Archived WebPage of Course Offered In 2001
English 3303: Advanced Composition at Tarleton State University, Texas
"The trouble is that essays always have
to sound like God talking for eternity,
and that isn't the way it ever is. People
should see that it's never anything other
than just one person talking from one
place in time and space and
circumstance. It's never been anything
else, ever, but you can't get that across
in an essay. . . ".
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance.
"A person who writes books is
either all (a single universe for
himself and everyone else) or
nothing. And since all will never be
given to anyone, every one of us
who writes is nothing. Ignored,
jealous, deeply wounded, we wish
the death of our fellow man . . . .
The reason is that everyone has
trouble accepting the fact that he will
disappear unheard of and unnoticed
everyone wants to make himself into
a universe of words before it's too
ate."
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
"To endow the writer publicly with a
good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes
dry white white and underdone steak, is
to make even more miraculous for me,
and of a more divine essence, the
products of his art. . . . For I cannot but
ascribe to some superhumanity the
existence of beings vast enough to wear
blue pyjamas at the very moment when
they manifest themselves as universal
conscience, or else make a profession of
liking reblochon with that same voice
with which they announce their
forthcoming Phenomenology of the Ego."
Roland Barthes, The Writer on Holiday
Students Essaying
James Hinman: "Thoreau and the Art of Quality Control"
Dominga Gutierrez: "The Barbie Experience"
Dominga Gutierrez: "The Lost Proposal"
Tricia Canales: "Pathways"
Kathy Chandler: "Theodore"
Texts and Supplies:
Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Roland Barthes' Mythologies
Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Several plain manilla folder (8.5 x 11)
Course Work:
Daily reading assignments; one-page response papers to reading assignments (10%)
Contribution to Web Site Resources, reports, discussion (10%)
Four 1,000 word papers (80%)
Course Objectives:
". . .Write a 350-word essay answering the question, What is quality in thought and statement? Then he sat
by the radiator while they wrote and thought about quality himself. . . . Quality . . . you know what it is,
yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is,
they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from things that have it, it all
goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you what it is, or
how do you know that it even exits? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't
exit at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else
would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are
better than others . . . but what's the "betterness?" . . . So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels
and nowhere finding any place to get traction. What the hell is quality? What is it?" (Pirsig, Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 163)
If this course could be said to have a primary object(ive), it would be to explore possibilities for ESSAY-ing our worlds
through writing. Advancing composition, yes? Milan Kundera believes the writer "teaches the reader to comprehend the
world as a question." He believes and shows us I think that "there is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude." Taking us
further:
In a world built on sacrosanct certainties [writerly writing] is dead. The totalitarian world . . . is a world of
answers rather than questions. There, [writing] has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the
world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice
of the [writer] can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties. (BLF, 237)
To move in this direction, we must roam across the spaces of reading and writing and thinking, clothed in the nomadic
perspectives of fresh interpretation, writerly expression, "channel deepening" (Zen 8) thought. Helene Cixous, one of my
favorite writers on writing, tells us:
The thing that is both known and unknown, the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are
looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not
knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of
understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable,
which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth
the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know
before you have written [my italics]: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at
the point where blindness and light meet. (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 38)
We will write four prose pieces we will call essays. To understand what I mean by essay, we will read writers migrating
through the borders of essayistic space, writers, thought-full nomads, who go beyond the borders of what we might call the
rigidity of formula to reach for what Robert Pirsig calls Quality. Our challenge, like Pirsig's, will be to get at what we mean
by Quality, to make Quality a working concept for us in the art of understanding and composing texts. Pirsig intuits that
there's a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful
way of doing it, both an ability to see what "looks good" and an ability to understand the underlying
methods to arrive at that "good" are needed. (
(Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 262)
We will try to push ourselves past the plastic, the phony, the stylized, wandering/wondering towards techne, the "art-full,"
the creative, the original.
For Roland Barthes, a starting point is
usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of "naturalness" with which newspapers, art and common sense
constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by
history.
Barthes wants to get behind the always already scripted accounts of our worlds which confuse Nature and History to "track
down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse . . . hidden there" (Mythologies 11).
Barthes wants to, in essence, say what-goes-without-saying. Of course, like Barthes, Kundera, and Pirsig, you will be
guided by your own current interests in choosing what you will write about or better what you cannot not write about.
We will serve as each other's mentors and audiences. We will try to form our "community of graphomanics."
A word or two about the reading. According to Cixous, "not everyone carries out the act of reading in the same way, but
there is a manner of reading comparable to the act of writing." She calls it a "clandestine, furtive act." She advises us to steal
the key to the library and rebel:
Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book's door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover,
and in broad daylight escape! We are no longer there: this is what real reading is. If we haven't left the
room, if we haven't gone over the walls, we're not reading. If we're only making believe we're there, if
we're pretending before the eyes of the family, then we're reading. We are eating. Reading is eating on the
sly. (21)
Books, she writes, "await us in a country we can't get tickets to." I invite you to "leave the room" with Pirsig, Barthes, and
Kundera, travel beyond your own borders to countries you can't get tickets to.
Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tickets us to the country of thought: thinking about thinking, thinking
about writing/composing, thinking about teaching, thinking about our culture, thinking about ourselves. Pirsig intends a
Chautauqua:
that's the only name I can think of for it like the traveling tentshow Chautauquas that used to move across
America, this America, the one we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and
entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. (
(Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 7)
At the center of his Chautauqua is his journey towards Quality in thinking, working, writing, teaching, learning, living.
In Roland Barthes' series of essays in Mythologies, you will find woven "an ideological critique bearing on the language of
mass-culture." Barthes wants to assume the role of what he calls the "mythologist." He aims at the everyday in our lives
ranging from professional wrestling to the face of Garbo to automobiles to politicians to art to literature to food to writing to
say "what-goes-without-saying." Barthes presupposes that our lives, our beliefs, our cultures, our worlds, are
historically/politically constructed but, through what he calls the language of myth, become "natural." His rhetorical move is
a kind of de-naturing of "the natural," an uncovering through writing.
Kundera thematizes laughter and forgetting in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. As a Czech writer, politically exiled to
Paris after the Soviet occupation of his country, Kundera shows us something of the Quality-less world Pirsig writes about
in Zen. Kundera's "novel" explores the horrific "idyll" of totalitarian totality: the loss of History and Humor. The act of
writing always lurks marginally on the borders of Kundera's texts to decenter the centralizing machine of the totalitarian.
Writing? To make us remember and laugh? In an interview, Kundera describes his book: ironic essay, novelistic narrative,
autobiographical fragment, historic fact, flight of fantasy. Above all, Kundera wants to question, to search.
Finally, another goal of the course is to begin construction of Web resources for future students in English 3303. I will
assign you short reports on topics, writers, issues, etc. that will benefit students advancing composition. I will also seek
your permission to publish your essays on our Web so we can begin to build an electronic anthology of student work in this
course. You will also be able to read each others' texts. I've started our class web site, including pages for the course,
Pirsig, Barthes, and Kundera. You can find links to information about the writers, composition, rhetoric, electronic texts
(Pirsig, Plato, Aristotle, Thoreau, etc.). As soon as you can, please browse the site on one of the terminals in the library.
You have to use a terminal that has Netscape, a Web browser software. Our web location is
http://www.tarleton.edu/academics/depts/english/eng3303.htm.
The Response Papers
You will write one-page responses to selected reading assignments. The responses should be typed, singe-spaced, about 1/3
summary and 2/3 thoughtful response to what you consider the primary issues contained within the texts. The idea is to get
as much on one page as you can.
Contributions to the Web Site
I will ask each of you, both individually and collaboratively, to contribute short reports that we might integrate into the
course web site. These reports will center issues, writers, concepts, historical information, bibliographical resources, etc.
that will add to the content of the course.
The Essay Assignments
You will compose 4 texts of about 1,000 words each. We will have approximately 4 weeks to work on each assignment. I
want you to approach these assignments through some kind of writing process that will include invention, drafting, review,
and revising. For each composition, you will need bring a reading draft to a conference with me. In addition, we will have
workshops in class so that you can get your manuscripts reviewed by your classmates. I will have suggestions for the
assignments or you can come up with a topic and strategy of your own. The idea here is to stretch yourself beyond the kinds
of things you have already written.
I will ask that you turn in for evaluation a hard copy and then resubmit your work on disk so that I can, with your
permission, put your essays on our course web site.
Assignment 1
Description can be an end in itself; however, this is seldom done. It is also possible to use description as a discovery
technique; that is, rather than choosing details to meet some pre-determined end, details can be examined from various
perspectives, relationships among details can be considered, and finally new meaning may be discovered as a result of the
describing activity. This discovery is easily done when describing something entirely unfamiliar; it is much more difficult
when dealing with the ordinary.
For this assignment, use description as a mode of discovery. Choose a familiar thing (abstract or concrete) or situation (the
trick here is to transform the private into public discourse) or person (again the trick is to move into essayistic space from the
personal experience) or activity (something cultural perhaps) and through examination of details and relationships among
details, try to discover fresh meaning (fresh meaning for both you and your readers). The idea here is to use writing itself as
an inventional technique. You should have only a partially formed idea of what you are going to write before you start your
most important ideas should come to you as you do preliminary writing. Of course, we will try some of the formal and
informal inventional strategies to see what works for your own unique noodle.
Assignment 2
Just as descriptive writing can result in discovery, it can also be a device that allows the writer to explore causal relationships
and to anticipate the future by carefully examining the present or past. The end product of such a process may take one of a
number of different forms: it may be deadly serious, as when conservationists project ecological disaster after examining the
status quo; it may be whimsical, as when a writer makes tongue-in-cheek predictions based upon deliberate misuses of
statistics; it may be argumentative or quizzical or resigned or any dozens of others. However, what all of these have in
common is the movement from an exploration of the present or past to expectations and predictions about the future.
Your assignment is to choose a current situation and, through explorative description, arrive at projections about its future.
Remember that tone and purpose may vary. This assignment might be a good opportunity to use some of the techniques in
the selection of diction we have been discussing in class; it might also be worthwhile to consider descriptive possibilities that
do not rely entirely upon sight.
Assignment 3
We have seen that description can serve as discovery and as exploration; on another level description can effectively
distinguish between what is real and what appears to be real. This "unmasking" of reality can proceed in several different
fashions: the expose of the investigative journalist, the introspection of the autobiographer, the denunciation of an angry
prosecutor, or the wit of the ironist. All of these have in common establishing the contrast between what should be and what
is; however, as their goals differ, so do their methods. The journalist objectively presents facts, the autobiographer examines
his own consciousness, the prosecutor attempts to fix blame and assign retribution, the ironist sees the discrepancy as a
source of humor, as an opportunity to exercise his wit, as a means of instruction and possibly even correction. In order to
accomplish these ends, the ironist must work through reversal of meaning rather than through overt, direct assertion;
however, the results of these efforts is quite often a work that is far more effective and memorable than is the more direct
approach.
Your assignment is to ch[1]5oose a topic and write an ironic treatment of it. Please discuss your topic with me before you begin
writing.
Assignment Four
Write a critical response paper to something in Pirsig or Kundera. You decide on topic, strategy, etc. This paper will count
as the final examination. I will want to see all pre-writing, drafts, and the final draft when you turn in your essay.
Evaluation Criteria
Preliminaries? Is good writing writing that succeeds in
saying something worthwhile
to a specific audience
for some purpose?
What about these characteristics?
Substantive: says something worth reading
Clear: whatever that means
Unified: a kind of master plan holds the parts together in a unified whole
Economical: no clutter; no fat
Grammatically acceptable
Vigorous: active verbs, sharp images, specific examples, figurative language
Authentic: not faked or canned or put together by formula care, "quality"
This webpage was formerly at: http://www.tarleton.edu/~english/eng3303.htm
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