and composition.”  The problem becomes that this integration means that composition becomes a the lesser of the pair as in doing so it will have to return to its former position as “mechanistic” error hunters who become “complicit” (185) in the practices of literary studies that marginalize non-traditional students and champions bourgeoisie values.  2) Separatism.  Miller cites Stephen North as the largest proponent of this movement, and explains that this has happened in some places (UCLA, Michigan). While the results have been mixed, she warns of the possibility that “‘separate but equal’ status may result in entrenchments of existing inequities for those inside—a ‘new ghetto’” (184).  Miller criticizes both for their inability to question “the hegemonic strategy” that “makes ‘low’ status intrinsic to student writing and by extension demeans those who are deeply involved in its academic treatment” (183). The third method, the alternative, recognizes composition’s carnival status and utilizes this outsider position to question the forces (cultural, institutional) that assigns “low” status to student writing, and challenges the entrenched idea that good writing is intransitive, bourgeoisie, and universal.  Using the alternative method and outsider status, Miller posits a composition classroom where the student writer is a real person with pre-existing political, economic, and social ideas; and this method would argue that good writing is situational, contextual, and has real consequences beyond the grade.

 

Notes:

Establish “universal” courses maintain the importance of American writing but also the infinite postponement of its purported egalitarianism (179).

Explanations of important translations, displacements, and recreative functions of the carnival allow for composition’s story to be told as a story not one inconsequential incident as another (180).

Continuing superstructural agendas for composition teaching maintain earlier necessary boundaries (178)

The important alternative to each of these political/symbol results would be a pointed and continued awareness of processes (194).