New
Histories of Writing I
Historiographies
2003 MMLA Meeting
Chicago, IL
08 November
Richard
Jewell
Inver Hills Community College
A
Phenomenology of Composition's Fifty-Year War of the Paradigms
Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology in the early twentieth
century, asks us in his Cartesian Meditations to accept "any
judgment as scientific" only if it is "derived from evidence,
from 'experiences'...present to me." Spellmeyer calls such
evidence "ordinary sensuous life, which is...the ground of
thought itself...." It is this sensuous life--the real writing
experiences of real writers--that suggests no one system alone is
right and the interregnum that now exists--what Kathleen Blake Yancey
calls our "plural commons"--might be the best situation
possible in the field of writing practice. Fifty years ago, there
was no understanding, let alone acceptance of, Spellmeyer's "sensuous
life" in student writers. Thirty years ago, Peter Elbow's books
helped set the cultural stage for the process movement. Ten years
later, social epistemic theories began gaining power. We now seem
to be in the midst of a great and continuing pause, a time when
no one system dominates. The phenomenological experience of writing,
in itself, thus has become the concrete ground in which we submerge
ourselves each day to discover which theories truly work.