Critical Expressivism- Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom, 2014a

Past-Writing
to understand her experience. The experience, as she can access it, is not foundational
because it is only later in school when she realizes what happened—a
delayed realization that becomes the foundation for her response to Griffin’s
interview, and which may be understood as a “system” or “code,” in Scott and
Lowenthal’s terms, through which the experience is constructed legibly. My students
began to see the slipperiness of experience because Griffin sprinkles her
tapestry with reminders that, though she speaks of and through various historical
figures (from Himmler to her grandmother), it is always mediated through
her own memory. The aforementioned interview, a form of evidence collection
often validated by its claim to direct experience, is called into question when
Griffin writes, “I give [the interviewee] the name Laura here,” (1993, p.114)
suggesting that it is Griffin who controls the representation of “Laura’s” memory
and that ultimately, it is Griffin’s memory to share. In-class close reading practice
helps students see how individual memories are constructed retrospectively in
different social environments, and that it matters how we represent memory in
language, because to do so critically is to interrogate how memories get made
and what present needs they serve.
In order to get students close-reading these kinds of rhetorical moves so they
could later put them into practice in “personal” writing, I asked them to write
an analytical essay first, in which they examined and evaluated the rhetorical
strategies Griffin used to “write the past.” One student 5 wrote that
Griffin keeps herself in the story as an ‘imaginer’ that tries to
see how an event transpired. Perhaps this gives her an opportunity
to include her own stories of childhood in comparison
with Himmler’s. For instance, she details Dr. Schreber’s
[German, WWII-era] advice on childhood parenting: “Crush
the will, they write. Establish dominance. Permit no disobedience.
Suppress everything in the child.” She then compares
the childrearing acts with what she had gone through with her
grandmother. She too was suppressed: “When at the age of six
I went to live with her, my grandmother worked to reshape
me … not by casual example but through anxious memorization
and drill.”
This student is noticing how Griffin is able to incorporate her personal memories
into a larger collective past: by remaining in the story always as an “imaginer”
who looks through the same lens of inquiry at historical pasts as she does
her own memories.
Another student wrote of rhetorical moves that allow Griffin to evade talking
about the past “as though it had actually occurred” and instead allow her to “state
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