Among English faculty there's reason for some quantity of despair, or at the very least, frustration at the current state of style and composition. Partly, this conundrum seems to me earned, if not deserved; partly, it seems inevitable; partly, it seems an Atlas-heavy task laid not on our shoulders, but our students. As it should be.
I want to concentrate on Dale L. Sullivan's "A Call for Reaffirming a Humanist Understanding of Technology," from Pragmatic Perspectives 5.1, and touch briefly on Patricia Linton, et al., "Introducing Students to Disciplinary Genres: The Role of the General Composition Course," before quickly examining "Re-placing the Sentence" by Peter Clements.
I believe one of the greatest hindrances to a full education is not that an anthropology is missing from our universities, but that the anthropology that is there is not acknowledged if not outright denied. The homo sapiens, the "knowing self," is disparaged, seen as antiquated if not (and this is mistaken) out-and-out racist and therefore inadmissible to a university's dialogue. Homo faciens, the "making self" is perhaps the more proper model the university favors, in both its trans/post-humanist sense, and in its "show me the money" sense. It is my belief humans are far more in need of guiding our ways of knowing than our ways of making. Sullivan addresses this concern in his essay, in which he argues empathy has gone the way of Homo australopithicus and prosthetic existence has taken its place. Humans have always been creatures of tools, and toolish creatures: "We need companions, fellow travelers through a technological environment changing so rapidly that, to older eyes like mine, the landscape looks more and more like a trail of relics, junk discarded by the early adopters
long ago in their race to the promised land" (155). Knowing comes about not through making, but through conversation and argument, which is also where empathy is most likely to flourish (cf. J. B. Peterson's Beyond Order (2021) and Greg Lukianoff's and Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind (2018).) So long as our classroom exercises encourage a conversation across the aisle, figuratively and literally, across cultures/individuals, empathy ought to flourish. The flourishing of individuals is loft and almost certainly more difficult to achieve than human flourishing, as communities, groups, species. Yet, the explicit teaching of genre ought to be conducive to this as it focuses on a student's discipline.
My concern and question is how do we increasingly teach to students, not to the classroom. How do we teach writers and thinkers, not writing and thinking. The demands are extraordinary, and as long as our universities are bureaucratized in such a manner and to such a degree that they admit homo faciens, homo sapiens will in fact become extinct.
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