Green's project is a good one I think, and really the only sensible response to Fish. He aims to move the workshop out of its strict textual focus and onto issues of audience and what he calls "vernacular interpretive communities." The author has to take responsibility for his/her text and its social status, and the peer reviewers must take the intended audience into account in their critique.
Here's how he explains it:
As the fierce and thoughtful work of multicultural scholars has shown, the differences in readerships and cultural values are not only historically but currently myriad. An effective piece of poetry to one interpretive community will not necessarily seem interesting or well done to another. In addition to writing well and having a broad literary background, our students should learn how to speak to chosen vernacular interpretive communities and their literary traditions...writers do best when they learn how to write better poems for those communities they wish to serve. (155)The "sublime reader" concept remains a little vague to me, but I think its the "reader" implied by standard workshop criticism and aesthetics. Here's the clearest quote I pulled on the issue:
Before asking how students can better write "good" poems, I propose we look beyond the gaze of the sublime reader and ask how students can write useful poems. Only after the potential use of a poem is established within specific cultural institutions of production, distribution, and consumption can poets then judge how to train themselves to write "good" poems that can act with efficacy within particular cultural situations. (159)
The workshop needs to address lived situations rather than assuming and perpetuating the presence of a falsely sublime (generally a white, educated, middle-class) reader...Poems are not read by ethereal readers considering craft. The audience in the workshop should be able to anticipate what interpretive speech community is going to receive the poem, in what form. (162)So we see Green is using "sublime reader" as a way of critiquing standard workshop practice as a sort of "ivory tower" phenomena (He avoids this cliche, but it fits his thesis). And moving beyond the "sublime" reader to real audiences, or "vernacular interpretive communities" is a real sea change for CW praxis. This shift in audience is what justifies his throwing out the idea of "good" poetry and replacing it with a different (but I think more valuable) concept: the "useful" poem. And Green uses the term "usefulness" rather broadly:
Usefulness can make artists uncomfortable, for they can feel constrained to tangible, socially recognized productivity. I wish to examine usefulness, however, beyond the confines of commodity labor...Within the concept of use comes the concept of act or event-someone is using the poem, someplace, to do something for some reason. Poets then go beyond writing a good poem and begin to think about how to use a poem, and how to write a poem they can use...we have to remember to be careful not to limit use to pragmatic utility but extend our consideration to other varieties: use might be pleasure or horror, stimulation or seduction. (165)You can see he's using "use" so broadly it can include any poetic effect at all, and this could be somewhat problematic. Especially since the general tone of his work implies an actual social utility for the poem beyond entertainment value. I think Green would agree that "use" is broad enough to include entertaining uses, but still carries a suggestion of responsible social engagement. Or something to that effect. In any case, the main value of using "useful" in conjunction with "poetry" is not to define a limited class of poetry, but to focus writers on the social nature of their work.
He also warns against a certain attitude toward "vernacular interpretive communities":
It is tempting to assume that such communities exist as...natural traditions to which we do not belong and about which we talk as outsiders. Rather, communities are fluid and continually in the process of creating their foundations...Neither ought we to limit possible communities in readily available terms of demarcation (ethnicity, race, class, nationality). Undefined communities, which lie outside the language and concepts we currently use, are struggling toward definition and coherence through culture and writing. (169)Interpretive communities have porous borders, and, while ethnicity and class and etc do define some communities, there are some that are more inclusive. And new communities come into being and pass out of being all the time. I'm not sure what Fish has on this, but it would be interesting to see how he compares.
All in all, there's some good stuff here. A solid expansion of the idea of interpretive communities. I think he may have found a way past Fish without even really bothering to argue with his theory. A much nicer move than the one I made in my paper last semester. And the concept of the "useful poem" is a good one. Very quotable.
Leads:
Green says he's getting his "vernacular interpretive communities" from Jane Thompson, who takes Fish's idea and puts it in terms of the writer, so I'll need to get this:
Tompkins, Jane. P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
And I probably need to read the rest of the essays in Fish's book.
This might be a solid cultural studies lead:
Berlin, James A. "Composition Studies and Cultural Studies: Collapsing Boundaries." Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 389-410.
This is the piece where he rails against theory:
D. W. Fenza. "Creative Writing and Its Discontents." The Associated Writing Programs. 2 Feb 2001.
This should point to a whole line of research interesting it its own right:
"Inquiring into the Nexus of Compositions Studies and Creative Writing." College Composition and Communication 51.1 (1999): 70-95.
Might be a lead into Cultural Studies, if perhaps a bit dated:
Johnson, Richard. "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 15 (1986-87): 38-80.
This guy had a great example of a lumberjack poem that was considered technically clumsy by his class until they were told of the poem's community:
Nelson, Cary. "A Theorized Poetry Class." Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates. Ed. Dianne E Sadoff and William E. Cain. New York: MLA, 1994. 179-91.
He cites this as the "best example" of his type of praxis:
Muller, Lauren, and the Poetry for People Collective, eds. June Jordan s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. New York: Routedge, 1995.
No comments:
Post a Comment