James Zebroski’s text places the reader at a crowded “intersection” of ideas involving and surrounding the theoretical work of L.S.Vygotsky, com­position theory and writing pedagogy. The book is a composite of sixteen essays which Zebroski wrote over the course of a decade; the texts flow from his extensive practice as a teacher of writing as well as his extensive reading in the work of Vygotsky and other social language theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman. Zebroski’s knowledge of Eastern European critical theory is impressive, and he uses it to advantage in the second half of this collection to both explicate Vygotskian theory and to recuperate Vygotsky’s unfinished work. Despite the fact that Vygotsky died quite young, he completed some of the most compelling theoretical work in child psychol­ogy of his time—theories which have animated the field of composition for the past twenty-five years. As this book makes clear, the attraction of Vygotskian theory for the field of composition deserves analysis, and in one of the final chapters of the book, “Vygotsky and Composition: Influences on an Emerging Field,” Zebroski uses Lotman’s theory of “dynamic semiotic systems” to explain the way in which Vygotskian theory has informed composition theory, and in turn has been appropriated and construed by the field.

Zebroski’s analysis is best at moments like these where he’s actually “thinking through” the theory. In an earlier chapter (Chapter Six), he provides a clear explanation of how “inner speech” mediates our relation­ship with the world in a way that is distinct from external discourse. He succinctly delineates the connections between Vygotskian and Bakhtinian theory. In a later chapter, Zebroski distinguishes Vygotsky’s work from that of Mikhail Bakhtin: two theorists whose work scholars of composition have continually compared and conflated. Zebroski argues that the value of their work is best understood by what distinguishes them. Rather than simply suggesting, as many have, that Bakhtin amplifies the social nature of internal­ized language, Zebroski explains how Vygotsky’s work anticipated Bakhtin’s description of the protean nature of language. Zebroski reconstitutes Vygotskian theory, representing it as a dynamic system, rather than a sum of its constituent and popularized parts.

Zebroski’s attraction to Vygotskian theory is clearest in Chapter Six, where he describes the theorist’s attempt

Having said that, I’d like to entertain the idea that criticism might just as well be reserved for the editor of the book, rather than the author, for a more critical editor might have guided this author toward consolidating the strongest ideas in the text in a shorter work, a work that might have been more meaningful for a narrower audience than the several the publishers (Heinemann Boynton/Cook) suggest in their 1995 catalogue:

I’m not saying that many of Zebroski’s ideas in the first half of this book for “composing context,” or for creating coursework will have trouble finding a receptive audience. In the first couple of chapters, teachers of writing, who are undoubtedly, as most are, too overworked to develop a curriculum guided by theory, can find a valuable primer to ethnographic writing and assignments. Rather than being in dialogue with or “thinking through theory,” as the author claims, this first section delineates Zebroski’s syllabi, the majority of which sequence writers through stages of the writing process toward a larger understanding of how writing composes "self." The goal here, according to the author, is to aid student efforts to “use writing to work through the questions of their lives, which, of course, are effects of political and social forces.” These concerns are developed in Zebroski’s own thinking through his advanced writing course, and reach a critical mass in Chapter Five, where Zebroski offers a candid description of problems he confronted in his graduate composition course. At the end of Chapter Eight, Zebroski deftly draws together pedagogy with theory in a way that illumi­nates how ethnographic approaches to writing enact the ideology behind Bakhtinian theory:

As mentioned earlier, Zebroski’s Chapter Thirteen is the most focused. In his analysis of Vygotsky’s overall meaning to the field of composition, Zebroski builds on Lotman’s textual theory to argue that it is the “alien” (translate: different and original) nature of Vygotsky’s work that accounts for its significance. Accordingly, Vygotsky’s work disturbed and transformed the field of composition. The strength of this chapter is that its analysis remains current. Some might well say that Zebroski tends to over-romanticize his subject. Without questioning the privileging of “difference” itself, we might ask how really “different” were Vygotsky’s ideas? A point which raises the question of Zebroski’s bias towards all things East European. Indeed, while the text furnishes an extensive historical record of social and developmental theory during the past sixty years, there is a conspicuous absence of the work of the American social theorist George Herbert Mead, a contemporary of Vygotsky’s whose theoretical concerns and conceptions of the role that language plays in processes of socialization overlap those of Vygotsky.

Zebroski’s privileging of Eastern European theory is consistent with his romantic vision of proletarian struggle. And, Zebroski doesn’t hide his nostalgia for “the old country”—he let’s us know that his parents and grandparents were working class Polish Americans, who knew but hardly spoke Polish. The final chapter goes as far as to repudiate theory, as it recounts—guess what?—a ride the author took with his father and grand­mother “back for one last trip to the tiny town deep in the middle of Pennsylvania from which she came” (329). One cannot help but ask why scholars of both literary and composition theory must disown their member­ship in their own scholarly communities. Where Richard Rodriquez exam­ines his own pain and separation from his parent’s culture, Zebroski goes further—not in claiming that his work as an intellectual has come at great sacrifice, but in symbolically sacrificing through disparaging his own enter­prise at the end of this book. Zebroski tells us at the end of Thinking Through Theory that while he “does do theory,” he doesn’t at this time see any reason to “do Theory.” He prefers to identify what he does as “broken theory.” This is particularly annoying, especially coming at the end of a three hundred and thirty four page book. His claim here connects him with his forebears who spoke “broken English,” andwho in doing so, according to Zebroski, resisted assimilation.

Because this book is really a collection of essays rather than a consolidat­ed work, there is a high degree of overlap. The result is that the reader must plow through a lot of exploration to get to places in the text that accumulate into meaningful analysis. This in itself is not necessarily damming. Jam sure there will be teachers of writing who will appreciate Zebroski’s enthusiasm for teaching and commentary. The text will be more problematic for those who are expecting the writer to formulate and engage the work of Vygotsky in new ways. Many of the issues that this text explores have been thought through in works by writers who predate this volume. In other words, the news here is not new. In many ways, I can imagine Zebroski’s writing anticipating James Wertsch’s Voices of the Mind (1991), had this work appeared five years ago. Indeed, one often feels that time itself is hindering the success of this text, as Zebroski continually introduces Vygotsky’s ideas to a field that is by now familiar with his work.

If one turns to the end of Chapter Thirteen, one reads Zebroski’s recommendations for how Vygotskian theory might influence the field of composition in the future; Zebroski suggests that an increasing interest in Vygotsky’s notions of self could provide “a means of doing ideology critique but ideology critique with a human face, that avoids the abstract, objectivist, and ultimately fatalistic language of most post-structuralism” (308). Despite this text’s inability to recognize and focus its strengths in a way that would make a contribution to the field, there is no doubt that Vygotskian theory has a future.