Metadissertating

Initial Reading List

preterite Metadissertating

I realize I haven’t yet talked much about what for me is the most significant component of this dissertation-type project, which is the computers angle to composition and socioeconomic class. I say most significant for me because in the readings I did to pass my exams, I concluded that — while very few people in composition are talking about socioeconomic class — it dwindles to almost none in the sub-discipline of computers and composition. I think some of the reasons for this phenomenon are the same as the reasons for the dearth of class discourses in composition; however, I think there are other factors too — things having to do with the uneasy ways computers complicate cultural and economic relations, and our notions about the relationship between education and technological progress — that I haven’t yet adequately started to pin down for myself.
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Where I’m Coming From

preterite Class (Meta), Class (Other), Metadissertating

My discipline, composition, has only really started to talk about socioeconomic class in the past several years. Comp folks have been doing smart, rigorous work with other aspects of identity politics, particularly race, ethnicity and gender, for a while now, and we’ve started to pay better attention to sexuality as an aspect of identity politics, but the conversations we have about class have been problematic and inconsistent. So that’s what I’m after in my dissertation, generally speaking, and what I’m going on about here.

It’s not just an issue with compositionists, though; America has its myth of how nobody is ever really poor, we’re all just pre-rich (I think that’s a Geoff Nunberg quotation, though I’m not sure). But compositionists, aside from Richard Ohmann, John Trimbur, Bruce Horner, and a few others, have either ignored class, or treated it only as an authenticity claim based on lived experience: “I’m working class because I’ve had a working-class life and I know what it’s like.” (Never mind the adjunct with the million-dollar vocabulary and seven years of graduate school who claims she’s working class because she makes <$25K). Or, well, that's not entirely true. To be a little more rigorous: as I've suggested elsewhere, we discuss class in terms of (1) relations of production, (2) wealth and vocation, (3) values and culture, and (4) lived experience and authenticity claims, often without sorting those categories out, or even acknowledging them. So I could go a number of ways: I could say, "Here's how things look, and here are the teaching implications, if we use perspective 1," and devote a chapter to it, and then another chapter to perspective 2, and so on. Could be useful. Alternatively, I could try to come up with my own, more rigorous perspective, based on what people outside of composition have had to say about class. Although it doesn't come with its own handy dissertation-chapter-ordering-scheme, it's an approach that currently appeals to me a little more, in large part because I think even the 4 perspectives I've mentioned above are way too loosey-goosey to do anything with.