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“A Map to the Next World”: Narrative Ecologies in College

Composition

Stephanie Wade, Rowan UniversityWatson Conference on Rhetoric and CompositionOctober 14, 2010

Narrative ecology

• A theoretical tool for navigating college composition in a post-process period.

• Implications for pedagogy, research, and maps of our field

Jean Francois Lyotard

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (published 1979 French 1984 English translation)

Primary questions: 1. How is knowledge represented? How is it evaluated?

2. What is the role of consensus in the legitimation of

knowledge? What counts as authority? 3. What is the relationship between narrative and

scientific discourse?

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

• “The grand narrative has lost its credibility” (37).

• “…scientific knowledge replaces traditional knowledge” (44).

• “The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is established” (45).

Avenues of resistance

1. The social nature of language games circumscribe even power, capital, and terror.

2. Sublime aesthetics evoke apprehension of realities that elude logic.

3. Scientific observations reveal the ultimate inability of any system to represent or predict the essentially unstable nature of reality.

Fredric Jameson’s critique

• “not the disappearance of the great master narratives, but their passage underground, as it were, their continuing but now unconscious effectivity”

• An ecological view allows us to address Jameson’s critique.

Ecology

• From the Greek word for home.• Contemporary definition: ecology redefines

the unit of survival from the individual to the ORGANISM + ENVIRONMENT. (Gregory Bateson).

• Social, ideological, cultural, built, and biotic environments.

Narrative ecology

• Responds to Jameson’s critique of Lyotard.

• Builds on ecological approaches to writing: Richard Coe, Marilyn Cooper, Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser, Derek Owens, M. Syverson, Nedra Reynolds.

• Posits local and grand narratives as layered, uneven, dynamic, multiple, living systems.

Arran Garre

“…. the Promethean grand narratives of modernity are embedded in institutions and organizations, in cities, buildings, instruments of productions”

Questions for composition studies:

• What master narratives continue to haunt/inform our work?

• How do these narratives constrain our teaching and research practices?

• What do we need to do to enact change?

Dominant maps of our field

• Berlin- expressive, current-traditional, social-epistemic

• Fulkerson- expressive, critical/cultural studies, rhetorical.

Context of the maps

• Late-stage global capitalism.

• Business model in higher-education.

Conclusion

• Permaculture as a design strategy.

• “..permaculture practitioners value cooperation and recognition of each person's unique contributions rather than standardization and competition”