Faigley, Lester. “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal.” College English, vol. 48, no. 6, 1986, pp. 527–542. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/376707.
527: “The convenient landmark for diciplinary historians is the Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer review of the field in 1963, a survey that found a legion of pedagogical studies of writing, most lacking any broad theoretical notion of writing abilities or even awareness of similar existing studies.”
“Richard Young’s and Maxine Hairston’s accounts of the process movement as a Kuhnian paradigm shift have served as justifications for disciplinary status.”
528: “…a third perspective on composing has emerged, one that contends processes of writing are social in character instead of originating within individual writers.”
“Finally, I argue that disciplinary claims for writing must be based on a conception of process broader than any of the three views [expressive, cognitive, social].”
529: “…Roman and Wlecke [1964] maintained that thinking was different from writing and antecedent to writing; therefore, teachers should stimulate students’ thinking by having them write journals, construct analogies, and in the spirit if the sixties, meditate before writing essays.” ***Here’s a nod to ‘mindfulness,’ though it’s pejorative. Interesting that ‘analogies’ also here depicted as ‘retrograde.’
“What Young neglects to mention is that Rohman and Wlecke revived certain Romantic notions about composing and were instigators of a ‘neo-Romantic’ view of process…This definition of ‘good writing’ includes the essential qualities of Romantic expressivism—integrity, spontaneity, and originality—the same qualities M.H. Abrams uses to define ‘expressive’ poetry …” ***Berlin suggests AB’s work is “Romantic” in this sense in “Rhetorics“…
530: Harris writes “Growth” as the first term governing his history. He dis-includes Berthoff’s work in the consideration, likely because it didn’t catch on, but it didn’t catch on, it seems to me because people didn’t recognize in it the very antidote to the issues Harris defines as problematic of “the growth theorists” work. She doesn’t fit his description of the movement in general, but her work definitely suits the ‘organicism’ described in Faigley’s article: “Elbow chose the metaphor of organic growth to describe the operations of composing, the same metaphor Edward Young used to describe the vegetable concept of genius in 1759 and Coleridge borrowed from German philosophers to describe the workings of the imagination…Coleridge contrasted two kinds of form—one mechanical, when we impress upon any material a predetermined form, the other organic, when the material shapes itself from within. Coleridge also realized the plant metaphor implied a kind of organic determinism…He avoided this consequence by insisting upon the free will of the artist, that the artist has foresight and the power of choice.” ***Coleridge. AB, I think, because of her instrumentizing of Coleridge’s concept of imagination, gets charged as being “a Romantic.” It’s almost like we must full scale reject what’s come before, so we discard AB’s work, without considering the nuanced ways it changes the romantic notions, resulting in conceptions quite useful for pedagogy and quite suited to postmodern notions of subject and the social epistemic.
530: “Elbow’s point is one of the standards of Romanitc theory: that ‘good’ writing does not follow rules but reflects the processes of the creative imagination.”
“In other words, the writing should proceed obliquely as a ‘striving toward’—a mimetic of the writer’s actual thought processes—and only hint at the goal of such striving.” **Notice the concept of time here. It’s as thought the writing process itself follows along like a narrative. AB’s allatonceness challenges this notion of process, of expressive/cognitive/social relationship.
531: “The concept of natural genius has been replaced in contemporary expressive theory with an emphasis on the innate potential of the unconscious mind.” ***Not with AB; no “unconsicous”/the CONSCIOUS mind, as an aspect of the innate workings of the human mind.
531: “Several researchers in the late sixties were encouraged by Rohman and Wlecke’s mention of heuristics and their finding that students who were taught ‘prewriting’ activities wrote better essays.” More important, Rohman and Wlecke’s proposal of three linear stages in the writing process stimulated research in response.” ***Note: Vitanza’s “systematic approach”
533: “Flower and Hayes’ main claims–that composing processes intermingle, that goals direct composing, and that experts compose differently from inexperienced writers—all have become commonplaces of the process movement.”
“The idea that thinking and language can be represented by computers underlies much research in cognitive science in several camps, including artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology.”
“The [cybernetic theorists] theorize that the brainlike a computer—is divided into a memory and a processing unit.” ***Uh oh. Why divide?
534: “…many writing teachers believed cognitive research could provide a ‘deep structure’ theory of the composing process, which could in turn specify how writing should be taught.” **Here is Vitanza’s structure desire again. So interesting. Could it be that the desire itself is a strong holdover from current-traditional pedagogy!!
Giroux: “…would fault the cognitive view for collapsing cultural issues under the label ‘audience.'” *** Okay. But cultural issues accounted for, given space for, in the notion of interpretant?
“…the intent of the study still suffers from what Giroux sees as a fundamental flaw of cognitivist research—the isolation of the part from the whole.” **This aligns with Berthoff, only instead of relationships manifesting outwardsy, she’s focusing on the relationships as they manifest inwardly.
535: “Thus taking a social view requires a great deal more than simply paying more attention to the context surrounding a discourse. It rejects the assumption that writing is the act of a private consciousness and that everything else—readers, subjects, and texts—is ‘out there’ in the world. The focus of the social view of writing, therefore, is not on how the social situation influences the individual, but on how the individual is constituent of a culture.”
“Bizzell cites Vygotsky, whom many cognitive researchers lump together with Piaget, but whose understanding of language is very different from Piaget’s. Vygotsky studied language development as a historical and cultural process, in which a child acquires not only the words of language but the intentions carried by those words and situations implied by them.”
536: “Thus a social view of writing moves beyond the expressivist contention that the individual discovers the self through language and beyond the cognitivist position that an individual constructs reality through language. In a social view, any effort to write about the self or reality always comes in relation to previous texts.”
537: “If process theory and pedagogy have up to now been unproblematically accepted, I see a danger that it could be unproblematically rejected…Expressive theorists validate personal experience in school systems that often deny it. Cognitive theorists see language as a way of negotiating the world, which is the basis of James Berlin’s dialogic redefinition of epistemic rhetoric (Rhetoric and Reality). And social theorists…”
“If the process movement is to continue to influence the teaching of writing and to supply alternatives to current-traditional pedagogy, it must take a broader conception of writing, one that understands writing processes are historically dynamic—not psychic states, cognitive routines, or neutral social relationships. This historical awareness would allow us to reinterpret and integrate each of the theoretical perspectives I have outlined.”
538: “In a similar way, historical awareness would enhance a cognitive view of composing by demonstrating the historical origins of an individual writer’s goals.”
539: “The preoccupation with an underlying theory of the writing process has led us to neglect finding answers to the most obvious questions in college writing instruction today: why college writing courses are prevalent in the United States and rare in the rest of the world; why the emphasis on teaching writing occurring in the aftermath of the ‘literacy crisis’ of the seventies has not abated; why the majority of college writing courses are tuaght by graduate students and other persons in nontenturable positions.”
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