Hi,
Sorry to have missed Sunday's talk, but intrigued that notions of
authenticity would come up in the context of teaching writing.
As some of you may know, Don Lawrence & I worried "authenticity" as a
critical term in our recent book, seeing it as the hallmark of the kind of
writing/composing that interested us. In a recent interview (in _West Coast
Line_) Don links authenticity to the vernacular in art: he says that the
"vernacular ... involves a sense that one's personally-experienced past
(often hidden or buried) can be recovered, even redeemed, in the present
moment--specifically, at the point of contact where artist and audience
meet. When vernacular art moves us, it does so not because of its
originality or its illustrative function, but because it strikes us as
authentic, authentic, that is, to the moments of production and contact."
Some of this, it seems to me, might be true for classroom-based writing as
well. As teachers, we are asking our students to recover (or redeem) that
which is not necessarily "at home" in a classroom setting; we are asking
our students to share our sense of academic reality, encouraging them to
find ways to make their ideas, experiences, intuitions, and research count
in a new linguistic context? We are asking our students to believe, with
Russ, that the classroom provides more than mere conjectural reality--that
it is a good space for authentic expression. As Marcy writes, authenticity
is a property of the writer, but it is also something felt by the reader as
true to the moments of production and contact?
Cheers, Will
< < Dr. W.F. Garrett-Petts > >
Associate Professor,
English & Modern Languages
UCC, 900 McGill Road Voice: (250) 828-5248
Box 3010, Kamloops B.C. FAX: (250) 371-5697
B.C. V2C 5N3 Canada. E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.cariboo.bc.ca
< < Writing is a Performance Art > >
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