The Innovative Critical Essay: Hybrid-Form as a New Direction for Cultural Studies Scholarship: A Roundtable

“Hybrid essays”

Ames Hawkins

The form of the academic essay is often taken for granted—a linear, four step process:
1) make an observation
2) define the terms
3) provide examples
4) discuss the relationship

The prose employs a particular discourse, reasserting a particular discourse. Ames proposes that cultural studies should work beyond the rhetorics of academic convention. This new form of writing is called the critical hybrid essay.

One example given by Ames includes narrative prose, poetry and lyric, drawing upon a previous more traditionally academic work. Another example, “Manifesting New Media Writerly Processes One Really Bad Flash Piece at a Time,” Ames utilized digital media, using ones and zeroes (binary) to consider queering language. In particular, the linear is abandoned. Footnotes become a space for prose commenting on an email above.

Ames further looks at the forms of writing when looking to write a memoir about her father as he was dying from AIDS. In particular, zie looked at the idea of love letters and Gemara. Zie took the envelope from the first letter from hir mother to hir father, and surrounded it with commentary and commentary on commentary.


Arielle Greenberg

Coming from the background of an MFA in poetry, focusing much more on form. She speaks to the ways in which college and college writing practices work to limit the ways in which students can write. She cites Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, who write beyond a traditional academic audience.

What does it mean to be a scholarly writer versus a creative writer?

In particular, the fine arts consider how form drives content, as opposed to the taken-for-granted nature of traditional academic writing.

Arielle has recently (Birth/Work- poletics) worked on a transgenre, collaborative, nonlinear writing piece, drawing out from an original thought seed. The piece itself, she explains, should not be linear because it speaks to a nonlinear issue- home birth.

She read from a book called Girlesque, for which she wrote one of the two introduction. The piece speaks to the idea of girlhood as something not to be taken seriously, invoking a voice of the silly, in your face, and generally ignored. Like girlhood, cultural studies is seen as silly and frivolous, and thus we should not be pulled or draw ourselves intentionally toward traditionally, serious writing forms.