ed 366 967 aut7or title institution report no pub date note ... - ERIC

14 Reconsidering the Workshopworkshop as antithetical. What most characterizes the workshops,distinguishing them from academic classrooms, is their INTENSITY,deriving, I think, from the fact that MORE IS AT STAKE IN THEWORKSHOP THAN IN THE ACADEMIC CLASSROOM. Why? Wellyou could explain this by saying writers are a bunch of oversensitive,navel-gazers, and this would lead us to your Position #1: the workshopis a safe place for writers to hide from the cold, hard gaze of academicscrutinybut I don't believe this. The writers I've encountered hereare not interested in hiding in workshops, they are far from antiintellectual,they are in fact among the best students in all academicclasses, with a healthy interest in theory and criticism to the extent itis useful, i.e., can be plowed back into their own work.I'd argue that the reason for the high level of intensity in theworkshop, and this is what makes it different from the academicclassroom, is that there is no object of study that filters, directs,constrains, and distances response as there is in academic classes. Theexistence of an object of study, as nebulous as this may be (as, say, inDon Byrd's Spring 91 workshop/class "Models of History in LiteraryCriticism"), and its embodiment in a set of texts creates a circumscribedcontext with boundaries for response even when the mode of discourseis open, even when the focus is on student-written texts. Still there isthat filter. that object of study, that other thing to come back to thatcircumscribes the discourse, that is one step removed from me respondingdirectly to your text, if I respond (and this is a problem in workshopclasses, often we don't prepare a response to each other's work, that isstudent-written texts are not taken as seriously as assigned texts are inacademic classes) I am responding to your response to the assignedtext we both read, which is a very different form of response than inworkshops where it is me responding with all my unarticulated ideological,personal biographical, psychological baggage as well as myliterary prejudices and, maybe, a critical tool or two. (Of course I haveall this baggage when I respond to any text, but with an accredited,assigned text between us we have a common, distanced object we cantalk about.) This is not the model of response literary scholars use torespond to texts. What was most apparent to me in Judy Johnson'sSpring workshop/class (where visiting faculty members discussed student-writtenwork using their critical perspective) should have beenthat writers do not respond to texts the same way as literary scholarsdo. What we are willing to call a response, literary scholars would callan initial personal response which then requires a standing back, theinsertion of critical distance, the use of a critical lens which turns thetext into an object of academic study rather than a nebulous encounter,