Scenes from Graduate School: Playing in the Smooth Spaces of Academic Writing

In this essay, I describe how I have experienced difficulties writing in particular academic genres. Finding spaces to play in these genres has helped me to ease these difficulties and negotiate the conflicts and contradictions of the academy. To explore and explain innovative spaces within genres, I extend Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of smooth and striated spaces with work in rhetorical genre studies. I conclude that opening smooth spaces in striated academic genres is not only important for students like me but may also help us better respond to the changing realities of graduate studies and academic work in Canada. I offer some suggestions as to how writing studies scholarship could support these efforts. “Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.” ―Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

genre-learning these good manners-is part of integrating into and becoming an expert in a discourse community. Writing, therefore, not only exposes what we are, but it also reveals where we belong (or where we don't).
In the following autobiographical scenes and reflections, I will explore how I have learned (wrestled with, resisted, acquiesced to) the manners of the academic community and its written genres. At each stage of this twenty-year long journey, I have had to negotiate different constellations of the social and linguistic pressures that shape academic genres. These different constellations have either hindered or advanced my graduate school journey as I wrestled with the peculiar bind of academic writing: how could I find a way to assert agency and offer originality while observing the strict genre conventions of the academic communities to which I aspired to belong? I describe how the first stage of my learning journey-a completed Master's degree and one year of a PhD program in comparative literature in the 1990s-was marked by profound confusion and difficult experiences with academic writing. After I abandoned that first PhD program, I worked in the margins of academia for 15 years, following a different career path but always looking back at the university. It was in this liminal and ambiguous space of my journey that I began to play with my academic writing by mixing personal narrative with critical analysis. In this writing, I worked to open up what I call the "smooth spaces" (nomadic spaces without marked paths) within the "striated spaces" (settled, demarcated spaces) of academic genres. (This typology of internal genre spaces follows philosophers Deleuze and Guattari's analysis (1987) of these phenomena in other media such as music and textile arts.) For me, writing in the smooth spaces of academic genres gave me a place to play, a liminal place where I could practice "free assimilation, without accommodation" and I could "combine elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them," as Piaget and Turner define play (Turner, 1982, p. 34). This liminal, playful writing helped me to overcome some of the pressure and contradictions of academic work.
In the latest and final stage of my journey, I returned to the university four years ago to complete an interdisciplinary PhD that focuses on writing studies. Here, I have continued to struggle with academic writing: I am drawn to smooth genre spaces, where narrative and analysis are combined, but this type of writing can be marginalized and seen as less serious than the intellectual work conducted in traditional academic genres. The difficult writing experience that I describe at the beginning of this piece occurred when I chose to work in a traditional genre to confirm my While I recognize that my story is unique, I hope by recounting it I will reveal some of the complexities of graduate student writing and provide insight into the various permutations of the journey from novice to advanced academic writer. By shining light on these complexities, I hope to help other graduate students on this journey. To this end, I conclude this essay with some thoughts on how writing studies scholarship might act upon these insights and further support the development of this smooth space in academic writing, particularly in the face of the changing nature of graduate studies and university work in Canada.
Still, I do my best to mimic their voices. I practice the dense, almost incomprehensible prose, characteristic, in my mind, of good academic writing. "The subject in process is in a cyclical movement, not dialectical, propelled by a continuous process of translation between the body's semiosis and the symbolically-constructed linguistic order," I wrote carefully in my essay, shuffling about these words. Do I know what this means? Can I say why this matters?
"He also said he is surprised that you can dance so well," my classmate laughs as she stumbles back under the pulsing lights. She returns to dance wildly with our professor. They are having an affair, the latest in a long string of affairs that this professor has had with his students. I'm tired of the thumping music and the blurred dancers. As I leave the club, the winter wind blows through the quiet, familiar streets. A piece of garbage is kicked up by the wind and rattles away. * "Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion," Bartholomae famously wrote (1985, p. 134). Bartholomae uses this insight to explain the difficulties that undergraduate writers experience when learning academic discourse, the language of the academy. Bartholomae's statement, however, also hints at the protean nature of our conception of the university and its authority. It suggests an instability, a mirage onto which students, faculty, and the public project their conception of human learning and knowledge.
In the first years of my graduate school journey, I imagined the university to be a sacred place, set apart from the ugly uncertainties of human existence. I believed that a graduate degree would  Bartholomae (1985) suggests that student writing difficulties often begin with a conflict between the student's own authority and the authority that they must project, and as a result, they feign academic authority using "the voice of a teacher giving a lesson or…the parent giving a lecture at the dinner table" (p. 135). As a graduate student, my conflict was far more nuanced. Unlike  (2009) and Behar (1997Behar ( /2014, that we need a new genre to negotiate these divides (Chess & Johnson, 2008;Hulme, 2009;Moser, 2010).
Opening up smooth space in academic genres is thus not just about permitting stylistic innovation: it is also about finding ways to overcome these emerging conflicts with and challenges to academic work.
Many Canadian universities have recognized these pressures and are adding extracurricular professional development programs, discussing alternative thesis and dissertation genres to better reflect the new outcomes of graduate programs and exploring better ways to engage communities (K. Campbell, personal communication). Writing studies scholars are, I believe, in a unique position to help create new writing spaces to support these efforts. To do so, we can build on our existing scholarship on genre, academic, and professional writing in the following ways.
First, we should explore student writing difficulties and community critiques of academic genres as areas of conflict and contradiction that may need to be resolved by opening up new smooth spaces in traditional academic genres or by developing new hybrid genres. Second, we should participate in current university discussions of alternative thesis and dissertation genres at our universities. While these initiatives are helpful-writing a dissertation-by-publication has certainly eased my dissertation journey-they may not acknowledge how the precariousness of graduate writing and prescriptive genres like dissertation preparation courses impact a student's willingness to innovate in research and writing. I entered my doctoral program in an ideal situation to write an alternative dissertation, and yet I bowed to the implicit social pressure of the academic community and chose to write a chapter in a traditional genre. (Fortunately, the hybrid nature of the dissertation-by-publication saved me from wrestling with this genre for the remainder of my dissertation and helped me to negotiate the multiple purposes and audiences of the dissertation that Paré, Starke-Myerring and McAlpine identify (2009).) We need to more thoroughly explore the question of how can we make these emerging genres more advantageous and accessible for the students who wish to write in them. Finally, we should model and share alternative academic writing in all levels of the academy including undergraduate work, graduate work, journal publications, and theses and dissertations. Because the genre function of traditional academic genres currently enforces a hierarchy between novice and expert writing and restricts access to smooth spaces based on this hierarchy, actively working against these limitations may shift the boundary between striated and smooth space in these genres. As a discipline, writing studies is "Smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory," Deleuze and Guattari (1987) warn us. "But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new spaces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us" (p. 500). In other words, opening up these smooth spaces in academic writing will not resolve all of the conflicts and contradictions of academic life or set us loose to write in "[a] space free from institutional pressures, a cultural process free from the influence of culture, a historical moment outside history, and academic setting free from academic writing," as Bartholomae fears that it might (1995, p. 64). Rather, identifying and exploring smooth spaces will force us to acknowledge that academic genres, like universities, are inventions; they are rooted in historical developments, community needs, and community values. As individual writers and as academic communities, we can challenge, revise, rail against, subvert, and play with the limitations of these structures that we have developed. Insightful, creative, helpful scholarship may develop in these spaces as a result.