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Writing Our Academic Selves: The Literacy Autobiography as Performance

Johanna Schmertz

Pedagogy, Volume 18, Issue 2, April 2018, pp. 279-293 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Writing Our Academic Selves The Literacy Autobiography as Per formance

Johanna Schmertz

In 1995, Peter Elbow posed the question, “Have you ever noticed that when we write articles or books as academics, we often have the same feeling that students have when they turn in their papers. ‘Is this okay? Will you accept this?’ ” (82). Elbow is talking about the perils of academic discourse, encour- aging empathy for students struggling with academic writing by reminding the readers of College Composition and Communication that we and our stu- dents are not so different when it comes to meeting its demands: our identities are at stake in academic discourse, identities that are measured, accepted, and rejected by a removed audience that the seasoned writer must fictional- ize (Ong 1975) and the novice must invent (Bartholomae 1995). Because of this removed audience, and because academic writing requires the use of the voices of others, academic writers adopt and perform identities that can feel somewhat uncomfortable.

We can share the reasons for our discomfort in academic writing — and the inevitability and necessity of such discomfort — with our students, so that they can consciously manage their academic performances in ways that foster rather than inhibit their identities. In this article I discuss ways of reading and responding to an academic genre that bridges personal and aca- demic writing and provides opportunities for constructing new identities in a relatively safe space: the literacy autobiography. The literacy autobiography can be read and renarrated in ways that enable students to identify the par- ticular problems posed by academic forms of writing and that help them find

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Volume 18, Number 2 doi 10.1215/15314200-4359197 © 2018 by Duke University Press

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their own solutions to those problems. When the literacy autobiography is contextualized in other stories about literacy, students are able to take up the task of using this genre to revise their identities through explicit acts of reflec- tion and self- citation, revisions that also help open up the practices of aca- demic discourse. To illustrate the pedagogical possibilities of a performative approach to the literacy autobiography, I read two literacy autobiographies that directly address the issue of academic writing for their performative moves: writer Barbara Mellix’s frequently anthologized essay “From Outside, In” (1987) and a paper written by my student Violet after she read Mellix. As their engagements with academic writing show, academic performances shape new academic identities when those performances pay particular attention to that which nonacademic forms of discourse keep silent: the role of citation in identity formation.

The Literacy Autobiography: Performing on the Boundaries

Literacy autobiography assignments ask students to narrate and reflect upon their previous and evolving encounters with written language. They have been incorporated into university courses for decades, at least since David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts in 1986. Occupying a special status in the teaching of writing, the literacy autobiography — frequently referred to in the scholarship under the more encompassing term literacy narrative — is typically assigned to students who are beginning new academic paths. It is assigned frequently enough that we might consider it a rite of passage or initiation of sorts. In fact, it can interact with academic discourse in ways that position it as an antecedent genre or a boundary practice.1 Exemplifying what Mary Louise Pratt has called the “arts of the contact zone,” the literacy autobiography provides the kind of opportunities for “self- translation [that] are critical to learning how to write in any new context” (Soliday 1994: 520).

In pedagogical practice, the purpose of the literacy autobiography gets adapted to specific needs of specific courses. For example, in freshman writing courses where it is assumed that students must learn to write in ways specific to the university environment, the literacy autobiography is often used to encourage students to unpack conflicts between their identities and the kind of writing they are expected to perform, enabling students to main- tain a sense of agency as they move between home and academic discourses (Scott 1997; Williams 2003; LeCourt 2006; Alexander 2011; Rutten 2011; Scenters- Zapico and Chandler 2012). This use of the literacy autobiography to help college freshmen identify and mitigate identity conflicts is especially

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prevalent in basic writing and English- as- second- language classrooms, where the gap between home languages and university expectations is often more pronounced.2 At more advanced academic settings, the purpose of the liter- acy autobiography shifts toward more metacognitive reflections on the nature of language and writing, particularly when the genre is being used as an entry point to a new academic discipline. Such entry points include the profes- sional writing classroom (Ryan 2001), the instruction of writing associates (Carpenter and Falbo 2006), professional development courses for secondary education teachers (McKinney and Giorgas 2009), and graduate seminars for novice teaching assistants (Mortimer 2001). In these more advanced aca- demic settings, students are encouraged to reflect on new forms of academic discourse and new disciplinary genres as they engage in the process of taking them on. Finally, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), a digital repository and interactive database of literacy narratives supported by Ohio State University that enables students to contribute their own literacy auto- biographies while studying those of others, has proved useful to teachers at all levels of the curriculum, supporting an “archival turn” in research- based writing instruction (Comer and Harker 2015).

Scholars in the social sciences who have applied the tools of narrative analysis to performance studies have concluded that identity is constructed through storytelling performances, with performance being the mecha- nism for change (e.g., Bruner 1990, 1991; Riessman 2000; Wortham 2001). Such work aims to identify how humans shape (and reshape) their identities through conventions of storytelling. In the field of literary studies, the study of autobiography has similarly incorporated the tools of performance studies, positing links between writing autobiographically and transforming one’s cir- cumstances (or perceptions of them). Feminist literary critics Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001: 45), for example, suggest that autobiographical writ- ing holds out the promise that “people, in the act of narrating their lives . . . might change the stories they tell, might gain access to other cultural scripts, might come to understand themselves differently, might, that is, exercise agency.” Adapting Judith Butler’s theories about identity- formation, they sug- gest that the kind of change autobiography makes possible works performa- tively: “The interiority or self that is said to be prior to the autobiographical expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical storytelling” (145). Autobiographies, then, may be seen as active constructions of self and oppor- tunities to revise that self. Telling a story about oneself helps one construct that self. Retelling it helps one revise one’s identity.

The connection between identity and self- narration that I outline

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above is somewhat less developed in composition scholarship, an absence particularly noticeable in the area of literacy narrative studies, where such work would seem to naturally fit. The scholarship on literacy narratives and literacy autobiography assignments in the field of composition studies largely ignores the question of performance, even though the genre explicitly foregrounds turning points in a student’s career where he or she is expected to perform in new ways. There are places in composition scholarship where literacy narratives are considered as performances — as opposed to documents that accurately record and reflect personal experience — but the emphasis is generally on the ways in which such performances reinforce or counter the “literacy myth” (Graff 2010) that posits a “great divide” between literate and nonliterate societies. For example, Krista Bryson (2012: 225) argues that it is in the “inherent nature” of literacy narratives to “hail narrators into literate identities framed by the literacy myth” and that narrative analyses of literacy autobiographies contained within the DALN will uncover the various struc- tures of that myth. Work by Bronwyn Williams (2003) and Kara Poe Alexan- der (2011) similarly focuses on the identity types that literacy autobiographies summon forth from their writers (e.g., the hero, the child prodigy, the rebel), types that reinforce the literacy myth.

However, a recent emphasis on retelling and revising self- narratives shows promise of bringing greater attention to the literacy autobiography’s pedagogical and critical possibilities as a self- shaping performance. Notably, Sally Chandler (2013) invites her students to identify themes in their own literacy narratives and reflect upon them because learning requires reinven- tions of the self (159) and because “repeated retellings and new combinations of identity stories work to support identity shift” (197). Patrick Berry (2013: 155) shows how literacy narratives can engage prisoners in acts of self- making and world making that project them into possible futures. Finally, Anne- Marie Hall and Christopher Minnix’s (2012) article on the successful use of the literacy autobiography to structure an entire basic writing course shows how repeated performances within this genre can be used to spur the work of reflective revision. My work in this article aims to emphasize the impor- tance of the role of repeated retellings to constructions of academic identity, particularly as it relates to academic discourse and its parallel insistence on retracing its own steps through the mechanism of citation.

Agency and Intelligibility

Judith Butler’s theories about subjectivity enable us to reconsider the ques- tion of agency in writing, in particular academic writing and the anxieties

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about identity that it can provoke. I will be calling attention in this essay to her use of the terms cite and citationality in her discussions of performativity, in order to apply them to academic discourse, a form of writing that requires the writer to use and cite the ideas of others. Butler suggests that “identities are constructed iteratively through complex citational processes” (Parker and Sedgwick 1995: 2). In other words, our identities are formed in and through uses of language, through repetitive citations — performances — of preexist- ing norms that our words both create and stabilize. We are addressed, clas- sified, and named in culturally specific ways — for example, by nation of origin, physical condition, roles in familial and economic structures. And we respond according to the terms of that address, repeating and invoking specific sorts of norms within specific discursive contexts — we are this kind of son, that kind of American, and so on. When we invoke — or “cite,” to use Judith Butler’s term — these categorizing norms in our speech acts (including, for my purposes here, academic writing), we gain what Butler in Bodies That Matter (1993) calls intelligibility: the possibility of being recognized by oth- ers, as well as a precondition for agency.

Extending these insights to the classroom, we understand that both the university and its students are framed by preexisting norms, norms that determine what will be deemed intelligible. Students come to the classroom already performing norms that have given them various degrees of intel- ligibility within the communities of which they are part. In our classrooms they often must recompose their identities in order to be deemed intelli- gible within our discourse communities. They must craft academic identities which their teachers recognize as such. Such recomposing of academic iden- tity is required of all of us who operate in university contexts, as I suggest. But what I would like to draw particular attention to is the role of citation in constructing these academic performances. Our performances of academic identity consist of citations and reformulations of identities that have previ- ously been recognized as intelligible, repetitions with a difference that both define and extend the boundaries of academic discourse.

Citation and the Literacy Autobiography: Mellix and Violet

In the same journal issue where Elbow noted the identity disconnect between academic and other forms of writing, David Bartholomae (1995: 67) suggested that the problem faced by novice college writers had to do with citation and a failure to recognize its role in creating academic voices. Bartholomae’s use of the word citation to mean both standard academic practices of acknowl- edging one’s sources and the ability to understand how one’s “voice” may be

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constructed via those sources forecasts Butler’s later contention that iden- tity is a matter of citation, of (re)citing preexisting discourses and social norms.3 In the literacy autobiography, the ways we practice and build identity through citation are often brought to the surface and explored, either directly or through indirect, self- reflexive performances. In this section, I focus on two specific literacy autobiographies to illustrate how we produce identities through citation, and academic identities through calling attention to those citations.

In the first literacy autobiography, “From Outside, In” writer Barbara Mellix (1987) repeatedly reframes — cites — her own language and writing and states that she has learned that she is continually subject to change in and by language. Throughout this essay, Mellix reveals the performative identity work that academic discourse accomplishes. Mellix discusses the shifting linguistic norms she struggled with over a series of dramatic life transitions: from childhood in an all- black small- town environment in Greeleyville, South Carolina, to working adulthood in a mostly white city and, finally, to life as a college student. She encountered and adapted to a wide range of discursive norms during this period of transition but makes clear to her read- ers at the outset of her essay that her “finest, most cherished Black English” remains a significant and powerful language resource for her (287). She talks about gradually discovering the powers of “standard” English through a series of mixed messages from the adults in her childhood, and of watching city relatives move easily in their speech from “black English to standard English to a mix between the two” (291). Notably, she finds her most signifi- cant struggle takes place in and around the act of writing. Writing, she makes clear, was always an occasion for Standard English. Written English equated to Standard English for Mellix, and Standard English represented her feeling of outsider status (297). Thus, Mellix felt unable to use written language to claim an identity for herself and found herself “hugging to herself a disabling mistrust of language she thought could not represent a person with her his- tory and experience” (296).

From her elementary school sentences to her first attempts at college writing, Mellix provides her readers with excerpts from her writing, reading those excerpts for the conflicts they register. By displaying various stages of her development as a writer, she is, I believe, doing much more than offer- ing herself and her readers an opportunity to applaud her development as a writer. She is not, in other words, simply rehearsing a success story or literacy myth — she is citing herself, and thereby reframing both her old identities and

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her current identity, adding new links to a citational chain of identities that had already been working to reshape her world. For example, she discusses an important stage of academic development where she described others but did not recognize at the time that in so doing she was redescribing herself. Writing of the physical and emotional pain that frequently goes along with working- class jobs, she quotes an authoritative and persuasive passage from her own writing, but she qualifies her achievement: “I was free to move about in the language of ‘others’ [only] as long as I was speaking of others” (294). Following the logic of the literacy myth, one might anticipate that her next move would be to offer a passage from a later stage of her college writing career, to show readers that she has moved past this stage into one where she feels free to “move about” in academic discourse while speaking of herself. Mellix does not do this. Instead, she lets the last two paragraphs of her essay attest to her ease and ability. She performs, rather than states, her achieve- ment. She cites linguists and psychoanalysts whose insights bear on her own situation, synthesizing them and using her own insights to extend what they say. And she states that for her it is no longer a question of learning how to make writing (or language) express her identity. Rather, writing/language and identity move forward together:

Now that I know that to seek knowledge, freedom, and autonomy means always to be in the concentrated process of becoming — always to be venturing into new territory, feeling one’s way at first, then getting one’s balance, negotiating, accommodating, discovering oneself in ways that previously defined “others” — I sometimes get tired. And I ask myself why I keep on participating in this highbrow form of violence, this slamming against perplexity. But there is no real futility in the question . . . writing and rewriting, practicing, experimenting, I came to comprehend more fully the generative power of language. I discovered — with the help of some especially sensitive teachers — that through writing one can continually bring new selves into being, each with new responsibilities and difficulties. Remarkable power, indeed. I write and continually give birth to myself. (297)

In writing, Mellix both experiences and explores the new selves which have been compelled into being by education and by the discursive acts performed therein. But she also gives intelligibility, within academic registers, to old selves that matter. Finally thoroughly at home in the academic discourses that have shaped her, she changes the terms of that discourse by citing those terms with a difference — a difference created by her prior encodings as a rural African- American nontraditional student. Over the course of her essay she

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alters the terms of what may be spoken academically and how it can be spoken while still remaining perfectly intelligible within academic norms.

As my discussion of Mellix shows, the process of gaining an academic identity is not a matter merely of repetition of academic norms but also of cit- ing old norms in new ways. My second example of a literacy autobiography, written by my student Violet, shows this as well: Violet self- consciously fash- ions an identity that is both personal and academic through the practice of citation. For her, academic discourse became a citational (re)construction of her own voice, and of the practices of academic discourse as well. I frequently use Barbara Mellix’s essay in beginning writing classes like the one Violet was in to spur a class discussion of dialects, registers, and academic genres. I next require students to write the history of their own encounters with reading and writing. Once they have read Mellix’s literacy autobiography and writ- ten their own, I encourage students to write a second literacy autobiography as a means to reflect on how they have positioned/performed themselves as readers and writers, asking them to contextualize their first literacy autobiog- raphies in other depictions of literacy.4 Violet, whose work I excerpt below, followed one of my literacy sequences. While she fully comprehended Mel- lix’s reasons for embracing the norms of academic discourse, she distances herself from a similar embrace while acknowledging that she cannot entirely avoid it. She pokes fun at the limits of academic discourse. In her final paper, from which the following passage is taken, Violet mounts an argument against the restrictive forms of writing required by freshman composition:

We have been instructed to “use writing both to explore and to communicate” (Schmertz 1). If I were given leave to write in whatever way comes natural to me, to explore the way I think, I would probably end up with a stream of thought, used with contractions, interrupted by explanatory parentheses (like these) and many side comments outside the natural stream (also used for explanation purposes or just for interjection of humor (especially humorous are nested parentheses (like these) though there is a point at which the point is lost and the train of thought is derailed (like now))). . . . I would also write more like how I speak, in some cases, usually with short sentences. Really short. Really. There would also be gratuitous bolding and italicizing, to show which points I am drawing attention to. However, these are not accepted in collegiate- type formal writing. There is still a language barrier from the way I think to the way I must record my thoughts in written form.

Consequently, the way we believe writing should work and the way the rest of the world communicates are two mismatched sets that don’t mesh unless liberties are allowed for the writer. Writers must change what they think into something that doesn’t always match their thoughts. Nevertheless, these liberties do not seem to

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be appearing in mainstream literature, though I eagerly await a time in which I’m considered the most talented writer of my time for outstanding breakthroughs in writing theory.

Violet argues for a greater realm of what “counts” for academic discourse, and in her writing she successfully expands those domains. She enjoys playing with language in ways she recognizes are not consonant with the expectations of her English teachers (though she obviously knows her performance will earn a high grade from me, which is part of my point). Her paper mixes the genres of the academic multisource essay and academic parody. Her approach to academic writing shows her to have sufficient critical awareness of aca- demic norms to be able to turn them to her purposes. Butler (2008: 88 – 89) writes, “Academic training . . . doesn’t just require a continual repetition, but also gives rise to a repetition that is also a kind of experimentation, one that is knowing about the norms, even if not strictly obedient .  .  . [T]hose who breach the norm require the norm as well in order to establish their radical- ism.” Violet’s paper provides evidence of just such a successful manipulation of academic norms. Violet breaches these norms but frames this breaching in academically “intelligible” ways. For example, she cites me (my syllabus) and herself (her previous papers), a way of ironically mocking the practices of academic citation while adhering to them. (Elsewhere in her paper she refers to the expert testimony of the illustrious Arthur Lusby III, a friend in another class.) Also, her use of nested parentheses and “gratuitous” bolding and italicizing is framed in an academically “appropriate” way: as examples supporting a larger claim about writing and recognition. In so doing, she is able to deftly sneak into her paper what she thinks of as abuses of academic language — Butler would call them “breaches” — and show their importance to thoughtful communication.

Both Mellix and Violet know, and performatively demonstrate, that the practice of positioning oneself in relation to the texts of others is one of the defining characteristics of academic discourse (Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst 2006; Thonney 2011). Each uses the practice of quoting in ways that both break with and foreground academic expectations. By quoting from herself first, and then language experts only in her conclusion, Mellix makes space for her voice alongside those of other experts. And by deliberately making up her own “expert” authority in her student friend, Violet ironically calls attention to the expertise gap between students and experts which she is called upon to bridge. Violet, more so than Mellix — and by way of response to her text — used academic discourse both to construct a voice and to critique

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the limits of academic discourse. Butler asks, “What are the conditions of sayability, of speakability, of visibility? Does one want a place within them? Does one want to be assimilated to them? Or does one want to ask some more profound questions about how political structures work to delimit what vis- ibility will be and what sayability will be?” (quoted in Olson and Worsham 2004: 337). Using the “conditions of sayability, of speakability, of visibility” available to her in the academy (in this case the citational norms of academic discourse), Violet is able to ask some of the more “profound questions” about how these conditions work to delimit “what visibility will be and what say- ability will be,” and examine the whole question of academic discourse.

Academic Identity and the Pharmakon of Writing

Because it so radically separates knower from known, writing can distance us from writing itself . . . Writing has the power to liberate us more and more from the chirographic bias and confusion it creates . . . which cannot be radically eliminated but only controlled by reflection. — Walter Ong, “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought” (emphasis added)

Literacy autobiographies can serve as a sort of boundary genre bridging expressive writing and academic discourse, as my discussion of Mellix and Violet indicates, and they can display for us the citational mechanisms that produce both writing and the academic writer. As with any discourse, aca- demic writing changes along with its participants, and like any discourse, academic discourse in turn shapes identity. But academic discourse is a spe- cific kind of discourse, in that we construct our identities within it largely through writing. For this reason, I conclude by returning to Barbara Mellix’s insightful piece to offer a brief speculation about the relationship between writing and identity.

Mellix, as I have described, was compelled by a series of geographic and cultural dislocations to perform norms unfamiliar to her, norms that often seemed to require her to leave behind her prior identities/identifications. Given these circumstances, it may seem ironic that Mellix eventually finds the solution to her feeling of psychic dislocation in writing, the place where she first felt her alienation most keenly. Her solution to the problem of writ- ing mirrors Walter Ong’s solution proposed in the epigraph above: even more writing. I think that this irony is a fundamental paradox of academic identity, and the ambivalence we and our students feel about academic dis- course is perhaps created not by the institutions that require it as much as by

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writing itself. Jacques Derrida (1981) and Walter Ong (1975) have noted that writing signals the absent presence of its author; the writer and her words do not coincide in the same time and space. To create an academic identity in large part through writing, then, as the university requires, is to consent to a fundamental split in the self. Like the pharmakon, which in Derrida’s reading carries the twin valences of cure and poison, writing both threatens identity through difference from it and creates it anew. Derrida (1981: 125 – 26) defines the pharmakon as follows: “The ‘essence’ of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance . . . It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced.” Writing produces change, produces difference, and academic writing in particular does so in specific ways. Mellix would likely agree that any distinctions between true selves and those created by academic writing are false. The title of her essay “From Outside, In” suggests that Mellix’s inner, “personal” transformations began outside any sense of self, in the place of the Other. Mellix’s inversion of the standard “from inside out” trope playfully undercuts the idea of an originary self that might be undermined by a language alien to it. Her descriptions of her ambivalent reaction to having to express herself in writing suggest that writing is, like a pharmakon, a force outside any notions of power difference or self/other dialectics, a force that precedes such differences but constructs (and reconstructs) them. Writing is a pharmakon precisely because it comes from outside the self but blurs those inner/outer distinctions.

Conclusion: Academic Discourse and Identity

If change operates through the mechanisms of performativity, specific writing pedagogies involving the literacy narrative will not always produce identities that are “intelligible” within their respective academic contexts. I am not, therefore, suggesting that reading literacy narratives about academic settings or writing literacy autobiographies within them will resolve the identity conflicts that accompany academic writing. Reflecting on the identities produced in these narratives, however, and re- citing/retelling them in new academic contexts may provoke new performances that carry new insights. My recommendation is that teachers find ways to use the capacities of the literacy autobiography to help students perform identity in ways that reconstruct it, taking stock of the academic moment and rhetorical situation in which they find themselves at the time of their writing. We can teach students that by writing and revising their literacy autobiographies, they are

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bringing the protagonist of the past “into the present in such a way that the protagonist and the narrator eventually fuse and become one person with a shared consciousness” (Bruner 1991: 69). Such uses will likely include revisiting and revising one’s literacy autobiography at a later date and explicitly citing one’s own work, as Mellix and Violet did in their literacy autobiographies.

In sum, if we understand how autobiographical writing functions as productive identity work — and if we think of writing itself as a pharmakon, producing differences within performative repetitions of the same — we can welcome the uncertain relation to identity that academic discourse can ren- der so visible to writers like Elbow, Mellix, and Violet. We may also begin to think of the citationality that goes hand- in- hand with academic discourse more positively, as a model for how we grow and change.

Notes 1. For a discussion of antecedent genres, see Jamieson 1975 and Devitt 2004; for a

discussion of boundary practices, see Wenger 1998; for a discussion of how the literacy autobiography’s use as a “bridge” genre can oversimplify its relation to academic discourse, see Hall and Minnix 2012.

2. For examples of such uses, some of which encourage hybrid writing that mixes home and academic languages, see Soliday 1994, Corkery 2005, McCrary 2005, and Steinman 2007.

3. Butler uses the term citationality to refer to any given term or action’s potential place within a chain of citations or, put another way, the tendency of any speech act to repeat previously established norms and point toward future ones. Mikhail Bakhtin offers a similar model for how discourses grow and change, although he does not, unlike Butler, tie discourse to identity. For Bakhtin (1953), all utterances are part of signifying chains, and changes in discourse come from the “lamination” (Prior and Shipka 2003) or “layering” (Goffman 1969) of multiple discourses. Bakhtin’s model of genre as stabilized forms of utterance describes both assimilation and change in discourse. Combining Butler’s concept of performativity with Bakhtin’s discussion of genre, academic discourse and identity may each be seen as moving targets that shift according to the discourses outside them.

4. In the case of Violet, the contextualizing readings were essays by Andrea Fishman (2000) and Barbara Christian (2000). Subsequently, I have been using essays by Jerome Bruner, Kara Poe Alexander’s “Successes, Victims, and Prodigies” (2011), and the students’ choice of readings from the DALN. However, readers might consider using any of the essays in Vivian Zamel and Ruth Spack’s collection Negotiating Academic Literacies (2012), which conveniently includes Mellix’s essay as well.

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