blogging for discursive variety

In his essay, “Resisting Academics” (found in Andrea Greenbaum’s collection, Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition), Bruce Horner argues against composition’s resistance to “the academic” and defends academic discourse as having “use value” that is often overlooked in our fixation on “exchange-value.” He borrows from Tom Fox’s ideas in Defending Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education and makes the point that the issue we face in composition classes is not “which discursive form to use but how to participate in continuing literate traditions of using a variety of discursive forms, traditions ordinarily hidden from view by the dominant” (182). Horner and Fox argue that just because a certain discursive form is understood by dominant culture to be a certain way and having a specific purpose (e.g. academic discourse can’t be relevant to or address the personal) does not mean that the form is as static, as “fixed in meaning” as we assume it to be. Textual forms–even academic discourse, according to Horner–can be put to a variety of uses in a variety of contexts, dependent, in part, on “the conditions making possible those practices and the work to which readers and writers so situated may put them” (Horner 182).

I am hoping that blogging in first-year writing classes can have the potential to explore, experiment with, and illustrate these arguments that Horner and Fox make. As both readers and writers of blogs students will be exposed to the various textual forms used for blogging, as well as the UNfixed meaning, purpose, and use of these writings. It will be about exploring the conditions that might be involved in producing various types of writing–even though we may not always know them or have access to them. We can at least see our own situatedness as students, readers, writers, etc..