Show us your chora.

 

In Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan argues for the value of composing processes and modalities that move beyond the formal scholarly genres so often privileged throughout the field of rhetoric and composition. For her, avant-gardist exploration and authoring in new media spaces all but intrinsically open up possibilities for seemingly more authentic composing and critique:

 

As with experimental writing, arguments for multimodal composition suggest that especially through the use of new technologies, students may be better allowed to express their individual experiences, articulate marginal or underrepresented social realities, as well as critique the limits of the dominant sociopolitical discourses and the institutions that perpetuate these discourses. (147)

 

Sullivan analyzes the work of Geoffrey Sirc, Gregory Ulmer, and Jeff Rice to explore how experimental writing might tap into undervalued ways of knowing. For instance, she notes how both “Ulmer and Rice advocate associational writing, thinking, and intuition, among other compositional strategies and values. . . . avail[ing] themselves . . . of any materials that are available, academic, artistic, scientific, popular, old, new, trash, sound, made, and so on” (155).

 

We appreciate the spiritedness of Sullivan’s interest in experimental writing, and her turn to valuing different forms of composing over time gestures to the potential malleability of composing to meet different needs, address changing circumstances, and refract different possibilities. Indeed, expressing “individual experiences,” articulating “marginal or underrepresented social realities,” and critiquing “the limits of the dominant sociopolitical discourses” should be less about uncovering truth and much more about making things up as we go along. For how can “associational writing, thinking, and intuition” be anything but provisional, temporary, in motion?