JAC Volume 19 Issue 4

In a 1998 JAC interview with Stuart Hall, Julie Drew refers to having heard the "first faint rumblings of what may prove to be a significant backlash against cultural studies . . . in rhetoric and composition." Charles Paine's The Resistant Writer adds a certain level of noise to this rumbling, while, at the same time, demonstrating the continued importance of cultural studies to the field of composition studies. Paine writes a compelling cultural history, and he uses that history as a form of critique that demonstrates the limitations of what he refers to as "composition and cultural studies." By examining the theories of nineteenth-century composition teachers within the context of the rise of print journalism and cultural anxieties over its supposed deleterious effects, Paine's study joins a growing number of recent cultural histories--including Miriam Brody's Manly Writing, Kathryn Flannery's The Emperor's New Clothes, and Thomas P. Miller's The Formation of College English--that explicitly set out to tell a different, a more richly textured and nuanced history of writing instruction.

Paine's central argument is that contemporary teachers and scholars of composition--particularly those who advocate a cultural studies approach--have inherited from the nineteenth century a view of rhetorical training as a means of providing students with immunity to the influence of popular culture. Paine draws on array of historical data, in addition to anthropological and social psychological studies, to expose and critically examine the figurative "inoculation" that, he maintains, composition teachers continue to set as their goal. In an introductory chapter, "On the Idea of Discourse Immunity, or the Public Health of Rhetorical Instruction," he argues that contemporary teachers of composition have inherited a tendency to deal less with the production of rhetoric and more with the healthy reception of rhetoric. Instead of learning how to intervene in arguments, students learn to distance themselves critically from "bad" influences. Thus, contemporary composition pedagogies--particularly, argues Paine, those pedagogies identified with cultural studies--operate according to a nineteenth-century understanding of what counts as a healthy self, an understanding out of sync with postmodern theories of immunity. According to Paine, the idea that controlled exposure to "dangerous" rhetoric can inoculate a student against the future influence of that rhetoric is in keeping with what medical anthropologist Emily Martin calls the "modernist model of immunity." This model posits a "clean division between self and nonself" so that "the outside must not get inside, and when it does, the outside must be exterminated."

Paine objects to this modernist model, not so much because he considers it outmoded, but because he finds it ineffective. He cites a study in which a group of researchers, led by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, met with a group of experimental subjects to help them uncover the logical errors in political attack ads. The researchers found that, rather than becoming immune to these ads, "persons 'exposed' to the attack ads were more likely to favor the candidate who launched the attack ad than were persons with no exposure." This study suggests to Paine that composition teachers need a model of pedagogy and of "healthful" argumentation that does more than simply expose students to "bad" rhetoric. He therefore offers Martin's postmodern model of "flexibility," in which "the immune system is capable of adapting to and responding 'intelligently' to the changes in what counts as self and nonself," as a better model for contemporary composition teachers.

Before presenting a detailed account of what a "flexible" model of rhetorical training might look like, Paine must first persuade contemporary teachers of composition that they have, in fact, inherited an ineffective model of rhetorical immunity. Paine wants contemporary pedagogical theorists to recognize something of themselves in their nineteenth-century forebears, who worried over the negative influence of the media; he thus devotes most of his book to a cultural history centering upon two of these figures. In the historical section's opening chapter, entitled "The Uses of Composition History," Paine offers a valuable critique of the tendency in composition scholarship to figure nineteenth-century teachers of composition as either heroes or villains and to reject, out of hand, most nineteenth-century rhetorical theory as "current-traditional." He explains that he hopes to show that Edward T. Channing and A. S. Hill, two traditional villains, were "complex figures," and that "understanding that complexity is rewarding."

Paine believes, in particular, that a more complex picture of Channing and Hill will allow his readers to recognize that "we may perhaps have more in common with this nineteenth-century side of our heritage than we have previously been willing to recognize." By examining their approaches to teaching within a cultural context, Paine sets out to demonstrate "why these nineteenth-century theories seemed to make sense for them" and thus place contemporary teachers of composition in a better position "to critique our beliefs." In seeking to understand how a theory makes sense within its cultural context, Paine places his study firmly within what have been the traditional concerns of cultural studies. As Stuart Hall puts it in his JAC interview with Drew, cultural studies scholarship has always insisted that "no practice is ultimately understandable outside of the context of its meaning."

It is an interesting twist, then, that what Paine would have contemporary cultural critics understand about Channing and Hill is that they, too, regarded themselves as cultural critics.

More specifically, Paine argues that Channing in the first half of the nineteenth century and Hill in the latter half were reacting to the rise of mass-distributed newspapers and that this (largely negative) reaction formed their approaches to the teaching of composition. Paine draws constant comparisons between their pedagogical goals and contemporary goals. For example, he describes Channing as both a champion and a sceptic of public forms of writing: Channing thought writing superior to oratory because it allowed time for thinking and reflection, but he also believed that much popular writing "inhibited the capacity for critical reflection." Like contemporary teachers of composition, says Paine, Channing was concerned with students' "developing the kind of 'critical consciousness' needed in a democracy." And although Paine admits that Channing's idea of immunity "differs significantly" from the modern concept of resistance, he nonetheless argues that "the crucial component for both modern pedagogical theorists and Channing is critical distance: improved 'habits of thinking'--'critical thinking'--enable students and citizens alike to lessen the impact of the dominant culture upon their consciousness."

Like Channing, Hill formed his pedagogy, Paine argues, in reaction to the emergence of print culture. Paine's two chapters on Hill, who is generally credited with creating the first-year course in required writing at Harvard, are a major contribution to composition scholarship. Never before have I read such a detailed account of the life and career of this central and much maligned figure in composition's history. Paine describes Hill's early work as a newspaper writer and his subsequent disenchantment with the so-called objectivity that was being demanded of news writers. He also debunks the common representation of Hill's pedagogy--namely, its focus on mechanical correctness. Hill, Paine demonstrates, was primarily concerned with getting students to write "naturally." To this end, he encouraged students to pursue a writing style that would reflect their true selves rather than merely repeat the style of newspapers, which, as Hill puts it, "smack of the mill, the writer sinking his individuality in that of the journal to which he contributes." As Paine points out, "Hill sounds more like a Ken Macrorie or Peter Elbow" than like a formalistic task-master. Nevertheless, the parallel Paine wishes to draw is not between "expressionism" and Hill, but between cultural studies composition and Hill. Because Hill blames popular discourse, particularly the newspapers, for robbing people of their critical, individual voices, Paine sees him as a forebear of composition teachers who wish students to develop a critical perspective on their culture.

This somewhat strained connection that Paine draws between Hill and cultural-studies-based composition points to limitations in Paine's historiography. Although Paine's historical chapters are illuminating, they also leave a great deal unsaid in their singular focus on the limitations of a pedagogy based on cultural critique. Paine has definite reasons for narrowing his focus: he maintains that past writers (like James Berlin) have attempted too much in trying to explain all of composition's history as a function of a nebulously described "ideology." He sets out to avoid the problem of taking on too much by focusing on "more localized narratives." While composition scholarship would certainly benefit from such narratives, it seems essential to enrich these narratives with complex understandings of cultural contexts. By focusing almost exclusively on the relationship that Channing and Hill had to journalism, Paine avoids more complicated questions of how the development of "critical consciousness" served to construct individualized writing subjects with particular gendered and racialized identities. This avoidance leads to some oddly anachronistic pronoun use: at one point, for example, Paine describes Channing's pedagogical concern with allowing "the student/citizen to discern her 'original mind,' that is, to separate her own self from the biases of others' ideas." Given that Harvard was open only to men, and that men alone generally participated in civic debate, it seems unlikely that Channing could possibly have intended his pedagogy to help any woman to "discern her 'original mind.'"

While the use of the feminine pronoun may well have been an editorial decision outside of Paine's control, it seems symptomatic of the absence of any real consideration of the identity of those immune selves whom Channing and Hill set out to cultivate and whom, Paine argues, contemporary teachers of cultural studies and composition continue to work to produce. The very idea of a "healthy" self, which is the central metaphor Paine investigates, was a racialized concept, as both Susan Miller (in Textual Carnivals) and Kathryn Flannery (in The Emperor's New Clothes) have shown. And although Paine does allude briefly to the ideal of manliness in nineteenth-century culture, he avoids making a consideration of gender a central part of his argument. While it is certainly true that no single author can do everything, and while it is also true that Paine has done an admirable job of providing new insights into the cultural meanings of nineteenth-century composition instruction, it seems equally true that a study of selfhood that avoids questions of social positioning is seriously limited.

Because of these limitations, Paine's proposed solution to the current crisis of cultural- studies-based pedagogies fails to persuade me. The book's last two chapters consist of a direct critique of contemporary pedagogies and a description of a pedagogy based on the idea of "flexibility" rather than immunity. Paine argues that if composition teachers hope to prompt students "to grow as participants in important argumentation," then they need to do more than simply expose students to arguments; they need "to bring . . . students into the argument." To do this, teachers need to allow for "fragmentary student texts or texts that wonder out loud." This sort of exploratory writing will contribute to the development not of an isolated, autonomous self, but a flexible self "who is willing to take the risk of foraying into unknown, alien discourses, willing to recognize that the outside always gets inside, and that there is no permanently good distinction between self and nonself." Certainly, bringing students into arguments and encouraging them to take risks are important pedagogical goals. My concern, however, is that this postmodern "flexible" self may continue to replicate the modern inoculated self insofar as both selves are unmarked. Is it possible for a pedagogy that does not take into account the subject positions of its participants (of both the student and the teacher) to avoid replicating dominant understandings of the good self--that is, of the white, masculine, heterosexual self?

Although Paine leaves this question unanswered, his book makes an important contribution to composition scholarship. By demonstrating how different a narrative might look when it is broadened to include social history, Paine offers a useful model for a much-needed change in the trajectory of composition historiography.