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The Cheating Kind: Stories. (Original writing);, and, Getting restless: Rethinking revision in writing instruction
Abstract
Part I of this dissertation, The Cheating Kind, a collection of twelve short stories, comes from my own use of fiction writing as a sometimes heady, frequently unnerving, always productive practice of "dis-orientation." With their focus on the difficulties of enacting revision in daily life and relationships, these stories dis-orient me from commonplace constructions of revision--as correcting, as accommodating readers, as decontextualized textual strategy--and lead me to the studies in Part II. Part II, Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction, looks at five academic contexts for writing to consider how revision can be defined not as a process of increasing orientation toward a particular thesis or a particular discourse community but as a process of increasing dis-orientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries; seeking alternatives. Drawing particularly on contemporary feminist and psychoanalytic theories, I've aimed through these studies to learn how to create for myself and for my students environments that encourage and support us through this kind of revision. Through this project, I also argue that composition as a discipline, currently split into the two antagonistic camps of "process" and "post-process," can revitalize its process legacy through understanding that our means to form and change communities, to form and change constructions of authority, are located in practices of revision. The fictional stories of The Cheating Kind and the theoretical and ethnographic essays of Getting Restless are linked in their exploration of revision as a personal, social, and political act. Both explore the kinds of collaborations and contexts that inhibit this kind of revision and the kinds of practices, relationships, and classroom settings that make re-vision, in Adrienne Rich's sense of the word, possible.
Subject Area
Language|American literature|Womens studies|Language arts
Recommended Citation
Welch, Nancy E, "The Cheating Kind: Stories. (Original writing);, and, Getting restless: Rethinking revision in writing instruction" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9528837.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9528837