Reflections on Bizzell and Young

In short, "Contact Zones" ultimately left me with more questions than answers. Bizzell's approach to the "reorganization" of English studies is novel and thought-provoking. There is something, certainly, to be said for the seemingly arbitrary ways in which we organize and, finally, specialize within our field. However, I feel like totally dismissing chronology as an organizing principle of literature -- as Bizzell suggests -- in favor of grouping studies by "contact zones" fails to recognize the practical reasoning behind dividing literature into time periods. First and foremost, we need to recognize that time is a static figure in relation to text generation. There is no arguing about when Adrienne Rich wrote "Diving the Wreck." Despite our lack of knowledge concerning the composition process, we are able to discern almost precisely when Emily Dickinson began and completed her life's work. While chronology may not insist upon the kinds of cultural investigation that is often times necessary to literary study, temporal organization is, unarguably, consistent.

I think this is one of two things that turns me off to Bizzell's essay. While her intentions are good in theory, the practical element just doesn't exist, and, as such, her argument remains just that: theory. A number of practical questions arise: Who decides which contact zones deserve our attention? How do we standardize that set enough to make a legitimate discipline out of its study? If chronology becomes essentially irrelevant to the study of literature, how do we then define contact zones without temporal boundaries? This last question seems to be one that Bizzell herself is unable to consider: even when describing particular contact zones, she frames them in terms of time periods. "For example, The New England region from about 1600 to 1800 might be defined as a contact zone..." writes Bizzell on page 167. How, practically, one is expected to specialize in a period of over 200 years of modern letters (not, I should note, limited to strictly "literary" texts) is begs another set of questions on its own.

It seems that a simpler and much easier to manage practice would be the simple recognition of contact zones in current literary discussions (though I'm not totally sure that this conversation would differ greatly from what you're likely to hear in comparative literature seminars across the country). I'm personally very suspect of any theory that forbids an approach to reading in favor of another. The gift of literary theory, in my opinion, is the multitude of avenues we develop to approach literature. There is no "one true lens" as it were, but rather only our capacity as thinkers to see a work from as many angles as possible. But I digress...

I do, however, greatly appreciate Bizzell's suggestion that we examine the rhetorical choices of literary works. I'm not sure that I agree with her search for "effective" rhetoric in literary texts, but I certainly understand and fully see the importance of impulse to deconstruct literature and examining what powers the "argument" of the poem, or short story, and so on. I think I much prefer Richard Young's conception of "the art of glamour" and "the art of grammar" in this respect (202). In terms of both my creative work and my critical analysis, I'm always interested in what choices were made in order to make art "work." I often find myself beginning with a basic question at all levels of the language: Why this way and not that?

Surely, there is some ethereal motor driving these choices -- the ghost of process -- but given the very real boundaries of language, it seems that artists are more or less presented with the same series of choices time and time again, and to study these choices would give us an even greater sense of how rhetoric can be the basis for beauty. I'd second Young's warning, however, that it can be a great disservice to "over rationalize the composing process" (201). There must be something like intuition -- some unteachable instinct -- that makes the "right" choices in the "right" sequence in order to materialize any particular utterance. To trivialize this instinct might be to dismiss the mystery of art completely.