Article Spotlight on “REFRAMING WRITING, RHETORIC, AND LITERARY STUDIES: A MIXED METHOD APPROACH TO INTERROGATING INTERSECTIONS” by Gabby Bunko, Montana State University.
Blog post by Luis Rios Garcia
Gabby Bunko is a Ph.D. student in English at Arizona State University and graduated from Montana State University with a Bachelor’s in English: Writing. In her article titled “REFRAMING WRITING, RHETORIC, AND LITERARY STUDIES: A MIXED METHOD APPROACH TO INTERROGATING INTERSECTIONS” she notices the gap between writing and literary studies. To research this topic, she does a mixed-method procedure of conducting interviews with faculty members and a survey from the students. The interviews with faculty were done in person and they were all asked identical questions; meanwhile the questions for the students were done three times during the semester with small tweaks. From there, she observes that there is an overlap in the values obtained from the interviews and surveys that needs further research. The overlaps involve varied feelings about whether writing and literary studies are similar or different subjects.
The reason I chose to spotlight this article from the Young Scholars in Writing archives is because it presents an idea that I believe should be further researched. From my personal experience from my years in school, there has always been a clear division between writing and literary studies to a point of thinking of them as different subjects even if they feel under the umbrella of an English class. As some of the students note in the article, they feel the division of the subjects to be akin to the division of math and science. This division made me have a different mindset when learning about them and caused me to fail to see the overlap in them until years later. Though it may be due to the way teachers introduce these concepts, I believe there should be a greater focus on how to implement them together. The possible intersections could lead to more students being able to understand the material and improve their writing capabilities.
The article notes that making the intersection between writing and literary studies bigger is a challenge that has no concrete solutions. Bunko provides the idea of further research using a bigger survey population and the need for an interrogation of the theoretical intersections between writing and literary studies. With larger datasets, there could be a greater understanding of how to overlap writing and literary devices and concepts. If the research is done in a larger and different population, it could provide teachers with new pedagogical tools on how to implement their content into the classroom.
An important factor that the article highlights is the use of conceptual metaphors. These metaphors are what they use as data when seeing the overlap between writing and literary studies. One of the important highlights of the results is that there is a shared viewed among students about the overlaps between these two subjects..I believe using conceptual metaphors as a methodological approach should be kept as a factor in further research, as they provide a concrete way of seeing the thought process of students as they view their material. By keeping the metaphors as a part of future research, it also makes future studies have a base of what has changed in the study if they were to sample a similar population. It could also be used to compare other studies and see any patterns and discrepancies that may reveal insights into why there is a division and how to shorten it.
Bunko’s article is so well-crafted research that I believe it deserves a spotlight due to its potential for future research expanding upon the concept and showing the division of writing and literary devices in a different view.
Article link:
Bunko, G. (2024, March 15). Reframing writing, rhetoric, and literary studies: A mixed method approach to interrogating intersections. Young Scholars in Writing. https://youngscholarsinwriting.org/index.php/ysiw/article/view/382
Luis Rios Garcia is currently a student at the University of Texas Rios Grande Valley. He is currently in his freshman year of college and is applying for the biomedical program. He hopes to aim for higher education in his field.
