Thomas Newkirk’s idea of the “reflexive turn” is useful for understanding the transformational imperative at work in the version of personal writing taught in many composition classrooms. Newkirk identifies the “reflexive turn” as a distinguishing feature of the personal essay, a genre whose persuasiveness depends not on a writer’s certainty, as in many forms of argumentative
writing, but on her vulnerability. According to Newkirk, “The personal essay dramatizes thought by showing the writer as someone open to the potentially transforming effects of a life
sensitively encountered” (Performance of Self 13). To create this persona, personal essayists frequently expose the innermost, often physical, details of their lives to readers. Seneca, for instance, tells readers about his asthma, Jorge Luis Borges ruminates on his blindness, Joan Didion divulges her psychological history.
Coupled with this impulse to expose one’s secrets and flaws is the personal essayist’s tendency to draw meaning from these experiences, to show what knowledge she has gleaned from experience and what readers may in turn take away. As Newkirk puts it, “Even confessions of inadequacy, insensitivity, and cruelty are redeemed by those reflexive turns that show the writer has—often, it seems, through the act of writing itself—achieved a measure of self-
understanding and moral growth” (Performance of Self 13). The essayist Phillip Lopate, whose work Newkirk draws on, offers a more sinister portrayal: “The personal essayist is a Houdini who, having confessed his sins and peccadilloes and submitted voluntarily to the reader’s censuring handcuffs, suddenly slips them off with the malicious ease by claiming, I am more than the perpetrator of that shameful act; I am the knower and commentator as well” (xviii, original emphasis).
The “reflexive turn” marks that place in an essay where the writer moves from confessing to interpreting, where, as Newkirk puts it, the writer “shifts from rendering to reflection”
(Performance of Self 12). He quotes this passage from George Orwell’s canonical essay “Shooting an Elephant” as an example:
And it was at that moment, as I stood there, with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility, of the white man’s dominion in the East.
Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leader of the piece; but in reality I was only the absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. (qtd. in Performance of Self 13)
Early in the essay, in a passage Newkirk doesn’t deal with, Orwell makes clear to readers that he detested British imperialism before this event, although he wasn’t yet able to say why. “I could get nothing into perspective,” he writes. “I was young and ill-educated and I had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East” (155). To hear Orwell tell it, this silence is shattered as he stands between the Burmese villagers and the
elephant and apprehends, as if in the blink of an eye, the perspective on imperialism he lacked in the beginning of the essay. Seemingly no longer young, Orwell transforms at this moment into someone conscious and critical of his own thoughts and actions.
Teachers demand that students perform similar transformations in personal writing assignments, which often ask writers to ponder the significance of pivotal moments in their young lives. Looking back over assignments I designed for basic and introductory writing courses, I come across passages like this one that makes such a demand on students:
For your first exercise, I’d like you to try something similar to what Mike Rose does in his book Lives on the Boundary. That is, I’d like you to remember a particular moment from your own experience as a student. This moment should be one that you think is important. It could be a time when you were excited by something that happened in class—or puzzled, upset, whatever. Thoroughly describe this moment and interpret it. What makes this moment interesting to
you? When you look back at this moment, what insight does it give you about school or about yourself as a student?
Such an assignment, especially in its final question, presumes that students will write a narrative of development that illustrates how, through their reading and writing, they have reached a more critical understanding of their education. I expect students, like Orwell, to gain perspective where they presumably had none before.
Newkirk would respond by saying that an assignment such as this one unrealistically presumes that students have at their disposal a collection of life-altering experiences to write about. In addition, it privileges seriousness over pleasure, significance over triviality, interpretation over sensation, and therefore ignores an alternative tradition of essay writing rooted in the arts of observation. Tracing this tradition back to Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s work in The Tatler and The Spectator, and continuing on into E.B. White’s and others’ “Notes and Comments” in The New Yorker, Newkirk proposes that this genre, in which the writer’s “goal is often nothing more than an ironic bemused delight in the diversity of human experience,” has a place in college writing classrooms (“The Dogma of Transformation” 259). In the observational essay the writer adopts the position of the idler or flaneur, the leisured gentleman who concerns himself less with analyzing the world around him and more with capturing it into his gaze. Not surprisingly, Newkirk finds that numerous themes written by students at Harvard in the 1880s and at the University of New Hampshire in the 1930s follow this genre. Here is an excerpt from one, written by a student at New Hampshire in 1935, that Newkirk cites:
There’s a window full of good looking pipes. Say, there’re some beauties in there. Mmmm—that one in the center—it would be a pleasure to smoke yourself
to death with a pipe like that. No sudden mouthfuls of hellish-tasting juice; no rank and soggy heals to assault your nose, mouth, throat and cause nice people to cast wry meaningful looks in your direction. (qtd. in “The Dogma of
Transformation” 259).
The value of such essays, for Newkirk and, he claims, for the instructors who taught them, comes from the extent to which the writer captures an experience in language, a practice that pays dividends in the classroom: it “help[s] students claim lived experience by sharpening perception and stressing skills of description that help take writers beyond and beneath the habitual and taken-for-granted” (“The Dogma of Transformation” 266). As the student above makes clear, especially in his comment that he prefers the pipe whose smoothness will not cause people to look his way, the imperative of observational essays is aesthetic and not political: he aims not to disturb the status quo, but to render experience in such a way that readers may share it with him.
However, Newkirk fails to address several important questions concerning observational writing: What criteria should teachers use to judge whether an essay has thoroughly captured an experience? How can teachers draw on the observational genre to introduce students to forms of writing valued across the university curriculum? In addition, the observational essay may open up alternative possibilities for students’ personal writing, but it also potentially reproduces the problems many students face concerning writerly authority, the very issue Newkirk seeks to address. While nuanced description is an important step in a writer’s development, Newkirk’s version of the observational essay figures students as bystanders, a role many students already problematically take on when entering the writing classroom. Some students may be able to pull off the critical ironic detachment the observational genre calls for, but others will likely see this
genre as an invitation to fall back on familiar writing strategies that encourage the kind of objectivity Newkirk seems to affirm but that reinforce a rule-governed approach toward writing (i.e., “Is it okay to use ‘I’ in my papers?”). Far too many students already believe their writing has little or no value within and beyond the classroom walls, and a writing pedagogy centered on observational vignettes may further confirm this belief. In other words, Newkirk replaces one extreme, the transformational essay and its commitment to critical scrutiny, with another extreme, that of the observational essay and its potential lack of engagement.
Students’ personal writing in the AC, I argue, falls between these two extremes: students typically resist the urge to generalize or draw moral lessons from their experiences, as the transformational genre calls for, and they construct themselves as actors rather than passive observers.