Response to February 22nd readings - Landmark essays: Perl and Runicman

One thing that didn’t completely convinced me from Perl essay is the concept of “felt sense”. While reading this chapter, I remembered our discussions about voice, and how this felt sense concept resemble the voice concept since both of them are kind of blurry and ambiguous. What does she mean by “inner reflections” and “bodily sensations”? I felt that this chapter, in general, was more confusing than the previous chapter that Perl has in the book (chapter 3). Although, I do agree with the author that the writing process is recursive and that what is recursive in the composing process varies from writer to writer.
I think that her ideas of writing as a recursive activity resemble a lot what Flower and Hayes propose. Actually, the first two recursive elements that Perl proposes (re-reading and key words or items called by the topic) are named by Flower and Hayes in their chapter. But again, the third recursive element, the felt sense, is still not clear to me.
On the other hand, when reading Runicman’s article one question kept on coming to my mind: it all depends on what kind of writing we are talking about. Runicman mentions “the literary impulse” (p. 202). I do not necessarily associate every kind writing with an impulse or a pleasurable activity since different kinds of writing pose different kinds of challenges. However, I think that he makes a point by calling to our attention that the word “problem” in conceptualizing writing as a problem-solving activity is not a happy one. Well, that word, as Flower and Hayes state, comes from the psychology field, and in that context is not necessarily linked to a negative connotation. Although, as we all know, scientific vocabulary is never detached from everyday language, therefore, we could think of a better word to conceptualize the writing activity. Personally, I like Casanave’s metaphor: writing games.