Monday, October 2, 2006

Cooper, "The Ecology of Writing"

Cooper, Marilyn. "The Ecology of Writing." College English 48.4 (1986). 364-375.

Setting out from Hairston's 1982 embrace of "a process-centered theory of teaching writing" to "process, not product," what happens when writers write has been reduced, hazardously, to a simplistic cognitive process. The cognitive process model idealizes the solitary author, isolating the author from the social world. Cooper emphasizes a social turn: language is essentially social.

Ecology does not equal context, which, read through Burke's pentad, concerns individual language acts. An ecologist, on the other hand, takes into account the systemic effects of writing. Ecological systems are "inherently dynamic" (368). The systems are concrete (distinguishable) and also interwoven. Intimacy and power are two determinants of the interactions between writers. Ecological systems are also moderated by cultural norms and textual forms (370).

Cooper introduces the primary metaphor for ecological systems: the web. She begins to discuss audience in terms of such a model. Audience becomes real in an ecological model.

Terms: "writing theory" (365c), tyranny of the solitary author ideal (366), writing as a "way of acting" (373).

"Like all theoretical models, the cognitive process model projects an ideal image, in this case an image of a writer that, transmitted through writing pedagogy, influences our attitudes and the attitudes of our students toward writing" (365).

"Such changes in writing pedagogy indicate that the perspective allowed by the dominant model has again become too confining" (366).

"What I would like to propose is an ecological model of writing, whose fundamental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems" (367).

"Thus, though the grammar allows one to assign labels to important aspects of a situation, it does not enable one to explain how the situation is causally related to other situations" (368).

"An ecologist explores how writers interact to form systems: all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all other writers and writings in the system" (368).

"The systems are not given, not limitations on writers; instead they are made and remade by writers in the act of writing" (368).

"As should be obvious, the perspective of the ecological model offers a salutary correction of vision on the question of audience" (371). It renders audience real rather than imagined--the outcropping of a mental construct.

"Writing, thus, is seen to be both constituted by and constitutive of these ever-changing systems, systems through which people relate as complete, social beings, rather than imaging each other as remote images: an author, an audience" (373).

Posted by Derek Mueller at October 2, 2006 11:03 AM to Tools-in-use