I'm musing on this idea for my project for Anne's class. When we met last week, I told Anne I wanted to think about pleasure in writing: How do we get students to take pleasure in their writing? How should we approach it? Why? And is this even something we should be teaching or thinking about?

I still want to explore these questions, but as I read Byron Hawk's book (yes, I'm reading ahead for Dennis's class-- cool your jets. It's for research purposes only), I came across this idea that had been clanging around in the back of my head. It comes from Gregory Ulmer's book Internet Invention, which I've read twice and on which I'm presenting in two weeks at NeMLA. Ulmer writes about what he calls the "bliss-sense" (I think he takes this from Barthes). For Ulmer, the "bliss-sense" refers to the experience of remembering based on a small detail in a photo, film, image, etc. It does not necessarily have to be an aesthetic detail or pleasure in that detail itself; in other words, we could look at a photo of a dog chasing a ball, see the background, and remember a summer day when we caught our first fish. These memories are at first, and likely, unrelated, but they call on the store of associational networks in our experience.

So what? I think that this discussion of "bliss-sense" might be valuable for teaching writing, especially under the aegis of personal writing. If we ask students to remember, to examine things slowly and critically, we can tap into this "bliss-sense" and allow invention to occur. This is Ulmer's hope, I think. At present, I'm not sure where to go or where to take this. I'm wondering if this "bliss-sense" can be applied to Crosswhite's idea of reasoning. Would it catalyze reasoning techniques and the desire for change/argumentation? Or would it incite other methods that remain completely outside of current paradigms for rhetoric?

On a somewhat related note, I'm thinking of asking my students what gives them pleasure in writing, or what would give them pleasure, if anything. I might ask if personal writing -- telling their own stories in particular ways -- would achieve this. We'll see.