The Art in the Everyday: Making the Extracurricular and the Vernacular Academic, Without the Bullshit

For me, the main overlap of Gere’s article and the article we read by Eubanks and Schaefer is that academic discourse is structured to only value certain kinds of experience and very specific ways of communicating that experience. For example, in many ways student writers are expected to keep the self out of their writing, to eliminate their own voice and appropriate the voice of academia—a voice that has not historically allowed the smallest fraction of subjectivity. Many of the writers Gere describes not only had “many negative experiences with schooling,” but also came from communities in which “nobody ever asked them their opinions about anything” (78, 76). So, the abnegation of self that has already been internalized in so many student writers is even further impounded by the expectations of academic writing when they get to secondary school and college. Along these lines, Eubanks and Schaefer point out that composition “explicitly advocates” that students replicate the forms and internal logic of academic discourse, forcing students to “develop an identity within a community of discourse,” or in other words, “gain genre knowledge” (385). However, they also point out that “good writing is inseparable from the context in which it arises,” something we can see quite clearly if we take into account the contemporary view that writing should be as direct and concise as possible and take a peak back and see how dense and confusing most academic writing was for the majority of history (385). It is really only since the civil rights era that academic discourse in universities began to challenge its own internal ‘bullshit,’ so they ways in which students manipulate their own voices to qualify as ‘good writers’ now vary from those that might have been produced earlier in the twentieth-century. As Gere found in her article, the extracurricular writing workshops motivated and inspired writers so substantially precisely because they valued the experience of each individual, and connections were permitted and encouraged between the writers’ compositions and the larger social situation they were writing from. While Eubanks and Schaefer mostly just critique academic discourse, Gere points to ways that composition can be made more organic (and less, well, shitty) by allowing connections between the work of the classroom and the life of the writer, as good writing usually has a strong life in the writer.

The Eubanks and Schaefer article seems to suggest that we tend to define literacy as an ability to speak on par with and follow the logic of academic discourse. In other words, we define literacy as the ability to create and interpret ‘bullshit,’ and those who are skilled in this arena are not necessarily more intelligent than others, but rather have merely mastered the genre conventions of academic discourse. Eubanks and Schaefer do not categorically reject ‘bullshit,’ however and spend most of their time delineating between malignant ‘bullshit’ and benign ‘bullshit,’ ultimately deciding that some of the latter is “inevitable when people are attempting to write well” (387).

My only observation is that I really enjoy the Gere article and appreciate how it connects the personal and the academic in compelling ways. The Eubanks and Schaeffer article is less interesting to me just because it appears more technical and less constructive than the vision Gere has for creating more engaging composition environments. I also feel like Eubanks and Schaefer’s approach to critiquing ‘academic bullshit’ remains very much within the realm of academic discourse and would like to have seen them take more risks than just using a relatively minor profanity; with Gere I feel like her article is smart and resourceful without relegating her message to a very specific community of intellectuals.