11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Most Radical Recent Book in Composition Studies?, October 8, 2004
This review is from: English Composition As A Happening (Paperback)
Sirc sees composition studies as having taken the wrong road, back in the late 70s, and the wrong road has been one of increasing professionalization, of selling out on the creative potential in teaching writing in exchange for being accepted within the institution and disciplines as the department that trains kids to do well in other departments. The road we're on is one of few options, Says Sirc, most of which (defined by Bartholomae) are really just another form of formulaic writing.
Sirc sees Bartholomaean writing programs and curricula as curratorial, setting up great works to be revered and imitated. To these present day realities, Sirc offers cultural studies (though he doesn't call it that) in the form of classes on rap, he offers chat and unfinished collections of sampled texts, he offers any array of things that can organically come together in unique classrooms -- The Happening.
In many ways, this book does the same thing over and over, and in a good way: it takes Duchamp's radical aesthetic and process and rams it up against composition studies. Why don't we do that? It takes Jackson Pollack and his foregrounding of how he painted as much as what he painted, the action painting, as well as the intense newness and refusal in Pollack's work, and asks of composition: Why don't we do that? Sirc talks a lot about the situationists (discussed in more detail by Highmore) and their derive (from the French) and other wanderings, and asks: Why not do that in a writing class? He looks at the radical work of Lentz (sp?) and others in the late 60s and early 70s and asks: Why didn't we follow up on that? Why did we become such a staid site of cultural reproduction? He even looks at architecture in order to think of the parking lot as a sort of ideal space: Let's tear the heck out of comp, Sirc says, then sit out there in the wreckage, appreciating what students do and putting them in positions to be radical text makers.
This book made me want to teach (and read!) in this field all over again.
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