Imagine that you had a colleague in your English department whom everyone consults when planning a syllabus, puzzling over a lesson plan, or contemplating curricular change. Someone knowledgeable about the history of the profession, familiar with current debates on pedagogy, and theoretically well-informed. Someone who is open to colleagues with diverse viewpoints. Someone who understands the recurring problems that arise at all levels in the teaching of English and who realizes that errors in writing and reading do not cease to occur after being addressed in first-year courses. Someone who sees connections between disparate levels of teaching and among disparate subspecialties—rhetoric and composition, literary studies, and creative writing. Someone who can discuss personal failures and successes in the classroom and draw lessons from them that generalize to multiple situations.

Of course, he's not the department's resident theorist who separates the sheep from the goats with technical language and arrogant certainty about what is no longer thinkable. In fact, he takes an active interest in projects that may seem passé in some theoretical circles—New Criticism, the work of Roland Barthes, the theory of metaphor that had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. The remarkable ability characterizing this person is that he makes these investments pay off in lucid and practical remarks that he delivers with more modesty than his considerable theoretical power warrants. He actually advances the theoretical conversation on metaphor in the context of a pedagogical discussion, where he also shows the continuing relevance of some limitations in Brooks and Warren. His reading of Barthes is more nuanced than many offered by major theorists, a reading that, again, attends closely to pedagogical practices.

He is, in short, a genuinely original thinker, but he's not too proud to have dug through two-hundred years' worth of rhetoric textbooks to discover the derivative and limiting conception of metaphor they have routinely promulgated; nor is he too proud to have read his students' responses to a poem as carefully as he reads the poem itself. He's not so intoxicated by metaphor that he ignores or dismisses the literal; on the contrary, he attends to it even as he acknowledges the inescapably metaphorical basis of language.

This scholar is a colleague most of us would seek out for consultation and conversation. We would be grateful to have a record of those conversations that we could return to and reflect on; or, if we were not fortunate enough to have such a colleague, we would welcome a record of the thoughts of one such person from another department. This is why most of us will be grateful for James Seitz's Motives for Metaphor. This book presents itself as an intervention into our daily discussions of our professional work rather than as an intervention in published debates, though it draws the essence of those debates repeatedly into the orbit of its informed intelligence about our common practice. Motives is more like a generous colleague down the hall, a teacher's companion to literary and compositional instruction, than a contender in the critical/theoretical agon, even though it has what it would take to contend.

Seitz works to perform the idea of metaphor that informs his whole argument and to exclude the more familiar, agonistic figure in critical discourse: hyperbolic self-assertion. Metaphor, as he persuasively elaborates the figure, asserts identity and poses the problem of difference; it does not stand out by violating something in the normal order of things. Metaphor is more a figure of thought—perhaps the paradigmatic figure that poses the problem of identity in difference and difference in identity—than a trope that asserts what cannot properly be said. The assertion of a metaphor is an imaginative act that calls for a corresponding critical act: the insertion of a piton in the rock-face of possible meaning that requires us to test it before we trust our full weight to it. The habit of mind this insight engenders is one that is at once willing to explore any potential identity—even the too-easily-dismissed mixed and strained metaphors—and to observe the haphazardousness and willfulness of the posited identity that may put the tenor in danger of being overrun by the recklessly driven vehicle.

Some may cluck their tongues on the brink of the abyss of meaning that opens when the metaphorical basis of language becomes evident; others may vainly attempt to cover it over; still others may plunge headlong into the abyss. Yet, Seitz cultivates the reflective habit of testing the rift for footholds and probing it for ore:

Seitz reads his own metaphors and those of his mentors, Judith Summerfield and Geoffrey Summerfield, in light of this understanding. He puts their "metaphor of persona," and their pedagogy of guiding students to take on roles other than their own, through a rigorous examination of their possibilities and limits, pointing to the repertoire-expanding advantages of adopting fictional roles while acknowledging the inescapable power of identities, owned and inalienable. Metaphor, as Seitz understands it, is ultimately a figure that cultivates judicious criticism, not uncritical identification, and judicious criticism resists representation by a paraphrased thesis or fixed controversial stance, a sound bite or a school label.

It is not surprising, then, that Seitz deplores a writing pedagogy that encourages students to maintain "the solidity and immobility of one's stance." He memorably characterizes an "appealing argument" as one that appeals to others—to those who, despite their differences, can in some sense become the readers that the argument desires. . . . [T]o argue adeptly has much to do with creating a generous social space, one in which people holding any number of views find it possible to become engaged with a view unlike their own. From this perspective, inclusiveness, not "support," becomes the test of a well-written argument: writers who have intelligently thought about their positions are those who have imagined—and demonstrate that they have imagined—how people from other positions might respond.

This is one of those passages that tempts one to apply it to the text in which it appears and to the author of that text. As I read Seitz's book, I imagine myself entering a "generous social space" occupied by one who has intelligently thought about the process of argumentation. Choosing not to insist on a position but to invite collegial critical exchange, Seitz opens a space in which various English faculty can review the implications of their presuppositions for their thinking and teaching. In such a space, they are less likely to be provoked into defensive postures that cover over the weaknesses of their positions than they would be in more agonistic forums, such as the faculty meeting or the MLA session. They are more likely to leave edified and refreshed in their own thinking about their practices. They may even realize, as I have, how rare it is to think together about these practices and how precious is the opportunity afforded by a book that is finally more interested in engaging its readers than in impressing them.