CFP: Refiguring Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy (4/1/03; collection)

full name / name of organization: 
T. R. Johnson
contact email: 

Refiguring Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy


Since the early 1980s, many teachers of composition have associated the
teaching of style with a product-oriented pedagogy that emphasizes
standards of form and rules of usage and that relies on exercises that
are stripped of rhetorical context and unconnected to the student's
actual writing. In short, many of us understand pedagogies interested in
style as counter to pedagogies interested in critical and creative
thinking. Conversely, many figures in the history of rhetoric have
understood style very differently -- as inherently interwoven with the
sorts of reflection that generate ideas for writing. Classical
rhetoricians such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, for instance,
recognized style's capacity as a tool of invention. What's more, much
recent scholarship in the field of composition suggests we should
re-evaluate style-based pedagogies. In her book The Emperor's New
Clothes (1995), Kathryn Flannery argues for a rhetorical conception of
style that advocates artifice and a range of styles; Robert Connors
questions the demise of sentence-level pedagogy since the 1980s in his
article "The Erasure of the Sentence" (2000); and Peter Elbow laments
the dismissal of style in a recent College English opinion piece, "The
Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the
Other?" (2002). Therefore, we are seeking essay-proposals from a wide
range of composition teachers for a book called Refiguring Style:
Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy. We are particularly interested in
works that address one or more of the following questions: How can we
teach style as a tool for invention and/or critical reflection? How has
style figured historically in writing classrooms and/or in the minds of
writers? What sorts of theories can help us understand the ways an
awareness of style might figure in students' experience of the composing
process? How should we think about style-based pedagogies in the context
of institutional and disciplinary politics, even the wider politics of
race, class, gender, and sexuality? How might we re-imagine the role of
literary texts in a style-based writing classroom? How can style help us
rethink the conflicting interests in authorial voice and academic
discourse? How might style-based pedagogies figure within composition
teachers' anxieties about their status as professionals, as belonging to
an academic discipline? Please send a 500 word proposal by April 1, 2003
to T. R. Johnson / Dept of English / University of New Orleans / New
Orleans, LA 70148 or to Thomas Pace / Dept of English / John Carroll
University / 20700 North Park Blvd. / University Heights, OH 44118.

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Received on Thu Aug 29 2002 - 11:46:03 EDT