Why Emotion?
Feeling Out the Writing Classroom
"What emotional rules do we teach, intentionally or not, and what political projects do those rules support?" ~Jennifer Trainor (652) |
Scholars in emotion studies prove that emotion is a largely unexamined structure of knowledge that plays an integral role in maintaining oppressive cultural systems, forming identities, and inciting social justice. This scholarship reclaims emotion from the supposedly noncritical or apolitical realms of the 'private' and 'personal' by unearthing the ways emotion is a social phenomenon implicated in various value systems.
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Feminist scholars (like the ones represented on this website) have traced the gendering of emotion and dismantled the false binary between emotion and reason sustained by masculine Enlightenment ideals. Critical race scholars have shown how schooling and privileging of certain emotions, like affirmation and 'cool' rationality, systematically controls emotion when expressed by marked bodies. The study of emotion as a rhetoric betters our understanding of how systems of knowledge, language, and power intersect.
Emotion and Writing
In her passionate essay "What's Love Got to Do with it?: Eros in the Writing Classroom," rhetoric scholar Susan Kirtly reclaims emotion's primary role in critical inquiry: "Eros helps us move from simply existing as objects in the world to becoming thinking, questioning subjects” (62). Passion, wonder, inspiration, as well as frustration, anger, and confusion are all valuable emotioned meanings that shape and engender critical inquiry. When we ask students to question their understanding of the world, we are inevitably sending student on a journey through their emotional attachments. Although often unacknowledged, students' emotions inform every facet of the college writing agenda--topic selection, research and inquiry, argumentation, and persuasion. Emotion and reason, though often believed to be diametrically opposed, are in fact interdependent in knowledge formation.
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“To present emotion as a teachable critical term involves a wholesale rethinking of what is ‘teachable’ as well as what counts as necessary and usable knowledge in the context of writing and rhetoric.” ~Laura Micciche (49) |
Emotion and Self-Knowledge
Rational deliberation and debate, although necessary to critical thinking, is not likely to create opportunities for students to rethink or delve deeper into their political and ideological commitments. Marlia Banning's brilliant study on the dangerous circulation of resentment in current political debates demonstrates that "beliefs structured by feelings are likely to be the ones to which we have the strongest attachments" (93). Thus, any pedagogy committed to developing critical inquiry skills should not only teach students about emotion's binding role between the social order and individual subject, but it should also challenge students to discover and evaluate their own emotional positions within various power structures. Emotions studies, then, requires both rational analysis of emotion within cultural systems—like race, gender, or class--and engaging emotion as a valuable resource for new insight and knowledge production. Throughout this website, you'll encounter five scholars' approaches to doing just that in a college english classroom.