Abstract
This essay begins from the premise that acts of thinking and writing are shaped immanently by corporeal need. Accordingly, my aim is to sketch a vision of composition pedagogy that acknowledges the moves and modulations of the thinking body. The route I take to get there explores four works of critical prose that mobilize form and content toward a radical re-orientation of body-in-space and body-in-writing. These texts—by Eleni Stecopoulos, Robert Kocik, William James, and Eli Clare—are to varying degrees experimental, demonstrating a manner of textual difficulty that signals the visceral difficulty implied in any act of writing. What follows is a work of both institutional critique and disability studies, examining the ways in which illness and bodily discomfort become intimately intertwined with the locales that are most insistent on erasing all traces of them. In invoking the architecture of writing education—both the spatial design of the classroom and its systemic elision of somatic experience—and pointing to alternative forms, I mount a critique that is more imaginative than diagnostic, more creative than critical.
Recommended Citation
Atkin, Miriam L.
(2024)
"Indisposed to Write: Teaching a Visceral Poetics,"
The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning: Vol. 29
, Article 7.
https://doi.org/10.7290/jaepl29qddp
Available at:
https://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl/vol29/iss1/7
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