what I'm taking home from #4C14

A fantastic CCCC has come to a close, and I'm going to act on the advice I heard a seasoned conference-goer give a first-timer: take a moment to pause and think about what two or three things I'm taking home from the conference.

One: I'm thinking about the genres and approaches we use when writing, in the profession.

While working the Composition Studies booth in the exhibit hall on Friday, I had a conversation with someone who was surprised—and gratified—to learn that a new section of the journal debuted last fall, "Composing With," publishes largely narratives (according to the submissions page, work that "aim[s] to immerse readers in a particular experience rather than making a traditional academic argument").

I suppose this is something cribbed straight from my mentor, but I believe it's important to open up our profession's work past traditional academic arguments and to work in other modes, genres, and approaches that may be more wandering or inquisitive and generative. That can point us, not only grab us by the horns.

I especially thought of this as I attended session N.36 ("Never Mind, Geoffery Sirc: A Tribute Panel"). What I most appreciated about it was the willingness of panelists (and I'm thinking particularly of Jenny Rice's beautiful, lyrical musing on "lines" that is still haunting me two days later) to work with words that were beautiful, to work with experience and emotion, and to make arguments that were more implicit than explicit, that wash over and percolate.

Two: I'm thinking about invention as a relational, potentially affective force.

This is a raw and unformed nugget of an idea that's a product of attending both panel A.09 (“The things they left behind”: Toward an Object-Oriented History of Composition) and E.35 ("Spaces of Invention: The Museum, the Collection, the Screen"). In A.09, panelists argued for opening rhetorical history up past the study of "what it means to be a human" to addressing the role of non-human things in our field history. In particular, I'm thinking about Jason Palmeri's talk about assemblages in Berthoff's work, a focus that led one panel-goer in the Q& to characterize the panel's focus as being more about Berthoff's attention to relations, than to meaning making.

This thinking followed me into E.35, where I was struck by how Susan Delagrange, Elizabeth Weiser, and Nan Johnson all variously discussed being drawn toward (or, most particularly in Weiser's case, away from) objects, narratives, aesthetics, others. Here are the various threads, as I remember them: Delagrange quoted Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, where Scarry notes that our natural reaction, in the face of beauty, is to stare—that beauty draws us to objects, draws our attention outside of ourselves, and can therefore be used in the service of justice and attending to others. Weiser worked with how museums construct narratives, and how their multi-dimensional spaces can ask visitors to identify (or not) with the unifying narratives constructed through spaces, arrangement, and objects. Johnson, in a tour of several objects in her collection that had drawn her interest (and obvious passion), made the argument that items considered as ephemera can actually be important to rhetorical history (arguing "ephemera is only ephemera until you decide it's important"). She looked at the pathways implied by these obejcts, and how they show how ideas get diffused throughout culture.

It seems that there's something to following the things that pull us, feel immediate to us, make us feel emotions. There's work done in putting things in relation to one another (as so amusingly demonstrated in Palmeri's slide with the chicken and chicken salad). Invention happens in those affectively charged moments, or can be traced through those relations? Something. Something's there.

I'll be letting these thoughts percolate as I revise my RNF proposal into a dissertation prospectus, sometime this summer....