Fragmenting the Hell out of Essay (IV)

      Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call this Essay version 3.5. or, rather, Somewhere else in the imagined outline than where I last left off. Oh well. I have ideas, and I am going to write them; organization is, afterall, the second step of Aristotle's 5 step model.
      I am reading Peter Elbow, a composition theory dude, and I run across his self-effacing remarks about not knowing whether he is exagerating a perceived conflict or not, a conflict between the act of writing and the act of reading. In some ways, he wants to see them on a continuum of meaning making, as people like Foucault and Stanley Fish do, to see the readers as makers of meaning, and thus "authors." On the other hand, Elbow is a writer, and like all writers, can't help but think of each text as his baby so keep your freakin interpretations out of my work! This, I think, is actually a good thing to hold in play; I can see the validity of each one. That "play" doesn't help me to do anything, though. So how is it handled?
      Let's turn to fanfiction again, as a place where people are, in fact, "Writing without Teachers" (the title of one of Elbow's first essays). They are, for the most part, not taking part in "academic" writing; there is no exchange value for their writing (that they have any control over). They are outside of many of the overt power relationships of the classroom (although, as Foucault says, we are always/already caught up in the webs of power and ideology, so there is no neutral writing space).
      Instead, there is a play between reader and writer which mimics some of the questions of domination we find in RL (Real Life). The review process on FFN and MediaMiner allows for readers to give suggestions and praise to the fanfic authors; this alone would not be of importance, except for the way that that feedback is often exemplary of the ideologies of power and truth in society at large. Who writes these feedbacks? How are they recieved? What does the author do with them? How do reviews affect the drafting process? How are these reviews like what we have learned to do in school? How might they affect the younger generation, who learn this type of feedback first, before learning the formulaic public school versions of "Peer Editing?" (And I do not mean to imply that these students will be at a disadvantage--they may, in fact, turn out to be better at responding to texts because they are used to being given the authority to speak on others' texts, where as some of my students still feel embarrassed or hesitant to (re)mark on their classmates' papers.)
      Elbow finds that as much as he wants to destroy the reading/writing binary, he can't help but feel that they are fundamentally opposed, that "readers and writers have competing interests over who gets to cntrol the text" (75). When we readers throw back to the idea that it is readers who construct the text (a reader response methodology), we can't deny that as writers, we are inherently frustrated when our work is misinterpreted. At the heart of this debate is "the question of what I 'said,' what meanings are 'in' my text" (76). Who "owns" the text determines who gives it meaning, value, and legitimacy.
      Elbow names the interaction between reader and writer as one of "disdain," approaching "mean and disrespectful." The reader wants to control the text, to remove the writer from the scene; the writer, already knowing s/he is absent in the mind of the reader comes to disdain the readers' misinterpretation and appropriation of her/his creation. This is when we may see the writer say, in the words of Elbow, " 'Readers are not my main audience. Sometimes the audience that I write for is me. For some pieces I don't even care whether readers always understand or appreciate everything I write [....] What do readers know?" (76). To me, this is a self-defense mechanism; always/already absent from his or her text, the author tries to regain control by making him/herself the audience; this, however, only serves to further the belief that the power is in the hands of the readers.
      These types of moves are common in fanfiction, but, as always with new media, the multiple authors, multiple texts, and fragmented composition of the texts create some interesting rhetorical moves and the creation of some strange writings meant to ease the shift from writer to reader. These, I think, are based on those common responses readers and writers have in classroom settings; the language of individual interpretation is learned early, and the ideologies of individualism are so tightly woven into American culture that self-expression through writing is a fairly common experience. It is when the writer can actually talk back, can use those responses to shape a continuing text that makes for an interesting study: What we would expect to be a typically (generically) monologic discourse is, through the implimentation and encouragement of peer review processes, becoming dialogic. And that dialogue between writer and reader is, as the genre expands, gains momentum, and establishes its own traditions, becoming an integral part of a text that is already complicated by problems of invention, authorship, and genre. And by "dialogic" I am not just refering to the way texts "enter into conversations with" other texts, or "respond to" other texts; I am refering to acutal dialogue between writer and reader about the writing process being inserted into the text itself, being refered to in various rhetorical moves that mimic other genres, but use these moves to create a further sense of fan community.
      What do these moves look like? What kind of feedback, and thus dialogue, is being created? How does it compare to what we do in a composition classroom? These are questions I want to consider in Return of the Fragmented Essay; I also would like to note to myself here that at some point I need to address (okay, figure out) my own standpoint on whether the peer review skills are "tools" that can be moved from context to context or whether the reframing in an academic setting means the skills must change, discourses must be silenced, fanfiction must be denigrated as non-legitimate texts...and how that affects peer reviewing in its two separate contexts.