On Silence

Authors

  • Daisy Levy Michigan State University

Keywords:

rhetoric of silence, voice, homophobia, teaching writing, rejection, pedagogy, LGBT

Abstract

I wrote this piece as a way to try to reconcile some difficult events in my life as a teacher, a scholar, and a person living in a complicated world. I wanted to make visible the collage effect of all these things, and so a collage essay was the most interesting form for me. I examine the politics surrounding subjectivity, authority, and the role of voice, in and out of the classroom, in daily life.The events I am drawing on are related: comments from a student on institutional course evaluations, rejection letters from a prominent university's graduate writing program, reflection on my participation in one year's Day of Silence in my writing classroom, and my own personal experiences of restricted, imposed, or chosen silence. In the spaces between all these incidents, I reflect on multiple suggestions about an ideology of speech, voice, listening, and embodiment in the institution.

Author Biography

Daisy Levy, Michigan State University

Daisy Levy recently completed her PhD at Michigan State University, and is now Assistant Professor of English at Southern Vermont College. She is continually fixated on questions of voice, on silence as an active space, and how the body sustains its rhetorical agency. She also has an extensive collection of rejection letters.

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Published

2012-10-15

Issue

No. 8 (2012)

Section

Issue #8

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