Mid-Term 1: Elbow/Bartholomae

III. Elbow/Bartholomae
The Elbow/Bartholomae debate seems to be a composition based continuation of modern society’s debate over the nature/nurture argument of human development. Bartholomae’s focus on the socially constructed identity of the students precludes his supporting Elbow’s identity based writing. If, from Bartholomae’s perspective, you don’t have an individual identity until you’ve been explicitly taught to analyze the society you grew up in and choose to either accept or reject it you can’t very well use that identity (which Elbow seems to presume is pre-existent in his students) as a basis for writing. How can you privilege personal writing (Elbow’s approach) if the students don’t truly have an independent personality until they’ve effectively been guided through a critique of their culture? I think this philosophical difference provides the irreconcilable rift between the two.

The other key point I see that differs between them, and where I disagree with Elbow is the focus in a freshman comp course. Elbow’s focus is on helping the writer develop a sincerity, truly developing their own voice. Bartholomae is focusing on the critical, more traditional academic writing. Elbow has maintained that he feels the one semester beginning writing course is not the place to focus on these skills, arguing instead that they should be introduced at higher and more major specific levels. Elbow pushes the students to trust language and themselves, preferring to promote a writer’s faith in his/her own ideas as opposed to an academic’s professional skepticism. Bartholomae fronts a very academic approach to literature and other readings, intentionally chooses difficult texts to introduce difficult reading as well as academic writing, and promotes a distrust of language and communication in order to highlight the possibility that the students’ responses may be more cultural than personal. In short, Elbow’s goal is to create writers of whatever stripe, while Bartholomae’s is to create a very specific type of writer (or at least open the door to the students becoming that very specific type of writer): the academic. This debate has been (was?) a flash point in comp theory, highlighting a continued variance in the field concerining not only how a freshman comp course should accomplish its aims, but what, exactly those aims are.