Just as the ideal academic term paper gives no sign of the struggle which brought its final form into being, the graduate student classroom and graduate student culture at large is ashamed of letting on to any such difficulty due to its perception as a sign of intellectual weakness rather than a condition which deserves our interest and respect. However, the third technique which I outlined above, that is the erasure of the techniques themselves, inadvertently creates a culture of exclusion within academics whose effects transcend the activity of writing itself. Indeed, writing that ignores these three techniques will be hard pressed to find an appreciative audience only on exceptional occasions do we find a market for the artifacts of labor which produce the final, written work. These three techniques arguably play an important role in the production of writing that is legible and publicly valuable. Any sign of imperfection, such as a typo or logical fallacy, unveils the perfect (and almost divinely-given) authority of the narratorial consciousness as a mere production made possible by the slavish labor of an inferior student. The third fictive technique is the erasure of any trace of the techniques themselves the labor required to produce the performance of a confident and authoritative narratorial consciousness must not be seen. However, this reordering and culling of thought into a legible and logical order represents one of the primary labors of the term paper’s material production. In the age of copy and paste, the gap between an element’s birthplace and the location in which it is at last frozen for the public, expands. Every element within a paper has a unique history of its particular emergence in both the writer’s mind and the writer’s writing medium. The second fictive technique of the term paper is the presentation of thought ordered according to the paper’s logical structure rather than its chronological unfolding. If the narratorial consciousness performs dialogic activity within the bounds of the paper, it is just that, a performance, such as is also the case in Plato’s dialogues for its outcome, unlike an authentic dialogue, is predetermined from the get-go. Likewise, this narratorial consciousness must not reflect on its own production, for this too can introduce new thoughts which may threaten to topple its direction altogether. It need not fear the disruption of its plan by unexpected spirits which might force it to reconsider its assumptions, to change and adapt. This consciousness is particular in that it is singular and static its convictions and ordering principles do not fluctuate throughout the paper at the very first sentence it has foreseen all of the material which it will treat and the entirety of the plot which will constitute the paper’s unfolding. The first technique involves the theatrical production of the narratorial consciousness, by which I mean the perceived personality and mind which constructs the text and arguments from the paper’s beginning to its end. Let us start with a general account of the techniques used to transform private thought into the public form of the term paper. In this paper I will draw upon what Lawrence Rosenwald calls Emerson’s “literary system” to argue that we must develop new respect and attention towards process in order to design writing tools which better support its key activity of reflection. While arguably necessary for the production of a publicly-consumable form, these techniques contribute to the general culture of shame and disregard which surrounds the private process of writing. I call the term paper here a form of theater as its successful execution requires mastery over several fictive techniques. Students who are baffled by the theater of the term paper might look to Ralph Waldo Emerson for an alternative conception which more sensitively accounts for writing’s diverse processes and objectives.
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