JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

In the past few years attention has turned to the history of teaching composition and to traditions of its teaching, evidenced perhaps most notably by such works as James Berlin's books on the history of college writing instruction in America, Stephen North's account of knowledge-making in composition, and John Brereton's collection of portraits of individual figures influential in the teaching of composition in the United States.¹ By identifying our past, we hope to find an identity for ourselves. Reviewers of such efforts have pointed out that in our search for traditions, we need to question the usual means by which traditions in the teaching of writing have been traced and categorized. Robin Varnum, for example, warns that students of the history of composition and rhetoric need to consider not only the evidence supplied by textbooks but also such ephemeral materials as course syllabi, assignments, student papers, and department memos ("History" 50; see also Brereton, "Learning" 827-28). Brereton argues that such historians also need to broaden their scope to consider courses not explicitly identified as "composition" courses ("Harvard's"). North pleads for the recognition of "practitioner lore," the traditions of teaching that seldom make their way into published writing (371). And Richard Fulkerson has shown that historians of composition attempting to identify particular composition theories need to attend to a variety of independent elements constituting any one theory (420-22).

But such advice on the "search" for traditions leaves unchallenged a tacit conception of traditions as inert objects, hidden but nonetheless discoverable by those with the requisite time, access to materials, and sensibility. Overlooked is the process by which traditions in composition are constituted and maintained. However, the term "tradition" itself refers both to that process and to that which the process maintains. The peculiarities of the "tradition" process and the ways in which that process actually constitutes and shapes its "tradition" are suggested by the complex of meanings, some of them contradictory, of the term and its Latin root. One dictionary translates the Latin root verb tradere as "to hand over, surrender, deliver; to betray; to hand down, bequeath, transmit, pass on; to relate, recount; to teach." Additional complexity accrues to the term in English. Aside from maintaining the odd conjunction of indicating transference, teaching, and betrayal present in the Latin term, definitions of the English term qualify such actions by the medium of transmission and specify that the term signifies not just the action but also that affected by the action: through "tradition" (often oral) a tradition is transferred/surrendered/transmitted/ taught/betrayed. The OED defines "tradition" as "The action of handing over (something material) to another; delivery, transfer"; "A giving up, surrender; betrayal"; and also "That which is thus handed down; a statement, belief, or practice transmitted (esp. orally) from generation to generation." In carrying out a tradition--that is, in the act of attempting to transmit that tradition--we can say that a teacher may also simultaneously enact, constitute, surrender, and betray it.

Failure to acknowledge the complex ways in which any "tradition" functions as a process accounts for some of the difficulties which critics and historians have encountered. David R. Russell, for example, seems to assume a model of the process of tradition as the direct, unproblematic transmission of pedagogies and theories. He ends an essay reviewing what he terms the "search for traditions" by praising those histories which search out traditions "directly and openly" as "the most useful approach," distinguishing these from what he calls the "romantic approach" which "seems to ignore or condemn tradition, forcing teachers to find their own way in a maze of competing methods" (443). Yet he admits that "ironically" those teacher-scholars he deems "romantic," in spite of condemning "tradition," seem quite able to "perpetuate their tradition" (443). This ability, however, may well signal not a condemnation of "tradition" but a different conception of tradition both as a process and as that "perpetuated." The matter may be better described as not ironical but paradoxical, a fact countering the received notion of the process of tradition as direct, unproblematic transmission.

Calling into question this received notion can prevent us from overlooking or denying as "traditions" those traditions constituted by indirect, less "open" means: traditions which themselves understand and practice "tradition" differently. Raymond Williams has warned that tradition is "an actively shaping force":

What we have to see is not just "a tradition" but a selective tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification. . . . What has then to be said about any tradition is that it is in this sense an aspect of contemporary social and cultural organization, in the interest of the dominance of a specific class. It is a version of the past which is intended to connect with and ratify the present. What it offers in practice is a sense of predisposed continuity. (115, 116)

In this light, the growing turn among compositionists to history, and with it to a "search" for traditions, represents an attempt not only at self-identification but also self-direction. Varnum warns of the need to "reclaim all our history . . . if we are to have any hope of solidifying our academic identity, answering detractors, evaluating the appeals of reformers, and guiding students and the profession wisely into the twenty-first century. We need to know where we have been in order to know who we are and where we are going" ("History" 51-52). But Williams reminds us that this is not strictly a matter of "knowing" but of selecting as well. Any historical effort itself shapes the sense of who "we" are and where that "we" is going and thus must be understood as not only an historical but a political project, a process of selecting and creating a sense of the past that ratifies a particular view of the present and the future. At a time when compositionists are searching for the identity of their discipline, investigation of the possible relationships between the process of tradition and the constitution of traditions is of particular moment.

Williams notes that the ties of "tradition" to the contemporary and its basis in the historical record are the source of its power but also render it vulnerable to critique. For those ties can be revealed, and exclusions from that record are always subject to re-vision and recovery (116-17). To illustrate what is involved in the constitution and revision of traditions--what Williams terms the "struggle for and against selective traditions"--I want to examine the work of William E. Coles, Jr. and David Bartholomae and the reception given their work. In doing so, I'll be critiquing common identifications of their work with particular traditions and arguing for an alternative identification of their work with what I'll call a tradition of "resistance." Of course, I myself will thus also be participating in that "struggle" over "tradition." More importantly, I hope to illustrate the need to attend to differences in how any traditions are constituted.

Coles and Bartholomae are rarely linked.² Coles is regularly dubbed a "neo-romantic" or "expressionist" advocating that student writers find a personal, authentic voice cleansed of institutional constraints (see Berlin, "Contemporary" 771; Berlin, "Rhetoric and Ideology" 485; Fulkerson 421; Young 55; discussion below). Bartholomae is often denounced (and sometimes praised) as his extreme opposite, a kind of updated, jargonized version of Martin Joos' Miss Fidditch, the enemy of "personal voice," an advocate of the conformity of students' writing to the conventions of academic discourse (see Boyd 335-36, Ritchie 152-53, Spellmeyer 261ff; Wall and Coles 229-31, and discussion below). Nonetheless, I would argue that Coles and Bartholomae can be identified as belonging to a particular tradition, one marked by its resistance to standard, or "traditional," notions of tradition. Both can be shown to accept an epistemology commonly identified as "epistemic."³ That is to say, the work of both seems aligned to the belief that knowledge is contingent, relational, dynamic, continually subject to revision. Nonetheless, they differ from other figures who ostensibly share that epistemology by their insistence that both teaching and writing about teaching somehow enact that epistemology.⁴ Accepting that in their teaching and writing their knowledge is contingent, relational, dynamic, continually subject to revision, they resist any direct transmitting of that knowledge, for to do so would be to risk reifying the contingent and dynamic into the absolute and static.⁵ The rhetoric they employ as writers and teachers thus marks their tradition as resistant to the usual sense and practice of a tradition as an explicitly stated and promulgated set of beliefs and methods about writing and the teaching of writing, and thus works against identification of the two with a "tradition" conventionally conceived. This resistance accounts for the difficulties readers have had with their work. More importantly, the troubled reception given their work demonstrates the need to reconsider the different ways in which traditions in the field of composition are themselves composed by composition teachers, theorists, and historians. For their work illustrates a different way of defining composition teaching, theory, and tradition and the relationship of each of these to the others.

(A) Resisting Tradition in Coles and Bartholomae

What immediately identifies Coles and Bartholomae with one another is their shared view that knowledge resides only within and in dialectical relationship to language. As Coles puts it in his book Composing, reality is "composed," "composed by language, or more accurately by languages . . . with which each one of us frames and organizes the world he lives in and by which, for better or for worse, each one of us is framed and organized" (1). Coles emphasizes the dialectical nature of the movement between knowledge and language when he explains that he wants to lead students to an awareness of the degree to which they themselves are "made by the languages they manipulate--or are manipulated by" ("Sense" 28). The assignment sequences in his books invite the kind of dialectical process necessary to the creation of knowledge, asking students to shift from position to position to create ideally what Coles calls a "dramatic dialogue" resulting in "a fresh progression in thought and expression, a gradual building up of a common vocabulary, a more precise definition of terms" (Plural I 13, 12).

Bartholomae similarly describes the problems students have as a problem of writing one's way into knowledge. As he puts it, "A student, to be a student . . . must write his way into the university by speaking through (or approximating) a discourse that is not his own--one that is . . . part of the habitual ways of thinking and writing of the community he would enter, a community with its peculiar gestures of authority, its key terms and figures, its interpretive schemes" ("Writing" 69). For Bartholomae, then, knowledge is intimately involved with language, with particular ways of writing. This does not, however, lead him to recommend that we attempt simply to transmit particular discourse conventions into which students might "translate" knowledge--or be translated. For Bartholomae, literacy education involves enabling writers not so much to write within a discourse--learning and reproducing its conventions--but rather "to work within and against the languages of a closed, privileged discourse" ("Writing" 78; emphasis added). For Bartholomae and coauthor Anthony Petrosky, successful readers and writers are those who "actively seek out the margins and aggressively poise themselves in a hesitant and tenuous relationship to the language and methods of the university" (Facts 41). In the pedagogies which Bartholomae and Petrosky have developed, students are engaged in a dialectical "struggle within and against the languages of academic life" (Facts 8) in which they "make [their] mark on a book and it makes its mark on [them]" (Ways 1).

The statements of Coles and Bartholomae I've cited align them with tenets of what James Berlin has labeled "epistemic rhetoric." According to Berlin, this rhetoric holds that

Knowledge is not simply a static entity available for retrieval. Truth is dynamic and dialectical. . . . It is a relation that is created, not preexistent and waiting to be discovered. . . . Communication is always basic . . . because truth is always truth for someone standing in relation to others in a linguistically circumscribed situation. ("Contemporary" 774)⁶

But what distinguishes both writers from many others who align themselves with such tenets is the resistance they offer to having such statements "received" by either students or colleagues. For when Coles and Bartholomae do offer statements of such tenets, in what might appear to be efforts to transmit them, they frequently and regularly qualify those statements by offering critiques of them, disavowing them, framing those statements in forms which work against receiving the statements as "substantive," or employing paradoxical formulations which prevent any simple identification of the knowledge ostensibly to be transmitted.

For example, in one of his essays, Coles introduces what he calls a "Statement" which he first says contains knowledge that "one part of me believes all teachers of writing must know, subscribe to, and work out a set of classroom procedures in terms of." However, Coles immediately follows his "Statement" with a stinging critique of its logic, its oversimplifications of history, and its arrogance, and ends by confessing that in fact his "Statement" amounts to

really no more than a massive rationalization of the practice of William E. Coles, Jr., himself and as is. . . [that] can in no sense be received as anything like substantive knowledge. Further, it would be no trouble at all for another kind of teacher with a quite different conceptual frame for seeing the activity of writing, to show first how my frame could be pedagogically ruinous, and then how his frame, on the basis of what he could prove it made possible, worked better. ("Presbyters" 6-8)

More commonly, these writers regularly offer disavowals of and discouragement to any attempt to proselytize what they do present. For example, in one of Bartholomae's essays, he warns, "This paper is not meant to be in defense of any particular curriculum" (though he adds that he has one to defend if anyone's interested ["Wanderings" note 5]). Similarly, Bartholomae and Petrosky assert that the purpose of the essays in Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts is "not to defend or explain a curriculum" (Preface; emphasis added). Coles likewise claims he does not intend The Plural I as a blueprint for others. Rather, he says, "My intention . . . is to illuminate what is involved in the teaching (and learning) of writing however one approaches it, in hopes that this will enable other teachers to take a fresh hold on whatever they choose to do. . . . I have no desire to tell anyone else how he or she ought to go about handling the subject" (2). Coles makes a similar disavowal in the Preface to Teaching Composing, along with an explanation that his disavowal results directly from his philosophical position that writing and the teaching of writing are, or should be, self-creating activities. For neither students nor teachers, he claims, "do I intend the approach and discussion to be seen as in any way prescriptive. . . . Thus, although I am concerned in this book with describing a way of introducing students to seeing writing as a creative process, . . . I am just as concerned with the teaching of writing as an activity to be seen in exactly the same terms." And he claims in statements to students that his assignments

are not an argument. They contain no doctrine, either individually or as a sequence. There is no philosophy in them . . . for a teacher to become aware of and give to students, for students to become aware of and give back to a teacher. . . . In fact, the assignments are arranged and phrased precisely to make impossible the discovery in them of anything like a master plan. They are put together in such a way as to mean only and no more than what the various responses they are constructed to evoke can be made to mean, a meaning that will be different for different teachers and students as well as differently come by. (Composing 3-4; rpt. Teaching Composing 11-12)⁷

To further discourage teachers from taking their works as blueprints, Coles and Bartholomae, particularly Coles, have sometimes published in nonconventional forms. Coles has issued explicitly fictionalized, novelistic accounts of his courses, and an "essay" on the topic of "Literacy for the Eighties" which consists of a collage of fictional monologues of a writing teacher, a recovering alcoholic, and a racetrack "handicapper" (See Plural I, Seeing Through Writing, "Literacy for the Eighties").⁸ In both Facts Artifacts, and Counterfacts and Ways of Reading, with its accompanying Resources for Teaching Ways of Reading, Bartholomae and Petrosky present odd comminglings of course materials and theoretical essays on teaching. And, again, they warn against reading those materials or essays as dogma, and they even warn against any dogmatism that may have crept into their writing by situating their comments in the context of their own history as teachers:

We cannot begin to imagine all the possible ways that the essays [in Ways of Reading] might (or should) be taught. The best we can do is to speak from our own experience in such courses. If we seem at times to be dogmatic (to be singleminded in saying what should be done or how it should be done), it is because we are drawing on our own practices as teachers and they are grounded, finally, in our beliefs about what it means to read, write, and teach. We don't mean to imply that we have a corner on effective teaching or that there is no other way to help young adults take charge of what they do with texts. (Resources v)

Finally, both Coles and Bartholomae write in styles so densely textured as to provoke and require active readerly participation in response. Coles has described his own sentences as advancing "somewhat crabbedly from one notion in them to the next" ("Counterstatement" 208; qtd. in Harris 159). Joseph Harris, one of the keenest readers of Coles' work, observes that Coles' sentences are

freighted with commas, qualifiers, rephrasings. . . . I find myself continually circling back in order to move forward, rethinking my place in the text, checking again to see how a certain word was used a line or sentence or paragraph before. His writing seems engineered to force a kind of rereading--or at least a very slow and close reading--from the start. His prose resists glossing; what it says seems peculiarly tied to the precise form of its saying. To use one of his own most characteristic phrasings, I like how Coles makes me aware of his writing as writing--as the tracing of the particular choices of a particular writer. (159-60)

And George Dillon, analyzing the "hard rhetoric" of The Plural I, observes that "Coles has not courted the reader's approval any more than he has that of his students. . . . He is sometimes superior and enigmatic. . . . Coles forces the reader, like his students, to draw her own conclusions about his style and methods" (Rhetoric 65). Bartholomae describes himself similarly as trying in his writing "very hard to interfere with the conventional force of writing, with the pressure toward set conclusions, set connections, set turns of phrase. . . . What I learned first as a behavior . . . I've come to think of as a matter of belief or principle (working against the 'natural'--that is, the conventional--flow of words on the page)" ("Against the Grain" 24).⁹

A remarkable passage in "Inventing the University" illustrates this strategy of interference. Bartholomae is describing the problems beginning college student writers have in establishing authority in their writing. In order to achieve that authority, he says, they must

speak not only in another's voice but through another's code; and they not only have to do this, they have to speak in the voice and through the codes of those of us with power and wisdom; and they not only have to do this, they have to do it before they know what they are doing, before they have a project to participate in, and before, at least in terms of our disciplines, they have anything to say. (156)

This is a curiously accretive passage. Each clause, while ostensibly adding an independent task for students to those mentioned in preceding clauses, functions instead semantically to qualify the meaning of the preceding clauses: students must speak in another's voice and through another's code, but in the voice and code of specific kinds of people, and under highly unpromising conditions. The addition of each subsequent clause interferes with the sense of closure suggested by the ending of the preceding clause (marked by each of the semicolons) by qualifying it. The cumulative effect of this passage is to render as increasingly difficult of resolution the dilemma these students face, an effect created through the insistent addition of a seemingly endless list of qualifiers. The sentences immediately following this passage give a further twist to this effect. A tentative resolution and conclusion to the dilemma is offered: "Our students may be able to enter into a conventional discourse and speak, not as themselves, but through the voice of the community"; but the efficacy of this resolution is then immediately questioned: "the university, however, is the place where 'common' wisdom is only of negative values--it is something to work against" (156). Bartholomae's refusal to offer closure goes hand in hand with a characteristic insistence on conflict and difficulty. He denies not only readers' desire for set conclusions but also their quite understandable desire for resolution of conflict. He ends "Inventing the University" with a warning about such difficulties (and in an accretive structure which mirrors the first passage cited above):

[The writer of the "White Shoes" paper] will have to be convinced that it is better to write sentences he might not so easily control, and he will have to be convinced that it is better to write muddier and more confusing prose (in order that it may sound like ours), and this will be harder than convincing the "Clay Model" writer to continue what he has already begun. (162)

Bartholomae's most characteristic strategy for interfering with set conclusions and insisting on difficulty, however, is to employ paradoxical formulations. "Inventing the University" itself represents an extended investigation of the paradox of "inventing" the already established.¹⁰ But his other formulations of writing are also paradoxical, as when he describes writing as "an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity" ("Inventing" 140) or when, with coauthor Petrosky, he describes his basic writing course as leading students to practice "imitative originality or . . . captive self-possession" (Facts 40). And Bartholomae and Petrosky do not reserve such formulations for teachers. In the Introduction to Ways of Reading, they warn students:

Such paradoxes place the work of resolution emphatically on readers, whether they are students or teachers. The task of making sense, of reading, becomes an active task for both as they encounter and wrestle with such paradoxes.

(Mis)Reading Coles and Bartholomae

The resistance both these writers offer to ready formulation has, not surprisingly, made their work unusually liable to mixed, sometimes contradictory interpretations. Dillon offers two contradictory readings of Coles. On the one hand, he links him with writers who use "hard rhetoric" to evoke "the codes of 'manly' plain-spokenness and the courage of one's convictions" (Rhetoric 64), a reading difficult to square with either the opaque style Coles employs and encourages in students or Coles' explicit denunciations of advocates of plain style ("Presbyters" 6, "Freshman"). On the other hand, Dillon also argues that Coles appeals in The Plural I to an "estheticizing school of prose criticism" which holds plain prose in contempt, seeking readers' "complex involvement in a sustained drama--a concrete universal, an esthetic object, the experience of which is self-validating" ("Fiction" 209, 205), a reading difficult to square with either Dillon's other argument or Coles' statement that he intends The Plural I not to give aesthetic pleasure but to "enable other teachers to take a fresh hold on whatever they choose to do [in teaching]" (Plural I 2). Coles' reluctance to offer explicit statements of his philosophical position leads Richard Young to identify Coles with those who hold that "the act of composing is a kind of mysterious growth" not susceptible to exposition (55). Berlin uses that same reluctance and Coles' emphasis on the "self" to link him with those Berlin calls the Expressionists, those who locate truth outside language, in personal experience which the writer must attempt to express authentically ("Contemporary" 771-73; see also Courage note 2). Harris, on the other hand, argues that, for Coles,

The task of writers is not to make language adhere to some mystic and wordless vision of their selves, but to use language in a way that begins to constitute a self. . . . [Berlin] sees [Coles] as starting with the self of the writer and then moving to the question of what language best expresses that self. The movement [for Coles] is actually the opposite. (162; see also Wiley 142)

Bartholomae, as Susan Wall and Nick Coles observe, has been interpreted as Coles' opposite, an advocate of an "unambiguously accommodationist Basic Writing pedagogy, a return to a new set of 'basics,' the conventions of academic discourse written out, 'demystified' and taught in our classrooms" (231).¹¹ And he is so identified in spite of evidence to the contrary from the course materials he and Petrosky provide in Ways of Reading and Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts. The paradoxical formulations he offers are frequently stripped of their sense of paradox and rendered unequivocal declarations.

For example, in essays Richard Courage cites, Bartholomae rejects the notion that students and teachers can choose only between students' being true to a prior "home" language or accepting uncritically the "language of the academy," arguing instead for a model of "appropriation" and "approximation" in which writing becomes a "dramatic act of verbal placement" that will "engage a student's own sense of his knowledge. Yet Courage characterizes Bartholomae's response to the "ambivalence" Mina Shaughnessy expresses about leading students to academic discourse as "the rather traditional one of championing the gain of a college education over any loss in individual voice or identity" (257). Bartholomae rejects "basic skills" courses ("Teaching"), advocates basic writing courses which give students "real [academic] work to do" ("Released" 84), and, with coauthor Petrosky, has offered a basic writing course modeled after a graduate seminar (Facts 47-48). Nonetheless, Joy S. Ritchie reads Bartholomae as advocating "a process of socialization to the dominant community [of the academy]" and thus encouraging drill and imitation, in opposition to those who "attempt to prepare students for genuine intellectual activity . . . the development of . . . individual voices within, but not subsumed by, the academic community" (152-53). In perhaps the most extreme example, Richard Boyd argues that Bartholomae, in "Inventing the University," recommends "a pedagogy of mimeticism" (339) in which students are pried loose from the discourse communities to which they had previously belonged (336). Boyd straitens Bartholomae's observation that "the student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse" ("Inventing" 135) to signal "Bartholomae's effort to have the student writer be 'appropriated by' the academic discourse community" (336). He straitens Bartholomae's warning that students comfortably inside the "tidy, pat, discourse" of freshman themewriting (for example, the writer of the "White Shoes Paper") need to be pried loose from it ("Inventing" 150-51, 162) to a warning to pry students loose from their home language (336). And he takes Bartholomae's observation of students' difficulties assuming positions of authority as writers ("Inventing" 139-40) as evidence that they can never usurp the authority of their teachers (341).

Bartholomae observes that interpretation "begins with an act of aggression, a displacement, . . . with a misreading--a recomposition of a text that can never be the text itself speaking" ("Wanderings" 93). As the discussion above demonstrates, it is of course possible for (mis)readings of Coles and Bartholomae to be countered. However, given the formulations of Coles' and Bartholomae's work, such counterings seem, if not unjustified, somehow out of place. The ways in which Coles and Bartholomae frame their statements position both badly, at best oddly, to complain, or to complain very loudly or directly, about such (mis)readings of their work.¹² Their dilemma is the dilemma of those Roland Barthes describes as attempting to resist the authority and law inherent in the teaching/speaking situation. As Barthes explains,

Whoever prepares to speak (in a teaching situation) must realize the mise en scene imposed. . . . Either the speaker chooses in all good faith a role of Authority, in which case it suffices to "speak well," in compliance with the Law present in every act of speech--without hesitation, at the right speed, clearly (which is what is demanded of good pedagogic speech: clarity, authority). . . . Or the speaker is bothered by all this Law that the act of speaking is going to introduce into what he wants to say, in which case . . . he uses the irreversibility of speech in order to disturb its legality: correcting, adding, wavering, the speaker . . . superimposes on the simple message that everyone expects of him a new message that ruins the very idea of a message and. . . asks us to believe with him that language is not to be reduced to communication. . . . Yet at the end of all this effort to "speak badly" another role is enforced, for the audience . . . receives these fumblings as so many signs of weakness and sends the speaker back the image of a master who is human, too human--liberal.

The choice is gloomy: conscientious functionary or free artist. . . . Nothing to be done: language is always a matter of force, to speak is to exercise a will for power; in the realm of speech there is no innocence, no safety. (191-92)

What most interests me here is how the sort of (mis)readings I've described above can be distinguished from continuations of the tradition in which I'm placing Coles and Bartholomae. Such readings attempt to transform the work of Coles or Bartholomae into ready formulations: Coles as the advocate of the search for a personal voice, Bartholomae as the drill sergeant of academic prose. But in adopting such formulations, even in cases where they seem favorably disposed to and advocates of the positions outlined, such readings depart from the resisting tradition by failing to enact that resistance in the formulations they offer. Instead, in their responses, they enact an alternative, far more dominant conception of tradition, the tradition which Barthes identifies with teaching and speech "in compliance with the Law."

Coles, Bartholomae, and Expressivism

To get at what might constitute a continuation of a tradition which resists such transmission, I want to look more closely at the relationship of the work of both Coles and Bartholomae to the "Expressivist" position. Though I would identify neither with that position, as I've described above, Coles is frequently identified with Expressivism, and Bartholomae is identified as adamantly opposed to it. How Coles might be identified with Bartholomae, given their opposed reputations, can illustrate how the resistant tradition I am identifying constitutes itself.

One of the more obvious signs of the ostensible opposition of the two is the difference in how each positions his work in relation to other texts. Coles emphatically rejects anthologies of readings. Two of Bartholomae's best known works require students to engage in extensive outside reading: the assignments in Facts have students read more than six books, and Ways of Reading is, as its title proclaims, an "anthology." Similarly, whereas Coles' published essays cite almost no one and frequently adopt colloquial language, Bartholomae's essays are littered with references to other academic writers and position him insistently in relation to the language of critical theory and research (see, for example, "Reply" 124). Coles ends "An Unpetty Pace" by quoting the words of Joe Frazier; Bartholomae begins "Inventing" with lines from Foucault. This difference at least suggests that Coles wants to evoke an aura of originality, of being self-made and in no one's debt, an impression aligned with the Expressivist emphasis on personal authenticity and individuality, and it suggests that Bartholomae is aligned to post-structuralist critiques of authorship and authenticity in insisting on the continuity of his work with that of others. Some of the statements each makes lend validity to such impressions. For example, Coles (at first) insists that the Statement of his beliefs about teaching writing "owes nothing" to others' ideas about writing ("Presbyters" 6). The terms Coles and his students use to describe types of writing in the class discussions presented in The Plural I invoke distinctions between authentic and fake writing, using one's "real" voice versus using borrowed language, "snow-jobs" or "themewriting" (see, for example, 32, 36, 40-41). And there is a comparable distinction between the authentic and the false implicit in Coles' penchant for using the rhetoric of the tautological statement, exemplified in his claim that because "the teaching of writing as writing is the teaching of writing as art," "[w]hen writing is not taught as art, . . . it is not writing that is being taught, but something else" (Plural I 11).

Bartholomae, on the other hand, asserts the necessity, the inevitability, that a writer borrow from others. Discussing the development of a style in writing, and (significantly) drawing on the work of literary critic Geoffrey Hartman, he claims, "A style . . . is more than a sign of an individual linguistic performance; a style is allusive, derivative; it refers out to a language that is a cultural legacy and that an individual writer can finally neither invent nor control" ("Released" 82); and he insists that a "student moves into . . . discourse; he does not invent it for the occasion. Understanding, then, is not 'genuine' but is acquired through an act of appropriation" ("Writing" 72). With Petrosky, he observes that the image of a writer that the Facts course offers students is "not an affirmation of a person, free and self-created, but an image of a person who is made possible through her work, work that takes place both within and against the languages that surround and define her" (Facts 40). More succinctly, he warns, "I think it is wrong to teach late-adolescents that writing is an expression of individual thoughts and feelings" ("Reply" 128).

This difference in how each positions his work in relation to others is part of what has led critics to identify Coles with the Expressivists and Bartholomae as opposed to Expressivism. Berlin, for example, offers as evidence that Bartholomae has "moved firmly into the ranks of the epistemic category" (as opposed to those Berlin deems Expressionists or those called cognitivists) the fact that Bartholomae calls on "the discussions of discourse communities in Foucault and on the cultural analysis of Said, as well as on the rhetorical speculations of Kenneth Burke and Patricia Bizzell" (Rhetoric 185). And Kurt Spellmeyer, in an analysis of the 1989 Conference on College Composition and Communication Convention debate between Peter Elbow (cast as Romantic valuing Self) and Bartholomae, notes that it is Bartholomae's use of the language of high critical theory that has marked him for many, especially for Elbow's followers, as the representative of a repressive Academy opposed to the empowerment of the Self associated with Expressivism (in this case, the devalued teacher's self) (271-73).

As I'll demonstrate, it is possible to counter some of these impressions, showing the underlying continuity between Coles and Bartholomae. Aside from illustrating what a continuation of a "resistant" tradition entails, revealing that continuity can serve two additional purposes. First, their work and its underlying continuity suggests a different model of how the writings of Practitioners might or should be read, and so a revaluation of possible relations between teaching and scholarship and between Practitioners and others involved in the work of composition, an issue given prominence in North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition. The tradition in which I am placing Coles and Bartholomae, I would argue, represents an alternative conception of lore and of Practitioner inquiry generally and, as well, represents an important attempt to bridge, or rather erase, distinctions between teaching and scholarship through the enactment of a practice of writing opposed to straightforward transmission of knowledge. Second, a revaluation of their work demonstrates that in searching out traditions and theories of composition, historians need to recognize the imbrication of theories of composition in the material practice of composition traditions.

A different (and, yes, "closer") reading of the work of Coles and Bartholomae would force significant qualification of the view that Coles denies influence and that Bartholomae privileges the writing of academics. In the same essay in which Coles denies being influenced by the ideas of others, he later admits that his statement "owes a good deal more . . . to what I claim I owe nothing to than I care to admit" ("Presbyters" 7). And he regularly acknowledges the influence of his teacher Theodore Baird and colleagues on his own work (see, for example, Plural I 5-6, "Looking Beyond" 274). Coles' rejection of anthologies for his classes can be read not as a rejection of influence on students' writing but as a rejection of the common practice (common at least in the 1960s and early 1970s) of turning composition courses into courses in literary appreciation (see his "Freshman" 266-67). Note that unlike assignments which ask students to put their personal experiences into words, his assignments typically have students respond to some statement or excerpt from a text on some general subject in order to test its usefulness: a quote on professionalism versus amateurism, C.P. Snow's description of the "two cultures," a Gertrude Stein essay on composition, or a "nonsense" story.¹³ His efforts to have his students "come clean" represent more an attempt to get students to acknowledge their own indebtedness to existing discourses. It is the ruse, not the failure, of originality and authenticity he has students learn to uncover. His is an argument for artifice. As he explains in an essay contesting calls for classroom "relevance," "involvement," "meaningful relationships," personal contact," and the like,

In not knowing what they would really say, or how to say it rightly, in not understanding the code as a code, and therefore what it is that they are saying, the demand for Freedom, particularly in that it can be met so easily by a reasonable facsimile thereof, all too often amounts to a demand for its opposite, for the sort of slavery which can be made to look and feel like freedom. ("Unpetty" 378, 379)

And so he argues for the "necessary artificiality of education": "Education does more, and better, than simply supply the world of experience. It supplies a number of ways of making sense of the world of experience and is, therefore, in the best sense of the term, artificial" ("Unpetty" 379, 380). Coles is not against artificiality but "unadmitted (and therefore insidious) artificiality" fronting as the Real ("Unpetty" 380; emphasis added). His focus on the "literary" self of students is thus not, as James Catano claims, an attempt at distinguishing the classroom self from the mundane world of skill or craft, but an insistence that selves are constructs (Catano 433). For Coles, "style," which he calls a "metaphor of the self," is not something one is but "forged," something to which "there is both quickness and vulnerability," something which "argues both its own integrity and its own inconclusiveness . . ., its own momentariness as a stay against the confusion which in being reseen from the perspective of another style must be reordered, restaged, restyled" ("Unpetty" 380). Thus, he explains, style is "a form of self-extension, one's offering in the form of a role the best he is capable of imagining for himself at the moment . . . that which it is possible to grow within as well as to" ("Unpetty" 380-81).

The assignments in Bartholomae and Petrosky's texts clearly do not focus nearly so closely or explicitly on student writers' construction of a self as do Coles'. And there is far greater attention to reading. But as the full title of Ways of Reading stresses, this reading anthology is in service of writing: it is An Anthology for Writers. The writing privileged, then, is not the writing of the Academy but the writing of students. Granted, many of the assignments ask students, at least initially, to take on the language and projects of others: John Berger, Paulo Freire, Robert Coles, Gloria Steinem, Walker Percy, Adrienne Rich. But first, as Kurt Spellmeyer has observed, many of the figures whose works Bartholomae assigns to students are hardly representative of the Academy but rather are "activists or social critics who have used knowledge improvisationally, often in contravention of established institutional practices" (273). Second, assignments asking students to take on the language of such figures is less a pedagogy of mimeticism than of appropriation. In asking students to adopt some of the language and projects of others, the assignments also ask students to make them their own and, as well, to struggle against their domination. As Bartholomae and Petrosky warn students in one of the assignments in a sequence on composing, "One of the difficulties of writing is that what you want to say is sometimes consumed or displaced by a language that mystifies the subject or alienates the writer. . . . The ways of speaking and thinking that are immediately available to a writer . . . can be seen as obstacles as well as aids" (Ways 747). Such assignments, though they emphasize the power of the language of others, also place students in a position of power themselves, as writers capable of responding to these other (published) writers and responding both with and against the grain of those others. For Bartholomae, teaching students that "writing is an expression of individual thoughts and feelings" is "wrong" not just because it's inaccurate. It's wrong, he says, because it makes students "suckers and . . . it makes them powerless, at least to the degree that it makes them blind to tradition, power and authority as they are present in language and culture" ("Reply" 128-29; emphasis added). Thus, while he shares the goal of "empowerment" with Expressivists, his understanding of what it takes to achieve such empowerment differs radically from theirs (see Spellmeyer 265-66). It is an understanding, instead, that rehearses the position of Coles when he states that writers are "made by the languages they manipulate" ("Sense" 28). Bartholomae's use of the language of poststructuralist theory, which might seem to distinguish his position from that of Coles, simply makes more explicit Coles' position that the writer's self is a construct necessarily located within and among conflicting discourses, and enacts that position by locating Bartholomae within and against such language.

I've argued above that the work of Coles and Bartholomae represents a "resistant" tradition identifiable by its adoption of an epistemic rhetoric and by the enactment of the implications of that rhetoric through resistance to direct transmission of particular beliefs, including beliefs about epistemic rhetoric. The relationship of both writers to the Expressivists shows further that this tradition is identifiable by its insistence that any use of language represents a response to other, preexisting, powerful languages. Though, not surprisingly, both Coles and Bartholomae advocate a certain resistance to such languages, both also reject as utopian the possibility of avoiding such languages and thereby distinguish themselves from the Expressivist position. And thus, both necessarily acknowledge the influence of others.¹⁴ Necessarily, for two reasons. First, to do otherwise would be to pretend to that utopian condition divorced from history and language. And second, to do otherwise, as Bartholomae explains in critiquing the "expressivist" position, is to engage in nothing less than "imperial domination." Expressive writing "resists or erases difference. . . [and one's] own position within a discursive practice" ("Reply" 126). It is this argument that underlies the structure of their assignments, a structure which, within individual assignments and in sequences of assignments, repeatedly asks students to locate a position for themselves as writers, in writing, in relation to the positions of other, powerful, pre-existing languages. It is also the same argument, however, that leads them to resist any attempts, especially their own, to influence others.¹⁵ Like Barthes' unwilling speaker, they attempt to "speak badly," to convince that language, at least their language, "is not to be reduced to communication" (Barthes 192). Acutely aware of the power of language to enact "imperial domination," they work against the authority commonly granted the position of Barthes' teacher/speaker.

Resisting Tradition and Practitioner Inquiry

The seemingly odd position taken by writers in this tradition, I would argue, offers an alternative to the picture North, in his widely read The Making of Knowledge in Composition, gives of "Practitioner inquiry" and a potential resolution to the difficulties which North sees Practitioners generally having in their relations to the other "methodological communities" in composition of "Scholars" and "Researchers." Virtually all of the work of Coles and Bartholomae, including material presented originally for students, addresses teachers, and virtually all of it is founded on teaching experience, as the frequent and lengthy quotations of student writing in the work of both demonstrates. It is thus possible to categorize their work as representations of what North calls "Practitioner inquiry." North himself identifies Coles as an exemplary Practitioner writer. North's book has been read as championing Practitioners, their knowledge ("lore"), and their means of making knowledge ("Practitioner inquiry") (see Raymond 93; Larson 96-97; Lloyd-Jones 99). He ends his book by calling for "a full recognition of and appreciation for lore: an understanding of what it is and how it works such that other kinds of knowledge can usefully interact with it" (371). But given the way North describes lore, it's difficult to see what is to be the basis of that recognition and appreciation. In North's account, Practitioners have mechanisms but no powerful ones for testing or rejecting any lore, though some "tinkering" is common (25). According to North, among Practitioners, "once somebody says that [an idea, notion, practice, or whatever] has worked or is working or might work, it is part of lore." Not only that: "While anything can become a part of lore, nothing can ever be dropped from it, either" (24). And it is this difficulty of evaluation, North acknowledges, that makes Practitioners especially vulnerable to "outside interference" (50).

The resistant tradition I have been identifying in the work of Bartholomae and Coles may represent an alternative sense of the process by which lore is constituted and maintained among Practitioners. North's account of the transmission of lore is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, he describes it as occurring most commonly and ideally not in writing but in talk, a medium which allows for much give and take between participants. He argues that "writing is, by definition, the medium least amenable to representing the results of Practitioner inquiry" (52). For the reciprocity crucial to Practitioner inquiry is impossible in writing:

The disclosure [in writing of results of Practitioner inquiry] will inevitably drift away from the sharing of accounts of inquiry--the confusions, the tentativeness, the recursiveness, the muddied uncertainty about successes--toward a neater, more linear, more certain prescription. (53)

Yet at the same time, North claims that the virtue of the few successful Practitioner writers resides in the certainty they offer readers about the teaching experience and the pragmatic logic underlying their advice (52). Though North would seem to value "uncertainty" in the ordinary dissemination of lore, he praises successful Practitioner writing for its reduction of uncertainty.

This contradiction stems in part from the assumption that in writing and reading, Practitioners accept, or must accept, Barthes' "Law" of the teaching mise en scène. As a result, in spite of North's call for respect for Practitioners, the picture of them that emerges from his discussion is that of unquestioning consumers. Interaction between other methodological communities and Practitioners, he observes, "tends to be top-down: the spoon-feeding of the lowly Practitioners with whatever they can handle of the findings of other communities. The end result, of course, is that the little that is spoon-fed gets absorbed into lore in a form likely to be rejected by its contributor" (372). Though North laments this style of interaction, it seems inevitable given his view of "lore" and its "pragmatic logic." But this has to be the case only if we confuse the "pragmatic logic" governing Practitioner inquiry with a search for prescriptions. North describes Practitioners as hungry for those who will tell them "what to do," to the extent that they take descriptions for prescriptions (see 25-27). "Because lore is fundamentally pragmatic," he explains, "contributions to it have to be framed in practical terms, as knowledge about what to do . . ." (25). For example, North claims Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations is popular among Practitioners because it tries "to tell practitioners what to do," and Shaughnessy's authority rests primarily on "our sense of her competence" (53).

North doesn't say what convinces him that this is Shaughnessy's appeal for Practitioners. He admits that, for himself, it is Shaughnessy's attitude that is "more valuable than any of her findings per se" (53). But it seems at least possible that this same "attitude" is what appeals to Practitioners as well. Bartholomae explains the appeal of Shaughnessy's book for Practitioners in terms of the use to which it puts Practitioner knowledge and the model it provides for merging teaching and scholarship. Rather than praise the work for its "practicality," he admires it for the completeness of the picture Shaughnessy is able to give of writers at work, a completeness obviously made possible strictly by virtue of her teaching experience ("Released" 73-74). Comparing Errors and Expectations to statistical research on prose features, he notes that prior to the publication of Errors and Expectations,

It was not uncommon . . . to hear statistical research being praised at the expense of the anecdotal accounts that had characterized another tradition of scholarship in composition. Much of that criticism . . . came from people who didn't teach writing and who lacked the day-by-day contact with writers and their problems that makes the impressions and speculations of writing teachers, at least the best of them, like Shaughnessy, so valuable. Shaughnessy, like Ann Berthoff, has demonstrated how teaching and research can together be part of a professional life. ("Released" 73)

Both Coles and Bartholomae imagine Practitioners receiving writing not as prescriptions to be swallowed but as enactments of a merged teaching and research, enactments which can then inspire or provoke enactments in response. It is that sort of writing and the sort of knowledge it produces which Coles values, writing which captures in writing what North describes as "the confusions, the tentativeness, the recursiveness, the muddied uncertainty about successes" of day-to-day teaching practice without transforming the account of that experience into prescription. As Coles observes in the Introduction to The Plural I, while much has been written on how to teach writing, there is "surprisingly little" on "the actual doing, on . . . the continuing dialogue [between 'nonmythic' teachers and students] at least as undramatic as it is dramatic in its workings, repetitive often, seemingly circular, inevitably messy, on the sheer dirty work of teaching and learning day by day, in this time, of that place" (3-4). What matters to Coles is not the sort of knowledge easily transmittable in clear, linear writing but what's done with that knowledge at individual locales of individual teachers with specific classes. As he argues in response to calls for defining what composition teachers yet need to know, "the only substantive knowledge connected with the teaching of writing which is worthy of the name is knowledge that has been made more than knowledge by the teacher himself" ("Presbyters" 9). Hence, Coles offers little, really no, direct advice either to teachers or students on how to write, how to teach. Similarly, Bartholomae offers few prescriptions either to teachers or students on how to go about teaching or writing. Whereas expressivists are commonly known for their advocacy of such techniques as free-writing and "helping circles" aimed at smoothing the writing process, presumably anyone's writing process, neither Coles nor Bartholomae is associated with any comparable techniques. Both have described specific courses and assignment sequences, but as noted earlier, they bracket them with warnings about their use by others. William Irmscher's response to Coles' The Plural I illustrates an alternative image of how Practitioners might respond to books on teaching. Irmscher praises the book for telling him what not to do. As he explains, what the instructor is like and how the students react is "so vivid that I know I don't want to be like Coles. I don't want to use his approach, and I don't want to treat students as he does. But I know all of this because he has dramatized the situation" (87). In the resistant tradition I am tracing, such a response might indeed be a welcome one.¹⁶

Resisting Traditions in Composing Composition

I have argued that the work of Coles and Bartholomae represents a tradition resistant to common conceptions of tradition in composition operant in recent studies of the field's history, and I have shown further that this "resistant" tradition illustrates a "mode of inquiry" among Practitioners which merges teaching with scholarship while avoiding the pitfalls of Practitioner lore as North has described it. To identify this tradition, I've had to look at pedagogies, teaching materials, and statements of philosophy as practices, as "performative," blurring imperceptibly into one another, and these practices as resisting rather than complying with the Barthesian "mise en scene" of teaching and speaking. But it is worth emphasizing that this tradition's insistence that teachers re-invent the tradition both in their teaching of writing and in their writing about teaching means that this tradition resists the usual means of identification. In a recent overview of theories of composition, Richard Fulkerson describes no less than four elements or "components" constituting any theory of composition: axiology, or a belief about the goal or aim of writing; procedure, or a sense of the means by which writers achieve that aim; a pedagogical component, or how to teach writers to use those means; and an epistemology, a belief about what counts as knowledge (410-11). Fulkerson's analysis helps to resolve some of the confusion marring other analyses of the field, a confusion Fulkerson blames on the failure to recognize all of these elements and their independence (410, 420-21). But as my discussion of Coles and Bartholomae suggests, tradition represents an additional element distinguishing any theory from others. Fulkerson is interested only in categorizing composition "theory" in his essay, whereas a tradition--that is, the process by which a theory, and/or any component of that theory, is constituted and maintained--would seem to emphasize something non-theoretical, a material practice: the question, say, of whether one teaches a theory of composition by example or handouts or through refereed publications, of whether one's writing style is smooth or knotty. But as the work of Coles and Bartholomae illustrates, the material practice of tradition--including writing and writing style--is not to be so easily divorced from axiology, procedure, pedagogy, or epistemology. At least in the tradition I have traced, every component is imbricated with the others. This imbrication qualifies Varnum's advice that historians of composition broaden their gaze to include material other than books and journal publications. The question is not simply whether historians of composition have done their homework. In attending to as broad a range of material documentation as possible, historians need to attend as well to the nature of such materials as a practice by which particular traditions are constituted and maintained. And, to the extent possible, we need to consider what the reception given those materials signifies. The very different public receptions given Coles and Bartholomae in spite of the close correlation of much of their work and in spite of Bartholomae's explicit acknowledgements of Coles' influence on him attest not only to the resistance their work offers to common conceptions of traditions in composition. It attests to the power those common conceptions have exerted on historians of composition, and it attests as well to the engagement of historians in the selective process of constituting some traditions and denying others, and thus their own engagement in composing composition.

In my engagement in that process, I have argued that the work of Coles and Bartholomae constitutes a tradition that resists ordinary conceptions of tradition and provides an alternative model of the process by which Practitioners might share "lore" and by which teaching practice and scholarship might be reconciled. Attention to the variety of practices by which traditions are constituted and maintained can inform our understanding of those practices and of the daily lives of composition teachers and scholars. But such attention is not only important as a technical matter of historiography but important politically as well. For such attention not only informs but also shapes theories of composition. As the tradition I've identified shows, theories inhere as much in such practices as they do in statements.¹⁷ We will fail to see the variety of traditions in composition, and we will exclude much of that variety from the "field" of composition, if we think of "traditions of teaching" in traditional terms only. If we are to understand traditions of teaching, we need to look not just to statements of philosophy, textbooks, the paraphernalia of course materials, or even the interaction of all these in relation to each other, but to the teaching all these enact on both students and teachers, immediately and in history. We need to see how these define, and define differently, what "tradition" means in the teaching of writing.¹⁸

Drake University
Des Moines, Iowa

NOTES

Works Cited