Beyond the Dialectic of Work and Play: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric for Composition Studies

Abstract

In a computersandwritinglistservdiscussiona fewyears ago,the topic of play provoked an interesting eruption of discourse. One participant called play one of the dragons of our culture. Another participant began to rant, blaming a perceived privileging of play in education for many problems of learning, literacy, and discipline. The play element in education, he claimed, leads to the expectation that the hard work of literacy should be fun-a dangerous expectation because it dooms the system and students to failure by creating a demand for entertainment when education is, in fact, the result of years of blood, sweat, and tears. This pitting of hard, meaningful work against the empty frivolity of play is endemic in our culture's thinking about play, not only in the workplace, but also in literacy education. This way of thinking can be seen in the extent to which play has been purged from much language use, reflecting both the rationalist clarity demanded by objective science and the legacy ofTaylorist efficiency in our educational systems. The model of the academic print text, as Richard Lanham points out, has repressed the playful tendencies of language in favor of a just the facts, ma'am monotony of presentation. While some elementary educators embrace the role of play in the learning activities of the young, college writing instruction continues to maintain a fairly rigorous separation between serious, persuasive, utilitarian writing and creative, expressive, play­ ful writing.' Yet, play in language is the undeniable id, bubbling up no matter how stringent the control. When the medium expands beyond the austere conventions of the book, as it has with the computer, the suppressed play of language and its users moves to the foreground. For this reason, the computer writing classroom presents a compelling test case for exploring the value of what I will call the play element in writing instruction. In the late 1980s, Marcia Peoples Halio noted that students in her classes who

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