JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

The essays in Left Margins attempt to connect the liberatory and political impulses of cultural studies to the day-to-day realities of teaching writing. This attempt results from the editors' view that "composition practitioners have in general avoided cultural studies' postdisciplinary insights into the discursive formation of composing subjects" (xiii). As a result, most of the essays present pragmatic strategies for teaching students to write critically about contemporary cultural artifacts and media and, thus, to develop awareness of their own ideological subjectivities.

The strength of this collection is undoubtedly its unabashed dedication to writing pedagogy: the editors' objective is "to enrich the body of theoretical work in composition studies by focusing on the actualization of theory in practice" (x; author's emphasis). Much like Patricia Sullivan and Donna Qualley's Pedagogy in the Age of Politics, this book offers itself as a pedagogical companion to more theoretical composition/cultural studies texts such as Patricia Harkin and John Schilb's Contending with Words and Hurlbert and Blitz's Composition and Resistance. Nevertheless, Left Margins does unfold into a somewhat productive theoretical discussion in the book's "Rereading, Rethinking, Responding" section, where outside respondents Gerald Graff, Gary Tate, and Richard Ohmann comment on the essays while the editors and essayists, in turn, respond to these comments.

The pedagogical strategies described in the majority of the essays take the form of innovative assignments devised by composition instructors who believe that to understand how cultural meaning works to situate individuals, students must be alerted to the historical and political dimensions of language and knowledge production. For example, in "Recovering `I Have a Dream,'" Keith Miller, Gerardo de los Santos, and Ondra Witherspoon describe how they introduce students to the normalizing effects of anthologies, interrogating the very sites from which students usually learn. The authors discuss how they work with students to show how anthologists, by typographically and textually altering Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, suppress its rhetorical and collaborative nature and reproduce it as "something strongly resembling a self-contained, Western literary essay" (84). This kind of "inside" critique of educational apparatus illustrates well the reflexive stance taken by many of these teacher-researchers: that being critical about culture, including education, is in part being critical of how and why cultural artifacts and texts reproduce dominant ideology. Other essays, such as a reprint of Henry Giroux's "Who Writes in a Cultural Studies Class? or, Where is the Pedagogy?" describe successes and frustrations with Freirean-styled, student-centered classrooms where students help to select reading material and devise course syllabi and assignments.

However, in "The Dilemma of Oppositional Pedagogy: A Response," Graff worries that giving students leftist strategies to interrogate dominant culture serves only to indoctrinate them into the radical pedagogue's personal politics. Kathleen Dixon and others respond to Graff's centrist position by stating that students have already been indoctrinated by the largely conservative ideologies of dominant culture and that simply presenting the interrelatedness of varying social views and political positions, as Graff and Donald Lazere advocate, does not go far enough in helping students develop skills for refiguring the public sphere. Ohmann comments that many of the contributors imply that there is something wrong with students, elaborating that "what's wrong with them is culture, culture in them, culture as it speaks them" (328). Many of the contributors agree that shaking up students' "natural" world is necessary in beginning to get them to see how they are already situated and identified by language.

As might be expected in a pedagogically oriented collection, many of the essays give student writing a good bit of space, which in turn allows for a reading of instructors' presentation of materials. In "Making and Taking Apart `Culture' in the (Writing) Classroom," Dixon describes how she denaturalizes, among other things, binary thinking. One student's written response to class discussion suggests his anger at male rap music being represented as sexist; Dixon notes his anger but seems to neglect the generative tension between how the student feels about the musical group and his need to respond critically, missing an opportunity to consider the kinds of issues concerning affiliation and identification that rhetorical cultural analyses raise. In light of critiques that point out how these certain cultural products may be sexist, racist, classist, how might students negotiate the pleasure they derive from consuming these products? What kinds of statements and affiliations would they make by either continuing or refusing to consume them? What kinds of ethical responsibility do such negotiations imply? As Ohmann points out in the afterword, it is one thing to make students aware of how oppressive social structures operate, but it is quite another to allow them to explore how they might live with these realizations outside of the classroom.

The point I'm getting at here is that students' responses to popular cultural texts (and our own) are, as Joseph Harris says elsewhere, "often at once both pleased and skeptical, amused and doubting, open and resisting" ("The Other Reader," JAC, 1992, p. 28). As Harris observes, one pitfall of analyzing popular cultural texts is that students--often following their instructor's lead—set themselves up as critics standing outside the effects of the culture they live in and largely identify themselves with. According to Harris, to connect cultural studies and composition, we "need to set up classrooms where students can talk about their responses to popular texts as mixed rather than simple," where "they can write of the pleasures as well as the problems they find in popular texts" (35).

Another issue that a number of essays in Left Margins fail to consider is what effects these kinds of cultural analyses will have on students' writing. Tate points out that the essays in the book focus more on the rhetorical analysis of cultural texts than on actual writing. Although Tate's concern seems to be based on an outmoded notion of the separation of thought and language, he does bring the essayists back to talking about writing in their responses, where most claim that even while they engage students in cultural analysis, they are still concerned with issues of voice, clarity, organization, mechanics, and so forth.

What is at issue here, though, is not so much whether the radical instructor is teaching the basics of writing—that's part of the job. What is at issue is the kind of writing that gets done in composition courses organized around the rhetorical analysis of culture. We might ask what effects this type of writing attempts to achieve, or even what we mean when we say "this type of writing." As the editors point out in the "post/face," the intersection of the transdisciplinary fields of cultural studies and composition is "radically altering what is meant by reading and writing" (322). If this is so (and I believe it is), the essays in Left Margins do not explain how these shifts might manifest themselves in students' writing. If feminism and postmodernism, for example, legitimate "alternative" forms of writing, then what hybrid possibilities for writing does the transdisciplinary field of cultural studies offer? And how will these possibilities be conveyed to students? Should they? Would such writing be at odds with expectations of dominant culture? In response to Tate, Dixon discusses possibilities of agency, commitment, and responsibility, but what is the connection between this kind of stance and the restrictions of, say, genre? Certainly, new ways of thinking about culture and our relation to it necessitate new and different ways of writing. But how would this benefit and/or limit the ability of students to express themselves and analyze culture? If students are to examine their relationships to culture, then we should concurrently theorize how their writing negotiates these relationships. What is at stake is nothing less than what comes to be considered "effective," "poor," "oppositional," or "good" writing. But the essays in Left Margins offer little discussion on these issues.

Because Left Margins presents solid pedagogical methods that reflect shifts in critical and educational theories of the last few decades, it will be a helpful resource. But "how to" manuals only get us so far, and the essays in Left Margins offer no new ways to think about the connection between existing social problems and the composition classroom. To be fair, the book does not seek to advance current theoretical conversations concerning the connection between cultural studies and composition, and so what it has to offer those who are already theorizing and incorporating such methods is limited.