Laura R. Micciche: Embodying and Performing Emotion
Laura R. Micciche, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati, introduces her book Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching with an ambitious, but much needed claim: “What is absent in composition studies are the tools for
recognizing [emotion’s] presence in so-called rational discourse” (8). In hopes of teaching emotion as a meaningful site for knowledge production, she hypothesizes a number of classroom activities designed to engage emotion as an embodied and performative phenomenon that emerges not from within a text or person, but in between bodies.
Micciche's approach to teaching emotion draws on performance studies. Her pedagogy emphasizes embodiment, physicality, movement, and group activities rather than the individualistic reading and writing experience found in most text-based english courses. In fact, Micciche makes explicit that if we continue to locate and teach emotions as only accessible through language, "we fail to grapple with their performative and embodied aspect” (51). Needless to say, Micciche's pedagogy calls for a radical reworking of how scholars think about teaching writing.
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"Live enactment, including the study leading up to it and the discussion following it, changes our connection to text-on-the-page, gives it a new kind of dimensionality, and enables us to see relationships and story differently." |
To understand Micciche's turn to a performance based pedagogy to teach emotion, we first need to know how she conceives of emotion. For Micciche, emotions are:
- Embodied: “Emotions are mediated by the body; they are made visible on and through the body via posture, facial expression, voice, and movement” (52)
- Performative: Emotions do work; they have the potential "to enact, construct, name and defile, become and undo--to perform meanings and to stand as a marker for meanings that get performed" (14)
- Relational: "Emotion takes form between bodies rather than residing in them” (13)
- Meaning-full: "Emotion is central to what makes something thinkable, which is to say that the act of conceptualizing inserts emotion into thought" (47)
Like Stenberg, Winans, and others, Micciche designs her reading list around highly controversial, emotional, and "feminized" content: the culture of eating disorders. Many of her students felt angry, disgusted, and frustrated with the (mostly women) writers they encountered. In class discussion, she encouraged her students to interrogate the emotions the text engendered--much like Stenberg and Boler call their students to dwell in discomfort. Micciche asks her students to be open to insights from emotion, and to use their emotions--what calls us to write--as a guide through which they can engage the readings (68).
Example In-Class Activity
In Chapter 3 of Doing Emotion, Micciche describes in detail a two-part assignment that requires college writing students to participate in classroom group work and out-of-class independent work. First, students form small groups and choose one passage from one of their assigned readings that they believe best show "how and where emotion underwrites the surface of language" (57). Passages might focus on a highly emotioned confession or truth, or might demonstrate the way emotions generate and circulate attachment to an idea in a character. Second, each student records herself reading the passage at home.
Discussion Questions:
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Third, the groups reconvene in class to listen to the recordings and discuss how different stylistic choices inject different meanings into the passage. Some of Micciche's example discussions questions are highlighted in the bulleted list. Fourth, the group selects one student to re-record a final reading of the passage that integrates the group's findings about the emotional sensibility of the passage and the oral, stylistic choices that most speak to it. Finally, one student from each group performs live the recorded reading for the class. This could naturally progress into a class discussion and reflective writing assignment about "how emoitoned meanings are embodied...rather than explicitly evoked to make an audience feel a certain way" (58).
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Connecting Performance & Writing
Most college writing courses address emotion only in terms of rhetorical appeals and persuasion. They present and analyze emotion only as it appears in language. Micciche hopes that a performative, interpersonal assignment like the one described above will help students experience rhetoric--or "how we come to be moved by language"--through their own embodiment instead of from the position of a detached interpreter or rhetorical analyst (57).
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“We have bodies and feelings that make a difference when it comes to how and why we put words on the page." |
Micciche's approach to teaching emotion challenges students to think about and embrace the embodied nature of writing. Using rhetorical assignments inspired by performance studies, Micciche highlights: 1) the interdependence of emotion and "rational" thought; 2) the ever-present role of subjectivity and embodiment in ostensibly "objective" argumentation or writing; 3) the extra-lingual expressions of emotion, and 4) the way emotion emerges between people, rather than located in people or in texts.