The Creepiness Conundrum

Geoffrey Sirc makes some good points....

We could try to make composition more interesting to students. (In fact, most of us do try this.)

Few of us are happy to think of ourselves as an “academic gate-keeper” (126).

That said....

...did anyone else reading this essay get a little creeped out?

Let me gather some examples:

Sirc seems to encourage authors perceiving text production in the way the artist Cornell “loved his objects, 'happy to possess them'...the materially interesting, then, is what should guide acquisition” (116).

Later, he affirms: “A primary goal now in my writing classes (is) to show my students how their compositional future is assured” (though in what way assured I'm less certain) “if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic” (117).

On that same page, he proposes “composition as craving; teaching students to feel desire and lack” (117).

Soon after, he celebrates composition materials “chosen on the basis of exoticism and strong interest” (118).

And he argues that “the grammar of the box can keep us grounded in the basic image, in things we really care about” (119).

***

In other words...Hey people, let's colonize composition!

Yes, this is probably not Sirc's goal. I highly doubt that, if asked, Sirc would feel we should take the same social aesthetics colonizing powers took toward empire-building and apply them to composition.

Unfortunately, his wording could not have been more ill-chosen, at least from my perspective. Many of his descriptions of composition or the way teachers should approach composition have tinges of either colonialism or sexism. The materials of writing are like “objects” that should be “acquired” and “possessed.” They should be “exotic” and “craved.” Composition itself should be focused on the aesthetic, as the “image” equates to “things we really care about.” (By the by, isn't caring only about the "image" of almost anything considered fairly shallow?) I'm sorry, I'm putting an “image” together in my head of composition as the unknowable, exoticised, eroticised female “other,” defined best in terms of what she lacks, and born to be controlled and possessed by the patriarchal gaze.

Umm...Excuse me. You're making Composition uncomfortable now.

C'mon, I can't be the only one who finds Sirc's use of this language weird, right? 

In fact, this language alienated me to the point that I'm sure I've overlooked much in this essay. Looking over it again, I can see there are places where I've marked “hmm,” in the margin, my go-to marginalia for sections I feel deserve deeper thought. But Sirc's deep, deep interest in aestheticizing composition (to the point that his noting that students should be learning “some kind of basic prose styling to help them avoid verbal pitfalls in formal settings” seems a grudging after-thought not included until page 128) rubs me the wrong way.