Writing Studies
I’ve not entered into the carnival circuit before, but I would like to offer some thoughts regarding John Trimbur’s Changing the question: Should writing be studied?. Some responses (at least so far) seem to have relatively little to do with the substance of the article, but are nonetheless stimulating.
To begin, Jeff Rice conflates Trimbur’s arguments with his own argument about networks: “‘The social relations and bodies of knowledge’ are central to any ‘thing’ we name or categorize as ‘writing.’” Trimbur’s question is branded as “odd” because, (at least as I understand Jeff’s claim) writing cannot be “studied” without studying the surrounding networks/economies of production and consumption. This point is easily granted, but seems commonplace. More intriguing is his closing reflection on Barthes A Lover’s Discourse:
Each conversation brings an ordinary, insistent, or occasional relationship to the reading or writing. Those conversations, implicit and explicit, can occur in a shopping list (which is one example Trimbur provides from his textbook; a writing some students dispute and label irrelevant) or on a website or in an encounter, or in a book, and so on. This writing, however, is not, as Trimbur offers, symbolic. Its process or flow does not represent another experience or encounter. It is writing itself. The challenge is to ask: how does one generate or maintain such relations with references? How does one teach that writing within an already established network that poses references as proof or confirmation?
The conflation attempted here does not make nearly as much sense to me. The methodology deployed to explore the discourse of lovers is not even vaguely interchangeable with the context of academic writing studies. I am a huge fan of Barthes; the “process or flow” of the discourse of lovers does not represent another experience or encounter, but this is not equivalent to a lack of symbolic content. Indeed, such discourse is at its root symbolic in an iconic sense:
