Tending Inward, Tending Outward

Hi. I was going to finish this last night, just so I could post the title Saturday Night LeFevre, but then that began to seem sad.

Some have already mentioned Emerson, and I'll say I was also put in mind of American Scholar and Ralpha Waldo's notions (or his society's notions as they moved him and he moved them) regarding education. On one hand, we have the Platonic influence on New England transcendentalism and LeFevre's critique of current-traditional through Elbovian process through cognitivist comp theory being focused on "the individual inventor apart from sociocultural contexts" and composition, like invention, being depicted as "a closed, one-way system, and the inventor as an atomistic unit" who is seeking a priori ideal forms not by turning to the social but to the inner voice of inspiration (32). On the other, we have LeFevre's post-process call to "writers in all discourse communities" to attempt "to clarify and possibly expand the prevailing sense of what constitutes collaboration and how it should be acknowledged" (123). Both sides began to remind me of our post-Emerson icon, Walt Whitman.

After one of Whitman's more famous lists in the fifteenth canto of "Song of Myself" (after the conductor, child, president, and Missourian are rendered coequal with the opium-eater and the "prostitute draggl[ing]her shawl"), he offers that famous conclusion: "And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them. / And such as it is to be of these more or less I am / And of these one and all I weave the song of myself"). Of course, you could leap in on any page of Leaves of Grass and find support for rhetorical invention spawned by 1) the "Me" and the "Not Me", 2) by the inner voice seeking to sound its "barbaric yawp" and announce its identity, and 3) by the "collective masses" that are America at this moment in the mid-19th century, who are acknowledged as co-creators of Whitman's unspooling poem.

When LeFevre posited that "an understanding of invention as a social act helps direct us toward a possible synthesis of the fragmentation of knowledge existing in the academic disciplines," I was still thinking of Whitman as both uber-Platonist and denier of the purely "atomistic individual." Then I remembered another connection to Whitman. I was at a conference once where two Whitman scholars did not find themselves heading toward a "possible synthesis"; rather, they disagreed sharply and in the territorial way that signifies "the fragmentation of knowledge existing in the academic disciplines [or, within academic disciplines]". Using this week's rhetoric, I would say both Whitman scholars wanted to own Whitman (like Jack Gladney comes to own Hitler in White Noise), or at least wanted to own the Whitman each had invented. I guess it took me twelve years and this week's reading to appreciate the irony of their posessiveness regarding their (somewhat invented) subject matter.