Owens, Resisting Writings (and the Boundaries of Composition)
Owens sees teaching as “collective exploring” and claims that he teaches because he “enjoys the company,” and this book is permeated by those two ideas. Owens doesn’t just say he respects and appreciates his students; he shows it by describing an innovative and challenging course he designed and taught that put him and his students on equal footing. The course Owens designed combines rhetoric, literature, creative writing, composition, and feminist and cross-cultural studies. His premise is that different modes of discourse offer students different ways of making knowledge, and so exposing them to different modes—and engaging them in real study of those modes—can only help them develop their thinking and resisting skills. And he has another premise, one it will not surprise you to know that I love: “I’m urging teachers to undermine our self-constructed positions of authority by admitting additional compositing philosophies [other than the ones we ‘know’ which shape our attitudes about and expectations of composition] into our classrooms” (12).
Owens aims to make writing for students something other than the “hollow, pointless chore” it can be in composition classes (25). To illustrate how homogeneous most of the views of composition are, Owens critiques a popular reader edited by Donald Hall. He finds that although there are many different topics covered in the essays presented, there are basically two or three different types of essays presented. “Introducing students to alternative essays does more than provide them with means of experiencing a sense of play, the ability to generate more complex ‘voices’ during revision, and the opportunity to review things from experimentalist points of view,” he argues. “By weakening the gulf between the discourse of the academy and the far richer mix of dialects rarely entertained in our classes, we loosen the prescriptive reins with which we censor student composition, and their thinking in general” (70-71).
Owens wants students to be exposed to and to write what he calls “open texts,” texts that resist traditional closure. While a traditional text in linear and allows some passivity in the reader, an open text “invites participation [and] rejects the authority of the writer over the reader” (Hejinian qtd. in Owens 160). Like multigenre work, open texts use repeated elements and repetend instead of a tight focus to create harmony. Hypertext is an example of open text.
Owens ends with a series of proposals for integrating different types of texts into the teaching of writing and literature, including WAC programs.
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