The authors of this book look at authoring, defined here as the phenomenological act or felt sense of creating a text, from two perspectives: the philosophical idea of potentiality, and the factual perspective of singularity as a verifiable human condition. Without abandoning postmodern perspectives, they use their own perspective to reconsider English-studies concerns such as gender, character, literacy, feminism, self, and interpretation. In the first chapter, working authors describe their felt sense of authoring. In chapters 2-7, the concept of potentiality leads first to a study of several student writers, then to a discussion of William Butler Yeats. Chapters 8-13 use student experiences and writings to explore the fact of human singularity and its implications for teaching and studying literature and composition. Brief interchapters focus on science fiction writer Alice Sheldon as an example. The book is of interest to English teachers and scholars. The authors are affiliated with Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The postmodern conviction that meaning is indeterminate and self is an illusion, though fascinating and defensible in theory, leaves a number of scholarly and pedagogical questions unsatisfied. Authoring—the phenomenological act or felt sense of creating a text—is “a remarkably black box,” say Haswell and Haswell, yet it should be one of the central preoccupations of scholars in English studies. Not only can the study of authoring accommodate the “social turn” since postmodernism, they argue, but it accommodates as well conceptions of, and the lived experience of, personal potentiality and singularity.
Without abandoning the value of postmodern perspectives, Haswell and Haswell use their own perspective of authorial potentiality and singularity to reconsider staple English-studies concerns such as gender, evaluation, voice, character, literacy, feminism, self, interpretation, assessment, signature, and taste. The essay is unique as well in the way that its authors embrace often competing realms of English studies, drawing examples and arguments equally from literary and compositionist research.
In the process, the Haswells have created a Big Idea book, and a critique of the field. Their point is clear: the singular person/mysterious black box/author merits deeper consideration than we have given it, and the book’s crafted and woven explorations provide the intellectual tools to move beyond both political divisions and theoretical impasses.
