Authors on Writing: Metaphors and Intellectual Labor

237 Pages·2005·1.76 MB·English

by  Barbara Tomlinson (auth.)

Authors on Writing
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Authors on Writing
Metaphors and Intellectual Labor
Barbara Tomlinson
University of California, San Diego
© Barbara Tomlinson 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-4895-3
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2005 by
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DOI 10.1057/9780230595668
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tomlinson, Barbara, 1946–
Authors on writing: metaphors and intellectual labor/ Barbara Tomlinson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Authorship. I. Title.
PN145.T65 2005
808’.02–dc22 2004057525
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Part I Metaphor and Cultures of Composing
Chapter 2 Composing and Metaphoricity 9
Chapter 3 Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 32
Chapter 4 Metaphorics of Embodied Labor 51
Chapter 5 Metaphorics of Discursive Sociality 72
Part II The Apparatus of Authorship
Chapter 6 Authorship and Intellectual Labor 97
Chapter 7 Authorship in an Economy of Promotion 113
Chapter 8 Writing in Earthquake Country 125
Appendix: Sources, Selection, Classification of Metaphors 132
Notes 135
Critical References 169
Interview References 179
Index 221
v
Acknowledgments
Thanks to colleagues and students at the University of California,
San Diego who have offered useful comments and criticisms including
Evan Adelson, Linda Brodkey, Betty Cain, Lori Chamberlain, Aaron
Cicourel, Stephen Cox, Charles R. Cooper, Edwin Fussell, Brent
Gowan, Eugene Holland, David Keevil, Hugh B. Mehan, Bill McKnight,
Ken Mendoza, Louis A. Montrose, Peter Mortensen, Brooke Neilsen,
Richard Terdiman, Don E. Wayne. I have also learned a great deal
from colleagues in the profession on other campuses including Nancy
Armstrong, Rise Axelrod, Steve Axelrod, Carol Berkenkotter, Peter
Elbow, Linda Flower, Ann Matsuhashi Feldman, Sheryl I. Fontaine,
Sarah Freedman, Paul Gordon, Robert Hanneman, John R. Hayes,
Shirley Brice Heath, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Bruno Latour,
Donald McQuade, Donald M. Murray, Jan Radway, Helen Rivera,
Mike Rose, Rusty Russell, Jane Tompkins. Thanks to the composition
group at the University of Minnesota that made me welcome as a
visitor and as the first Fellow of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
in Writing; it was a quarter when I got an amazing amount of work
done: Chris Anson, Robert L. Brown, Jr. Geoffrey Sirc, Donald Ross,
and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles. A special thanks for inviting me in and
giving careful readings and comments to my Friday Morning
Reading/Writing Group: Sara Evans, Amy Kaminsky, Elaine Tyler May,
Riv-Ellen Prell, and Cheri Register; and also to Hildy Miller. Particular
thanks for the late stage contributions of Jennifer Diamond of UCSD
and an exceptional reader for Palgrave.
The people whose hard work has helped make the Muir College
Writing Program succeed include Maria Arande, Michele Bigos, Caron
Coke, Cynthia Dupray, Barbara Eyer, Patrick Gleason, Nancy Hesketh,
Liza Kamps, Pat Ledden, Barbara Mauro, Douglas McCannel, Lorie
Newman, Eliza Segura, and Linda Vo and Carrie Wastal.
Thanks for sharing the years of intellectual labor to George Lipsitz,
Kerry Tomlinson, Matthew Tomlinson, Lisa Choy Tomlinson, and now
Rebecca Leigh, Emily Rae, and Kevin James Tomlinson.
I would like to thank Masha Zakheim for permission to use Bernard
Zakheim’s Coit Tower mural Library (1934) for the cover. I would also
like to express my appreciation to New England Publishers Association
for permission to quote from Packard, William, ed. The Craft of Poetry:
vi
Acknowledgments vii
Interviews from the New York Quarterly. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1974. I would also like to thank those who provided permission to
reprint essays of my own that I have revised to incorporate into the
book. To Tom Waldrep for permission to use “On Earthquakes, Lost
Wax, and Woody Allen: Composing Composing,” Writers on Writing.
Vol. II. Ed. T. Waldrep. New York: Random House, 1987. 205–211. To
Sage Publishers for permission to use “Tuning, Tying, and Training
Texts: Metaphors for Revision,” Written Communication 5.1 (1988):
58–81, and “Characters are Co-Authors: Segmenting the Self, Integrating
the Composing Process,” Written Communication4.3 (1986): 421–448. To
Erlbaum for permission to use “Cooking, Mining, Gardening, Hunting:
Metaphorical Stories Writers Tell About Their Composing Processes,”
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity1.1 (1986): 57–79.
1
Introduction
In this book I provide new ways of exploring a very old topic—the
activities of writing and what authors say about them. Drawing on
published interviews with writers, I explore the discursive and cultural
practices that shape writing as both an individual activity and a col-
lective practice. As narrative acts performed in public, interviews with
published authors constitute critical evidence about the cultures of
writing that shape us and that we help shape. In the pages that follow,
I argue that serious and sustained analysis of figurative language
about composing by authors in literary interviews enables us to under-
stand writing as work, as a shared social practice, as an activity with
both critical and creative dimensions. Analysis and interpretation of
authors’ interviews shifts focus from the idealized humanist subject
often enshrined in discourses about creation and criticism since the
Enlightenment to the struggles of actual human individuals attempt-
ing to forge new subjectivities, subject positions, social identities, and
social relations. Interviews allow us to see that something new happens
through conversation, that interviews help writers and readers recog-
nize and realize the trans-individual dimensions of activities conducted
in solitude.
In Part I, Metaphor and the Cultures of Composing, I argue that crit-
ical engagement with the metaphors that writers draw on in discussing
their writing acts can help us locate our critical, creative, and inter-
pretive practices in the historical matrices that give them meaning. By
reading author interviews diagnostically and symptomatically, we dis-
cover the trans-individual and inter-textual dimensions of writing—the
ways in which the words we write always echo, answer, amplify, and
occlude words written by others, how a collective metanarrative about
composition and authorship influences our efforts whether we know it
1
2 Authors on Writing
or not. Perhaps most important, employing metaphor-reading as a crit-
ical method teaches us that words are more than tools and that writing
is more than a technology. My investigation highlights the importance
of metaphor in composing as well as the connections that link the
teaching of writing to collective, historically specific, and socially
shared narratives and metanarratives about originality and creativity.
In Part II, The Apparatus of Authorship,I explore how mechanisms
of publicity and promotion produce the genre of author interviews and
permeate its constructions of authorship. Interest in authorial sub-
jectivity and even celebrity has been a long-standing aspect of cultural
life as well as an occasional aspect of scholarly inquiry. It is related to
larger cultural interest in representations of imagination and invention
by all kinds of creative people, including artists, musicians, and scien-
tists. My inquiry examines how conversations between interviewers
and authors reveal socially shared understandings of what writing is
and how it gets done. When writers converse about their composing
practices, they recover and reconsider aspects of their artistry that may
have eluded conscious recognition. Author interviews thus restore a
temporal dimension and teleology to the seemingly timeless quality of
literature as authors return to previous projects in order to plan new
ones. The ways that authors discuss their composing, particularly their
metaphors, help authors, readers, and critics recuperate what Gertrude
Stein called “the time of the composition and the time in the com-
position” (1962, p. 516).They remind us that the finished work of art
has a history, and that the unfinished draft has a future.
A dominant cultural metanarrative that I have called the Buried Life of
the Mind tends to govern discussions of composing in Western culture.
This metanarrative implies that writing emerges from deep within a
heroic self. Such a metanarrative of writing encourages us to focus atten-
tion on the special selfhood of the heroic author and its teeming buried
life, rather than the embodied labor and the social nature of composing.
Whatever their utility for moral education and inspiration, images of
heroic authors severely limit our understanding of how writing actually
takes place. These stories focus our attention on cultural products worthy
of admiration, rather than on the complex cultural processes that
produce them. They segregate literary authorship from other kinds of
textual production. As Raymond Williams argues, relegating writing
exclusively to the sphere of art “is to lose contact with the substantive
creative process and then to idealize it; to put it above or below the
social, when it is in fact the socialin one of its most distinctive, durable,
and total forms” (Williams, 1977, p. 212, emphasis added).