Dead Letters: Error in Composition, 1873-2004 (Tracy Santa)

Quantity in Basket:none Code: 1-57273-772-7 Price:$35.00 Title: Dead Letters Sub-title: Error in Composition, 1873-2004 Author(s): Tracy Santa Publish Date: October 2007 Pages: 156 Format: Cloth

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The identification and alleviation of error in student writing has been a preoccupation of writing instruction in American colleges and universities since the 1870s and has been central to the discussion surrounding basic writing instruction since the 1970s. But the affective bearing of error on teacher response to student writing and student writers has been little researched or explicated. This longitudinal study documents the manner in which our visions of error and our perceptions of student writers who produce error have both transformed and remained static over the course of 130 years. What is revealed in an historical and critical reading of error is the diagnostic and judgmental gaze leveled at error and student writers who produce error. This book reconstructs error as a product of a clinical practice imposed on student writing. Central to this reading is an assertion that error is largely produced by readers of student writing rather than student writers themselves, an assertion designed to provoke critical reflection on the gap between espoused composition theory and theory-in-practice bearing on our response to student writing and student writers. Contents: Goals, Intentions, and Context. Error as Reader Response/A Reader's Response. REVISING ERROR. Total Control Over the Rules. The Phenomenology of Error. A Revisioning of Error in Composition. Prescribed vs. Described Response to Error. Correctness as a Cultural Signifier. Error and the Clinical Gaze. CORRECTION OF THEMES: THE CONTROLLING GAZE (1873-1963). Wrought in Error. Correctness in the Pre-comp Era. Error and Expectations. Descriptivists vs. Prescriptivists. Our National Mania for Correctness. A Rock and a Hard Place. Theoretical Perspectives on Error, 1873-1963. A More Humane Incarceration. Error as Deficit Model. Error, Otherness and Difference. Correction of Themes as Disciplinary Mechanism. OPEN ADMISSIONS: MINA SHAUGHNESSY, ERROR, AND EXPECTATIONS (1963-1978). Unprofitable Intrusions. Disciplinary Drift. Shaughnessy's Reading of Error. Journal of Basic Writing 1.1. "Error". Error and Interpretation. Ways of Seeing/Seeing Error. The Frontier of Error. A Theory of Difference. THE STUDY OF ERROR: MAPPING THE TERRITORY (1978-1989). Error Analysis. The Study of Error. The Phenomenology of Error. Developmental Reading(s) and Error as a Sign. Error and Response in Social Context. Bartholomae, Hartwell, and Hull—1985. Proofreading as Reading, Error as Embarrassment. "Released into Language" and Research in Written Composition. Hull, Lunsford, Connors and Lunsford, Wall and Hull. Limits of the Study of Error. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: DE/RECONSTRUCTING THE BASIC WRITER (1989-1999). Institutional Voices/Dark Shadows. Reading the Student Body. Espoused Theory and Theory in Practice. Shaughnessy’s Contested Legacy. Resisting/Mapping Basic Writing. Correctness, Signal, and Static. Under Imperial Eyes. Deconstructing Basic Writing/Turning a Clinical Gaze. A GLANCE AND A SILENT BODY: HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS/PRESENT REFLECTION (2000-2004). The Materiality of Error. Processing Student Error. Error, Mimesis, and Cultural Reproduction. Error’s Endless Train[ing]. Works Cited. Author Index. Subject Index.