Questioning Authority: Stories Told in School

Composition Studies, Spring 2004 by Jackson, Rebecca L

Questioning Authority: Stories Told in School, edited by Linda Adler Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.

Recently, one of my colleagues expressed irritation with our textbook committee's decision to scrap the handbook we'd used for years in favor of an altogether different text: new publisher, new authors, new approach. It is this last feature - the approach-that my colleague found particularly troubling. "What's with all the visual stuff?" she asked. "Designing pages, using visual images, creating websites-aren't we supposed to be teaching students how to write? What happened to just writing essays?"

I suspect my colleague's complaints are shared by others in our department- literature, creative writing, and rhetoric/composition faculty alike-and for very similar reasons. The new handbook challenges what the editors of Questioning Authority, Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington, call "textual authority": notions about what "the essay" should look and sound like, what form it should take, and what language it should employ. Textual authority, AdlerKassner and Harrington observe, "is perhaps the most authoritative idea we carry with us to the classroom" (9), and yet it is not, they argue, the only "authoritative voice" that influences our work in composition. Classroom practice is also shaped, at times constrained, by notions of "personal authority," the "touting of narrative and lived experience as the basis of writing" (Hesse 26), and by various theoretical approaches to teaching composition. Authority shapes writing, Adler-Kassner and Harrington observe plainly, and their interest, at least in part, is in assembling essays that describe the three kinds of authority they consider most pervasive and influential -personal authority, textual authority, and theoretical authority. What they and the contributors to the collection are most interested in, however, is how individual teachers and students understand, use, question, and revise ideas of personal, textual, and theoretical authority. The "fundamental dynamic" of the composition classroom, the editors argue, "turns on questioning assumptions about authority and the essay," for it is only when teachers "question received authority about composition [that] they promote generative change" (13). Particularly compelling is Kassner and Harrington's efforts to (re)see authority through the lens of story: that is, to talk about the "authorities" that influence composition studies as metanarratives of sorts (although this term is neverused), as "stories of composition" that currently narrate our work in the field and are simultaneously questioned and (re)narrated by writers and teachers in their daily work with one another. Adler-Kassner and Harrington provide a sketch of this overarching metaphor in their introduction, yet it is the essays themselves that illuminate its nuances blending discussions of narrative, theory, and classroom practice to illustrate the ways in which authority is questioned and, often, rewritten.

The first section of Questioning Authority, "Personal Authority," explores what Douglas Hesse refers to as "the embrace of 'the personal' in composition studies," the privileging of teachers' and students' lived experience and personal narratives as somehow more authentic, true, and authoritative than traditional forms of academic writing (31). In the first essay, "Stories, Style, and the Exploitation of Experience," Hesse provides a frame for the essays that follow, raising important questions about motives for storytelling in the composition classroom and the implications of turning experience into "artifact." Using his own essay as a case in point, Hesse weaves together personal history and narrative, theory, and classroom practice to challenge the notion that pedagogies emphasizing personal narratives are somehow "more faithful to postmodernity" than others -that they take a "stance against modernist rationalism and all its evils" in ways that other classroom practices do not (27). Hesse observes that when lived experience is expected as the "basis of student writing," the essays we read are

no less conventionalized than are lab reports. They are rhetorical moves whose presence or absence tells readers to accept or reject a personal narrative as a good, effective, or authentic one. "Authentic voice" ... is authentic only insofar as it matches received conventions of authenticity. The magic of the whole concept of "authentic voice" is that it depends on a disavowal of convention. (27)

In other words, such "disavowal of convention" obscures the often strategic use of story for primarily instrumental or aesthetic functions, "experience turned into strategy in order to serve purposes that are, but simultaneously are not, 'faithful' or 'just' or even 'respectful' ofthat experience" (26). Hesse's essay is intended to raise more questions than it answers and, for this reason, it works as an interesting counterpart to essays by Zawacki, Peters, and Golson, which focus on actual classroom practices, on ways to organize writing courses around a more complicated notion of "self as always already fragmented, shaped by innumerable material, social, cultural, and ideological constraints (Zawacki 39). Terry Zawacki, for example, describes her current classroom practice of using personal writing as a vehicle for examining culturally produced identities, to explore how we (students and teachers alike) are "written into certain stories and not into others" (46). And Brad Peters and Emily Golson each discuss the ways in which personal narrative might be used as a springboard for reflection and for "forays" into alternative stories, perspectives, and histories.