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Articles Conference Reviews |
M.16 Interest in EmotionM.16 The Persistence of Interest in Emotion in Our Field I had just come from the exhibition hall and its maze of book sellers. Someone had told me that Margaret Price's new book, Mad At School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, had come out, and I had to buy it. I flipped through it as I waited for the panel on affect and affective disorders to begin. I kept thinking, it is finally happening: compositionists are beginning to take a fearless look at mental illness. There has been other thinking in our field; we can point to Marilyn Valentino's famous article about what to write in the margins when students self-disclose. Lots of other fields have taken on the topic; fields like psychology and literary criticism have paid attention to what happens when writers with mental illness write. But this level of exploration is new. My excitement, my sense of finally, was met at the panel by an argument to study madness and student writers. The argument was the key point of a paper passionately delivered by Stephanie Stone Horton: "'Their Lives a Storm Whereon They Ride': The Affective Disorders, Student Composition, and the Case for Madness Studies." Horton talked about the dearth of exploration in our field despite the efforts of people like Valentino in the 1990s and despite the number of students who suffer from depression or bipolar disorder. (She put it at 10.2%.) Horton's delivery was at times light-hearted, a welcome respite from the intensity of the topic. She described her own mental illness and that of her father and daughter. Then, having done so, she admitted that "the moment we disclose a mental illness, we lose rhetorical power." But Horton gained rhetorical power in her disclosure. I think she made a better case for "madness studies" in our field because she could talk about her own learning to write. Madness studies, she suggested, would allow us to better recognize the struggles of our students in the classroom so that we can understand their writing processes and struggles and refer them as needed to resources. Also presenting with Horton was Julie Nelson. Her paper was entitled, "Teaching Emotion: Emotion as the 'Phantom Limb,'" a "phantom limb" being a term used by Lynn Worsham to describe composition's undertheorizing of emotion. Nelson gracefully explored the theories and pedagogies of two theorists of emotion, Megan Boler and Laura Micciche in their respective works, Power: Emotions and Education and Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching. Bringing together Boler's and Micciche's work, Nelson looked at some similarities, differences, and what happens when you place them in conjunction with each other. She explained how Boler and Micciche try to teach students to examine or live an other's emotion and how taking their two different ways of teaching emotion together--one by teaching students how to witness another's emotions through a "pedagogy of discomfort" and the other by using performance to embody another's emotions. In both cases, students learn another, much ignored way, of thinking critically. In the end, she called for more work into better understanding emotion's role in the classroom. The combination of affective disorders and affect in the same panel created dissonance for me. As I have argued elsewhere and at the risk of oversimplifying, the conflation dangerously suggests that affective disorders such as clinical mania and clinical depression with their many psychological and physical symptoms are just extremes of happiness and the blues--the kind of thinking that happens right before you tell a clinically depressed person to either "cheer" or "lighten" up. On the other hand, both affect and affective disorders influence composing and both require further study. This much is not new. In the foreword to Alice Brand's 1989 The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience, Peter Elbow explains why we should study emotion in composition, writing that “there is a continuous stream of feelings going on at every moment of the writing process” (xiii). If depression is one of those feelings and/or episodes, it will affect the writing, regardless of whether it is the kind of depression that makes writing more solemn and dark and anxiety-ridden difficult or the kind that blocks writing along with most other kinds of communication, well, completely. When the floor was opened for questions and comments, Horton's paper on madness studies elicited the first few. And, as often happens in discussions of mental illness, personal stories of suffering surfaced. One woman brought up what she called her own "insanity"; another spoke of whether to disclose her clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder to her students. At such times in such discussions, too, there always exists a brief moment of solidarity, a brief moment before the stigma returns to hang heavy in the air. And that moment happened. There were other questions and comments: a question as to what extent society plays a role in mental illness and to what extent biology does--to what extent those two things speak to each other; a comment about gender and the perception of emotional disclosure, with a reference to the books, Raising Cain and Recovery Ophelia; a discussion of writing and healing; a volunteered fact of a colleague offering a course on writing and healing; and a discussion of how to teach holistically, working with the emotional, cognitive, spiritual, and social. In the end, the title of the panel--"The Persistence of Interest in Emotion in Our Field"--seemed to suggest that our continued interest in emotion (both affect and affective disorders) is in itself notable. And it is. But what is more notable is that our interest, though persistent, has remained just outside the mainstream. We have yet to bring affect and affective disorder entirely into the forefront, but are (finally) on our way. |