Texts as a Happening

All day today, I kept trying to think about what to write about for this week’s “dumbass” blog entry. It feels like the entire week my fingers have been glued to a computer’s keyboard or to a pen or pencil. Writing has been non-stop; I’ve written checks, in-class notes, sent text messages, responded to countless emails, finished one term paper, and the writing keeps coming even when I dream I’m writing! Even now, I am writing this blog while simultaneously working on finishing up parts of my inquiry paper and presentation for our course. Needless to say, I feel a little drained to think of an interesting topic or some deep connection or profound statement about writing. Nevertheless, I would like to use the space in this entry to share with you a fascinating book about writing that I encountered while researching and reading for my inquiry paper in our class.

“I suppose the reason none of us burn incense in our writing classes any more is because of the dick drives. Smoke’s not supposed to be good for them, right? But what about the sounds, the candlelight, the students on the floor, the dark? What about that other scene of writing instruction? Where has that gone, the idea of the writing classroom as black canvas, ready to be inscribed as a singular compositional space?”

Catchy opening for a book about writing and the composition classroom, huh? I thought so! The book’s author is Geoffery Sirc and the title is English Composition as a Happening. Sirc uses the space of the book to raises some very simple yet powerful questions about the writing classroom such as: How shall writing be defined?; How shall we teach what we put into theory?; How can composition studies look to other disciplines to see how they view the processes of composition and what can English learn from them? To situate what Sirc is referring to when he say “Happening” he is referring to a very specific movement in the visual arts that took place in the 1960s. The term Happening was coined by Allan Kaprow and they were rather avant-garde “performances” that took place only once. I put quotations around the work performance because this work might provoke certain image in people that involve a very formal performance on Broadway for example. Performances typically imply a group of trained people who’ve practiced, memorized scripts, and act out something for an audience. However, the 1960’s Happenings could be described as were roughly (sometimes very roughly) scripted events performed in a public space and often –but not always- relied on volunteers to be part of the performance. Happenings were often intended to be a form of social commentary and raised questions about things such as the status of art and its relationship to life. Sadly, almost as quickly as the movement game to a head it died out. I have been fascinated with the book thus far because of Sirc attempts to draw parallels between the development of Happenings in the visual art field and the developments of the process movements in composition, which took place in the 1960s as well.

I’m very interested to see where Sirc takes these ideas with respect to using them in a 21^st century writing classroom. I will leave you with another thought-provoking quote from the author and maybe it will spark some thoughts about writing, knowledge, and us as professional in whatever discipline.

“My sense of composition is now a field that all reads the same books, shares the same notion of what counts as professional knowledge; this auto-replicating homogeneity of the professional becomes the material discriminator…reading selections based on ‘the sorts of readings we talk about when we talk with our colleagues’”.

** The first quote used in the blog entry comes from page 1 and the second comes from page 265 of Sirc, G. (2002). English composition as a happening. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.