Conference Paper Abstracts

As promised, here are the abstracts about papers I'll be presenting at upcoming conferences. The first is at NeMLA, called "Telling Mystories: Heuretics, the Personal, and Composition."

An emerging genre of personal writing outside blogs, social network sites, and reality television is “mystory.” Mystory is a “hybrid” genre invented by Gregory Ulmer that attempts to “invent a rhetoric or poetics” of electronic media and to develop “picto-ideo-phonographic writing.” This genre also allows writers to engage in personal exploration and speculation because it is closely linked with heuretics, another of Ulmer’s terms. Heuretics, which is commonly heralded as a way “out” of the ideologically oppressive and constraining hermeneutics, promises raw invention and speculation instead of critical interpretation.

Many composition scholars advocate courses and techniques that question the institutions that enable or preserve oppressive norms or ideologies. Composition scholars are also examining online writing genres for their critical potential, either under the aegis of heuretics or in terms of the internet itself. But aside from Ulmer’s work, little has been done to explore the potential of heuretics’ relationship to hermeneutics. Scholarship pits them as opposites, with hermeneutics representing traditional, constraining forms of literacy, and heuretics representing liberation from these practices. This paper argues that heuretics can only entirely accomplish its aims if it is necessarily connected to hermeneutics.

This paper links mystory with personal writing, a link that Ulmer implies but does not directly explain. I contend that if composition instructors turn to the personal writing extant in mystory, they can help students not only develop their own “logic of invention” but also understand more effectively their roles in their culture at large. In adopting practices of mystory to the composition classroom, instructors also allow students to enact heuretics’ mission, though only with hermeneutics alongside it., This paper argues that the personal (mystory) should be a key component of the composition classroom because it juxtaposes heuretics with hermeneutics and, in so doing, leads to that more productive heuretics.

The second is called "Thought, in the Proper Sense: Reading Vygotsky with Reflective Writing" and will be presented at the MCLLM conference in March.

Reflective writing occupies a curious place in the composition classroom. Though many scholars have discussed it in various ways, existing scholarship does not account for the cognitive element. This paper, then, investigates the relationship between reflective writing and cognitive development. Lev Vygotsky’s Thought and Language offers a starting point for this investigation. By applying Vygotsky’s theorization of egocentric speech to a student reflective essay, I hope to illuminate moments of complex meta-cognition.

Vygotsky’s discussion of egocentric speech sheds light on the cognitive processes underlying reflective writing. This paper suggests that Vygotsky’s conception of generalization offers composition scholars a more qualitative vocabulary for understanding reflective writing. I argue that reflective writing and egocentric speech are intimately connected: reflective writing often adopts characteristics of egocentric speech. Reflective writing is also a highly analytical mode of cognitive problem-solving, which the connection to egocentric speech helps us see.

This paper presents a sample of student reflective writing to demonstrate how Vygotsky’s theory of generalization elucidates the student’s metacognitive process. As I discuss the sample, I will use Vygotsky’s discussion of generalization to help explain the places where the student is grappling with, and mastering, difficult concepts. Ultimately, I hope to create spaces where more qualitative interpretations of reflective writing might benefit our students and lead their cognitive development.