What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
I have already suggested that the way we teach writing and reading
seem to me almost universally to assume the "author construct" and
concomitant notions of private ownership of knowledge, texts,
intellectual property. These notions, moreover, have for too long
gone unexamined by those of us who are teaching reading and
writing, and this failure may well be a large part of the
resistance to collaborative and collective practices on the part of
many traditional teachers as well as for the devastating
trivialization of collaboration that we see taking place in the
pages of our journals as well as in the media and workforce. As
I've said more than once, when everyone from General Motors and
Turner News Network to the US Air Force starts to issue paeans to
the virtues of collaboration and teamwork, I become deeply
suspicious of just what is meant by those terms. As I suggested
earlier, what I believe is most often meant is just another way of
doing business as usual, of substituting the group for the
traditional "author" or, even more frequently, of viewing the group
merely as an aggregate of autonomous individuals. But as the work
of many poststructuralists, feminists, and, particularly, scholars
in the African and African American Tradition can tell us, there
are many other ways of locating "authorship" and of invoking and
enacting collaborative practices—ways that are not dependent on
the notion of an originary uniquely-creative author/genius. For
complex political, economic, and ideological reasons, we have for
the last 300 years or so focused the camera of ownership and
authority in on the single figure—usually European, usually white,
usually male—on Wordsworth, let's say. It doesn't take much of a
leap of imagination, however, to imagine relinquishing the
close-up and pulling the camera back into a wide-angle shot that
would reveal Wordsworth in a rich network of others, like his
sister Dorothy and the circle of friends with whom he constantly
talked and wrote. Nor would it take much more to embed that
wide-angle shot in a fully-realized historical/contextual setting.
Next *
Previous
Postmodern(un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions