Handbook of Autoethnography by Stacy Holman Jones & Tony E. Adams & Carolyn Ellis

Author:Stacy Holman Jones & Tony E. Adams & Carolyn Ellis
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781315427799
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

The Social View

Though the work of scholars such as Emig (1971) and Flower and Hayes (1981) has often been praised, many critics voiced concerns about the methodologies used to study the writing process as well as the models that were proposed to describe it (see Berlin, 1988; Rizzell, 1982; Dobrin, 1986; Odell & Goswami, 1984; Reither, 1985; Voss, 1983). Gorrell (1983), for example, was concerned about the loss of the "product" in the enthusiasm over process. Process, he noted, is "the attempt to achieve the product" and is to some extent defined by the product itself (p. 276). After all, sausage does suggest something about the pig more than, say, a meat grinder. Some critics were concerned about the essentializing qualities of the models, that such models codify all writing processes for all individuals in singular ways (Bizzell, 1982; Bruffee, 1981, 1986; Cooper, 1986).

Most critics of the cognitive view did not disagree with the idea that writing is a learning process. Rather, they argued that the cognitive process models obscure another important aspect of writing: the socio-cultural context (Bizzell, 1982; Bruffee, 1981). In the cognitive view, writers work in isolation, in the privacy of their own minds. As I sit in my quiet office, or in a library carrel, I feel this isolation acutely. Some days, I turn on a radio so that I can feel engaged in the world. Writing is lonely. Bizzell (1982) describes the cognitive model as "inner-directed," an idea dramatically elaborated by Cooper (1986): "writing becomes a form of parthenogenesis, the author producing propositional and pragmatic structures, Athena-like, full grown and complete out of his brow" (p. 366). If only, I think to myself; texts never spring from my mind fully formed. I even write drafts of birthday greetings. The social view moved scholars from thinking about the autonomous writer, abstracted from the larger context, to a situated, "outer-directed" writer (Bizzell, 1982). In this shift, researchers moved from how a writer makes choices in the composing process—a procedural emphasis—to why such choices are made (Bizzell, 1982, p. 222).

As with the cognitive view, the social view is best understood as a family of ideas rather than a singular model (Greene, 1990). Faigley (1986), however, identifies a central assumption of the social view: "human language (including writing) can be understood only from the perspective of a society rather than a single individual" (p. 535). This view highlights writing as a social activity, often collaborative. The individual writer is "a constituent of culture" (p. 535), producing the very culture in response to which the writer then writes. A writer is therefore never isolated; even in my quiet office, I am immersed in conversations, I am part of a discursive community (Bizzell, 1982). This idea is both terrifying and amazing—terrifying because creating culture seems a big responsibility, and amazing because I want to be a voice in that endeavor.

The arc of writing's narrative may sound vaguely familiar. I see a parallel in the story of qualitative scholarship. Chase (1988) describes

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