“Can You Hear Me Now, Ms. Monster?”: Anger, Thumos, and FirstYear Composition
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Composition Forum 17, Fall 2007 “Can You Hear Me Now, Ms. Monster?”: Anger, Thumos, and FirstYear Composition Diann Baecker In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, it’s difficult to speak of anger in the composition classroom in a positive way. Like other authors who write about the productive aspects of anger, I find myself adding disclaimers. I want to argue in this paper that we don’t do a very good job of acknowledging anger in our classrooms and that we can’t use what we won’t see, but in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, I find myself wanting to be clear that I don’t meanthat kind of anger. I mean “anger,” but not “anger.” There are not many English words for “anger.” There’s “wrath” and “ire,” although no one uses “ire” anymore and hardly anyone “wrath.” There’s “frustration,” “resentment,” and “indignation,” but they don’t have the emotional intensity of “anger,” a word that can slide so easily into “rage” and “violence” and, thus, “tragedy” and “horror.” This paucity of words suggests something about our unwillingness to confront anger, our belief that one should count to ten, turn the other cheek, walk away. We pretend that we are rational, logical persons, and we have tried to pushpathos out of our public lives and, certainly, out of the classroom. Lynn Worsham describes anger as the privilege of the powerful (“Going Postal”). Thus, one role of education is to school our anger into channels appropriate to our social class, ethnicity and gender. Consequently, as Gretchen Flesher Moon points out, emotion of any kind is rarely discussed in composition textbooks (“The Pathos ofPathos”). In our composition classrooms, writing is often presented as a process that is neat, clean, linear, and above all else, rational, a point also made by Laura Micciche. As she notes in her article “Emotion, Ethics, and Rhetorical Action,” logos has become the central concern of rhetoric (164). Certainly, there’s that messy stuff about brainstorming, but everything after that—outlining, drafting, revising, editing—sounds so rational, almost formulaic in most textbooks. We don’t often talk to our students about the chaos that comes with trying to communicate our thoughts to other people, nor do we talk about the emotions that attempting to work through that chaos creates, especially if that emotion is anger. Yet many of our students are often angry—with us, with themselves, with a curriculum that asks them to master a rhetorical style that does not come easily to them, with a course that can determine whether or not they can get the degree that they hope can lift themselves and their families economically. Writing is not just a means of expressing feelings, including anger. The process itself, especially as one is learning it, can produce anger. Or, at least, a certain kind of anger. Not a violent anger, but, hopefully, a productive one. “Anger,” but “notanger.” What we need is another word for anger. Aristotle had two words to describe what we call anger: orge—an irrational, strong emotion whose end is revenge—and thumos—a more rational emotion. orge is aroused by the experience or the impression of having been belittled or punished unjustly, or when someone close to one has been belittled, and its object is revenge (Cooper 250). Thumos is very much like anger and often associated with anger by Aristotle (Leighton 223). When thumos is particularly agitated or distressed, it becomes orge (anger). However, thumos is also a word that is “associated with spiritedness, and also with heart, or the seat or capacity for emotions” (Quandahl 13). It is a productive emotion that spurs us to action. It lacks the destructive quality of orge. Adding the Greek concept of thumos to our classroom discussions of logos, ethos, and pathos can provide a means for productively harnessing an emotion that is strong enough to see our students through the chaos of the writing process. Most books on writing downplay the role emotions play in the process. A study by Gretchen Flesher Moon finds that the textbooks most frequently used in composition classes make little, if any, mention of emotion. When they do discuss emotion, it is usually in relationship to Aristotle’s three intrinsic pisteis (logos, ethos, pathos). Or, they discuss emotion in the chapter dealing with argumentative papers and, then, as something to avoid (Moon 33). There is generally nothing on how emotion is part of the composing process itself, nothing about the pleasure, the frustration, the joy even, of writing (Moon 38). There are some exceptions, but these come from books that are not written exclusively, or even primarily, for students in a traditional college classroom. For example, Peter Elbow, in one of his word collages, declares that he is “tired of words” and admits that he has “always been angry at the articulate and fluent people” (Everyone Can Write 173). In Writing with Power, he devotes many pages throughout the book to using one’s feelings, including anger, in ways that are productive and powerful. Ironically, while many teachers use this work as a textbook, Elbow states clearly that Writing With Power is intended for “a very broad audience” (6). Similarly, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is written for a general audience (and one more interested in creative rather than academic writing). However, she, too, is one of the few to openly deal with the frustrations of writing. Over and over in the opening pages of her book, she tells her audience of prospective authors that writing is hard, first drafts are terrible, and that it’s ok to be angry and bitter as long as one keeps writing (perhaps about why one is so angry and bitter). And angry our students are. Part of the anger for firstyear writers may exist because their agendas may be radically different from their teachers’. As Russel Durst points out in Collision Course, many teachers have political goals associated with ideas about critical literacy. They want students to question assumptions and look for ambiguities in order to better understand themselves and the world around them. Micciche, in fact, states that “efforts to produce critical thinkers, cultural workers, or enfranchised citizens” are “now commonplace goals” (178). Other teachers may not articulate such explicitly political goals for their firstyear writing students, but they nevertheless hold out the hope that they can teach their students to be persuasive writers, good readers, and, in short, people who live the examined life (Durst 51). Such lofty goals often create conflict, especially when the content of the course challenges students’ beliefs about issues of gender, race, or class (Carroll 69). In addition, while teachers of firstyear composition courses often profess interest in teaching critical thinking skills, introducing students to academic forms of writing, or at least complicating their student’s threepoint, fiveparagraph essays, students may want only to learn how to punctuate their sentences properly. Students’ agendas are pragmatic: develop a good vocabulary, learn some grammar, streamline the writing process (preferably to something that can be done in under two hours), and pass the class with at least a “C.” Thus, Durst sees students as forming, however unconsciously, their own CCCC’s: correctness, clarity, conciseness, and creativity (60). In this organization, time spent on brainstorming, drafting, trying out different approaches, and revising is all time wasted (Durst 83). In addition, students often characterize teachers’ efforts to broaden their thinking as attacks on their own opinions (Carroll 68). Like their “voice,” students see their opinions as integral parts of their true selves and fear the loss of them (Carroll 85). Students resent being pulled into a writing process that demands so much emotional investment and risks so much of their selves. While some see the conflict between teachers and students as a difference in philosophy—the students’ pragmatism vs. the teachers’ idealism—Doug Hunt, in his book Misunderstanding the Assignment, suggests that the conflict exists in part because of the developmental stage in which firstyear college students find themselves. For him, the resistance from some students to engage in the kind of critical thinking and appreciation of ambiguity that we ask of them in our composition classes is not a result of deliberate resistance on their part, but of an inability to “read” the assignment as we do. Moreover, while we want them to see ambiguities, to question cultural myths, to experiment with writing styles, to accept contradiction—in short, to engage in what is essentially a very solitary activity—the typical eighteen year old freshman is at a stage in her development when social relationships mean everything (Durst 38). Writing is certainly a social act, insofar as all communication is ultimately social, but the process itself calls for solitude. We ask students to engage in an activity that will require hours spent alone thinking, brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and then are frustrated when our highly social students spend no more than a couple of hours on their essays. We do a disservice to our students when we don’t acknowledge their emotions, but even more importantly when we don’t provide a means for harnessing that emotion in a productive way. After all, while acknowledging our students’ feelings of sadness, frustration, anger, etc. is a first step, we can’t ethically leave them swirling in a vortex of emotions. Elbow advises his readers to use freewriting as an “outlet for these feelings so they don’t get so much in [the] way” of writing (Writing With Power 15). He suggests the use of journals as a way to articulate feelings and keep them in perspective (15).