Freshman composition pedagogy’s voice-centered ethos produced the first-personalism of MFA workshops.

Evidence

But one elementary tributary to first-personalism in the echelons of MFA workshops is surely the pedagogy of the freshman composition courses required of virtually every college student in the country. Voice-centered experiential writing, reflective writing, and metacognitive writing anoint the meta-discipline writing classroom now, where the content of writing is not subject matter but the subject’s intellective and spiritual journey toward prose. … The Conference on College Composition and Communication’s manifesto, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” cites Langston Hughes in their 1974 exhortation to “dig all jive” in affirming “creativity and individuality” in writing pedagogy. … Literary studies that understands itself as fundamentally offering students self-exploration, therapy, and mirroring or affirmative representation harmonizes with composition studies that understands writing as a technique of self-deployment that students should practice en route to profitable employment; both train the literary producers whose output activates contemporary immediacy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 144

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘writing without teachers’ lineage from Peter Elbow can be checked against the reader’s existing map of immediacy; also connects to the Freire/education-as-praxis debate.
• QUESTION: The reader may want to push on the ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’ invocation: Kornbluh frames an anti-racist 1974 manifesto as a tributary to therapeutic first-personalism—is that fair dosing with history?