Author Archives: jmwin

Blogs and the Self in Time. Jessica Winck.

Jens Brockmeier (2000) argued that narrativizing is a process of understanding ourselves in time. Constructions of ourselves are “reflexive” and represent our own autobiographical memories, a “back and forth movement between past and present that relates to the future” (p. 54). Blogs present a unique case study for understanding the concept of time. They not only represent the linguistic and rhetorical moves in our writing that reveal our understanding of ourselves in time; we also have to contend with the material structure of blogs. The ways that they structure time for us.

Blogs enable reflexive construction of the self because their materiality maintains past and present attempts to represent ourselves. If we blog about our day-to-day lives, the exceptional and the mundane, the blog functions as a record of our lives, at least as we represent it. The blog is also a record of how we understand ourselves temporally because it prompts several choices in relation to time—how frequently we write; for how long we write; and the ways we represent how, why, and when things occurred. These choices point to how writers rely on constructions of time to achieve a reflexive sense of self.

Additionally, blogs enable this reflexive construction of the self because a notion of time is already built into the structure of blogs. The reverse-chronological order of posts acts as a framework or organizing principle (Brockmeier, 2000). By this I mean that the blog post I wrote today is first on the page, followed by the post I wrote last week, followed by the post I wrote the week before. Blogs privilege a linearity of the occurrence of writing, beginning with the most recent. In this sense, currency matters: the most recent post is the most relevant. Thus, this unique structure shapes the selves that people construct on blogs.

We might also wonder if blogs draw our attention to writing in the present. Brockmeier (2000) argued that our understanding of the present is always inflected by how we think of our past and the expectations we have for our future (p. 55). Narrating one’s life through blog writing draws upon a past that is necessarily structured by the technology of the blog itself.

Lovelace as Writer: A Character in His Own Narrative. Jessica Winck.

Both Clarissa and Lovelace claim to be driven to write, and both turn to writing as an outlet for their intellectual energy. Lovelace, though, uses writing for an additional purpose. He writes letters because he enjoys being a character in the narrative of his own making. In the stories he tells Belford, his primary audience, he constructs himself as a passionate, relentless lover. Because Lovelace goes to great lengths in his attempts to earn Clarissa’s affection, an ultimately fatal pursuit for both characters, his stories are filled with elaborate plans, confrontations, frustrations, momentary joys, and disappointments.

Since the ongoing story of his pursuit of Clarissa is prone to drastic changes in plot, Lovelace also relies on writing as a platform for re-affirming his sense of masculinity, especially in relation to women. When he frequently compares women to animals (e.g. women and birds), he reassures himself that he can objectively comprehend women and their nature. Granted, the received wisdom of the time would suggest that the nature of women is as predictable and known as other objects of study to which men have claimed knowledge. However, because Clarissa is exceptional, which Lovelace repeatedly argues, she presents several obstacles for him. He frequently suggests that other women would have submitted to his advances. In this sense, Lovelace’s letters represent his persistent attempts to comprehend Clarissa on an epistemological level.

As inquiry, letter writing demonstrates Lovelace’s methods of thinking and drawing conclusions. As part of constructing a narrative that he enjoys re-enacting for Belford, his letters provide explanations for his often bizarre methods to comprehend as well as to persuade Clarissa. Within his first several letters in the novel, Lovelace is beyond crucial questions such as, “Is what I want good for Clarissa? Should I be held responsible for the negative consequences my actions have on her life?” Being past these, he fails to consider whether his way of life is unconscionable.

Since he is irrationally determined to have Clarissa, his narratives must serve some other purpose. By reciting the events of the novel, as if he cannot help doing so, he strengthens the shield he has built to protect himself from knowing what it feels like to Clarissa and other women when they are objects of his desire. Consequently, writing is not only a method for reaffirming and protecting himself. Writing also emboldens him.

Clarissa as Writer: Self-Making, Authorization, and Compulsion. Jessica Winck.

For Clarissa, the relationship between writing and identity is a constitutive one. By writing, she documents, preserves, and gives voice to a self that goes unrecognized in her family. Her writing reflects the circumstances and events that shape her, so writing reflects her identity; but she also constructs a version of herself that can make sense of her life. As a result, this self is resistant to outside forces that put constraints on her life (e.g., the pressure to marry). Writing strengthens Clarissa’s sense of self and reaffirms her life goals, and it is a method for re-animating events and feeling out their boundaries and nuances. Clarissa relives experiences in writing while constructing new reactions and responses to the people who have a stake in the choices she makes: Anna, her family, and Lovelace.

Clarissa’s letter writing also serves as a method for documenting events and even authorizing legal actions, such as making Belford the executor of her will. She writes so that this constructed, resilient self is proven to have existed. Signing her full name at the end of each letter, beyond being a convention of letter writing, certifies the existence of this self. We understand this more fully toward the end of Clarissa’s life when she entrusts Anna and Belford with maintaining a collection of her letters. The collection will come to represent her story to those outside the letters’ original trail of correspondence.

Writing is also a compulsion for Clarissa. She writes because she has to. She says she has “no other employment” and would write even if she did not intend to communicate. Writing is compulsory because it is a way for her to process, on her own, the events of her life. Writing enables her to decompress after an encounter with Lovelace or an argument with her family, which suggests that the practice of writing is therapeutic, a necessary practice for persevering through difficult situations. In the midst of multiple constraints, writing is Clarissa’s method for acting in concert with her deepest motives.

Remediating Clarissa: Reading, Response, and Accessibility. Jessica Winck.

Immersed in the scholarship of rhetoric and composition for the past several years, I began this seminar on Clarissa feeling out of practice in the study of literature. I admit to having some reservations about reading this 1500-page novel as a re-initiation into that study, so it came as a surprise when I found myself so invested in Clarissa’s world. This investment was partly a result of the fact that Clarissa is an unexpectedly engrossing novel. But the investment was also heightened because the ways we read and wrote about the novel helped us tap into a set of reading and writing practices that deepened our reading and enabled us to reshape and write back to the novel. This semester-long project afforded us several insights that relate to our field’s goal to make greater connections between our work as scholars and our work with undergraduate as well as graduate students.

As part of studying the novel, remediating Clarissa provided us with reading and writing practices that are more conventional in blogs than in academic writing and discourse. We read individually during the week, then we read the novel as excerpted by the members of the seminar, according to what was most remarkable or salient in that particular volume’s letters. Similarly, one’s personal blog represents a narrative construction of one’s life and identity while readers recognize that a larger, more complex narrative occurs off the interface. The members of our seminar came to appreciate the narrative construction of Clarissa that took shape on the blog. We soon realized that we were able to adopt blog conventions around response in our reading of the text. By commenting on individual letters as if on a blog, we collapsed barriers that typically exist across time and between readers and writers.

We were also invited to become part of Clarissa’s life. In fact, as readers we seemed as likely to respond in order to vent our private thoughts and frustrations while reading the novel as we were to engage in deep, critical analyses of individual passages, or of Richardson’s rendering of Clarissa’s struggles. In this sense we moved between the personal and the academic—categories that the blog asked us to challenge. Since the space of the blog permitted a rich variety of responses to the novel, the boundaries of academic and personal writing blurred. Though our responses to the letters developed from our years as readers and writers in the academy, the blog invited us to value ourselves as readers who responded affectively to Clarissa’s life and death. As a result, our embodied responses to the novel (whether we cried or expressed anger or grief) became available—and were validated—as academic responses.

Continue reading →