Eugene--"failed utopia" certainly captures something of what I wanted to
say about writing workshops. I have continued to try to make sense of
writing workshops as alternative spaces. I have written about
workshops as carnival (with my notion of carnival drawn from Bakhtin's
work in Rabelais and his world, and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics). I
find this metaphor interesting, in part, because Bakhtin's carnival is
not a total social environment (not really a utopia), but is imagined in
relation, in response to the workaday world. Right now, I tend to think
of workshops as sites of possibility. Advocates and teachers of
workshops have successfully loosened things up in transformations of
classroom organization, teacher and student roles, writing tasks. But
what we haven't lived up to and responded to yet, I don't think--at least
not in writing for and about these spaces--are the negative possibilities of
these sites.
Tim Lensmire
Washington University, Box 1183
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
tjlensmi who-is-at artsci.wustl.edu