Composition as Opposition

I'm thinking today of a project that has been on my mind since graduate school and I've just stumbled upon this phrase: composition as opposition. Opposition. To whom? To what?

To traditional notions of writing

To grammar or explicit grammar instruction

To the phonies (Murray/Macrorie)

To the academy itself (we teach how to not what to)

To authority! (Murray/Macrorie)

To our literature colleagues

This is what expressivism offers or offered me in my early to mid-20s. It fit so nicely with my movement out of literary study. Much of this is about authority, a romantic notion of the self? The need to oppose authority.

Questions: why do expressive notions appeal to much to new teachers of writing, like my former self?

An interesting quote from Paul Butler: I think we all begin in expressivism and then we grow up.

What are the possibilities for this project? What kind of analysis? What is meant by an oppositional stance? Who has theorized this? Who do I go to? Those early, angry, passionate years in the journals? What do we have to learn from them?

Marjorie embodies this ethos in a way. And somewhere in here, the transformational trope. Bringing students and others over to our side. Drinking the cool aid. Interesting. It would be interesting to browse CCC or CE from 1971 forward and try to get a sense of whether this oppositional stance really existed or whether I'm imagining it.

Opposition to the current traditionalists, who are the authority figures...

Growing up a process baby.

The conflation of the terms process and expressivist.

In a post to the WPA, 1/6/10, Rich Haswell coins the phrase:

Very much in the anti-establishment, crap-detection, remove-the-social/cognitive-blinkers tradition of the late 1950s and 1960s.