JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

Neither an easy nor a directly practical book, Contending with Words levies heavy demands on its readers. The aim of this collection of twelve previously unpublished articles is to transform composition from a “service” course to a site of intellectual activity and, ultimately, cultural critique. Expecting a certain sophistication in their readers, the contributors draw heavily on theory, particularly forms of feminism, Marxism, and Foucauldian analysis, in the event exploiting the problematic nature of the relation of theory and practice. Contending with Words marks, I think, a major shift in composition studies. For one thing, it dramatizes a move away from the modernism that continues to shape even “cutting-edge” thinking in comp and rhetoric to the postmodernism these authors hail. For another, with Contending with Words politics has invaded comp and rhetoric—with a vengeance. Nothing if not ambitious, this collection looks toward a “ground swell” such as accompanied the New Criticism, one “that transformed the character of English departments across the country” (Sosnoski 200). According to James Sosnoski, in one of the two responses concluding the volume, composition studies appears “in a better position to analyze social issues than literary I studies.” Contending with Words emerges as a manifesto for this effort     and theoretically informed, sophisticated, critical, politically engaged, and demanding. The arguments are powerful, if not compelling; the result, a text to be contended with.

I begin at the local level, with individual articles. John Schilb is superb—straightforward, informative, and effective—in his critiquelpro­posal “Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Composition,” as is Susan I Jarratt in her judicious and thoughtful “Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict.” In “The Postdisciplinary Politics of Lore,” Patricia I Harkin draws on Stephen North to make a fresh, and potentially important, argument for a new way of knowing. Lynn Worsham I find insightful and useful in her account of the controverted “écriture feminine” and its problematic but nonetheless fruitful relation to composition studies. Every collection is a mixed bag, of course, inevitably inviting comparative evaluation. Here William Covino’s “Magic, Literacy, and the National Enquirer” seems out of place; as does Don Bialostosky’s excellent “Liberal Education, Writing, and the Dialogic Self,” a sensible application of Bakhtin by one of the I Russian theorist’s most accomplished commentators. Contending with Words finds its focus only after these opening articles, beginning with John Clifford’s I “The Subject in Discourse” and accelerating with Patricia Bizzell’s “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies” and Bruce Herzberg’s “Michel Foucault’s I Rhetorical Theory.” Victor Vitanza’s article stands out, but not pleasantly; the title suggests at least some of the problems: “Three Countertheses: Or, I A Critical In(ter)vention into Composition Theories and Pedagogies.” Long, indulgent, consciously “paralogical,” and supposedly designed to I enact the “drifting” it advocates, it consists of convoluted sentences made up I ofjargon, nouns upon nouns, and extravagant, unweeded parentheses. If not I in the title, the problem is clear enough when Vitanza claims, of Jean- I Francois Lyotard, that “if hewere towrite in... transparent, plain style,what I he says would not get said at all. Such fetishist clarity would only perpetuate I the exclusion of his ideas.. .“ (159). A term comes to mind for such nonsense, I but I can’t use it here.

Politics is what’s happening these days in English studies. I for one am both heartened by the exhibited engagement, passion, and commitment and troubled by the enthusiasm (in the eighteenth-century sense) and a drive toward exclusivity. In her response entitled “Reimagining the Writing Scene: Curmudgeonly Remarks about Contending with Words,” Sharon Crowley does little to assuage my worries. Magisterial and legislative, she argues, for instance, that “composition studies must rewrite its notion of authors as integral, autonomous, individual selves, and substitute the notion of collective but shifting ‘subject positions’ that contemporary feminist and neo-Marxist discourses adumbrate” and that “we must also stand ready to dismiss the work of composition theorists who confine their thinking to traditional rhetoric or psychology.” The use of “must” is disturbing, as is the blithe call to dismiss so-called traditional kinds of thinking.

Both the virtues of this collection and some of its failures appear in Sosnoski’s “Postmodern Teachers in Their Postmodern Classrooms: Socrates Begone!” This contribution is unique here in its insistence on the practical, which Sosnoski thematizes, in fact, as he invites us to embrace Harkin’s argument for lore: do whatever you need, borrow wherever you must, and don’t worry about violating theoretical purity. I admire Sosnoski’s sensibleness—and humanity: “My bottom line is that persons are not equiva­lent to ideas about persons.... IEcriture feminine, for instance] is of interest to me only if it can be transported into my situation. In short, I am not concerned with protecting the ‘integrity’ of a theory. Protecting theory from the classroom seems to me a very unpostmodern attitude. Why protect theory? To insulate it from contamination of persons?.. . My position is that radical critiques must be domesticated (in the sense of denominalized, made credible) to effect change” (200).

I am heartened even more perhaps by Sosnoski’s desire “to involve students in alternative modes ofdiscourse,” writing different evidently from the phallocentrism Worsham (rightly) associates with academic discourse, and something that Jarratt and Harkin also seek. But neglecting to follow up on this desire, Sosnoski signals one of this book’s failed opportunities. One major alternative mode of discourse is glimpsed in Vitanza’s passing refer­ence to Lyotard’s indebtedness to “Montaigne’s genre of the essay” (in The Postniodern Condition, Lyotard describes the essay as postmodern). I might claim, in fact, that many of the articles in Contending with Words—Sosnoski wrongly calls them essays—hanker for the essay as form and the essayistic as attitude or perspective. Yet the authors, almost all of them, subscribe uncritically to the notion that we ought to be training students to write academically, which is quite different from essayistically. Despite the claim of Harkin and Schilb that freshman comp typically offers “instruction in correctness and appreciation of the informal essay,” I’m not sure the infor­mal essay has ever been given a fair chance in writing courses (nor elsewhere for that matter); what certainly has not is the “intellectual poetry” that characterizes the European essay famously theorized by Lukacs and Adorno and practiced by, inter alia, Roland Barthes. The informal essay, at least, an attractive alternative to the “bloodless prose” Clifford for one represents deplores in student writing even as he commits it himself, writing an article rather than an essay.