Decomposition as Pedagogy

This essay is an autotheoretical reflection on the experience of teaching life writing in programs outside of English and creative writing. Structured as a series of notes or fragments, it explores competing accounts of subjectivity by braiding personal narrative together with theoretical excursions on the body, place, and language. Arguing for decomposition as a term analogous to decolonization and deconstruction, the essay challenges assertions of selfsovereignty—ego, individuality, and success—that too often underpin creativity within an academic context. Using research from fields as disparate as ethology and psychoanalysis, it reimagines the writing classroom as a heterotopic space that is its most generative when it destabilizes students’ fixed notions of themselves as fully present and autonomous. In its commitment to both dissolution and failure, it offers new modes of collaboration—inter- and intrapersonal, human and more-than-human—as an ethics of care and solidarity.