gazing westward

Stygall argues that “the institutional practice of basic writing is constructed and inscribed by the notion of the author function, and that the teaching of basic writing is formulated around the educational discursive practices necessary to keep the author function dominant” (321).  Stygall creates a study of practice – her graduate students at Miami Ohio “correspond” with “basic writers” at Temple University and Indiana University-Indianapolis – with the hope that grad students, forced to interrogate discourse practices by “doing” them, will “analyze the dynamics of the project” and would be “converted to immediate differences in our practices” (322).  Exposing the author function within English studies, in this case through an analysis of Stygall’s ”bridging project” (bringing grad students/teachers/authors together with ‘basic writers’), will help composition to “resist privilege” and use our marginal status within English (as Susan Miller argues) to mount ’counterhegemonic’ endeavors – such as challenging the naturalness of “basic writers” as an idea and practice (323). 

Stygall surveys Foucault’s idea of the author function, contextualizing it in the following ways:

1)the basic writer is often recognized by, understood in actions of, and thwarted from pursuing transgression because the basic writer isn’t an author but a mistake-maker (324)

2) the dominant discourse (English/liberal arts) gives and withholds authorship status – teachers are limited by the author function via this discourse (tenure/non-tenure, literature/rhet-comp) and then impose these limiting values upon basic writers who are then likewise limited by the dominant discourse (325)

3)if students violate constructed ideas of “rational beings” they are then constructed as basic writers (325)

4)unity of voice is favored in student writing over more sophistocated multivocality which only authors get to evoke and appropriate (325)

These features lead Stygall to conclude that basic writers are marginalized, as rhet/comp is marginalized, at the hands of English, the discourse that controls/implements the author function (326) – “Being declared a marginal writer as a first year college student is public and institutionally sanctioned.  Being declared marginal in a graduate English program- as a consequence of a declared interest in composition, an interest in the non-authors, as it were- is less public, less officially sanctioned, yet is just as powerful… Like Brodkey’s students, my students best intention toward basic writers – to resist privilege – could not overcome the discursive practice of the author function, the fundamental ideological apparatus of English, the very affirmation of which could prove their ‘true’ nonmarginal status” (326).

Stygall presents the project.  She focuses upon her graduate students who are learning to teach basic writers via “trial and error” and wonders if self-consciousness about differences result in less re-inscription of basic writer status.  She hopes to challenge the act of labeling students “basic writers” – and hope, simultaneously, that her grad students want to resist the master discourse and do the same (326).  Stygall points out the trends in her finding (”aggregate data”) - grad students avoiding engaging in content that implicated them in the master discourse or verified from conventions of “instruction,”grad students wrote 2-3 times longer letters than their “basic writer” counterparts, grad students posed questions and assumed the role of teacher even while, initially, not disclosing their identity as author/teacher, author/teachers assuming shared ideas of education-as-empowerment, etc.  The aggregate data reveals that the author function is reproduced through the graduate student gestures/arguments/implications/ethos/etc. toward “basic writers” (335).  The values of the author function are filtered through the graduate students as they inevitably, Stygall implies, operate from the value systems associated with being an academic (author/teacher) self. 

Yet the same grad student, Stygall argues, resist the author function… “This move toward resistance slips in with their presentation of teaching narratives in the letters, almost as if to say that it is as teachers, not as author-scholars, that they are capable of scrutinizing their roles” (336).  Because pedagogical concerns are marginalized within the master discourse of English, Stygall reasons, resistance is most obvious in this arena, outside of canon. 

How do we resist?  Stygall examines her own project in which she hoped to use education to critique education.  She hoped to simultaneously survey the master discourse and institute “reflective practices,” working from the “liberal educational ideology [that] assumes that knowing about a situation is enough to change practices” (337).  The project, Stygall admits, “readily adopted the trope of the Other, setting off to other institutions to bring back exotic knowledge about the basic writer.  And ’knowledge about’ - rather than changed practices- is what we brought back” (337).  Yet the course led to reconsiderations of the “natural” state of “basic writers” – though it would have been a more successful project had grad students moved beyond letter to understand “basic writer lives,” possibly shadowing their counterparts (338). 

“By challenging the principles on which the author function rests, by exploring the lived experiences of our basic writing students, by agreeing to rethink our own positions, we can begin to resist the reinscription of power and collaborative redefine the author” (339).  

Pedagogical recommendations -

1)Historicize the “basic writer” “problem” - This isn’t a temporary crisis with temporary (non-tenured) solutions

2)Rethink the identity politics of the label

3)Fight to deploy tenured faculty to teach “basic writers” because sending non-tenured faculty to teach them reifies the institutional definitions Stygall hopes we’ll resist

4)Teach new teachers in a way that exposes these complexities and breeds resistance – new teachers (and the possibilities that will emerge once these teachers are in action) and the creation and regulation of the positioning of basic writing in English departments will establish a “path of resistance” (340).    

[A little birdie asked me to specify how Stygall understands the Foucauldian author-function... Stygall actually reviews the four characteristics on 324:

1) "when writing or authorship became property and thus operate within the law of property, writing offered the possibility of transgression"

2)author function is discourse specific

3)"the pairing of an author to a particular discourse is not a simple matching: it is rather the social construction of a 'certain rational being'"

4)author function allows us to "acknowledge several selves of the same author, framed by processes of 'evolution, maturation, or influence'"

Same little birdie asked for a refresher on the essay - What is an Author? - outside of Stygall's use of theory, so I just dusted off my good old Norton Lit Theory anthology and read my undergraduate marginalia (you should too - it is quite amusing to see the "big ideas" I thought I discovered/created)... So, to jog memories, Foucault's own terms/phrases when discussing the author-function in relation to production of text, book, work:

1)authors are objects of appropriation (ownership, writing as property, etc.)

2)author-function is not universal or constant in all discourse

3)the author-function isn't formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual - but is the construction of a rational entity we call the author

4)author-function doesn't necessarily refer to an individual but gives rise to a variety of egos and a series of subjective positions that may come to be occupied (this includes discussions of shifters, plurality of egos, etc.)]

Stygall’s “use” of students is intriguing here… crystalizing in her brief tour of her grad students “now” – one is now working “honorably” with basic writers, others have “helped” her with other projects about gender… She bases her findings and recommendations on her own students… She quotes her own students as they illustrate their own hyperawareness of the “researchness” of the project… She is clearly the Author and her grad students (who might in other spaces be called collaborators) are clearly not… But maybe I should more actively practice some of Laurie’s positive reading skills here…