busted…i stole that. word.

I’ve got this weird confluence (I know that word because of the placement of the Steelers’ stadium, not because I mined a thesaurus) going on.  Amy first suggested Bishop’s, “Reading, Stealing, and Writing Like a Writer,” during the second (I believe) Comp Conversations of the year.  It made sense to me to put it on the agenda for the first CRLS Reading Group because it was relatively short and emerged, organically, our of our discussions of teaching writing.

A week or so later after reading Foucault’s Power/Knowledge in my Independent Study with Tim, we decided to read Elbow’s Writing without Teachers.  Because…well, it seemed like a natural next-step given our discussions of Foucault. What? That’s right.  And if you can get to Foucault to Elbow (with or without Kevin Bacon) I’ll buy you a sodeepop.  It happened though.  And Tim has the whole thing recorded in MP3 format if you don’t believe me.

So.  Composition Conversations—>Bishop.  Independent Study—>Elbow.

I didn’t remember that I had read this essay by Bishop before.  Until I was reading it tonight that is.  And I hadn’t remembered a lot of Writing Without Teachers (or I remembered it differently) until I re-read it last week.  And now I’ve got all this stuff about writing-as-craft going on in my head.  The tension between “inhabiting” (Bishop’s term) language/writing and doing things with words (now that’s Austin).  It’s the same kind of tension that you see between creativity and critique.  Between writers and critics.  Between rhetoricians and philosophers.  Between activists and theorists.

I guess all I want to note for the moments is that I felt happy reading Bishop.  As I did Elbow.  They reminded me of the joys of being-with language.  Of play.

I’d love to play here all night…but it’s almost 1am and my #1 joy gets up at 5am.  So, till later today.

CRG remade…welcome to CRLS reading group blog!

Some of you may remember the olde days of the Composing Reading Group (CRG) blog.  Back in those days we had a blogger blog.  That blog still exists, but we have shifted our virtual space to WordPress.  And here were are.

This blog (like its predecessor) is a space to discuss on-going issues in teaching Composition and Rhetoric at Kutztown University. In the midst of our heavy teaching load, it’s often difficult to find the time to discuss issues that arise in our classes and how we think about teaching writing, our goals, and the role of Composition in the University and the world beyond. We hope this blog will be one space where we can come together and reflect, vent, theorize, develop our teaching, and feed our brains.

The CRLS group met last week and made some preliminary decisions about the texts we will tackle this semester/year.  For our October meeting, we will read Kathleen Blake Yancy’s, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” from CCC 2004.  This is the published version of Yancey’s Chair’s Address at the 2004 CCCC in San Antonio.

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, October 9th in Lytle 202 from 11-11:50am.

Here’s a look at the other texts we will be checking out this year:

• Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’.”
• Jonathan Alexander, “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body.”
• Nancy Welch, “Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Post-Publicity Era.”
• Min-Zhan Lu, “An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English against the Order of Fast Capitalism.”
• Donna LeCourt, “Performing Working-Class Identity in Composition: Toward a Pedagogy of Textual Practice.”

All articles are available in the English Department copy room in the CRLS Reading Group binder.  You can also download PDF versions of the articles on eReserve.

Looking forward to another great year!