Writing Reality: Constructivism, Metaphor, and Cosmology

Abstract

W hen language instructors teach from the conviction that words form the floor, walls, and ceiling of our existence (N ouwen, 1 98 1 , p. 3 1 ) , from a recognition that language is both the foundation and reflection of students' reality, value systems, experiences, and ways of being in the world, instructors receive and evaluate their students ' di scourse as far more significant than accumulations of discrete achievement skills . This (Ortony 1 979) or experientialist (Lakoff & Johnson, 1 980) perspective sensitizes teachers to a holistic view of their students ' linguistic lives; often teachers assign activities that encourage students to use expressive language, language that is close to the self' and gives signals about [students] as well as signals about [ s tudents ' ] topic [ s ] (Bri tton, 1 9 82 , pp. 96-97) . By doing this , the constructivist teacher becomes privy to the recurrent themes and metaphors by which students render their identities. In recent years epistemic theory in many disciplines has drifted from taxonomy to linguisticality (Foucault, 1 973 ), resulting in a burgeoning of publications on metaphor. Surprisingly, though, the trend has given rise to very little discussion about the significance of metaphor in writing theory. In fact, Seitz's Composition's Misunderstanding of Metaphor ( 1 99 1 ) notes a paradox in the field's persistence in viewing metaphor as something to be isolated, controlled, even expunged from student writing and discussions about writing, for the sake of clarity. As Booth ( 1978) reminds us, The quality of any culture is in large part the quality of the metaphorists that it creates and sustains (p. 72). Metaphors help thinkers and writers forge new connections, relevancies, realities and, at the same time, control the way they view the world. For this reason the discussion of metaphor should no longer be closeted in the literature class; a theoretical understanding of language, metaphor, and the reality they embrace is as essential to contemporary composition pedagogy as it is has al­ ways been to poetry and metaphysics. Those who take language seriously and acknowledge its power to change lives and, consequently, the world, recognize that composition classes must be more than laboratories to dissect syntax and paragraph patterns; composition classes must become studios where students' inchoate potentials can be transformed by the magic of metaphor from the unspeakable within to an articulate without.