This project develops a way of rethinking failure in the writing classroom—how we define it as well as how we respond to it. In rhetoric and composition scholarship, “failure” as a term is hard to pin down. Though most obviously associated with assessment, the term is rarely if ever engaged as an experiential, emotional process integral to learning. Drawing from queer, feminist, and emotion theory, as well as an original research study grounded in feminist qualitative methodology, this dissertation brings failure to the forefront of writing scholarship, insisting that writing teachers and scholars must think more critically about its role in students’ writing lives if we are to continue promoting writing as a vital skill in the 21st century.
I begin by reviewing disciplinary literature, claiming that our primary ways of studying writing (observation, talk-aloud protocol) do not enable researchers to “see” failure, or those activities, behaviors, and bodily and affective markers that fall outside our understanding of what “counts” (and is therefore observable) as writing behavior.
The second and third chapters describe a research study, consisting of a large-scale, open-ended survey of undergraduates and follow-up interviews with a representative sample of participants. My analysis of the data is guided by Silvan Tomkins’ categories of affect, Krista Ratcliffe’s scholarship on rhetorical listening, Thomas Newkirk’s work on narrative and case study, and Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Davis’s work on Portraiture. The data show that participants associate failure most often with shame, an affective state that should be of great interest to writing researchers. Shame, according to the extensive work of Tomkins, Elspeth Probyn, Brene Brown, and others, represents at its core a disconnection from something or someone we perceive to be important; because of this, its onset also compels us to strive for reconnection, a process requiring a new and different approach than the one resulting in failure. Therefore, I argue that shame and failure are linked to the rhetorical principle of invention, and help to account for the full emotional content of writing practice, something writing researchers have yet to explore adequately. The third chapter concludes with a call for the development of research methodologies that grant us greater access to the emotional and unseen elements of the writing process, and outlines the ethics that would guide such an endeavor.
In the final chapter, I discuss implications of the study, both pedagogical and theoretical, most prominently turning to Sara Ahmed’s work on wonder, Kathleen Stewart’s work on bloom spaces, and J. Halberstam’s work on failure to imagine ways of teaching, researching, and learning writing that resist neat, procedural methods in favor of messy, non-hierarchical explorations of thought. Embracing an “epistemology of failure” is a way of coming into knowledge in ways that cause discomfort, or attract notice. With such an approach comes the possibility of devising more inventive ways of moving and being in the world.