The Performance of Self in Student Writing

by Thomas Newkirk

All too often when we ask our students to engage in personal writing, they represent themselves in ways we find unsatisfying. They may appear naive, sentimental, simplistic. Their writing may have a voice, yet rarely the voice we are looking for. But is it the writing that is the problem or the aesthetic standards we use to judge it? In The Performance of Self in Student Writing , Thomas Newkirk offers some insight. Newkirk maintains that students' personal writing can provide a window into discourses that hold power in the wider culture, just not in the university. If we examine the roots of our own literary preferences, we might discover that our own sense of "quality" is arbitrary, timebound, culturebound, even classbound. "What if we viewed 'being personal' not as some natural 'free' representation of self, but as a complex cultural performance?" he asks. Newkirk puts student writing in this context, then examines some of the forms of self-performance students often employ. Newkirk directly engages the critics of expressivism and by extension, the place of personal writing. He moves beyond the polarized and sterile debate that has been the norm so far, borrowing heavily from the cultural studies perspective of these critics. He locates students in literary traditions, often juxtaposing their work with canonical literary texts. At the same time, he shows that the cultural studies approach, as it has been applied to composition, has failed to acknowledge the moral power and utility of some of the discourses our culture makes available to students. This is a book that will transform the way we understand the writing performance of students. It will have broad appeal to new and experienced writing teachers at both the high school and college levels.

Genres: Education

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Thomas Newkirk is a teacher and author who worked for 39 years at the University of New Hampshire.

Reviews

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers some great insights about sentimentality, narrative framing, and student writing, and I found myself analyzing my own experiences with editing teen writers' work throughout so many of the examples and theories. It would've been a solid 4 stars, but it devolved in the second half into some repetitive claims where it could've gone more in-depth and it reverted into some ableist language of schizophrenia and selfhood, so I'm demoting it to 3.5 stars. In particular, I really wanted more analysis of how students' and/or teachers' marginalized identities and power dynamics layer over writing and grading, and less insistence at points on top-down knowledge transmission (because this book challenges how that transmission works and to what end, but not necessarily the expectation of such transmission).

[Nicholas Jaroma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for a class project. I find many of Newkirk's ideas intriguing and will try to implement them in teaching personal writing. However, some of his ideas seem a bit dated, and even the ones I find intriguing are more mainstream than when he wrote this book.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Newkirk presents a solid argument for using the personal essay in a composition class. The book is a reaction to the postmodern criticism of the personal essay. Newkirk actually seems to situate his view much closer to the postmodern ideal of the student than many of his predecessors. While I don't think a composition class ought to focus only personal narratives, it seems to be an excellent approach for a first paper. Allowing students to demonstrate their writing skills in a relatively nonthreatening manner.

[Christina Lavecchia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Newkirk writes, "Mina Shaugnnesy taught a generation of composition teachers to see student writing as logical and plausible...[and] she showed the intelligence behind the sentence gone awry. I hope to do something similar with autobiographical writing" (10). Personal writing will find no stronger or sympathetic ally than Newkirk, who performs multiple readings on student writing in order to find what is "logical and plausible" (and also even complex or sophisticated) about what it is students do in this ideologically-fraught genre.