Write a composition on "Professional intentions of an author"
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Answer:What is composition’s twenty-first century relationship to what Susan Miller in 1989 called “the now easily deniable claptrap of inspired, unitary ‘authorship’ that contemporary theorists in other fields have so thoroughly deconstructed” (Rescuing 3)? In particular, this article asks what the status is of authorial intent in composition. I answer that the “claptrap” is alive and well: not only is the lure of intent still very much with us, but it also marks a series of fissures that are particularly telling of the dysfunctional ways in which student writers are often constructed in composition theory and pedagogy.
“How do writers and readers develop ideas together?” (372), we can reimagine the ways in which texts of all kinds work in the composition classroom and, thus, also rework the pedagogies that interpolate these texts into (and out of) the classroom.
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This isn’t to say that these theoretical understandings have been seamlessly translated into literature classrooms. Some students and faculty, whether out of habit, resistance, or ignorance, still may have recourse to discourses and constructions of the author’s intent in their quest to find and create textual meaning. Some continue to value authorial intent because of their conscious or unconscious allegiances to liberal humanist ideologies of individualism—the invincibility of individual agency, the allure of writers’ specialness. Sometimes teachers’ theoretically unsound pedagogy is less a sign of willful resistance to the reign of theory than a mark of the disjunction between theoretical understandings and pedagogical practices, of not knowing how to translate theoretical understandings into pedagogical practice, of falling back on old models of teaching, of teaching the way we were taught. The chasm is even more apparent in many K-12 classrooms, where textbooks, bureaucracies, inadequate professional development, and outdated teacher preparation programs mean that classroom practices are often many decades behind scholarship in English Studies.
The chasms multiply and deepen in the case of composition. First, composition theory itself is fractured and has not unequivocally announced the death of the author. Second, the disjunction between theory and pedagogy is larger and more consequential in composition classrooms at all levels than it is in literature classrooms—this is hardly surprising, given that critical theory revolutionized literary studies several decades before it made an impact on composition scholarship and pedagogy.{2} Third, as with the case of literature pedagogy, composition pedagogy still seems to be rooted in intent. Composition’s allegiance to authorial intent takes many forms, as I shall adumbrate in the following section. These include an implicit privileging of intent in much composition theory that treats writing instruction, well-meaning assumptions about best practices in commonplace directions for responding to student writing, and the dispositions and practices of many composition instructors and student writers.
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The ascendance of social constructionist theories of writing in composition studies,{3} and the work of compositionists and linguists such as Linda Brodkey, Marilyn Cooper, Sharon Crowley (“Derrida”), Janet Giltrow, Rebecca Moore Howard, and Jasper Neel that critiques modernist assumptions about authorial solitariness, originality, and unity in composition pedagogy, would seem to complement work in literary and cultural theory that destabilizes the Author, the subject, and presence. Further, we might imagine that collaborative writing, a practice much theorized in composition and often practiced in composition classrooms, would muddy the meaning of intent, and that electronic technologies’ dislocation of the “traditional subjectivities of classroom writers” (Faigley 200) would contribute to the erosion of traditional allegiances to writerly intent. However, in many ways that I will chronicle in this section, intent seems to hold sway in composition pedagogy, albeit sometimes conflictedly. Part of the attachment to authorial intent in the composition classroom is no doubt a function of what Lester Faigley in 1992 termed composition’s refusal to surrender “its belief in the writer as an autonomous self” (15), in his analysis of composition’s relationship to postmodernism. This refusal also informs composition’s modernist conceptualization of authorial voice.
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