Writing With Elbow
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0874214300
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Peter Elbow is one of those scholars who had such an impact on his field that by mid-career he had already attained icon status. As an early proponent of what became known as process theory, Elbow, with others working along similar lines, developed a powerful body of theory that gradually reoriented instruction in writing toward an emphasis on invention and revision-toward the process of writing as a mode of thinking-and consequently toward a focus on the interaction between writer and audience, instead of on the traditionally conceived product of writing, the text. It is not too much to claim that Peter Elbow, like few others, changed the way writing is taught in America. Writing with Elbow is a volume written by leading scholars now working in the field of composition who trace their own scholarship to foundational work done by Peter Elbow over the last thirty years. The book is in that sense a celebration. But it is more than that, too. Elbow and process writing are not without their critics, and the essays collected in Writing with Elbow also test him, extend his work, explore his intellectual forebears, address his critics and contexts, and complicate his legacy across a wide range of issues in current composition research and practice. A thoughtful, comprehensive retrospective on Peter Elbow's legacy, Writing with Elbow is a must-read collection for composition scholars, teachers, English educationists, and graduate students.
left, from those, myself included, who did not think his critique of the dominant ideology was sufficiently pointed to be 18 W r i t i n g Wi t h E l b ow considered legitimately transformative. Yet on the all-important matter of the politics one enacts in one’s own classroom, and specifically on how one seeks to define the teacher-student dynamic in one’s classroom, it is Elbow who would seem to have the more radical pedagogy. I believe that Elbow’s version of the “teacherless writing class”
with someone, I want to tell them that they’re not alone. That they have help in God. And we’ll get down on our knees and pray. That’s the strength of Christian counseling—you’re not alone. To give up the religious part doesn’t make sense to me. It’s the basis of what I do.” Another high school friend agreed, “Like when my father was dying of cancer. It was so hard, but I can’t imagine how people can go through that alone, without the church or belief.” I listened, as if across a great divide,
notion of “changing the world,” even though it comes third in Elbow’s original order, since, of the four principles, no other is more immediately damaging to the realistic possibility of a “critical” American classroom if it cannot be sympathetically recomposed. Why struggle over the nature of the teacher’s role or the 74 W r i t i n g Wi t h E l b ow substance of a syllabus if the end of the enterprise is either inconceivable or unacceptable? Surely, it is difficult to conceive a less
reveals his profound commitment to Polanyi’s more disturbing, thoroughgoing, and radical conception of rationality. Elbow creates in the body of WWT a powerful heuristic, a practice, based on a Polanyian theory of knowledge, but then wavers in the theoretical appendix: the belief enacted in the way he teaches writing suddenly, in his theory, becomes not the ground of all knowing and discovering but a game, make-believe. However, he trusts the power of writing—it is the deepest truth in his life.
already discussed, Elbow argues that both doubt and belief are present and necessary in everyone. This is not to suggest a benign relativism in Elbow. We clearly see that he has strong commitments to playing the believing game, for instance, and, through implication, to the doubting game. A further paradox that enhances Elbow’s work with contraries, therefore, is not an abandonment of goals but, rather, a reorientation of one’s relationship to those goals in ways that do not privilege them over