Annotation by Emma Moghabghab

Micciche, L. R. (2014). Writing material. College English, 76(6), 488-505. Retrieved from http://proxy-iup.klnpa.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy-iup.klnpa.org/docview/1540088288?accountid=11652

Article Summary

Micciche (2014) categorizes selected theoretical and practical movements as “new materialist” accounting for their relational ontologies. She claims that writing is a distributed and interconnected practice across time, space, objects, subjects and all human and non-human elements of the world as material entities. She reflects on composition studies in terms of the social turn and postprocess theory indicating that the transition of new materialism into composition is only just under way and under negotiation. Finally, she refers to the acknowledgment section in books and other writing to illustrate the dramatization of relationality in writing.  She emphasizes new materalism’s efforts to construct the concept of matter as central to writing and thus of major influence on the development of composition studies.    

Article Assessment

This article is a very useful survey of the theoretical backdrop of composition studies over the past 70 years for purpose of constituting a solid base for the development of theories of new materialism. Micciche’s use of the selected literature review and consequent build-up toward the conceptualization of new materialism illustrates the logic behind such a move and outlines its parameters effectively. By referring to the necessarily arising issues of subjectivity, agency, and media, she covers a lot of ground in outlining the possible implications for composition practice and studies. By extension, her work is exciting and thought-provoking with respect to possible applications in the classroom.

Key Quotations

On Writing as a Mediated Activity

•           “Writing isn’t a private activity, one that happens only in classrooms, heads, a room of one’s own, or at kitchen tables, nor is it a set of linear tasks or a unimodal endeavor. It is elliptical, immersive in diverse environments, dispersed, ordinary (not rarified), mediated, ongoing, and coexistent with other activities.” (p. 493)

On Agency in New Materialism

•           “New materialism reconfigures agency in relation to individuals, things, and publics by delinking assumed relations between action and causality, generating instead diffuse, unstable configurations of blame and responsibility that make for less clear targets but for more robust accounting of the interstitial qualities of any single problem.” (p. 491)