Volume 23, Number 2-3, Summer-Fall 2006

Review of Spigelman, Candace. (2004). Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Christina Halliday

Ontario College of Art and Design

Hallidayc@ocad.ca 

Have you ever read a scholarly book about a scholarly subject and then wondered about the things in the author’s past or present life that make them so invested in that subject? I have. Take Candace Spigelman’s Personally Speaking for example. What about Candace Spigelman, the person, makes the problem of “the personal” in academic writing such a natural subject for her? She provides hints in the book, but not the full story.

I’ve always been interested in the relationship between personal experiences that take place outside of academic contexts and academic inquiry. How does one inform the other? Recently, I’ve become interested in how academics represent the relationship between their extra-academic and academic preoccupations in their writing. What are the possibilities for this kind of writing? What are the difficulties? Perhaps my own preoccupation with the personal/scholarly dilemma has to do with the fact that I’ve been a journal writer since I learned to write, and I’ve carried this practice into how I make meaning and write in my academic life. For years now I’ve had two journals: my “research journal” and my “personal journal.” In the former I reflect on research ideas and books I’ve read that are relevant to my intellectual concerns. The latter is a pastiche of my frustrations, fears, questions, and expressions of joy. If you flipped through each journal, you would find that despite my best intentions, the two forms of writing and thinking are not so easily separated—each appears in the other as a momentary flight of expression.

Fascinated by the attraction between personal and academic writing forms, I have published academic articles that allow for their fuller expression, knowing that the end result would be more difficult to gauge as academic research. But despite this difficulty, I can’t help myself. I actually find it hard to write academically without letting the personal in, mostly in the rough drafts. And so I search for ways to think about the relationship between these forms. Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse, by Candace Spigelman of Pennsylvania State University, has been one pathway on this search.

Spigelman’s objective in Personally Speaking is to offer a defense for the integration of personal writing as evidence in academic writing. As a result, Personally Speaking offers elaborate responses to critiques against the personal in academic writing and somewhat undeveloped rationales for when these forms of discourse should be combined, what the combinations looks like, and how they should be evaluated. Given that the intended audience for Personally Speaking is higher education teachers, this might be the text’s main weakness. Drawing on postmodern theories of the subject in discourse, feminist politicizations of the personal, perspectives on ethnographic methodology, and both ancient and contemporary scholarship in the field of rhetoric and narrative theory, Spigelman crafts elegant explorations of the value of personal writing to the goals of academic inquiry and writing to “reduce anxiety about” and “objections to” blending these discourses (p. 60). Although I learned much from Spigelman’s book about the personal/academic writing debate—and how to intelligently think about it—my own vague anxieties didn’t go away. In fact, some were made worse by the conclusions she draws.

Spigelman forwards two main arguments in the book to convince the reader that despite critiques against it, there is something to be gained by combining personal writing with academic writing to form what she calls “personal academic discourse” (p. 3) or “surplus” (p. 92); that is, discourse that combines “different ways of knowing” to effect more challenging and more complex idea development. Both of Spigelman’s main arguments respond to concerns around what happens when university students are encouraged, without proper instruction, to include personal writing in academic writing. They write for personal catharsis, to express a personal opinion, or reveal their secrets (p. 6). Such writing can be read as inappropriately solipsistic or worse, exploitive (p. 17). More importantly for the higher education teacher, such writing is very tricky and maybe impossible to evaluate: “How do we grade a poorly executed essay about a brother killed by a drunk driver? How do we tell a rape victim that her scenic paragraph needs revising? (p. 17). Writing that involves an instructor in these kinds of dilemmas is not what Spigelman means by personal academic discourse.

Just what does Spigelman mean then? Enter her main arguments for why personal academic discourse is of value and how one should approach formulating it. In Chapter 2, “The Personal is Rhetorical,” Spigelman addresses complaints that “the personal opposes the social” (p. 30) by arguing that the personal “I” in writing should be understood as a “rhetorically forceful construct” that is socially implicated, politically located, and therefore not autonomous and not private. According to Spigelman, writers of personal academic discourse should draw the reader’s attention to the narrating “I” as social construct by representing, in the writing, a process of self-conscious location. This process of self-conscious location should also reference subjectivity as a state of de-stabilization, non-wholeness, and multiplicity. It turns out that an authentic, stable “I” in writing “may be irrelevant to the agency of the rhetorical personal” (p. 49). A destabilized, politically located, complicatedly positioned subject in personal narrative allows readers to become emotionally invested and intellectually interested, because that’s what narrative allows for, without risking naïve identifications on the part of the reader of dangerous exploitations on the part of the writer.

Spigelman offers a seemingly tidy solution to the question of the first-person “I” in personal academic discourse but her solution strikes me as problematic in practice. I am thinking about the kinds of texts students write at the Ontario College of Art & Design and the times that I have seen students attempt to integrate personal writing into their arguments and idea developments. Not all of these instances lent themselves to a “politics of location.” In other words, I think that representing a process of self-conscious location works in a piece of writing that already, in some way, references the politics of representation and a subject’s position in discourse but would read as a contrivance—and as simply not fitting—in other writing forms. Spigelman doesn’t take up this concern because she doesn’t discuss the implications of diverse writing forms, across university disciplines, to her thinking about how personal writing should be combined with academic writing more generally.

In Chapter 3, “Constructing Experience,” Spigelman directs her attention to the dangers of writing “decontextualized,” “culturally unmediated,” “experiential truth” in personal academic discourse (p. 61). Similar to her approach in Chapter 2, Spigelman advocates guiding students to engage the “constructedness” of experience through the writing itself. This is an appropriate methodology because, on a fundamental level, we have no access to “real” experience or the “truth.” Every personal experience is already mediated by language and culture and every recounting of the experience is necessarily, and at least in part, fictive. Spigelman proposes that students should be mentored to think of personal writing in academic discourse as recent scholars think of autobiography “as both an art of memory and an art of imagination” (Paul Eakin as quoted in Spigelman, p. 67). This means allowing students to fictionalize, where it makes sense to, their narratives of personal events. Spigelman includes the example of a student whom she coached to approach his own personal story as a kind of fiction:

I could help him develop his essay by asking questions about his fictive narrator rather than focusing on his actual experiences: What did the narrator think as he recounted his childhood in Spain and in America? What was the narrator implying about the loneliness of childhood and the man he had become? Because the narrator was not Robert, or perhaps a different version of Robert, we worked on the writer’s stylistic project of fulfilling the narrator’s purposes. (p. 71)

In this example, the student is being encouraged to give up some of his own emotional investment in the truth and authenticity of his personal story through disavowing his place as narrator and fictionalizing some of his experiences.

I have a number of concerns with this development in Spigelman’s thesis. Spigelman is right to point out that acknowledging the constructedness of experience in personal writing allows students to formulate more detailed, more complex, and more interesting stories. But what are the limits and implications here? What of the student that creates personal writing that is all fiction for a personal academic writing assignment? Does such a student achieve the goal of presenting a non-solipsistic, thoughtfully contextualized, politicized, and scrutinized writing subject if the writing subject she presents is a complete fiction? And what is lost for students when they are detached from the personal stories they narrate in academic writing? What did Robert feel when Spigelman was guiding him in the way she describes in the above long quote from the book? I suspect he might have felt uncomfortable to have a teacher manipulate his sense of agency and authorship in that way. Spigelman doesn’t adequately tackle these questions.

Nor does she successfully address another, more fundamental question that relates to her position in Chapter 2. Can we read a personal story without attributing some truth to the story itself and authenticity to the person recounting it? Is there danger in approaching personal stories as fictions? Yes, there is, and Spigelman refers to this very issue in Chapter 3 when she points out that “the survivors of the Holocaust have crucial reasons for fighting to preserve its events as real and not to allow them to lapse into legend or … lie” (Douglas Hesse, as quoted in Spigelman, p. 75). Overall, the crucial question of readership, and the teacher-reader as evaluator, is missing from Spigelman’s book. How can a postsecondary teacher think through the complexities of grading a student sample of personal academic writing when reading truth and authenticity into this writing might be inescapable, despite a politics of location and despite efforts to reveal experiential “constructedness”? What are the implications for a teacher’s own subject position, within the classroom and within the institution, when he has sensitively evaluated an entirely fictional personal story in a piece of academic writing? These are practical problems with letting students write personally that needed further investigation in Personally Speaking.

In Chapter 4, “Valuing Personal Evidence,” and Chapter 5, “Teaching Personal Academic Argument,” Spigelman focuses more closely on the integrity of personal writing as argument and evidence in academic contexts and returns to some of the recommendations she puts forward in Chapters 2 and 3 to offer more practical teaching examples and therefore contextualize her already made assertions. In Personally Speaking, Spigelman courageously takes on a subject that is so utterly complex as to require a whole series of books on the subject, perhaps not just by an academic or academics in the field of rhetoric and writing, but also education, philosophy, and literature. For those interested in exploring the threshold where differences between the personal and the intellectual both reveal themselves and elide, Personally Speaking is a good, if imperfect, introduction.