“Intellectual Bondage: Toward a Politics and Hybridity of Academic Writing” by Tyler Thier

 

In “The Politics of Citation,” Annabel Kim envisions this titular convention as “the map of a process, not the map of a territory.” She barrels onward, arguing for citation not as a site of accruing intellectual capital where the rich get richer and the stars get brighter while the precariat writing against erasure gets forgotten and poorer, but as a jubilee that levels the fields in which we write so that we might accrue an extravagant set of debts resulting not in intellectual bondage but in intellectual freedom.

I’m a writing scholar, so I know quite well that writing is situational, dependent on rhetorical purpose, audience, kairos, and so on, that it flexes across genres and adapts itself to various ethical schema. But just because this is an observed truth in my discipline doesn’t mean it should be fundamentalized. The goal of writing studies and composition is to acclimate students to the idea that writing is an essential object unto itself, that it is worthy of study in its own right and not simply a vessel for other ideas and subjects. It’s a medium, a tool, a process, a body of scholarship, and a field of study all in one.

So, why is published academic writing almost always achingly rigid? This is not a revolutionary epiphany, but I do want to advance the argument that it is, in fact, too rigid for the socio-political context in which it persists as usual. The contemporary landscape of knowledge production, not to mention the readers it could potentially reach, warrants more risk and experimentation than ever before.

Academic writing is rigorous, grounded in research methodology and analysis – it doesn’t need to lose these qualities when adopting a more hybrid form. A famous example is one that doesn’t necessarily drop the disciplined structure of an academic article, but it sure does push against expected syntax therein. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” is Vershawn Ashanti Young’s rallying cry against cultural critic Stanley Fish’s support of pedagogy that favors standardized English. Assuming a dialect of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Young expertly code-switches while engaging deeply with Fish’s statements and with broader scholarship in the composition field. His diction is not up to the standards that “dominant language ideology” holds near and dear, and that is precisely why his article proves indispensable scholarship.

“Should Writers Use They Own English?” is indeed an academic text that evolves the canon of writing studies research while couched in subversive strategies that include code-meshing and satire. But it’s still operating, at least on the surface, in the dominant compositional mode of academic literature. Traditional paragraphs, in-text citations, and a Works Cited where it should be. It works because Young is proving an argument that non-standard dialects, languages, and other forms of communication can still exist validly in the framework of the academy. But what if they can’t?
Adèle-Elise Prévost’s “the signal of noise” is the inverse of Young in terms of its approach to academic writing. Whereas Young adopted an “outsider” dialect within the norms of an academic text, Prévost sticks with a traditional SAE diction while gunning for an “outsider” organization, fracturing the space of the page on which the writing appears. The article’s form mirrors its content; Prévost analyzes the hyper-technologized themes of the Japanese manga Serial Experiments Lain within the kinetic structure of—you guessed it—a manga. The article is excitingly tactile, clearly scanned from a hand-crafted collage of text and image. It’s asymmetrical, shoddy, and all the more charming for it. It’s as frantic and high-energy and stylized as the Japanese cultural artifact that it’s bringing scholarly exposure to. And yes, it’s still academically rigorous and somehow finds the space to work in citations and footnotes, in case any of you academy traditionalists were getting nervous from my description.

These two core examples I’ve been drawing from are what I would deem “experiments” in academic convention. Nevertheless, they make compromises. They contain evident, academic benchmarks that mark them as scholarly material – as opposed to, say, creative nonfiction or screenplay. But this is exactly the kind of binary that I’m hoping to really deconstruct and resist as my research on this front develops; scholars like Gesa Kirsch and Cydney Alexis have argued for published academic writing that, among other things, radically embraces the first-person in all its contradictions and biases; more outrightly blends aesthetic with research; is unabashedly multilingual within a single text. In short, the kind of radical, diversified, and dangerously subversive academic literature I’m seeking out is the kind that (to quote Kim again) “maps a process.” It leans into the curious, messy work of scholarship and, in doing so, avoids strengthening boundaries around already existing territories of elite insiders and white-centric epistemologies.

Intellectual freedom requires intellectual rigor (methodology, theoretical frameworks, close observation and analysis, ethical considerations) to materialize. But, as I get further into my research, I’m realizing that intellectual—academic, scholarly, whatever you’d like to call it—writing doesn’t have to adhere similarly to those rules. A scientific lab report, for example, can still be validated in its empirical evidence, statistical findings, and other such factors even if its writing style is more hybridized, conversational, cheeky, conflicted, infused with cultural or linguistic quirks, and…what’s that word I’m looking for? Ah yes, accessible.

Tyler Thier is the Writing Proficiency Coordinator and an adjunct assistant professor in the Writing Studies & Rhetoric department at Hofstra University. His work can be found, among other places, in Aeon, Senses of Cinema, Times Higher Education, ANQ, and Praxis. If you see any frog-themed ephemera in Mason Hall, rest assured he is responsible.