JAC Volume 15 Issue 1

The practical value for composition teachers in the thirteen articles and closing dialogue of Into the Field, a collection of interdisciplinary perspectives culled from sessions of the MLA's Division on the Teaching of Writing, varies pretty directly from those written in English to those in poststructuralese. Several of the articles are so riddled with jargon as to be unreadable. In "Reconnecting Rhetoric and Philosophy in the Classroom," Brenda Deen Shildgen repeats "fore-meaning" and "foreconception" (anything like "preconception"?) thirteen times on two facing pages. In "Composition Studies and Cultural Studies: Collapsing Boundaries," James Berlin (whose later writing and pubic speaking sadly became increasingly entangled in jargon) uses "signifying practices" or "discursive practices" eleven times in four pages, and is also fond of "imbrication," "inscription," and "intervention." In editor Gere's six-page introduction, every other word seems to have an -ize or -ity suffix arbitrarily tacked on.

This is the second collection on composition, following Contending With Words edited by Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, that the editors at MLA have let slip by without urging writers to translate jargon words into plain English equivalents. For example, Berlin writes, "The subject is thus a construction of the play of discourses that a culture provides. These discourses interpellate or address us, providing each of us with directions about our behavior, scripts that have to do with such categories as race, class, and gender." Is there anything more original or profound here than what Ray Kytle wrote in the 1969 edition of Clear Thinking for Composition?:

Because we live in a particular country, in a particular part of the world, in a particular age; because we were raised in a particular class and educated in a particular educational system by teachers who were also in many ways the product of their culture, we possess a large collection of attitudes and values whose accuracy, truth, or merit we have probably never questioned. (49)

'Be first section of readings, "'Me Philosophical Turn," consists mainly of articles on phenomenology and hermeneutics. I have to confess that after some twenty years of sporadic efforts, I still do not understand what hermeneutics means or why I should care. In his opening article, "Being Philosophical About Composition: Hermeneutics and the Teaching of Writing," Kurt Spellmeyer (who has done better work than this, as have most of the contributors) defines it as "the study of meaning and contexts"--which doesn't help much. Spellmeyer is followed by Judith Halden-Suilivan's "'Me Phenomenology of Process," which explains that "in hermeneutic phenomenology, language as the saying of Being--as that which makes all worlds apparent and possible--addresses people." Get it now? In spite of having an M.A. in French and living in France for three years, I also have never gotten other staples of francophilic jargon endlessly intoned throughout this book, like "interpellate,” “interrogate," and "subject positionality." I do know that in common French usage, interpeller is synonymous with interroger, butAmerican followers of Althusser seem to use the two differently; Berlin tells us, "Ideology interpellates subjects--that is, addresses and shapes them." Everything clear?

Among the ironies of this jargonitis, which has been increasingly prevalent at recent CCC Conventions, is that its propagators at the same time are calling for student writers to liberate themselves from repressive academic discourse and celebrate Bakhtinian heteroglossia, a multicultural polyphony of voices; yet these theorists' own discourse has a lockstep, scholastic uniformity and, far from being comprehensible to the masses of teachers and students, it seems calculated mainly to win prestige for composition theory by elevating it to the level of the most arcane (and now outmoded) literary theory; "doing theory" now often has become a substitute for teaching writing, as it earlier became one for teaching literature. The worst consequence of the profession's surrender to poststructuralist theory and lingo is that it has allowed us all to be turned into a punching bag by political right wingers, who have thus been able to falsely claim the high ground as champions of clear writing and intellectual common sense.

Now that I have gotten that out of my system, let me praise the articles at the top of the line in readability and substance, those by George Dillon, David Bleich, and John Trimbur. Dillon's "Argumentation and Critique: College Composition and Enlightenment Ideals"--by far the most practical in the section on philosophy--courageously defends the rationalist-marxist tradition of the Frankfurt School, currently displaced in fashion by poststructuralist anti-intellectualism. Dillon translates the ideas of Jurgen Habermas--not an easy writer himself--into concrete writing assignments consisting of rhetorical analysis of op-ed articles by opposing political journalists like George Will and Lewis Lapham.

Bleich's "Ethnography and the Study of Literacy: Prospects for Socially Generous Research," builds on the work of current anthropologists who hold that

ethnographic work must change its purpose and conception so that it is in some significant way a contribution to the welfare of the community or society being studied. Suchresearch, which I have identified as "socially generous research," is no longer mainly a discovery project but, rather, an initiative that contributes to the empowerment of the subject community and to the mutuality of this community and the research community. (178)

Bleich applies this approach to a literature course he taught at the University of Rochester, in which students conducted a self-reflexive ethnography of the social relations of the teacher and students in the course. The students divided into small groups to discuss literary works and write about their own and others' responses, thereby doing primary research in differences in reading response varying with factors such as students' gender, race, and class. Ihis appears to be a fruitful application of the student-centered pedagogy advocated by theorists like Shirley Brice Heath, Paulo Freire, and Ira Shor.

Trimbur's "Composition Studies: Postmodern or Popular?" begins with a lucid survey of recent cultural theory, sorting out the frequent confusion of poststructuralism (deriving from phenomenology) and postmodernism (de- riving from Marxist analysis of the current historical phase of multinational capitalism), and concluding that both lines have led toward a deterministic view of individuals helpless to act as agents against their positioning by either linguistic or socioeconomic forces. He conceives of cultural studies, particularly in composition courses, as a way for individual students, if not to surmount these forces, at least to voice pockets of popular resistance and appropriations of them:

The popular as it has been developed by cultural studies avoids the pessimism of the Frankfurt school's account of mass culture as a colonization of private life worlds by the media and the culture industry. At the same time, it avoids the essentialized class identities ascribed to the working class and other subordinate groups by traditional Marxism .... The notion of the popular refers to the practices by which individuals and groups negotiate meanings and social identities in the course of everyday life. (129)

These meanings and social identities include those engendered through education: "We might then think of the study and teaching of writing as a way to explore how students internalize, resist, and evade the relations of power in schooling as they learn to separate work from play, academic life from social life, reading for comprehension from reading for pleasure." Because "the study and teaching of writing necessarily entails attention to mass communications and textuality of modern life," Trimbur sees cultural studies as a means of reuniting English studies with those in rhetoric, speech, and communication departments. This piece, then, links up with Dillon, with my "Teaching the Political Conflicts: A Rhetorical Schema," and with Trimbur's call elsewhere for a "move to reconceive (or perhaps restore is a better word) first-year composition as rhetorical education for citizenship and to place public discourse, as well as students' composing process, squarely at the center of the curriculum" ("Counterstatement" 248).

Berlin's chapter, which complements Trimbur's, begins with a review of Berlin's familiar taxonomy of modern rhetorical schools--romantic/expressive, liberal, social constructionist, and social epistemic. He favors the latter, synonymous with current Marxist and poststructuralist theory, because it takes more sophisticated account than any other of--you guessed it--subject positionality and the formation of consciousness by signifying practices. Like Trimbur, he conceives cultural studies as "acts of discourse analysis as individuals attempt to understand the semiotic codes operating in their discursive situation... [through] a rhetoric that considers signifying practices in relation to the ideological formation of the self within a context of economics, politics, and power."

Underneath all the jargon, Berlin's general position provides another sensible model for critically studying the rhetoric of politics and mass culture. However, Berlin goes farther than Bleich and Trimbur toward student- centered writing instruction intended to foster the proliferation of polyvocal expression and modes of resistance to the dominant culture. Berlin approvingly cites Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom, edited by Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl: "'Me detection of cultural codes is essential, as is cultivation of the student's ability to resist texts. Students are 'to assert power, to own rules, and to shape a new content."' And paraphrasing Composition and Resistance, edited by C. Mark Hurlburt and Michael Blitz, Berlin agrees that "there is no question that the 'required' form of academic discourse discourages these [political/social/economic] freedoms, enforcing instead a conformity of thought and expression." However, "as language rewrites the subject and society, the subject can rewrite language in reshaping the self and social arrangements."

Here Berlin echoes Shildgen, who calls for us to put aside "the attitudes, convictions, and prejudices we as teachers of composition bring to the classroom ... about the conventions of diction, style, and form and about ideologies." She urges teachers to be "conscious of cultural affiliations, norms, and conventions that may differ from one person to another ... and that therefore might make either party [i.e., the teacher as well as the student] vulnerable to misunderstanding the text under discussion." Consequently, Shildgen asks, "How willing are we to question our own preconceptions about the efficacy of conventions?" And about literary works, "Are we willing to consider the potential differences in interpretative conclusions?"

Such passages in Shildgen, Berlin, and other authors in Into the Field mark the demarcation line for me between poststructuralist ideological and pedagogical positions that I as a leftist am generally sympathetic to and those that I find quite naive if not foolish. 'Me assumption of these authors seems always to be that the student constituency is a zesty multicultural mix, eager for prompts from leftish teachers to learn to express their incipient feelings of opposition and resistance to the dominant, conservative political and academic culture. Well, things look quite the opposite from the college where I teach, whose student body is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and Republican, following business or technological majors and fiercely resisting any exposure to liberal education and leftist ideas. The conservatism of my advanced composition and literature students-most of them from affluent families and graduates of "good" high schools albeit in California's abysmal public education system-usually is directly proportionate to their provincial ignorance of world and American history and current events and to their junior-high-school level of reading, writing, and reasoning skills. They would be delighted to be told that submitting papers with dozens of sixth-grade spelling and grammatical errors on each page is admirably "transgressive," or that their native culture of MTV, Nintendo, and drunken Greek parties is a rich alternative discourse to oppressive academic culture. As for their "differences in interpretative conclusions," are we teachers supposed to accommodate to the many students who insist that Rush Limbaugh is the greatest writer and thinker of our time and who reject any exposure of Limbaugh's erroneous data, logical fallacies, and sheer demagogy as simply an expression of leftist teachers' biased subject positionality? In short, when poststructuralist and anti- foundationalist philosophy, which essentially deal with abstract phenomenological speculation, are applied as they frequently have been, in vulgarized and dogmatic form to pedagogy at elementary levels, they can lead to a slippery slope toward tolerance of anti-intellectualism, narcissism, ethnocentrism, sheer ignorance and bigotry--expressed in jeering dismissals of any claim by teachers to a greater store than students have of factual knowledge, cognitive skills, or life experience. There is little acknowledgement by any of the authors in Into the Field except Dillon that academic discourse is not wholly oppressive but contains oppositional and liberatory elements apparent to anyone except trendy theorists who take their own acquisition of those elements for granted, or that most American college students today, including many relatively privileged ones, have not studied enough of Western logocentric culture either to be in the thrall of its regressive elements or to be able to discern its progressive ones. Learning foundations is prerequisite to informed and creative anti-foundationalism.

My position here coincides precisely with that advanced in The Powers of Literacy, a valuable addition to the Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, edited by David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr. This is a series of papers written by education school faculty members in Australia associated with various projects developing elementary and middle-school curricula for migrant and working-class students, and allied with theorists of systemic linguistics and functional grammar such as M.A.K. Halliday, James R. Martin, and Gunther Kress. The emphasis on lower levels of education and on grammatical theory somewhat limit the book's usefulness for teachers of advanced composition. Its theoretical position, however, is eminently useful, as it presents an incisive critique of American and British applications of poststructuralism, translating theoretical concepts into language that is blessedly free of jargon and of obeisance to Derrida, Foucault, and Althusser; the favored sources are Vygotsky, Bernstein, Freire, Aronowitz, and Giroux--who are scarcely mentioned in lnto the Field, most of whose contributors regard developmental psychology as a phallogocentric snare and delusion.

In their two introductory chapters, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis delineate their colleagues' disagreement, as cultural leftists, with theories such as those dominating Into the Field, which they designate "the progressivist pedagogy of postmodernism and difference" and whose celebration of polyphony they charge leaves the marginalized even more marginalized and the present structure of social power intact--in contrast to their own "genre approach," also described as "an explicit pedagogy for inclusion and access." In the process they stake out a middle position on long-running controversies over the open classroom and student-centered learning, process instruction, “natural" writing, oral vs. literate culture, Bernstein vs. Labov, and black English vs. standard English. In brief, they accept neither traditional curricula denigrating marginal cultures and language nor pseudo-radical alternatives denigrating the mainstream; they propose instead "a dialogue of dominant ways of knowing (the Western canon or logocentric science) and other marginal discourses such that both core and margins are transformed"-that is, students strive to master both core and marginal genres of discourse and the capacity to switch between them. Rejecting romantic postmodern pedagogy that celebrates difference to the point of shutting students off from access to mainstream culture and language, genre theorists argue that students need to master them, whether it be for the purpose of gaining power within them or of cracking their codes so as to resist them more effectively. Cope and Kalantzis note:

A curriculum which makes the discourse of social power and influence one of its authoritative knowledges need not erase diversity .... Students from marginal cultural and linguistic backgrounds also have potentially advantaging linguistic and cognitive resources: the ability to see things from two points of view; . . . a linguistic and cultural positioning that can be a cultural resource for learning those theoretical distancing modes of language and thought needed for successful (compliant or resistant) negotiation in or with dominant social discourses. (79)

Cope and Kalantzis further specify that theirs is a view that rejects the progressivist ideas of formally equalizing teacher and student; relativising school and domestic discourses in the name of relevance; and trying to make schooling "natural" and at one with the students' own life worlds. Authority does not reside in the person of the teacher but in a peculiarly schoolish task-to master certain, often distant and distancing, discourses of social access. The teacher is in a position of knowledge-a position of social authoritativeness. (79)

Intrinsic to the genre approach is that "grammar is something that should be taught for its own sake, beyond the utilitarian objective of assisting students to learn how to write. Teaching grammar, in other words, can embody some fundamental linguistic-cognitive objectives that the progressivists have abandoned." Thus the various contributors build on Vygotsky's concept of the grammatical complexity of written language--contrasted to the simpler syntax of speech--as essential to cognitive development, critical thinking, and social empowerment. Moreover, "Building on Halliday's systemic functional approach, a socially useful grammar needs to be functional rather than formal, with a semantic rather than a syntactic focus, and oriented to discourse rather than sentences and their particles."

Unfortunately, the promise held out in the introductory chapters is not wholly fulfilled in subsequent applications of the genre approach, which seems to consist mainly of a pedagogy for elementary education based on developing taxonomies of diverse sociolinguistic situations, speech acts, and modes of discourse, albeit in a developmentally staged progression of linguistic and grammatical complexity. Not being an authority on elementary education theory, I cannot judge the efficacy of these applications. I am bothered, however, by the absence of a focus on critical thinking, especially as applied to the rhetoric of politics and public discourse, of thekind that can be found in elementary curricular materials published by theCenter for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique at Sonoma State University. In this absence, I must conclude that the most practical pieces for college teaching in these two collections remain those by Dillon, Bleich, and Trimbur in Into the Field.