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Current Topic: A Scholar in the Flesh

Amy's Side

Mysti's Side
As an academic, I must make scholarly production a priority. The standard form this takes, the journal article, holds little appeal to me, however. I have published a few pieces that I believe retain my sense of self, which relay not only information and interpretation but a sense of the person and experience behind the intellectual work. That tip to the individual means a lot to me, and not in the usual sense of wanting to retain personal style or voice (though I dig that, too, I do). While writing my dissertation, I struggled to understand what I was trying to retain through revisions, just what I was rebelling against, as I was encouraged to write more “in the scholarly genre,” and I think it is just this same essence I’m trying to describe here—a sense that my work is not impersonal.

This may seem a small affair; of course one’s work is personal, of course it matters in material senses. But the truth is, academic work can sometimes make me feel like the image I’ve chosen to represent me on my Formaldehyde blog: a brain in a jar. Narrative writing is supposedly hot in Composition studies right now; I’ve heard colleagues say that we no longer need to defend the rhetorical choice to include personal and professional experiences in our scholarship. But for all of that talk and a few significant texts, I don’t think personalized scholarship is mainstream; it’s trendy. A few people are having fun with it; a fewer still embrace it. But most scholars, I think, are continuing on in the same impersonal vein.

When’s the last time you read Lad Tobin in CCC? Don’t see any “hybrid texts” in our most respected journal. And “hybrid” annoys me, as it implies normality lies with purely “objective” scholarly work or with narrative. For me, the normal state has always been to weave these together.

I read over this entry, though, and I see that my tone is significantly more impersonal than others here in the Mirror; I’ve been doing Serious Academic Work all week, sending my preferred writing self to movies while I get the work done. This blogging is my way of calling her back, though, hurrying her on her way, so that together we can finish the conference presentation I am drafting. The conference paper might be my favorite—actual people in a physical room being themselves, though perhaps wearing slightly better clothes. I am myself in this genre. I’m a woman, a teacher, slightly nervous, with something to say. In that venue, I merge the woman in the Mirror and the Brain in the Jar—intellect and flesh matter just the same.
As a mammal who has named herself "Mysti," sometimes I see a chasm instead of a panty-liner between me and the academic I am supposed to be, dressed in the sueded-elbow blazer of "Assistant Professor of English." As the sixth of seven children, rebelling comes quite naturally to me; some might even claim that I define myself by what I am pushing against. But beneath my knee-jerk response of continually questioning the way things have always been done, the artist within me wants the freedom to discover what she's thinking and feeling, yearning for or obsessing about, as she tips her head and lets the pigment of her pain, her perceptions, her pleasure drip out of her ear and on to the page so she can swirl it into the fingerpainted collage of her heart, her hopes, her brain.

In other words, I am not interested in writing anything from which I am required to remove my fingerprints. Which puts me between the academy's rock and my hard place when it comes to writing the dissertation. I've been orbiting this particlar ring of hell for as many months as it takes to pay off one car note and start another, so you'd think I would've made peace with the part of the writerly me which must prostitute herself in order to procure her final degree. Only it doesn't seem to be very easy for me . . . so I look to the stories of others before me, those who also felt like outsiders in the academy--Gloria Anazualda, bell hooks, Richard Rodriguez, Gerald Vizenor, and yes, even Claude Mark Hurlbert. Each of these academics has given voice in the past to the importance of writing in one's own voice--that, in fact, they couldn't really get published until they took the risk of diving into their own reflections, kissing their own lips on the journey into the self-conscious abyss. And they did not say these things yesterday--or the day before--but many years ago. In fact, a review of the CCCC in 2006 reveals many sessions devoted to bridging the personal and the academic, my favorite being Leslie Olsen's description of Sondra Perl's presentation titled "Writing the New Ethnography: The Role of Creative Nonfiction in Composition Scholarship":
Perl gave us permission to know ourselves and to write ourselves into our own work. First-person is more than okay—it's REQUIRED—because we cannot 'separate the knower from the known.' She let us hear how ridiculous we sounded when we thought we could: 'this study shows…,' 'one can see…,' or the dreaded, 'this author concludes….' The 'faceless, voiceless, objective' self of the 70s has a champion in the 21st century: the new ethnography and creative non-fiction, which she charged with offering us truth and with removing the veil that previously hid the author behind the conclusion.

Allow me to include more of Olsen's words, as they tickle me like elephants on parade:
Listen, watch, taste, know. Know myself, see others, chew on my words, and let others see me in my writing. If I can't do that, why should anyone else care to read what I've written?

For more reviews of old CCCC sessions that formerly address Amy's present dilemma, clink the link below:
Across the Disciplines.
Or better yet, wait around for my dissertation to be published--as the first forty pages or so wrestle with my position--read: responsibility--as a feminist compositionist--a label that might be threatening to circles and squares both inside and outside of the academy. In case you are not stirred up enough to down your morning coffee, google "Feminism: The Other 'F-Word'" or go straight to the blog by Anna Braun and let your voice be heard--here, there, or on the bathroom door of your favorite stall--whatever it takes to put the fun back in feminism.
Reflections
Ms lynch, here. Mysti, the sources you cite and the words you paint on the page above are inspiring and are giving me hope.
They are also frustrating me.
Why, when so many good, respected, intelligent scholars embrace the personal, do so many of us have to fight to use it?
Why do so many English teachers tk, tsk me when they hear I allow my students to use "I" in a researched essay?
Mysti here: my short answer? because they've stopped reading--and hence learning--and have no idea of the variety of scholarship out there--not just in composition, but in history and sociology and anthropology and, god forbid, literary studies. I certainly don't claim to have read everything, but I just recently spent a semester reading instead of teaching, and I am encouraged by the good articles out there, even in the CCC, that rely on the pfd (personal flotation device) of first person writing. Of course, I've been hanging out with (read: reading) the feminists again--who always insist on owning their own subjectivity and dismiss any claims to impartiality, waving their fallibility around like underwear on a flagpole ( that's what I love about them).

But Amy makes a very good point in her no-longer-private correspondence to me: "Still, it makes me angry: every time a scholar blazes this trail, it seems to be over-grown the next week. The vines of conservative academese overtake it. Gah!"

Well said, my friend, well said.
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