The Self on the Page: David Bartholomae and Pitt Composition has been organized by Joe Harris. Here’s his description of the event:

This session honors one of the most influential figures in our field over the last 40 years, David Bartholomae, reading his work in the context of what might be called the “Pitt School” of composition, a distinctive tradition of teaching and writing that Dave has helped to develop and extend over the course of his long career. Pitt Composition has long centered its work on the relationship between the self of a writer—most often a student writer, indeed, a beginning student writer—and the words that writer puts on a page. For Dave and other teachers at Pitt, that relationship between self and language is seldom posed as a simple question of authenticity or sincerity, of whether a writer has expressed his or her “true” self. Rather Pitt Composition is interested in how a writer performs a sense of self through his or her language.

There are important antecedents to the Pitt approach in the work of writing teachers at schools like Amherst and Rutgers, but while we happily acknowledge those influences, our interest here is in celebrating some of the highly particular ways in which Dave has approached the question of how writers perform a self on the page. We will begin with a series of very brief (6–7 minute) remarks, in which each of our six speakers focuses on a different, characteristic aspect of Dave’s style as a teacher, writer, and mentor. We will then open up the last 30 minutes of our session to comments and questions from the floor.

It will be fun and celebratory. I’ll be one of the presenters, along with Joe, Peter Moe, Jean Carr, Stacey Waite, and Min Lu. Bruce Horner will chair the session.