Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility

EMANCIPATORY MOVEMENTS IN COMPOSITION

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EMANCIPATORY MOVEMENTS IN COMPOSITION The Rhetoric of Possibility

Andrea Greenbaum

STATE UNIVERSITY

OF

NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Christine L. Hamel Marketing by Jennifer Giovani Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenbaum, Andrea. Emancipatory movements in composition : the rhetoric of possibility / by Andrea Greenbaum. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5437-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5438-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Composition and exercises—Study and teaching. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 3. Interdisciplinary approach in education. 4. Report writing—Study and teaching. I. Title. PE1404 .G693 2002 808'.042'071—dc21 2001057550

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In memory of my mother, Elizabeth Greenbaum, who taught me to love books

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Preface

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1. Dissoi Logoi: Neosophistic Rhetoric and the Possibility of Critical Pedagogy

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2. Cultural Studies and Composition: Ethnographic Research as Cultural Critique

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3. “Bitch” Pedagogy: Agonistic Discourse and the Politics of Resistance

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4. “Wat’cha Think? I Can’t Spell?”: Postcolonial Studies and the Narratives of Literacy

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5. Emancipatory Politics and Composition: The Pedagogy of Liberatory Writing Instruction

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Appendix Syllabus for Expository Writing: ENC 3310—Explorations in Class, Race, and Gender

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Contents

Notes

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Works Cited

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A special thanks to Priscilla Ross, a wonderful editor, who continues to enrich the field of rhetoric and composition. My colleagues and friends at the University of South Florida: Joseph M. Moxley, Elizabeth Metzger, Jack B. Moore, Lynn Worsham, Steve Rubin, and especially Gary A. Olson, who graciously read, edited, and offered guidance throughout the composition of this manuscript. My gratitude to Joe Marshall Hardin, a kind colleague over the years and editor of Composition Forum, who granted permission to cite material from my essay, “‘Wat’cha Think? I Can’t Spell?’ Constructing Literacy in the Postcolonial Classroom.” Thanks also to State University of New York Press for allowing me to reprint my essay, “Bitch Pedagogy: Agonistic Discourse and the Politics of Resistance,” which appeared in my edited collection, Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies (2001). I am also deeply appreciative to Jennifer Hord, Christine Hamel, and Jennifer Giovani. I am indebted to Abe and Evelyn Cohen, who provided ample babysitting in order for me to complete this project; to Karen Maslow, friend and critic extraordinaire; to Cheri Magnus, Jacki Krone, and Heidi Yudelowitz for their continued support; and to my family, Neil, Ari, and Yarden, who sustain me.

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P R E FA C E

Once we were slaves

wnyyh µydb[

Now we are free

˜yrwj ynb ht[

—“Avadim Hayenu,” A Passover Song

For two nights during the Hebrew month of Nisan, Jews celebrate the holiday of Passover by conducting a Seder. This ritualized ceremony is organized by a Haggadah, the text used to narrate the story of Exodus. Since childhood, Passover has remained my favorite holiday—which should not be surprising, since this holiday is strongly pedagogical, rhetorically designed to have its participants engage in dialogical discussions about ethics, history, culture, and theology. Even as an adult, I am drawn to the rich narrative—the dramatic reenactment of slavery, the gripping tale of a close escape, the celebration of long-awaited freedom— demonstrated through two nights of ritualized eating, storytelling, and song. I am also captivated by Passover’s metaphoric quality, Passover as the synecdoche for freedom, a yearly tale about the possibilities of resistance, a narrative of emancipation. The Passover narrative suggests that human beings need to experience oppression—even if it is only relived mythically—in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals. Further, such storytelling aids us in recognizing that

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oppression is protean, taking shape in myriad forms, but most commonly recognizable as poverty and illiteracy. For those of us who teach writing, identification with the oppressed, the powerless, has become a pervasive concern, and such empathy has taken on its own narrative quality within the disciplinary boundaries of rhetoric and composition. While there are numerous conversations—scholarly critiques and public debates—about the continually evolving discipline of rhetoric and writing instruction, it seems to me that recent conversations in the field regarding the inclusion of emancipatory politics and pedagogy have coalesced around four key areas: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. These categories are by no means exclusive, and composition has come to embrace multitudinous perspectives, ranging from queer and film studies, to eco-composition, business, and technology. I am suggesting that it is, in fact, these subject areas that have, for the past ten years, dominated and influenced both the theoretical and pedagogical perspectives of rhetoric and composition. The purpose of Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility is to explore these four approaches by examining each of them as influenced by independent disciplines possessing unique theoretical and pedagogical objectives, and to consider the historical infusion of these disciplines into rhetoric and composition. Simply, this book has three objectives. The first is to critique the interdisciplinary roots of rhetoric and composition (which absorbs and reconfigures these other disciplines within the environment of the composition classroom), and to study how these disciplines are shaded by the umbrella of critical pedagogy. Second, this investigation explores the emancipatory objectives of these four other disciplines and their influence in shifting the current of rhetoric and composition theory and pedagogy. Third, this project analyzes the research on and pedagogical ethics of including emancipatory politics in the classroom, particularly as manifested, most recently, through service-learning and ethnographic research. Chapter One, “Dissoi Logoi: Neosophistic Rhetoric and the Possibility of Critical Pedagogy,” addresses how, in the past ten years, rhetoric and composition has devised pedagogical and the-

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oretical models based on reconfiguring sophistic rhetoric. Scholars such as Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, Jasper Neel, and Sharon Crowley have argued that sophistic rhetoric may be a useful pedagogical tool for helping students understand the nature of argumentation and the indeterminacy of language. This neosophistic rhetoric, many suggest, may offer contemporary compositionists a more fluid and malleable way to teach writing. Sophistic rhetoric takes into account notions of dissoi logoi, contradictory positions, and the use of mythos, or narration, as formidable rhetorical strategies. Furthermore, the pedagogical revival of sophistic rhetoric appears to be a useful paradigm shift for theorizing the emancipatory objectives of cultural critique. Feminist composition scholars (Susan Jarratt and Dale Bauer) contend that sophistic rhetoric augments feminist rhetorical strategies, since the sophists had a keen understanding that in order for persuasion to be effective, the rhetor needs to consider historical position and antilogike, an emphasis on contradictory positions. Chapter Two, “Cultural Studies and Composition: Ethnographic Research as Cultural Critique,” provides an historical overview of the field of cultural studies as it emerged in Britain during the 1950s and examines how the initial ethnographic studies which emerged from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies converged around notions of class (Paul Willis), media (David Morley), and gender (Angela McRobbie)— the thematic sine qua non in composition research. Cultural studies remains, for many compositionists and educators (Joseph Harris, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, and the late James Berlin), an intriguing and applicable discipline, primarily because it addresses several confluent concerns—specifically, constitutions of “literacy”—who has it, who wants it, and who controls it— around issues of class. Additionally, contemporary scholarship in composition and cultural studies, particularly the work produced by Ellen Cushman, Bruce Herzberg, Eli Goldblatt, Linda Adler-Kassner, Robert Crooks, Ann Waters, and many others, attempts to address the inherent problematics of cultural literacy. This chapter explores the research possibilities that cultural ethnographic study offers for both composition scholars and students, particularly when

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such research is supported by the scaffold of feminist ethics and research practices. Such reconfiguration of ethnographic research includes a set of practices that incorporates and relies on dialogic interaction rather than monologic dominance, with the researcher working with the community as partners enjoined in the task of creating new knowledge. By engaging in ethnographic research as a means toward broadening both students’ and scholars’ understanding of the politics of literacy, these scholars have successfully merged composition theory into community practice. Chapter Three, “‘Bitch’ Pedagogy: Agonistic Discourse and the Politics of Authority,” considers issues related to feminist critique and the ethics of feminist authority in the writing class. The primary focus of this chapter is the application of agonistic discourse—a conglomeration of various pedagogical strategies based on the premise of rhetoric-as-advocacy. Scholars like Susan Jarratt, Alan France, and Karen Fitts have long argued that wellintentioned, nonconfrontational classrooms often leave students ill-prepared for the necessary intellectual work required for full engagement as citizens in a democracy. More significantly, this chapter reviews argumentation scholarship from our sister field of speech communication, which unequivocally indicates that teaching and modeling argumentative behavior enhances students’ critical thinking skills, helps them to gain confidence and self-esteem, and is professionally beneficial. Those who are able to advocate positions are more likely to be perceived as more capable, and therefore more agile in social, political, and personal environments. Chapter Four, “‘Wat’cha Think? I Can’t Spell?’: Postcolonial Studies and the Narratives of Literacy,” addresses language and literacy as it emerged in a racially heated classroom environment. The chapter considers the manifestation of white privilege in the classroom, and how postcolonial scholarship (along with studies in ethnic rhetoric) is applicable in tracing and critiquing how language and literacy are construed by both teachers and students. Finally, Chapter Five, “Emancipatory Politics and Composition: The Pedagogy of Liberatory Writing Instruction,” discusses the ethics of engaging in emancipatory politics in the composition classroom. The chapter suggests that the emancipatory ideals of Freire, expressed through the combined disciplines of

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cultural studies, neosophistic rhetoric, feminism, and postcolonial studies may be pedagogically applicable by having students conduct ethnographic research, particularly within their local communities. I suggest that service-learning may offer students an opportunity to enlarge their understanding of various cultures within their communities, enabling them to recognize the broad spectrum of literacy expressed by these communities, and allowing students to take responsibility for conducting primary research, creating new knowledge based on empirical research methods. However, service-learning provides its own ethical conundrum, with critics like Bruce Horner arguing that servicelearning, rather than enhancing its emancipatory potential, in fact may reinforce the creeping administrative corporatization of the academy by viewing academic writing and knowledge as yet another commodity, and “mistake the official purposes assigned to academic knowledge and academic discursive and institutional forms for the full range of uses to which these can and have been put” (169). The objective of Emancipatory Movements in Composition is to demonstrate the varied and wide-ranging influences of emancipatory politics on the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of rhetoric and composition. Moreover, I would like to suggest that the four disciplines explored in this book—neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies—are threaded by the recurrent, optimistic leanings of “the rhetoric of possibility”; it is that sense of hopefulness that fully blends these disciplinary boundaries together. The theme of emancipation, as articulated in this text, proposes, in no uncertain terms, that we, as citizens, scholars, and teachers, have an ethical imperative, a social responsibility and obligation to engage in actions that work toward transforming inequity and oppression. For instance, Ira Shor refers to this social optimism as “Utopian” thinking, defined as “The hopeful challenging the actual in the name of the possible” (When 3). Similarly, rhetoric scholar John Poulakos echoes Shor by suggesting, “Rhetoric strives to create and labors to put forth, to propose that which is not” (“Toward” 43). And it is Henry Giroux’s narrative of a “pedagogy of hope” which sustains and nurtures the intellectual life of this study. Giroux maintains that critical pedagogy

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needs to explore a language of possibility that is capable of risky thinking, and engages in a project of hope (Pedagogy). The convergence of this “rhetoric of possibility” put forth by these scholars, suggests a notable intellectual merging, dual marriages between theology and rhetoric, ethics, and pedagogy—in sum, a more holistic approach to rhetoric, a sophistic approach to rhetoric. My hope is that this text contributes to the discussion of how better to teach writing, reading, critical thinking, and civic responsibility. Despite the a.m. radio perception that colleges and universities are mobilizing students to become liberal warriors, most students emerge from their academic experience benignly complacent, content to find that elusive but much touted “good job” that their liberal education is now suppose to provide. Very few civic leaders credit their colleges or universities with providing adequate leadership training in public discourse and argumentation; most civic leaders attribute their engagement in leadership roles to modeling the leadership they’ve seen expressed in the civil rights and women’s movement.1 Given the de-radicalization of American politics, students no longer have movement leaders to emulate, and so, as academics, as teachers of rhetoric, we need to ask: If not us, then who will provide the necessary, critical leadership training to university students? The sophists understood that the radical nature of education was to enable citizens to engage in public discourse—to defend or advocate positions. The objectives of emancipatory pedagogy suggest that those of us who are fortunate to be trained in the rhetorical tradition (including teachers of Speech Communication) have an ethical obligation to teach students the craft of public advocacy. By exposing our students to the narratives of literacy, alternate literacy practices of communities—either through class readings, or better yet, as many suggest, through firsthand service-learning encounters—we encourage them to consider the enormous power that language has in shaping the ideologies that structure our culture, and perhaps help them recognize that with the “possibility” of academic literacy comes an obligation to speak and write for those who are not yet trained to do so.

CHAPTER ONE

Dissoi Logoi: Neosophistic Rhetoric and the Possibility of Critical Pedagogy

Some say that the good is one thing and the bad the other, but others say that they are the same, and that a thing might be good for some persons but bad for others, or at one time good and at another time bad for the same person. —Sprague (279)1

The title of this chapter is taken directly from an anonymous sophistic treatise called Dissoi Logoi, or Dialexeis, and is traced back to the subsequent end of the Peloponnesian War (Sprague 279). I use this treatise as a convenient means to segue into my discussion of the infusion of sophistic rhetorical practices and theory into rhetoric and composition. The anonymous author of this treatise articulates the notion of contradiction as an inevitable consequence of discourse, and such notions of inherent contradictions have become standard rhetoric, the accepted a priori assumptions of postmodern discourses—an understanding that

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truth and knowledge are contingent upon circumstance and language. “Truth,” Richard Rorty writes, “cannot be out there— cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not”(5). This chapter will explore how the convergence of sophistic rhetoric with contemporary composition theory helps us to envision an alternate discourse model, based on notions of logos, antilogike, mythos, and ethos. Let me begin with a disclaimer about my employment of sophistic rhetoric as a springboard for discussion about cultural studies, feminism, postcolonial studies, and composition: as Edward Schiappa has pointed out, scholars do not know exactly who the sophists were nor what unified their particular rhetoric as specifically “sophistic” (“Sophistic” 5). However, it may be useful to look at sophistic rhetoric (in its varied manifestations) as a point of departure from the hegemony of classical rhetoric— with its emphasis on taxonomies and categories. Susan Jarratt has repeatedly made this argument, suggesting that the sophists’ teaching and politics was based on “a materialist anthropology completely antithetical to metaphysics and the hierarchical epistemological structures it engenders, as well as to oligarchic political theory” embodied in Aristotelian and Platonic rhetoric (“First” 28). Moreover, scholars like John Poulakos argue that our picture of rhetoric has been rendered incomplete since, “For over two millennia we have treated the sophistic position as an obscure but interesting footnote” (“Toward” 35). Further, by reconstituting Greek history through the use of the sophists we engage in what Schiappa has referred to as a sort of “useful fiction” (“Sophistic” 10). Such creative imaginings allow contemporary scholars to critique certain notions of disciplinarity, since the discursive nature of sophistic discourse makes it a creative theoretical tool in which to redefine and explore the epistemological boundaries of disciplinary structures (12). It is from this tenuous perch of historical uncertainty that I will tightrope across the discussion of sophistic rhetoric. As Eric Havelock has noted, “Much of the story of early Greek philosophy so-called is a story not of systems of thought but of a search for a primary language in which any system could be expressed” (8). I will demonstrate how the narratives of sophistic rhetorical

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strategies may indeed prove useful in contributing to the teaching of both cultural studies and feminist pedagogy as it is manifested in the writing classroom. DEFINING THE SOPHISTS

The term “sophist” comes from two Greek words—sophos and sophia, translated as “wise” and “wisdom,” respectively. The term had honorific connotative meanings, and expressed not only an ineluctable intellectual or spiritual quality, but also skill at a particular craft. However, it also acquired more pejorative connotations, with the implication that one who is sophos may be “too clever and may overreach himself” (Guthrie 28). While the term itself is not difficult to trace, the attempt to define the characteristics of sophistry is a far more arduous task. While there were those who referred to themselves as “sophists,” and others who were labeled as such, the title was ascribed rather inconsistently by various writers, and therefore there is not a singular identifying characteristic of the “sophists” from which we can claim a common perspective or set of pedagogical practices (Schiappa, “Sophistic” 8). Jarratt notes that sophistic rhetoric collided with various “disciplines,” such as the Natural sciences (Protagoras B1–2; Gorgias, On the Nonexistent B1–5; Prodicus B3–4; Antiphon B66C), social and political theory (Protagoras CI; Thrasymachus B6a; Antiphon B129–151), aesthetic responses and psychology (Protagoras BI; Gorgias, Encomium of Helen BII; Antiphon B123), law (Protagoras B6; Gorgias BIIa; Antiphon BI-66), religion and ethics (Protagoras A23, B4; Gorgias A28), as well as language theory and pedagogy (Protagoras A 5, 21, 26; Gorgias B14). (Rereading 13)

Despite the enormous range of what is considered sophistic rhetoric and Schiappa’s resistance to such categorization, the canon of those philosophers considered sophists include Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Antiphon, Thrasymachus, Critias, Antisthenes, Alcidamas, Lycophron, and several anonymous texts, including the aforementioned Dissoi Logoi. However, for the scope and purpose of this chapter, I will primarily use the works related to the best-known sophists, Protagoras and Gorgias.

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Over the years, several scholars—particularly those in the field of rhetoric and composition, such as Susan Jarratt, Sharon Crowley, Thomas Kent, Victor Vitanza, and Jasper Neel (among others)—have devised a neosophistic rhetorical criticism, a call for a return to sophistic rhetoric as a useful means of reinventing rhetoric in the ways in which it can be used to help mediate—indeed reinvigorate—composition theory and pedagogy. I can only assume that the resurgence of interest in sophistic rhetoric is, in part, due to the philosophical appeal of its near-poststructural, antifoundational soul. As Jacqueline De Romilly, in her foundational text, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, points out, “The sophists were the first to consider the relativity of knowledge as a fundamental principle, and to open up the way not only for free-thinking but also for absolute doubt regarding all metaphysical, religious, and moral matters” (238). This concept of positionality and relativity is continually threaded through the theoretical and pedagogical fabric of composition and rhetoric. Furthermore, it is from scholars like Jarratt, with her extensive oeuvre on the intersections of feminism and classical rhetoric, that I draw a great deal of my theoretical research—particularly, her contention that the goal of a rhetorical historiography would not be to renounce the strictures of classical rhetoric, but instead to recognize the broadened perspective sophistic rhetoric offers. She suggests, “This historiographical goal fits with a view of writing instruction that seeks to complicate categories of fact and fiction and with feminists’ challenges to a strict separation between personal experience and abstract reason” (Rereading 29). However, before we can assess whether or not these “sophistic” rhetorical strategies are efficacious in teaching or theorizing about writing practices, we must first attempt to grasp what constitutes sophistic rhetoric and use those qualifying definitions as a means toward understanding how such rhetorical strategies may be beneficial in teaching students how to read and write texts. Our general understanding of the sophists comes from what others have said about them. Plato describes them in several dialogues, and the characteristics he attributes to the sophist are far from flattering. In Protagoras, he claims:

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Is not a Sophist, Hippocrates, a person who deals wholesale or retail in such wares as provide food for the soul? . . . Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like dealers, wholesale or retail, who sell the food of the body, for they praise indiscriminately all their goods without knowing what is really beneficial or hurtful for the body. Neither do their customers know. . . . In like manner those who carry about the wares of knowledge and make the round of the cities and offer or retail them to any customer who wants them, praise them all alike, though I should not be surprised, my dear fellow, if some of them, too, did not know which of their goods have a good and which a bad effect upon the soul. . . . If you know which of his wares are good and which are evil, you may safely buy knowledge of Protagoras or of anyone; but if not, then, my friend, watch out. . . . (10)

I have quoted this rather extensive passage to illustrate how badly the sophists were regarded. Not only is the sophist a mercenary, but he is also likened to a shopkeeper who knowingly hawks bad produce. Additionally, he is a corrupter of knowledge, and much worse, the soul. The indictment is quite brutal. What seemed to disturb Plato most about the sophists was that they charged, often exorbitantly, for the privilege of their instruction in the techne (art) of rhetoric—an abhorrent concept for many Greeks at that time. In Xenophron’s Memorabilia, Socrates rallies against the sophists, arguing that “those who sell it to anyone for money are called ‘sophists,’ just like prostitutes” (Sprague 2). Aristotle concurs, in On Sophistical Refutations, when he writes, “For the sophist’s craft is an apparent wisdom but not a real one, and the sophist is a money-maker by apparent but not real wisdom” (Sprague 2). However, in Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus attributes this fee-taking practice to Protagoras, and takes a more kindly view of the practice, claiming that Protagoras “invented the practice of speaking for a fee and was the first to introduce it to Greece. He merits no reproach on this account, for we are more enthusiastic about pursuits which cost us money than about those which cost us nothing” (Sprague 4). In Meno, Plato claims, I know of a single man, Protagoras, who made more out of his craft than the illustrious Phidias, who created such noble works,

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Emancipatory Movements in Composition or any ten other statuaries. How could that be? . . . For, if I am not mistaken, he was about seventy years old at his death, forty of which were spent in the practice of his profession; and during all that time he had a good reputation, which to this day he retains. . . . (51)

Ironically, it was the democratic—dare I say, capitalistic—practice of taking money from “all kinds of people” (Kerferd 25), rather than the teacher’s selection of the students, that made the sophist (at least according to Plato and Socrates) a slave to those who were willing to pay for the privilege of his instruction, a kind of intellectual whore. G.B. Kerferd argues that it was not concern for the sophists that motivated Socrates’ criticism, but rather a fear of the democratizing effects such instruction would have on the Greek polis. Kerferd claims, “What they [the sophists] had to offer, in the words attributed to Protagoras, included teaching a man about matters of state, so that he might become a real power in the affairs of the city, both as a speaker and as a man of action, in other words become an effective and successful politician” (26). This point is exceedingly relevant for understanding the political, and therefore transformative, implications inherent in pedagogy, particularly critical pedagogy, which actively seeks to interrogate stable systems of discourse. Protagoras promises such transformative pedagogy when he says, “Young man, if you associate with me, on the very first day you will be in a position to return home a better man than you came, and better on the second day than on the first, and better every day than you were on the day before” (Plato, Protagoras 14–15). The promise of Protagoras’ transformative pedagogy is worth noting, since he does not claim merely to make the student a more proficient speaker or writer, although, of course, the implication is that association with him will prove fruitful in cultivating those particular skills; instead, he makes the rather bold claim that the student will go home “a better man.” This sophistic view, that pedagogy extends beyond the mastery of skills into the realm of self-improvement and critical awareness, is one that has been consciously embraced by the liberal agendas of cultural studies, rhetoric and composition, and feminism, and I will more fully discuss this connection later in this chapter. In an attempt to characterize the sophists, Guthrie suggests certain commonalties. First, the sophists were marked by their

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professionalism, meaning, as I already mentioned, they were paid (often handsomely) for their services. Second, the sophists were literally Athenian outsiders, as their appellations ascribe them: Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leotini, Hippias of Elis, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, and so on. They were foreigners in a host country whose residents were distrustful, as all hosts are, of their unusual guests. Third, their pedagogical methods consisted of either small circles or seminars or public displays (epideixeis). The former were typically conducted in an affluent citizen’s home; for instance, Callias’ home is the setting in Plato’s Protagoras. By Kerferd’s analysis, sophistic pedagogy consisted of three areas: (1) matters of organization, (2) teaching methods, and (3) curricula— though all three were often incorporated. The matters of organization revolved around certain forms of speech making, and one quite distinct type of performance was the epideixeis or public display lecture. Hippias gave such performances regularly at the Panhellenic games at Olympia. Gorgias offered to speak on any subject whatsoever in the theatre at Athens, and he spoke also at Olympia and the Pythian games at Delphi (Kerferd 28). According to Diogenes Laertius, Protagoras had been the first to introduce “contests in arguments” (logon agonas) or public debates, and this penchant for agonistic discourse came to be the general characteristic of the sophists (Guthrie 43). The second pedagogical technique involved a lecture on a set theme, such as the ravishing of Helen as expounded by Gorgias. Since the sophists were often paid to provide training in speech making for the law courts, they constructed rhetorical exercises, like those of Antiphon’s Tetralogies, which consists of a set of four speeches, giving a speech of the accuser, reply of the defendant, then a second speech on each side. The third element, the sophistic curriculum, varied among the sophists, but our general understanding emerges from Plato’s Protagoras. Protagoras describes the curricula as follows: But if he comes to me, he will learn only that which he comes to learn. And this is prudence in affairs private as well as public; he will learn to order his own house in the best manner, and he will be able to speak and act most powerfully in the affairs of the state. (16)

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For Protagoras, there is no distinction between the public sphere, politics and law (nomos), and the private sphere of the “household,” since his pedagogy promises an inclusive discourse applicable to both. Guthrie suggests a fourth commonality among the sophists, arguing that while there was no common ground in the subjects the sophists discussed, one subject they all practiced and discussed was the rhetoric or the art of the logos (44). LOGOS AND CONTEMPORARY COMPOSITION THEORY

The persuasive power of logos is the theme of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, wherein he argues against blaming Helen for leaving her husband and going to Troy with Paris. Gorgias considers four possible explanations for Helen’s behavior: (1) That it was by decree of the gods and of Necessity, (2) that she was carried off by force, (3) that she was persuaded by the power of speech (logos), and (4) that it was all the work of Love. In this treatise, Gorgias emphasizes the force of logos, and its ability to alter a person’s ability to think clearly and rationally. Ergo, Helen was not to blame for her actions, since she was under the spell of logos: What cause then prevents the conclusion that Helen similarly, against her will, might have come under the influence of speech, just as if ravished by the force of the mighty? For it was possible to see how the force of persuasion prevails; persuasion has the form of necessity, but it does not have the same power. For speech constrained the soul, persuading it which it persuaded, both to believe the things said and to approve the things done. . . . (41)

Gorgias’ view of logos is that it is more potent than drugs, and he boasts, “[M]any and many a time have I gone with my brother or other doctors to visit one of their patients, and found him unwilling either to take medicine or submit to the surgeon’s knife or cautery; and when the doctor failed to persuade him I succeeded, by no other art than that of rhetoric” (Plato, Gorgias 67). Gorgias explores his fascination with logos in On the Nonexistent or On Nature. He argues that if things are, they cannot be

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known or grasped by humans, since ultimately, the concepts could not be communicated to another person because the means by which we communicate is through speech or logos, and this logos can never accurately describe the external world. What we communicate is never the actual thing, but only a logos, which is always other than the thing itself. He argues, “Logos arises from external things impinging upon us, that is, from perceptible things” (Kerferd 83). It is Gorgias’ contention that should the material world be apprehended, it is impossible to convey that to another and that we do not reveal existing things, but a logos, which is something other than the description of material substances. Logos, in other words, is not evocative of the external, but the external becomes the revealer of logos. Summing up On Nature, Kerferd concludes that, “It is not even speech that displays the external reality, it is the external object that provides information about the logos” (81). Antiphon, another known sophist, also constructed a pedagogy that focused on the logos. In On Truth, he asserts that the mind (gnome) rules the body, and we believe what we see with our eyes, our perceptions, more than abstractions. However, when we speak, there is no reality behind our words, nothing comparable to the results of seeing and knowing. He writes, When a man speaks he expresses no single thing or single meaning, indeed the subject of his speech is not any single thing either of the things which the most powerful beholder sees with his sight or the things which the most powerful knower knows with his mind. (Sprague 213)

This inability of our language to accurately reflect and critique reality is salient to those of us who teach reading and writing, and it has been the subject of much contention in the field of rhetoric and composition. For instance, Thomas Kent makes note of this problematic when he suggests, “the Sophistic tradition provides the historical foundation for a paralogic rhetoric, a rhetoric that treats the production and the analysis of discourse as open-ended dialogic activities and not as a codifiable system” (25). Drawing on the work of Derrida and Davidson, Kent maintains that discourse analysis and production are hermeneutic acts, and he suggests

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both that communication involves modifying our ideolects to match the ideolects of others and that we can never truly have a match. If we agree with Kent that discourse analysis and production cannot be codified, how then do we even begin to approach the teaching of reading and writing? Kent suggests that the sophists’ view of antilogike (antilogic) offers an array of pedagogical possibilities for the writing classroom. But antilogic is a somewhat amorphous term, and so let me attempt to clarify what exactly is meant by antilogic and to examine how we, as compositionists, may glean both a theoretical and pedagogical understanding of the root of this term. ANTILOGIKE: THE INDETERMINACY OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND PRODUCTION

In the Phaedrus (261c4–e5), Plato condemns the sophistic use of what he called antilogike, which he characterizes as an argumentation technique that consists of emphasizing contradictory positions. The purpose of antilogic as a rhetorical strategy was to leave one’s audience in a state of aporia (doubt) and thereby demonstrate the impossibility of absolutes and the labyrinth of language. Obviously, Plato disliked such slippery use of argumentation, and sought, instead, to work toward creating a rhetoric based on eternal ideas and categories. To further our understanding of antilogic as employed by the sophists, Kerferd suggests that we must first be familiar with the concept of eristic, which is derived from the noun eris, meaning quarrel, or the seeking of victory in an argument. The meaning of the word is expansive enough to encompass not merely the act of victory, but the art that cultivates the devices for achieving such victory. Interestingly enough, concern for the truth is not a necessary part of the techne, since the primary objective is to win the argument. Therefore, “fallacies of any kind, verbal ambiguities, long and irrelevant monologues may all on occasion succeed in reducing an opponent to silence and so be appropriate tools of eristic” (Kerferd 62–63). Antilogic, however, differs from eristic, in that it consists of opposing one logos to another logos by contradiction. Therefore, it constitutes a specific technique—namely, preceding from a

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given logos, a position adopted by an opponent, “or the establishment of a contrary or contradictory logos in such a way that the opponent must either accept both logoi, or at least abandon his first position” (Kerferd 62–63). The problem with antilogic, as Plato sees it, is that instead of arguing on the basis of things by Kind, it proceeds on the basis of verbal contradictions. Plato also objected to the use of antilogic because he feared that novice speakers would abuse the technique. He argues in The Republic that young men, first learning to argue, misuse their skills, “as in a game, appropriating them in every case in order to establish an antilogy, and imitating those who engage in crossexamination . . .” (qtd. in Kerferd 64). Plato’s view of the phenomenal world is that it is in a continual state of flux, and, as such, “things which we say are large or small, light or heavy, may equally well be given the opposite epithet” (Republic 6–8). To sum up, antilogic demonstrates two things: First, that opposition between logoi can be simultaneous, and so, at any one time a person can be described as “tall” or “short” in relationship to whom he or she is being compared; and second, the opposition between logoi applies not merely to opposed arguments, but also to the facts of the phenomenal world (Kerferd 66). Antilogic recognizes that language is contradictory and unpredictable. Kent suggests that the sophists understood the hermeneutic task of interpreting the world through the contrariness of language. Kent views the sophists’ employment of antilogic as the historical precursor for our understanding that we cannot reduce discourse to a self-referential metalanguage, and that discourse production and analysis refute systemization. Further, the dominant rhetorical paradigm in composition classrooms emerges directly from Aristotelian and Platonic rhetoric, which establishes a tradition of discourse that emphasizes categories, kinds, systems, and taxonomies—a discourse that is still the dominant model for the way in which we teach writing. However, Kent argues that “because no logico-systemic process can account for the paralogical moves we make when we produce or analyze discourse, no formal pedagogy can be constructed to teach the act of writing or critical reading” (36). He suggests that a much more effective way to teach reading and writing would be for teachers

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to view their role as collaborators, rather than lawgivers, and rely on student literacies, thereby facilitating the students’ understanding that the creation and dissemination of knowledge is socially constituted—not handed down or bestowed, but negotiated. This view of negotiating literacy is certainly consistent with contemporary composition scholarship, particularly as it has been rearticulated through the concept of the “contact zone.”2 MYTHOS: NARRATION AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RHETORIC

Mythos, the poetic transfer of crucial cultural information, was condemned by Plato because of its “hypnotic effects.” Plato argued that it “fostered an uncritical absorption of the dominant ideology” (Jarratt, Rereading xxii). However, the sophists reveled in experimenting with mythos, particularly the use of narrative form and style. The sophistic view of rhetoric and language as playful and experimental, I believe, opens the pedagogical doors of the writing class and enables a broader, panoramic vision of rhetoric, a view that inevitably requires a revisionist definition. The first documented use of the word rhetoreia, or “oratory,” is in Isocrates’ Against the Sophists, which appears to date from 392 BCE (Schiappa, Protagoras 43). While the hegemony of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion” has dominated the fields of communication studies and writing, Poulakos advances a sophistic definition of rhetoric: “Rhetoric is the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible” (“Toward” 36; emphasis added). This perspective shifts rhetoric from the domain of the logos—where the only effective means of persuasion is through the presentation of pisteis, proofs—and instead transfers it to mythos, seeing rhetoric as an artistic, stylistic, aesthetic undertaking. Poulakos examines each of these three terms—“opportune” moment (kairos), “appropriate” (to prepon), and “possible” (to dynaton)—and offers a vision of rhetoric that differs considerably from that of Aristotle and Plato, since it is a rhetoric that does not strive for epistemological certainty. I would like to examine each

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of the three terms and consider how they may inform our contemporary notion of rhetorical pedagogy. The sophists were keenly interested in the issue of timeliness as it related to speaking, and the notion of kairos dictates “that what is said must be said at the right time” (“Toward” 39). Phillip Sipiora provides a useful explanation of the term: The rhetor must anticipate rhetorical exigencies; he or she can never know the particulars of a discourse situation until actually situated within it. And it is precisely because a rhetor cannot anticipate every important situational circumstance that he or she must carry a flexible attitude into any given rhetorical situation. (126)

While, most certainly, the sophists were concerned with the temporality of oral rhetoric, not written rhetoric, kairos is still applicable to the composition classroom. Walker Gibson makes clear the value of incorporating sophistic rhetoric into a writing and reading curriculum: “It’s precisely because rhetoric makes us sensitive to the limits of our own powers that it should play a major role in any curriculum” (287). In classes such as technical, expository, and professional writing, where we ask students to give oral presentations based on their written research, the teaching of kairos as a manifestation of rhetorical techne becomes, for most students, a necessary skill that reaches far beyond the writing classroom, since professional life often requires the verbal reporting of acquired research to an audience. Complementing the concept of kairos is the concept of to prepon, the appropriate. Because situations have certain characteristics, savvy speakers understand their audiences, and speak on the subjects most appropriate to them. Again, from first-year English to advanced composition, one of the fundamental elements of composition pedagogy is to teach students the importance of understanding audiences’ needs and desires in order to persuade them to take action; deciding upon an appropriate topoi is an essential rhetorical skill. However, both of these rhetorical motifs—kairos and to prepon—cannot truly be taught, and they function within what Kent might call a paralogical context. George Kennedy contends, “The two together constitute what may be called the artistic elements

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in rhetorical theory as opposed to the prescribed rules” (26). The third element in this rhetorical trilogy, to dynaton, the possible, offers, perhaps, the most intriguing ingredient to the neosophistic revisionist position on rhetoric. In Poulakos’ view, the possible stems from the ontological assumption that “the main driving forces in man’s life are his desires, especially the desire to be other and to be elsewhere” (“Toward” 43). In other words, the sphere of actuality, the now, is always lacking, and it is the future, or the possibilities of the future, the potentiality of the future, that is at the root of human consciousness and desire. Dreaming of the possible invites humans to envision themselves occupying a better reality, a “truer” reality, one more representative of their imagined potential. This, Poulakos writes, is where the rhetorician steps in: The rhetorician tells them what they could be, brings out in them futuristic versions of themselves, and sets before them both goals and the directions which lead to those goals. All this he does by creating and presenting to them that which has the potential to be, but is not. Thus it is no paradox to say that rhetoric strives to create and labors to put forth, to propose that which is not. (“Toward” 43)

The possible, then, is the opposite of the actual, and a sound rhetorician relies on the narrative of possibility to encourage listeners to envision a brighter, more equitable future, enticing them to be taken in by the allure of the realization of their potential, and still, at the same time, challenges them to re-examine their present, their actual circumstances. While those of us in rhetoric and composition have not characterized critical pedagogy in terms of the “actual” and “possible,” it is evident that they are philosophically kindred. Critical pedagogy does not merely foster critique of the political, social, economic, and intellectual status quo; it also demands social activism to remedy the “actual” in the hopes of achieving the “possible”—a more equitable democracy. In Henry Giroux’s understanding of critical pedagogy, it is the mode of critique whereby “lived cultures should interrogate the ways in which people create stories, memories, and narratives that posit a sense of determination and agency”(140).3

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The attention to cultural narratives as a mediating force within critical pedagogy helps to contemporize and punctuate how the sophistic consideration of mythos is applicable and relevant for theorizing about composition pedagogy. Furthermore, the challenging of dominant cultural narratives has become the infantry work of three emancipatory movements— cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist studies— whose theoretical and pedagogical concerns are connected to the revisioning of dominant historiographies to include those texts that have been glaringly absent from sanctioned canons. Emancipatory pedagogies seek to broaden the narrative possibilities, reinvent old stories and create new ones. The sophists clearly shared the liberatory objectives of these intellectual movements, since their pedagogical aims included making the student “aware of the potentiality of logos to reveal and conceal” (“Toward” 219–20). This concept of revealing and unveiling is integral to notions of ideology and semiotics. As Stuart Hall makes clear: The social distribution of knowledge is skewed. . . . The circle of dominant ideas does accumulate the symbolic power to map or classify the world for others. . . . It becomes the horizon of the taken-for-granted. Ruling ideas may dominate other conceptions of the social world by setting the limit to what will appear as rational, reasonable, credible. . . . The monopoly of the means of intellectual production . . . is not the course, irrelevant to this acquisition over time of symbolic dominance (“Toad” 44–45).

Clearly, sophistic pedagogy, like the rhetoric of Marxism, teaches us to be on the lookout for what is not there, what has been excluded, and to be suspicious of what has been rendered commonsensical, ordinary, and therefore, taken for granted. The philosophical imperative is to interrogate what stories are being told and who is telling them. For instance, Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen not only illustrates the sophistic view of logos and its power to persuade and manipulate (as previously discussed), but also argues in support of antithesis and mythos, since Gorgias insists upon indeterminacy in an argument:

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Emancipatory Movements in Composition How then can one regard blame of Helen as just, since she is utterly acquitted of all charge, whether she did what she did through falling in love or persuaded by speech or ravished by force or constrained by divine constraint? (42)

Gorgias challenges the dominant narrative and, by so doing, opens up, interrogates the notion of historical certainty; true to the notion of antithesis, he uncovers possible contradictions and a range of narratological possibilities. It is precisely for this reason that Plato denigrates the rhetoric of Gorgias, equating it to cooking and cosmetics (and as contemporary readers we cannot ignore the obvious misogynistic references to practices that have traditionally been confined to the female domain). While Socrates does give rhetoric a role in Plato’s Phaedrus, he insists on making it subordinate to “philosophy” (260–62). And for Aristotle, rhetoric is merely a method in the field of probable knowledge. “FEMINIST SOPHISTICS”: UNVEILING AUTHORITY IN THE WRITING CLASS

Jarratt draws a parallel between the exclusion of sophistic rhetoric from the traditional canon of rhetoric and the exclusion of women’s discourse from the field as a whole, and she argues for re-examination of sophistic rhetoric, with its acceptance of dissoi logoi as a kind of postmodern discourse, confluent with the objectives of feminism and cultural studies. Further, the sophists’ focus on nomos (custom), may be a useful starting point for the rewriting of history—a critical imperative of the emancipatory goals of feminist and cultural studies criticism. Also, Jarratt suggests that neosophistic rhetorical analysis may be the ramrod for the inclusion of texts that have been excluded from conventional canons, and that such recovery of marginalized voices “may offer increased leverage for dislodging the patriarchal institutions whose foundations were laid during the sophists’ time” (“First” 39). Indeed, Robert Wardy sees a direct correlation between the roots of rhetoric and philosophy and misogyny, and he maintains that “logos, philosophical reason itself, no matter how it varies

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through the philosophical tradition, is almost universally harmful just because its misogyny lies concealed beneath a misleading ideology of false impersonality” (141). Wardy contends that Gorgias was correct to suggest in the Encomium of Helen that we are all “Helens open to psychic violation” by the dominating, solitary male, “the wielder of rhetorical power” (139–40). Since the goals of both rhetoric and feminism are change, movement from one perspective to another, Dale Bauer and Susan Jarratt argue for the inclusion of what they have termed “feminist sophistics”: a teaching position that “combines the two fields for reflection on processes of change in the classroom and in society, reflection on what it means for a teacher to exercise rhetorical authority toward ends of social transformation” (149). The discourse within the liberal agenda of rhetoric and composition is to put one’s ideological money where one’s mouth is—teaching not from the pretense of liberal humanism, with its ostensible naturalization of power relations, but instead from an awareness of one’s political position within and outside the walls of the classroom: critical pedagogy. However, while the strategy of “feminist sophistics” and other such liberatory pedagogies is for the teacher to make clear his or her political and ethical commitment to social change, by no means does it advocate indoctrinating students to adopt a “politically correct” position. Instead, it argues against students’ cloaking the fixed agenda of the teacher, since such a strategy would effectively counter the goals of a critical classroom—which is to open up discussion, not artificially arrest it. Bauer and Jarratt call “feminist sophistics” a pedagogy that combines feminism with rhetoric, “linking civic responsibility for public discourse to personal experience” (150). A pedagogy that couples the historical with the personal has its origins in classical education. Sharon Crowley points out that according to Quintilian, once a child reached twelve or so, the student was handed over to a teacher of rhetoric. The rhetorician, then, engaged his students by teaching them reading, analysis, imitation, and composition. His pedagogy also included exercises in moral reasoning and judicial speeches—producing a student who would become a citizen-orator, a “good man speaking well” (318). Crowley argues that the central focus of the educational system was,

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Emancipatory Movements in Composition To produce students who were not only highly literate, but who were conscious of the power, and the responsibility, conferred on them by their mastery of linguistic and discursive skills. . . . Ancient teachers of rhetoric taught their pupils that the practice of rhetoric entailed deep concern about important ethical, political, historical, and legal questions (318).

As a rhetorician, Crowley’s plea for the revival of sophistry stems not from nostalgia—particularly to a time that excluded women from the discourse—but, rather, from a desire to advocate that teaching have an ethical and therefore social dimension. To ignore this teaching imperative is to be derelict in one’s duties, and “from a Sophistic point of view, teachers who refuse to make judgments about which issues are more important than others, which issues deserve to be studied, and which issues should be ignored abdicate their responsibilities to their students, and to their communities” (333). Patricia Bizzell sees this positionality, or what she terms “rhetorical authority,” as a necessary component to teaching, and she contends that such a pedagogy of persuasion is more respectful to students’ values, since the admission of a position problematizes the value-neutral classroom. Further, she insists that “the values-avowing teacher is saved from being a propagandist by the extent to which he or she must draw on values shared with the students in order to be persuasive” (“Teacher’s” 195). To be sure, this pedagogy of assertion is not embraced by everyone within the field, and contestations about the teacher’s authority (giving up or reclamation) is a subject of much discussion. Gerald Graff, in particular, has questioned not only the usefulness of teachers’ relinquishing pedagogical authority in a student-centered classroom, but also the value of assertion. He confesses, I took up strong positions, identified myself with a cause, and stated my views “up front,” leaving students in no doubt as to where I stood. Not surprisingly, I soon discovered that the effect of this polemical onslaught was to make my students all too compliant and docile. (181)

This dilemma, which Graff terms the “Bully/Wimp Syndrome,” is not uncommon for those of us who teach writing and seek to

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model the Freirean paradigm of the critical classroom; but, at the same time, we must also recognize an obligation to share knowledge with our students—not from an inauthentic position of “peer,” but from the inevitably authoritative (not authoritarian) position of teacher. Like Crowley and Bizzell, Susan Miller also argues for a more holistic, socially responsible approach to the teaching of rhetoric, arguing that, “American teachers must reclaim the development of literacy from relative darkness to make their students the capable thinkers and citizens whose absence, and whose replacement by general muddle, we now feel” (56; emphasis added). But while Miller offers a three-step approach to the incorporation of classical rhetoric in the contemporary writing class,4 its prescriptive quality still seems to me insufficient to help students with the daunting task of becoming “capable thinkers and citizens.” If we buy into the argument that our pedagogical and ethical obligation is not simply to teach students how to write better papers, but to have them become more thoughtful, critical thinkers, and ergo, more politically and socially active citizens, then the question remains, how do we teach ethics in connection to writing? How can we make the same promise to our students as Protagoras does to his, that by association, they’ll “go home a better man”? In essence, how do we teach character? I’d like to suggest that the answer(s) to this question might best be addressed by examining critical pedagogy, whose liberatory aims are inextricably tied to the creation of elevated consciousness, a critical consciousness of social reality. How an individual acts, or rather, enacts change in the world, is certainly related to the development of character. ETHOS: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND “THE POSSIBLE”

Ethos, as characterized by Aristotle, is one of three methods of creating a persuasive argument: “Of the pisteis provided through speech, there are three species: for some are in the character [ethos] of the speaker, and some in disposing the listener in some way, [pathos] and some in the argument [logos] itself, by showing or seeming to show something” (37). In this Aristotelian

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framework, a speaker’s character is integral to his ability to be persuasive, and Aristotle suggests that ethos may be the most effective means of proof: There is persuasion through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly than we do others on all subjects in general and completely so in cases where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt. (38)

In his Antidosis, Isocrates emphasizes the paramount importance of an orator’s character in relationship to his ability to be rhetorically effective. He writes, Furthermore, mark you, the man who wishes to persuade people will not be negligent as to the matter of character; no, on the contrary, he will apply himself above all to establish a most honourable name among his fellow citizens; for who does not know that words carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute than when spoken by men who live under a cloud, and that the argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words? (339)

The rhetor, in the Isocratean notion of ethos, exists out of time—in that the effect a particular rhetor’s message has on an audience is influenced even before he or she utters a word. From an Isocratean perspective, we are persuaded by the personae of the individual, the fiction, the narrative, which constitutes that speaker’s life, through his or her creation of ethos. The tripartite system that constitutes ethos consists of virtue (artete), practical wisdom (phronesis), and good will (eunoia), and while all three are integral to the concept of ethos, virtue is the characteristic that I believe encapsulates the essential ideology of emancipatory movements. As Aristotle defines it, “. . . virtue [arete] is an ability [dynamis], as it seems, that is productive and preservative of goods, and an ability for doing good in many and great ways, actually in all ways in all things” (79; emphasis added). Virtue is defined, in a general sense, as the ability to do good, particularly if it is most “useful to others” (80). James Kinneavy and Susan Warshauer note the etymological roots of the word, tracing it to ariston, meaning nobility or aristocracy, “sug-

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gesting that the ethical appeal is a type of cultural appeal. To be convincing, a speaker must exhibit that quality of character that culture, and not the individual defines as virtue” (175). While Aristotle goes on to list the various attributes of virtue—manly courage, self-control, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, prudence, and wisdom—it is the virtue of “justice” [dikaiosyne] that most closely embraces the ethical tenets of emancipatory movements: “Justice is a virtue by which all, individually, have what is due to them and as the law requires” (80). Now, of course, what critical pedagogies teach us is that we need to move beyond laws, which are elitist and patriarchal, designed to serve and maintain the status quo; however, the concept of justice (as distinguished from the practice) is that it serves the needs of individuals within a social context. In sum, “[t]he greatest virtues are those most useful to society, in which benefits may be conferred on others through one’s acts” (Kinneavy and Warshauer 175). Poulakos’ articulation of “the possible,” with its promise of transformation, complements the goals of critical pedagogy and similar emancipatory movements, whose ideology is founded upon rectifying social injustice. Further, the way to accomplish this task is through the promise of the possibilities of rhetoric, and its power to transform the “actual.” There are four issues here that I would like to highlight in regards to ethos: (1) A speaker’s rhetorical effectiveness is based on his or her perceived character, which exists outside the moment of the rhetorical act, and is, in itself, a fiction, and is therefore tied to the notion of mythos; (2) the characteristics of ethos are culturally constructed, created within a system of culturally inherited values and beliefs; (3) virtue, or the contribution of the social good through individual acts of kindness, is rhetorically persuasive; and (4) justice, as manifested through “the possible,” reflects the optimistic, transformative ideology of critical pedagogy. How, then, do we apply the concept(s) of ethos to the teaching of composition? Kinneavy and Warshauer argue that explorations of ethos in the writing class will help students to learn how to “shape their self-image in discourse,” and to be wary of the way the media manipulate “character” to further political and social agendas (172). Such pedagogical objectives seem consistent with the goals of critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and feminism.

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Further, as Jarratt and Reynolds point out, “The alliance between feminism and (sophistic) rhetoric thus makes sense historically. It is precisely the concept of ethos in rhetoric that theorizes the positionality inherent in rhetoric—the speaker having been created at a particular site within the contingencies of history and geography” (“Splitting” 47). The emancipatory movements explored in this book are concerned with ethos—the myriad ways in which to improve upon the lives of those who have been traditionally marginalized, whose voices have been ignored, or worse, silenced. The challenge of the sophists that makes their view of rhetoric salient for those of us who teach writing is that their philosophies seem to embody a realization that knowledge and values are historically contingent, and they seem to have possessed an understanding of the relationship between the public and private, theory and practice. Sophistic rhetoric is a “study of how to make choices and a study of how choices form character and make good citizens” (Neel 211). Classical rhetoric, as rearticulated through a neosophistic model, makes it incumbent upon us to teach students what the Greeks have taught us—that academic literacy entails the ethical burden of civic responsibility.

CHAPTER TWO

Cultural Studies and Composition: Ethnographic Research as Cultural Critique

If the cultural text shaping the construction of the world for most Americans in the late twentieth century is still governed by a “white” metadiscourse of exclusion, it is no wonder students can perceive little dissonance in their convictions of the essential fairness of American society. —France (159)

In 1991, James Berlin observed, “Composition as cultural studies has received little attention in current discussions of English studies, a fact that gives it special force as an oppositional alternative” (“Composition” 48). Remarkably, in the eleven years since Berlin made this observation, cultural studies, perhaps far more than any other discipline, has suffused itself into composition studies.1 Stated more aptly, rhetoric and composition studies has embraced the emancipatory objectives of cultural critique, with its Marxist focus on class structures and its fascination with ideology and semiotics, finding it congruent with the liberal ethos of most English departments. I view this infusion of cultural studies into composition as

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the second component of the emancipatory movements: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies. These four movements have become important areas of research within the field: first, they tend to share similar liberatory objectives; second, they seek to carve out a place in the continually evolving, relatively youthful discipline of composition; and, third, their research and pedagogical practices are bound to ethical concerns related to argumentation, cultural narratives, and research. The emancipatory movements within composition begin with the project of critical pedagogy, which in composition can be traced to the influence of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, particularly his germinal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s concept of radical pedagogy was the precursor, the paradigm shift in the field, which enabled the eventual infusion of cultural studies in rhetoric and composition. For the last twenty years, scholars like Ira Shor, James Berlin, and Henry Giroux have drawn on Freire’s work in advocating critical teaching as an integral component of education. Freire’s concept of conscientização—critical consciousness, which invariably leads people to analyze their reality in order to alter social inequity—is the sine qua non of critical pedagogy. Freire defines it as “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (19). For Freire, education without social consciousness is merely indoctrination, the primary vehicle for the reproduction of dominant ideologies—ideologies that are almost always sexist, racist, and classist. Further, in the Freirean model, it is not enough to gain class-consciousness: one is socially and ethically compelled to act upon this knowledge and work toward creating a more equitable system. Like cultural studies, critical pedagogy is firmly rooted in Marxist soil and seeks, like other emancipatory rhetorics (neosophistic rhetoric and feminism, in particular), to move beyond critique to social action, theoria into praxis. Giroux has argued that cultural studies offers the possibility of reconfiguring cultural borders, an opportunity for students and teachers to engage in “cultural remapping as a form of resistance” (“Resisting” 209). This notion of resistance to the hegemony of dominant ideologies is manifested in a variety of ways within the academy. Further, this creation of oppositional discourse within the infrastruc-

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ture of the academy has emerged as a central concern in composition studies. For instance, in 1991, Hurlbert and Blitz’s Composition and Resistance examined the disparate practices of resistance inside and outside the academy. They proposed, Educators teach composition and literature in order to encourage class actions, resistances in our classrooms, profession, and private lives that any of us will make against those who use money, access to information, administrative rank, traditional privilege (male, white, heterosexual), to control other people, to deny them freedom and safety and equality and their voice, or to distract them/us from noticing the dangers of these conditions. This action demands that composition teachers resist teaching writing as something for a classroom. (172–73)

Writing, then, becomes writing in context, in relationships connected to discourses within and outside the classroom, shattering the quiet belief that composition may be taught as a discrete skill, separated from class, race, or gender. Cultural studies, likewise, seeks to address how discursive cultural practices are shaped by dominant ideological forces that constitute a culture’s belief system. This form of inquiry complements and augments the liberatory and transformative ideals within the field of rhetoric and composition. But in order to understand the confluent relationship between cultural studies and composition, we need to examine the foundation of cultural critique. CULTURAL STUDIES: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Initially, when cultural studies began to take shape as a discipline in Great Britain in the 1950s, it had a dual commitment both to description and to intervention, and it focused on the notion of “subjectivity”; that is, it studied culture in relation to individual lives, providing a significant break from traditional, positivistic modes of inquiry. One of the earliest texts that posited this subjective mode of inquiry was Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), which described Hoggart’s personal experience of the changes in working-class life in post-war Britain. Hoggart demonstrated that “culture” affected an individual’s “whole way of life,” meaning that life practices are intricately connected, networked to

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larger cultural, social, and economic practices. Another critical text in the emergence of cultural studies was Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958), which made the distinction between the notion of “culture” as high-culture (defined by Matthew Arnold as a standard of aesthetic excellence, “the best that has been thought and said in the world”) and Williams’ definition of culture as a way of life. Williams writes, Culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture. (57)

Williams’ uncoupling of “culture” from “high-culture” enabled scholarly cultural inquiry to move toward ethnographic research methods. Further, ethnographic methodology allowed researchers to engage in narratives about the daily lives of, primarily, the working classes. Working from a Marxist-Humanist perspective, the early innovators of ethnographic cultural critique sought not only to describe the community under investigation, but also to intervene in its recuperation. Several cultural studies anthologies (Turner; Grossberg, et al.; During) cite three texts as the foundational predecessors to cultural studies investigations. One of the first ethnographic approaches to cultural studies was Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour. As a participant-observer, Willis described a group of estranged, working-class youth in a school setting. He observed that the boys created a counterculture, a subculture that resisted the dominant school ideology of deference to authority and reinforced hegemonic notions of masculinity, manifested through the boys’ valorization of physical violence. Willis, summing up his observations, noted, “Social agents are not passive bearers of ideology, but active appropriators who reproduce existing structures only through struggle, contestation and a partial penetration of those structures” (175). Willis hoped that his ethnographic investigation would ultimately lead to a restructuring of the British educational system, which perpetuated class disparity and brought with it the attendant despair of the disenfranchised.2

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The second text was David Morley’s The Nationwide Audience. Morley did not study a community per se, but instead focused on the audience of Nationwide, a BBC news-magazine program. Morley studied the viewers of the program, analyzing differentiations in their class, gender, and work. He noted that audiences filter meaning, decode texts, through those various discourses. He writes, The meaning of the text will be constructed differently according to the discourses (knowledge, prejudices, resistances, etc.) brought to bear upon the text by the reader and the crucial factor in the encounter of audience/subject and text will be the range of discourses at the disposal of the audience. (18)

The Nationwide audience is credited with exposing the polysemy of the television text. The third book that explores subcultural ideologies is the collectively written Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. Resistance through Rituals is a collection of essays exploring subcultural groups, primarily within the working class. For instance, one of the essays in the collection, John Clarke’s “Style,” argues that working-class youth generate style by bricolage (a term coined by anthropologist Lèvi-Strauss)—“the re-ordering and recontextualisation of objects to communicate fresh meanings, within a total system of significances, which already includes prior and sedimented meanings attached to the objects used” (qtd. in Hall and Jefferson 177). Clarke argues that youth cultures, by reappropriating and transforming these commodified objects, create oppositional discourse to dominant, hegemonic ideology and, further, that this resignification of symbolic objects works to reinforce group homology and identity. Thematically, what emerged from Resistance through Ritual was the overarching notion that the authors in the collection accepted that the working class was cleaved—with one segment able to move into skilled jobs, giving them the ability to adopt the style of the middle class, while others continued to maintain low-status service positions. Further, class disparity invariably generates oppositional discourse, which culturally manifests itself through style, leisure, and violence.

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Because issues of class (rather than gender and race, for instance) became the unifying perspective for early cultural criticism, the focus of inquiry was on individuals as the locus of intrinsic value; members of the working class, in particular, were lauded, valorized as having values and characteristics that must be preserved from the corruption of mass culture. Jennifer Slack and Lauri Whitt argue that the early cultural theorists set out to “rescue” groups of individuals who have been socially disenfranchised (574). They suggest that both Hoggart and Williams see individual members of the working class as having intrinsic value. In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart protests against the infusion of popular culture, which he believes will mar and undermine the values of the members of the working class. He argues that “class culture is being eroded in favour of the mass opinion, the mass recreational product and the generalised emotional response” (280). Hoggart’s agenda is to preserve the values of the working class, which are assailed by commercial culture. In both Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams calls for a “participating democracy” in which the “individual is in fact the general process of our humanity” (Long 118). Whitt and Slack suggest that these early studies can be characterized as atomistic, focusing on the working class as a group of oppressed individuals possessing intrinsic values that must be preserved. They contend that the theoretical problem with this atomistic approach is that a gap develops between the celebration of the individual and the commitment to resisting the oppressive social, economic, and political forces that created the workingclass culture in the first place. Another blind spot in early cultural critique was that men’s lives were the subject of inquiry, and the research produced stemmed from a decidedly androcentric perspective. While the intellectual transformation from quantitative to qualitative research was a novel paradigm shift, and the early texts indeed offered useful critiques of subcultures, these studies neglected to include women’s social realities, an argument made by cultural studies theorists Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber. They theorize about the portrayal of girls and women in subcultures, and the authors pose four critical questions:

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(1) Are girls really absent from the main post-war sub-cultures? Or are they present but invisible? (2) Where present and visible, were their roles the same, but more marginal than boys; or were they different? (3) Whether marginal or different, is the position of girls specific to the sub-cultural option; or do their roles reflect the more general social-subordination of women in the central areas of mainstream culture—home, work, school, leisure. (4) If sub-cultural options are not readily available to girls, what are the different but complementary ways in which girls organize their cultural life? And are these, if their own terms, sub-cultural in form? (211)

McRobbie and Garber suggest that the term “subculture” has acquired strong masculine overtones, and may account for female invisibility. They contend that the absence of female subjects may be the result of documentation of phenomena that exclude female reality, which is usually based within the home rather than outside the home where male ethnographers conduct their research. They conclude that girls have alternative ways of organizing their cultural lives and that girls negotiate “a different space, offering a different type of resistance to what can at least in part be viewed as their sexual subordination” (221). Such androcentric myopia in cultural analysis could only provide a partial view of a culture’s reality. And while these early ethnographic studies undoubtedly contributed greatly to our understanding of culture in relationship to class, they neglected to pay attention to the way women’s lives are woven into the cultural fabric. In a different context, Sandra Harding (discussing research in the social sciences) notes that such investigatory dereliction invariably produces less valuable, less “objective”—and therefore considerably more faulty—research. She contends that the application of feminist standpoint theory (the critical understanding that no perspective is neutral and that all perspectives are socially situated), which borrows its term from Marxist accounts of the standpoint of the proletariat, has its analogue in various other emancipatory social movements. She writes, Feminist standpoint theorists argue that not just mere opinion but also a culture’s best beliefs—whatever it calls knowledge— are socially situated. There are distinctive features of women’s social situations in gender-stratified societies that are being used

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Emancipatory Movements in Composition as a resource in the new feminist research. It is these distinctive resources that are neglected and devalued by conventional researchers which have enabled research and scholarship guided by feminist concerns to produce empirically more accurate descriptions and theoretically richer explanations than the conventional research. (18)

Harding’s argument is that examination of women’s lives will invariably lead to what she terms “strong objectivity,” a more inclusive view of empirical data. Strong objectivity enables scientists (and social scientists) to more fully evaluate the dominant knowledge claims that have been generated from the lives of men in “the dominant races, classes, cultures, and sexuality” and, by doing so, can decrease the partialities and distortions (19). McRobbie and Garber also note this distortion of cultural critique when it involves women’s—or, in the case of their essay, girls’—lives. “Very little,” they write, “seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings in general. They are absent from the classic sub-cultural ethnographic studies. . . . When they do appear, it is either in ways that uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women with which we are now so familiar . . . or they are fleetingly and marginally presented” (209). This gender gap in ethnographic cultural critique transforms itself into a subcultural oppositional discourse, since it resists normative assumptions of knowledge claims generated by dominant, patriarchal ideology. Further, these disruptions, these forms of resistance to hegemonic ideologies, laid the theoretical groundwork for the infusion of feminist critique into cultural studies, specifically in regard to the re-enunciation of ethnographic research. Additionally, this rearticulation of ethnographic methodologies as an oppositional discourse has been adopted by scholars in rhetoric and composition. “SEMIOTIC GUERRILLA WARFARE”: OPPOSITIONAL DISCOURSE AND SUBCULTURAL RESISTANCE

In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige uses the term “semiotic guerrilla warfare” to suggest that subcultures take the

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dominant signs of a culture and subvert them, twist them to acquire a new meaning, a meaning that is often antithetical to the established meaning of the sign. This semiotic sedition does not merely cement a subculture’s identity; it also has social and political ramifications outside the subcultural domain. But to understand the ways in which subcultures manipulate meaning, and the relationship between semiotics and cultural studies, it is first necessary to understand the general principles of Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of semiology. The founding concept behind Ferdinand de Saussure’s germinal Course in General Linguistics is that the linguistic sign is arbitrary. Saussure contends that a given concept unlocks a corresponding sound-image in the brain; this psychological phenomenon is followed by a physiological process whereby the brain transmits an impulse corresponding to the image to the organs used in producing sounds. Then the sound waves travel from the mouth of A to the ear of B in a purely physical process. However, a sign, as Saussure defines it, is a concept (a “signified”) plus the sound-image (the psychological image of the sound that the word makes when we pronounce it is called the “signifier”). Saussure contends that there is no natural relationship between the concept and the sound-image, and that the bond between the signified (concept) and the signifier (sound) is arbitrary: “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image” (qtd. in Davis 250). Saussure uses the example of the word “tree” to illustrate the arbitrary nature of the sign. There is nothing about the tree that necessitates that it be represented by t-r-e-e, since in Hebrew the word would be “etz,” in French, “arbre,” in Italian, “albero,” in Latin, “arbor,” and so on. So, simply, there is no true connection between the concept “tree” and the sound used to designate that concept. The only connection between the signifier and the signified, Saussure contends, is convention. This does not suggest, however, that the speaker can choose to assign any signifier-sound to any concept-signified, since it is fixed with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. That is, the signified and the signifier are fixed within a system of language, whereby it takes on a “linguistic identity” which resides in position to something defined within some system. Identity is a

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function of positioning within its system. Saussure elaborates on this notion of linguistic identity by using the example of a knight in a game of chess. Outside the system of chess, carried in a person’s pocket, the knight loses its value and can become a concrete element only when endowed with value. Signs are endowed with value precisely when they are part of a system. So, if the knight is taken out of the game, it loses its value as a game piece, but it may acquire another value, such as an object of art. Therefore, identity has to do with a stipulated position within a system. The importance of Saussure’s linguistic theory, often referred to as the beginnings of poststructuralism, is that value is not intrinsic but determined by habit and convention through a linguistic community. Because the study of signs is always connected to something beyond itself, imbued with the conventions bestowed upon it by a discourse community, it is always ideological, and Marxist critic Terry Eagleton suggests the inextricable connection of semiotics to ideology, arguing that ideology is just a way to categorize “a whole lot of different things we do with signs” (193). He traces the first semiotic theory of ideology to Soviet philosopher V. N. Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, whereby Voloshinov claims that without signs there is no ideology. For Voloshinov, “consciousness can arise only in the material embodiment of signifiers, and since these signifiers are in themselves material, they are not just ‘reflections’ of reality but an integral part of it” (qtd. in Eagleton 194). If we are to subscribe to Voloshinov’s definition, then ideology cannot be divorced from the sign, and if that is so, then ideology cannot be isolated from a social context. For Eagleton, the sign becomes an arena of class struggle; ideology becomes the agonistic struggle of competing social interests at the level of the sign. He argues, Ideology is essentially a matter of “fixing” the otherwise inexhaustible process of signification around certain dominant signifiers, with which the individual subject can then identify. Language itself is infinitely productive; but this incessant productivity can be artificially arrested into “closure” into the sealed world of ideological stability, which repels the disruptive, decentered forces of language in the name of an imaginary unity. Signs are ranked by a certain covert violence into rigidly hierarchical order. (196–97)

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Eagleton’s analysis of ideology is useful, in that it demonstrates that interests of a certain kind become masked, naturalized, and made legitimate by the dominant social order. He suggests that oppression does not merely take shape by someone being forced to live a “wretched existence,” but that oppression is the thwarting of creative capacities (207). Eagleton’s notion of oppression is similar to that of cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg, who argues that the term empowerment suggests “the enablement of possibility” (“Critical Theory” 95). He argues that the disempowerment of a person or a group takes shape in two ways: (1) by subordinating them within hierarchical relations of power and (2) by denying their ability to construct alternative life practices (Slack and Whitt 573). Ideology, because of its insidious ability to mask difference, exists beneath consciousness. Stuart Hall insists, It is precisely its “spontaneous” quality, its transparency, its “naturalness,” its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or to correction, its effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time, “spontaneous,” ideological and unconscious. You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very taken-for-grantedness is what establishes it as a medium in which its own premises and presuppositions are being rendered invisible by its apparent transparency. (“Culture” 11)

Ideology, then, can be said to saturate every aspect of discourse. This understanding of ideology is exceedingly relevant for cultural studies theorists and differs from the conventional Marxist notion of ideology as “false consciousness.” Louis Althusser has suggested that ideology has very little to do with consciousness: It is profoundly unconscious. . . . Ideology is indeed a system of representation, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with “consciousness”: they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their “consciousness.” They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them. (12)

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The close relationship between cultural studies and semiotics is that theorists and researchers seek to interrogate and decipher ideology, and as Voloshinov makes clear, one cannot divorce ideology from signs. He writes, A sign does not simply exist as part of reality—it reflects and refracts another reality. Therefore it may distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view. . . . Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation. . . . Whenever a sign is present, ideology is present too. Everything ideological possesses a semiotic value. (13)

Ideology exists as the ideas of the ruling class, which are invariably the ruling ideas, and those who control the material forces of society are also the culture’s intellectual force: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” (qtd. in Selsam and Martel 199). This form of ideological dominance has been termed “hegemony” by Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci and refers to a situation in which certain social groups can exert complete social authority over subordinate groups. The interesting element to Gramsci’s idea of social control is that the imposition of ideas is not merely exerted through coercion but is in fact won by the consent of those being subordinated, so that power appears legitimate, and therefore natural. Each individual, according to Gramsci, “is the synthesis not only of existing relations but of the history of these relations. He is a precis of all the past” (324). Gramsci’s view of ideology as historically significant is indeed useful for theorizing about the creation of cultural identities, particularly subcultural identity, which always constructs itself as agonistic to dominant structures. While subcultures are certainly molded by master discourses, they do seek sites of resistance through the manipulation and subversion of hegemonic signs, and since signs are material, they are almost always commodities—objects that can be bought or sold. Commodification is a dynamic process, and Hebdige notes, Commodities can be symbolically repossessed in everyday life, and endowed with implicitly oppositional meanings, by the very groups who originally produced them. . . . The consensus can

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be fractured, challenged, overruled, and resistance to the groups in dominance cannot always be lightly dismissed or automatically incorporated. (16–17)

The means by which subcultures appropriate objects and create bricolage—enact Hebdige’s “semiotic guerrilla warfare”—is generally relevant for those conducting ethnographic research, and particularly important for those of us in composition and rhetoric who seek to address how these disruptions to dominant ideology get played out in the writing classroom. Hebdige suggests, The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and meanings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a struggle within signification: a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life . . . commodities are indeed open to a double inflection: to “illegitimate” as well as “legitimate” uses. These “humble objects” can be magically appropriated; “stolen” by subordinate groups and made to carry “secret” meanings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their continued subordination. (17–18)

There are similarities to be drawn between Hebdige’s “semiotic guerrilla warfare” and Henry Louis Gates’ concept of the “the Signifying Monkey,” a staple figure in African-American folklore. While subcultures create resistance through subversions of dominant material signs, “the Signifying Monkey” in African-American folklore subverts the linguistic dominance of oppressive discourse. Gates analyzes the monkey figure as a rhetorical principle in African-American vernacular discourse. A symbol of “an oral writing within black vernacular language rituals,” it is itself a kind of semiotic disrupter: “The Signifying Monkey wreaks havoc upon the Signified in the way that subaltern groups subvert, mimic, and disrupt the original signs of the dominant culture and appropriate them for themselves.” The Monkey always dethrones the Lion (key figures in the folklore tales) because the “Lion cannot read the nature of his discourse” (Gates 85). Gates’ metaphor of selective literacy, an inability to “read” discourse, becomes a form of cultural conflict within composition classrooms, particularly in regard to AfricanAmerican and basic writers, and has been the subject of much discussion within the field—especially as it relates to student literacies.

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Emancipatory Movements in Composition LITERACY AS CULTURAL CONFLICT IN COMPOSITION STUDIES

Tom Fox suggests that academics have a responsibility to learn this new “Oppositional Culture,” and, (1) legitimate the cultural discourses students bring with them, and (2) challenge the notions (held by both the students and parts of the university) that these discourses are somehow inadequate to do academic work. (“Basic” 82)

In The Social Uses of Writing, Fox traces the concept of literacy, particularly working-class literacy, to Basil Bernstein’s early formulation of his theory of restricted and elaborated codes; restricted codes are characterized by short, simple sentences with little subordination, limited vocabulary, and simple use of conjunctions. Elaborated codes are characterized by complex syntax, an expanded lexicon, adverbs, and passive verb forms. In Bernstein’s view, working-class language was characterized by restricted codes and was indicative of working-class students’ inability to gain a foothold in academic literacy. Fox notes that Richard Ohmann objected to Bernstein’s work and outlined a relationship between class and language that recognized a speaker’s ability, regardless of social distinction, to vary his or her speech according to context. Ohmann contested Bernstein’s conception of language and class as fixed and invariable, and he argued that the static quality of Bernstein’s definitions of class and language worked to impede teachers’ efforts to create a more egalitarian educational environment. Instead, Ohmann argued for a reconceptualization of class and language that is dynamic and context-specific and respects differing styles of discourse. Fox suggests that the literacy debate began to crystallize with the publication of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, in which Ong makes the analogy between black urban speakers and primary oral cultures as linguistically deficient, while at the same time, he privileges literate culture. Responding to this controversy, Fox notes that scholars such as Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, Deborah Tannen, and Shirley Brice Heath have argued for the role that social context plays in shaping language practices. Tannen believes that speak-

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ers choose oral or written strategies based on their ethnic and social backgrounds, as well as the conversational context. Heath points out that once one understands a community’s discourse, the distinction between oral and literate dwindles, because in our culture they have “protean shapes,” are able to shift and move according to a given discourse context. Scribner and Cole suggest that literacy does not necessarily produce cognitive consequences, and they suggest that literacy teaching be tailored to the needs and goals of specific communities. Additionally, in Talkin and Testifyin, Geneva Smitherman discusses how easily theorists turn difference into deficit, and she suggests that any proposed change in language use for the purposes of improving the lives of black people must be accompanied by a concurrent social and political change. More recently, Smitherman’s critique of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s role in drafting its 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution—that she refers to as the “documented spirit of resistance”—articulates the cleft between student literacies and academic discourse (373). Smitherman claims that CCCC’s passing of the resolution was a response to the “developing crisis in college composition classrooms, a crisis caused by the cultural and linguistic mismatch between higher education and the non-traditional (by virtue of color and class) students who were making their imprint upon the academic landscape for the first time in history” (359). While the debate about linguistic literacy—with the prevailing assumption that black dialect is somehow deficient—still rages in the media, the CCCC Executive Committee has issued a “Statement on Ebonics,” arguing that “Ebonics is systematic and rule-governed. It is not an obstacle to learning” (524). The statement encourages teachers to undergo training to overcome the stereotypes about language and the learning potential of African-American students. In sum, English studies has been engaged in a debate regarding what Beth Daniell has termed the “narratives of literacy.” She suggests that literacy connect composition to the social, political, economic, historical, and cultural lives of our students (393). And further, composition researchers, in an attempt to theorize about literacy practices (our own and others) have often engaged in autoethnographic and ethnographic research, since it appears to

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be a useful research tool for considering how humans make meaning of their lives through their use of language and narratives. Daniell argues, Using ethnographic methods, offering “thick descriptions,” and exhibiting familiarity with Marxist and feminist critiques of language and culture, these analyses sometimes show the complexity of the relationship of orality and literacy, or spoken and written language, in actual practice. Taken as a whole, the little narratives argue as well that the relationship between literacy and oppression or freedom is rarely as simple as we have thought. (403)

The last section of this chapter will examine how ethnographic research has been instrumental in critiquing the “narratives of literacy” with composition studies, and how these “stories” are marked by the liberatory narrative of critical pedagogy. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH AND THE NARRATIVE OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE

The objective of ethnographic research is not merely to describe a culture but to analyze the multiplicity of influences (work, class, kinship ties, myths, rituals, gender) that construct that culture’s ideology. Since early cultural investigations almost exclusively studied marginalized groups, researchers often exoticized the scrutinized community (Slack and Whitt). Postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha sees a disparity between the terms “cultural difference” and “cultural diversity.” He suggests, Cultural diversity is the recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs; held in a time-frame of relativism it gives rise to liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity. Cultural diversity is also the presentation of a radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique of collective identity. (qtd. in Olson and Worsham 16)

Cultural diversity, or multi-culturalism, attempts to exoticize the Other, or worse, creates, as Henry Giroux has argued, an “iden-

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tity politics,” which is separatist, essentialist, and thereby ineffective, since it fails to unify positions. Conversely, cultural difference articulates cultural hybridity, which allows for enunciation of identity to occur, problematizing the division between past and present at the level of cultural representation. How then do scholars—and, in particular, composition scholars—articulate “cultural difference” within research and pedagogy without falling into the colonizing drift toward homogenization? The answer, perhaps, is best envisioned through a feminist framework, which, as Susan Jarratt suggests, is congruent with the disciplinary objectives of composition and, in fact, amplifies the emancipatory objectives of neocultural criticism. Jarratt contends that “composition studies speaks to feminist inquiry where it investigates gendered differences in language, teaching, and learning—the very places where subjects take shape in writing, reading, and teaching contexts” (“Feminism” 3). Feminist inquiry in composition offers the possibility of revisioning literacy narratives to include the historical, political, and social lives of women—narratives that have, until recently, been excluded from the framework of ethnographic research. The projects of feminism, as well as radical pedagogy and cultural studies, have invariably led to a revisioning of research methods in the field, particularly in regard to ethnographic research. Stephen North traces the inauguration of ethnographic research in the field of rhetoric and composition studies to the publication in 1981 of Kenneth Kantor, Dan Kirby, and Judith Goetz’s “Research in Context: Ethnographic Studies in English Education,” which was published in Research in the Teaching of English. Their essay addressed the uneasiness with conventional, positivistic-based methods and acknowledged the preferability of ethnographic research with its “descriptive, qualitative, naturalistic, and holistic approaches” (274). Since the publication of that article, ethnographic research has become a staple in composition inquiry. Cristina Kirklighter, Cloe Vincent, and Joseph Moxley comment in the introduction to Voices and Visions: Refiguring Ethnography in Composition, The research in composition studies is often and perhaps necessarily less comprehensive [than traditional positivistic empirical

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Emancipatory Movements in Composition research] with, for example, fewer researchers spending less time in the field. It is also, however, like much of the current research in anthropology and sociology, usually based on social epistemic and postpositivistic rather than positivistic assumptions about human behavior and potential. Our use of different methodologies reflects compositionists’ situatedness within a multivoiced and postmodern world. (viii)

Kirklighter and her co-editors note that between 1987 and 1995, ethnographic studies became the methodology of choice, and H. Eric Branscomb sees the increase of ethnographic methods, with its emphasis on narrative models, as conterminous with the rise of feminism and postmodernism in the academy. He also suggests that the “new polyvocality,” the empowerment of previously silenced practitioners, encourages teachers to tell their own stories (7). It is not surprising that like early cultural studies ethnographies, composition ethnographies (both autoethnographies and microethnographies) were also organized around notions of class. A prime example of such an autoethnographic text is Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary. Rose tells the story of growing up within the dark sphere of Los Angeles’ working-class neighborhoods. Deemed remedial and illiterate by the school system, Rose and several of his friends were placed on a vocational track, a place for “those who are just not making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected”—a political move which impaired his peers emotionally, intellectually, and socially throughout their lives (26). He writes, The people I grew up with were retired from jobs that rub away the heart or were working hard at jobs to keep their lives from caving in or were anchorless and in between jobs and spouses or were diving headlong into a barren tomorrow: junkies, alcoholics, and mean kids walking along Vermont looking to throw a punch. (18)

Rose managed to escape the vocational track with the encouragement of a dedicated teacher, but the experience haunted him and made him into an ardent educational activist. Similarly, Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence is organized, at least in part, around issues of class. A combination

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of literacy theories and autobiography, this book chronicles his life as a disenfranchised black boy struggling to acquire the academic skills necessary to succeed in college. Likewise, Ira Shor’s Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, Empowering Education, and When Students Have Power all employ ethnographic approaches and a self-reflexive narrative. Like Rose, Shor details the move from disempowered working-class youth to activist, composition scholar. Shor continues to write and critique class structures within academic life, and in a recent interview he returns to a topic he explored in Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, the aesthetics of university architecture and how notions of class get communicated via university surroundings: Aesthetic surroundings as the routines of your life allow people to grow up thinking they are the best, they deserve the best, they should expect the best. This is the developmental impact of aesthetics to pull people into differing expectations given the place they start in life. In this regard, I have always taught in the low-rent district of the academy. I can’t possibly rebuild the ugly functionalist surroundings, but I can use them as texts to teach about class inequality. (qtd. in Greenbaum, “Every Difference” 14)

By using a pedagogy that resists and critiques the assumptions of class, Shor creates a pedagogy of resistance. This “rhetoric of resistance” is a ubiquitous topoi in ethnographic research, congruous with the Marxist chassis of cultural studies. Henry Giroux views the infusion of cultural studies into the field of composition consistent with and complementary to the projects of radical pedagogy—always concerned with the variegations of class. Radical pedagogy seeks to address sites of resistance within the academy. Giroux has argued that cultural studies is important to critical educators because it provides the grounds for making a number of issues central to a radical theory of schooling. He suggests that cultural studies offers a basis for creating new forms of knowledge, helping students to recognize that knowledge is not bestowed, but created through ideology: “Knowledge and power are reconceptualized in this context by reasserting not merely the indeterminacy of language, but also the historical and social construction of

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knowledge itself” (“Resisting Difference” 201). Cultural studies encourages students and teachers to interrogate disciplinary boundaries, providing an invitation to look at culture as “contested terrain,” to embrace a macroscopic view of the margins and the center, especially concerning the subjects of class, race, and gender. He argues that cultural studies offers the opportunity to rethink the role of social activism, and he maintains that cultural studies provides the basis for understanding pedagogy as a form of cultural production rather than as the transmission of a particular skill or body of knowledge. Giroux suggests that cultural studies offers a terrain through which cultural borders can be refigured and through which the role of teachers as engaged critics can be “rethought within the parameters of a politics of resistance and possibility” (“Resisting Difference” 211). The reconstitution of cultural parameters can only be made possible, however, by shifting dominant narratives. Donna Haraway suggests that one way to engage in this cultural reconstitution is by “cyborg writing,” writing “that resists authoritative, phallogocentric writing practices, that foregrounds the writer’s own situatedness in history and in his or her writing practice, and makes visible the very ‘apparatus of the production of authority’ that all writers tend to submerge in their discourse” (Olson, “Writing” 45). In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway connects cyborg writing to literacy, and what she calls “freedom projects,” those projects which enable colonized people to seize the tools of literacy—reading and writing—to construct their own subjectivity. She maintains, Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups. . . . Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. (qtd. in Davis 587)

Haraway’s contribution to both cultural studies and composition is that she emphasizes not simply the importance of writing as a political act, but the relevance of storytelling—or, rather, the retelling of narratives with versions that “reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture” (qtd. in Davis 587). She is concerned with con-

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structing a feminist science wherein we learn to tell truly new stories, “reconfiguring the terms of that story—who are the actors, what are the plot structures, what kinds of action can be included in that story, how many layers of meanings are allowed to show” (Olson, “Writing” 57). This concept of cyborg writing is particularly salient for the ethnographer, especially those of us in rhetoric and composition who are continually interrogating the means by which race, gender, and class narratives are constructed. Haraway argues that these markers (gender, race, and class consciousness) are forced upon us by the experience of the social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Further, her suggestion that we seek the creation of new narratives is consistent with poststructuralist, feminist, neo-Marxist approaches to research. In fact, we cannot divorce our analysis of culture, class-consciousness, and ideology from the notion of mythology (and what are myths but culturally identifiable narratives?). Ronald Barthes has certainly made that point in Mythologies, where he argues that the function of mythology is to “immobilize the world.” He writes, Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types. Just as the cuttle fish squirts its ink in order to protect itself, it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixated this world into an object which can be for ever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight towards other forms of existence. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at last become computable: bourgeois morality will essentially be a weighing operation, the essences will be placed in scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam. For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world. . . . (155)

What mythology does, according to Barthes, is fix narratives, replicate stories (to borrow Haraway’s word) that invest in dominant class ideology. How then can the researcher move beyond mythology to create new stories, new narratives which enable the revisioning of cultural critique? Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner suggest that one of the ways in which we can work to create fresh narratives is by recognizing the power differentials between the informant and the community

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under investigation. This is especially true for compositionists using ethnographic research in their classrooms, where the asymmetrical power relationship between student and teacher is made apparent. They write, “For us, . . . critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice” (257). Critical ethnography continues to be concerned with “the politics of who is speaking about whom, to whom, where, when, and why, both in terms of how we represent experience and in terms of the lived, material consequences of such representations” (262). Further, the problematic of experience has to do with representation: “who represents it to who, to what ends, in what manner, and whether and how such representations change that experience” (258). Postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak calls the dual difficulties of representation, portrait and proxy—producing a portrait—and politically speaking for that person—acting as a proxy. Drawing on the work of James Clifford, Lu and Horner call attention to the narrative character of cultural representation. It is Clifford, they contend, who deconstructs the positivism underlying the representational authority of the researcher in traditional research. Clifford argues that, “Whatever else an ethnography does it translates experience into text” (qtd. in Horner and Lu 262). The ethnographer, then, writes that “experience” of another, reifies that representation, and then turns it into text, and by doing so, solidifies it, petrifies it, immobilizes meanings. While researchers, especially in rhetoric and composition, are becoming more aware of the ethical imperative to resist the desire to essentialize the community under scrutiny, Lu and Horner argue that such self-reflexivity is insufficient to truly address the issue of asymmetrical power relationships between the community and the researcher. They suggest that researchers engaging in critical work, “could contribute to undermining the hierarchical relations between not only researchers and teachers but also teachers and students, redefining the differences among these positions as fluid, and redeploying those differences for emancipatory aims” (275). The authors recognize the inherent ethical dilemma in conducting critical ethnographic research in composition, since teachers who seek to invest in emancipatory projects

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may often come from a leftist ideological position and sometimes seek to impose that perspective on their students—whether or not their students wish to subscribe to that ideological perspective. To reconcile this gap in student and teacher desires, Lu and Horner propose that we learn to make productive use of students’ lived experience and “involve the student as well as the teacher in politicizing the students’ experience” (267). In sum, critical ethnographers need not only to become more aware of the privileges, the economic and political power inherent in being an investigator, but also to recognize the emancipatory potential in interceding in the community under investigation. While there is no escaping the material, academic rewards offered by the publication of ethnographic research (tenure and promotion, for instance)—an obvious incentive for conducting empirical research in the first place—teacher-researchers can adopt an ethical position by recognizing the exploitative nature of scientific research. They can also share their experience with the community under investigation in order to help mediate the power differentials. Since Lu and Horner are specifically concerned with the composition classroom as a site of cultural investigation, they advise that the teacher-researcher assist students to understand their experience, and perhaps provide an opportunity for them to revise their literacy practices. I do not believe that the authors are suggesting privileging a “politics of experience,” to use Haraway’s phrase, which also risks closing off narrative possibilities. Haraway reminds us, “‘experience,’ like ‘consciousness,’ is an intentional construction” (qtd. in Olson, “Writing” 60). Instead, Lu and Horner propose that ethnographies embrace a more ethical, self-conscious stance that encourages informants to help decipher cultural ideologies. Paul Willis articulates a broadened perspective on this notion of experience and its relationship to cultural studies. He views cultural experience as shared material experience: “It does not proceed either from individual variation and proclivity, or from the specifications downwards of a gigantic social order. It comes from direct involvement with the everyday world. It is in relation to the commonplace, to trivia and the slow accumulation of concrete lessons that individuals in groups, come to recognize their subjectivity” (“Profane” 2).

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In fact, perhaps a more useful way of examining this revisioning of ethnographic practices as it relates to shared cultural experiences comes from Gesa Kirsch and Joy Ritchie. Like Lu and Horner, these authors seek to address what Adrienne Rich has called “a politics of location,” which recognizes that theorizing “begins with the material, not transcending the personal, but claiming it” (7). Kirsch and Ritchie examine what it means to bring a politics of location into composition research, arguing that it is insufficient to claim the personal (the “I” experience) as the political, since by doing so, researchers risk creating another set of “master narratives.” They propose [t]hat composition researchers theorize their locations by examining their experiences as reflections of ideology and culture, by reinterpreting their own experiences through the eyes of others, and by recognizing their own split selves, their multiple and often unknowable identities. Further, we propose changes in research practices, such as collaborating with participants in the development of research questions, the interpretation of data at both the descriptive and interpretive levels, and the writing of research reports. (8)

They encourage researchers to acknowledge the way race and class have structured their research, which invariably reinscribes their own ideological positions. A feminist politics of location requires that the teacherresearcher maintain a reciprocal relationship with members of the community. However, they note, often feminist research principles are at odds with ethnographic principles. Feminist research principles “urge researchers to listen to women’s voices, to cooperate with women in the telling of their stories, and to honor their trust” (17). Contrastingly, ethnographic research methods demand that researchers be “accurate, exhaustive, and frank as possible in the process of gathering and presenting information about other people and cultures” (17). How, then, can researchers reconcile the two principles, which at first glance seem incompatible? Kirsch and Ritchie suggest that it is only through establishing a collaborative relationship with the informants, inviting them to invest in the research project by formulating questions, aiding in interpretation, writing and contributing to the project itself, that researchers can conduct truly ethical research.

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The problem, however, is that researchers can never truly escape their position of power, and their ability to, perhaps inadvertently, manipulate information. However, Kirsch and Ritchie point out that scholars need to embrace contradictory positions, “view dissonances as opportunities to examine deeply held assumptions and to allow multiple voices to emerge in their research studies, an act that will require innovation in writing research reports” (19). This concept of embracing contradictory, dissonant positions is the bedrock of sophistic rhetoric, and is known as the rhetorical strategy of dissoi logoi—maintaining contradictory beliefs. Susan Jarratt has noted that sophistic rhetorical strategies “highlight the project of rewriting histories: a project central to both ecriture feminine and to the Sophists” (“The First” 36). The task of cultural studies and ethnographic research, as I’ve suggested, is to create narratives about given cultural practices, to attempt to understand the formulation of signs and, consequently, to invert these semiotic systems to resist dominant ideological claims.

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CHAPTER THREE

“Bitch” Pedagogy: Agonistic Discourse and the Politics of Resistance1

Connie Chung: What has Newt told you about President Clinton? Kit Gingrich: Nothing, and I can’t tell you what he said about Hillary. Connie Chung: You can’t? Kit Gingrich: I can’t. Connie Chung: Why don’t you just whisper it to me, just between you and me? Kit Gingrich: She’s a bitch. About the only thing he ever said about her. I think they had some meeting, you know, and she takes over. Connie Chung: She does? Kit Gingrich: Oh, yeah, but with Newty there, she can’t. —“Eye to Eye with Connie Chung,” transcript, online, Lexis, CBS, 5 Jan. 1995

Before Hillary Clinton stood-by-her-man through the Lewinsky spectacle, before she dreamed of being a New York senator, she 49

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held the distinctive and rather envious title of national überbitch. Not only, as Kit Gingrich lamented, did Hillary Clinton “take over” meetings, she also refused to be the kind of woman who stayed home and “baked chocolate chip cookies.”2 As I watched the now infamous Connie Chung interview with Kit Gingrich, I wondered why Ms. Chung had missed her journalistic opportunity to ask Kit a follow-up question to Newt’s assessment of Mrs. (Ms? Senator?) Clinton: what exactly makes Hillary a “bitch?” Was it simply because, as Kit suggests, she “takes over” meetings? And if so, by extension, are all women who speak their minds, assert positions, take control, and dare to assume authority, “bitches?” Is the assertion of female authority so offensive because it is—indeed—a cultural form of social resistance? As a woman and a teacher, I find the epithet disturbing, not because it offends my sense of propriety—let’s face it, most women are not strangers to the word—but because it is an invective designed, invented, not simply to denigrate (as all invectives are) but to corral, restrict, tame—silence. Typically, a woman who is labeled a bitch is a woman who is perceived to have overstepped her authority, and in composition studies, the question of women’s authority—as teachers, scholars, administrators, and public intellectuals within the field of English—has permeated the conversation in four prominent journals: College English, JAC, College Composition and Communication, and Rhetoric Review. And while considerable space has been devoted to exploring notions of authority and resistance in the composition classroom (for example, Penrose and Geisler; Tompkins; Mortensen and Kirsh; Ewald and Wallace), I do not believe that we have adequately addressed what I consider to be key issues in the discussion, and I would like to reframe the conversation around three questions: 1) What is the perception of female authority in the writing classroom?; 2) What implications does authority, or lack of it, have within the confines of the academy in general and in English departments in particular?; and 3) How can female instructors use their authority and argumentative strategies to create a socially conscientious pedagogy, a pedagogy of resistance, one that will help students not simply learn how to argue more persuasively, but that will assist in empowering women students outside the walls of the classroom?

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Given that the word bitch, as it is socially constructed, is often used to refer to a woman who uses power and authority with ruthless indiscretion, I will, for the purpose of this paper, appropriate the epithet, as African Americans have appropriated nigger (Marriott 1), and gays have used queer (Watney 23)—as a form of social resistance, an attempt to strip the word, demystify it, displace its hegemonic power by co-opting the term and claiming it as women’s own.3 I would like to speculate on approaches to composition pedagogy that address issues of authority and power—especially as it relates to argumentation—and develop what I am calling, rather tongue-in-cheek, “bitch pedagogy”—which I envision as an enhancement to the conglomeration of rhetorical pedagogical strategies articulated by Dale Bauer and Susan Jarratt (“Feminist Sophistics”), bell hooks (“Engaged Pedagogy”), and Dennis Lynch, Diana George, and Marilyn Cooper (“Moments of Argument”). Bauer and Jarratt coined the term “feminist sophistics” to refer to a rhetorical pedagogy that examines the role of rhetoric within a self-conscious historical context. They suggest that “[w]hile students are quick to notice bodies, they are less likely to attend to history. Central to our project, then, is the historical placement of the feminist rhetor and her students” (154). Feminist sophistics argues for a rhetoric that examines the conscious placement of “gendered” (as well as raced/classed/abled) bodies in the classroom. Such an approach calls for reflection on teacher authority and its connection to social responsibility. Likewise, hooks suggests that teachers should practice an “engaged pedagogy,” one that recognizes that we should not merely be concerned with imparting information to our students, but understand that we have an ethical imperative to enable their spiritual growth as well. She is not suggesting that we become our students’ gurus but, rather, that we take our roles as authority figures seriously, that we understand that when we educate, we educate the entire person—a mind, a body, and a spirit— and that we comprehend the scope and responsibility of engaging in such a task and rise to meet that challenge. Her “engaged pedagogy” is a pedagogy that is confrontational, honest, direct, and loving— always, always, loving. Above all, hooks claims, we need to view education for what it really is—“the practice of freedom”—and we need to demonstrate to students, through our actions, the power to resist the oppressive forces of racism, classism, and sexism (237).

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Similarly, Lynch, George, and Cooper argue that we need to conceive of a pedagogy that enables students to “participate in serious deliberations on issues that face all of us everyday” (63). Part of the difficulty in conceiving of such a pedagogical strategy is that we have, through good intentions, tended to foster a pedagogy of cooperation and collaboration. Compositionists like Patricia Bizzell, Susan Jarratt, Dale Bauer, James Berlin, Karen Fitts and Alan France have argued that this gentler approach to argumentation disempowers students. Our job is to prepare students for action within the confines of a democracy, and the art of confrontation and debate is a critical and necessary skill for them to acquire. Lynch, George, and Cooper argue for a reconceptualization of argument, one that Includes both confrontational and cooperative perspectives, a multifaceted process that includes moments of conflict and agonistic positioning as well as moments of understanding and communication. We want to see argument as agnostic inquiry or as confrontational cooperation, a process in which people struggle over interpretations together, deliberate on the nature of the issues that face them, and articulate and rearticulate their positions in history, culture, and circumstance. (63)

While the authors recognize the oxymoronic coupling of “confrontational” with “cooperation,” they contend that both are simultaneously possible, if one considers John Gage’s reconceptualization of rhetoric and advocacy. He argues that the primary function of argument is not to express some part of our inner selves, but to accomplish some task, to get something done. And the means by which we get things done in a democracy is through the ability to engage in effective argumentation. Therefore, we need to teach students not to fall into the trap of debating from a stable, unitary position, but instead help them seek to continually negotiate and rearticulate a position as they develop more knowledge about the subject—thus creating a dynamic approach to argumentation. All three of these rhetorical pedagogical practices—feminist sophistics, engaged pedagogy, and agonistic inquiry and confrontational cooperation—are concerned with creating a holistic approach to education, teaching students not only to become effective thinkers,

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writers, and speakers, but to use their knowledge to transform social inequities. Bitch pedagogy embraces these three approaches to rhetorical instruction but enhances the discussion to address the responsibility feminist instructors have in teaching and modeling agonistic discourse. I will suggest that we need to utilize the muscularity of argumentative discourse to empower all students, but particularly women students, who (as we know, and as I will further demonstrate) often lack the ability and confidence to assert positions; they are the primary beneficiaries of acquiring strategies of rhetorical combat, and I will suggest that such an understanding of rhetoric-asadvocacy will help them recognize that the instructor’s exertion of rhetorical authority, as well as their own, has ramifications beyond the narrow boundaries of the classroom. As studies from our sister field of rhetoric—speech communication—indicate, women who learn to resist the gendered prohibition against exhibiting argumentative behavior and who learn the techne of argumentation (what Protagoras referred to as logon agonas, contests in argumentation) are more likely to be perceived favorably, by both men and women. Women who engage in argumentative discourse are regarded as more persuasive, are more respected as organizational leaders, and are less likely to be physically abused by a partner (see Infante and Rancer). This chapter will examine the pedagogical implications of enhancing female authority through the engagement of agonistic discourse as a form of resistance to proscribed modes of female communication. First, I will examine the historical roots of the word bitch, and address how it stands as a contemporary metonymic representation of female authority; second, I will illustrate the political and economic ramifications of feminist authority in composition classrooms; third, I will explore the usefulness of argumentation theory and its application to composition; and fourth, I will suggest that there are several ways in which feminist instructors can reconstitute authority in the classroom. ALL SHE WANTS TO DO IS DANCE: AUTHORITY, POWER, AND THE CASE FOR BITCH PEDAGOGY

While bitch has been fashioned into a verb, synonymous with grousing, and can be directed in this context to both men and

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women (as in, “stop bitching”), it carries with it an obvious feminine undercurrent. The original Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word referred to the female of the genus Canis, but developed figuratively to express a male’s response to seeing the female dog in estrus (Kelly 2). It appears in print for the first time in a treatise on hunting, The Maistre of Game (c. 1410), which describes the dogs as, “As houndes ‘folowyn after a bicche or a brach. . . . As houndes do after a byches, when she is Joly” (qtd. in Kelly 2). Edward Kelly traces the word through the Renaissance period, noting Shakespeare’s use of the word in King Lear. Kent curses Oswald as “the son and heir of a mongrel bitch” (2.2.1076). In A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), Francis Grose labeled it the most “offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than whore” (qtd. in Gross 147). The etiology of the word is relevant, since we need to remember that it was male perception of the power of canine sexuality from which the term emerged, and it was not too far of a metaphorical stretch for men to equate the voraciousness of canine sexuality with a woman’s. But over the years the word has gone through a metamorphosis. In The Thesaurus of American Slang, bitch is defined as, “A woman one dislikes or disapproves of,” and for further elaboration, the reader should “see ball-buster.” n. Someone who saps or destroys masculinity. ball-wacker bitch nut-cruncher (Chapman 10).

The contemporary usage of the word no longer constrains it to the sexual realm (female promiscuity), but has been transformed connotatively as being oppositional to masculinity: “Female sensuality, even carnality, even infidelity, have been supplanted as what men primarily fear and despise in women. Judging by the contemporary colorations of the word bitch, what men primarily fear and despise in women is power” (Gross 151). Unlike the equivalent contemptuous term to describe a man, bastard, bitch is relational, seen in opposition to an Other—namely, a male adversary. In a phallocratic worldview, power is inherently hierarchical, and therefore female empow-

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erment can only be gained through emasculation—by being a nut-crunching, ball-wacking bitch. As teachers and scholars we need to understand how that generalized conception of female authority, as illegitimate and oppositional, is viewed in the writing class. Moreover, we should consider how women internalize cultural dictums that prohibit assertion and foster passivity which, according to Sandra Bartkey, result in “category confusion”: Feminist consciousness is often afflicted with category confusion, an inability to know how to classify things. For instance, is the timidity I display at departmental meetings merely my own idiosyncrasy and personal shortcoming, an effect of factors which went into the development of my personality uniquely, or is it a typically female trait, a shared inability to display aggression, even verbal aggression? (18)

The answer to Bartkey’s question may be found in the extensive studies in argumentation theory, which consistently maintain that there are marked gender differences in the display of assertion and argumentation. I would like, in the course of this chapter, to examine ways in which feminists can work toward closing that particular gender gap, and I will begin by tracing the evolution of feminist pedagogy in rhetoric and composition. I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND: FEMINIST PEDAGOGY AND THE ETHICS OF CARE

While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this trend toward feminizing the composition class arose, Elizabeth Flynn argues in her much-quoted article, “Composing as a Woman,” that compositionists have replace[d] the figure of the authoritative father with an image of a nurturing mother. Powerfully present in the work of the composition researchers and theorists is the ideal of a committed teacher concerned about the growth and maturity of her students, who provides feedback on ungraded drafts, reads journals, and attempts to tease out meaning from seeming incoherence in student language. (424)

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It is not surprising then that the field of composition would become more “feminized,” given that it is a field, Flynn notes, that has been shaped, primarily, by women—Janet Emig, Mina Shaughnessay, Ann Berthoff, Maxine Hairston, Shirley Heath, Nancy Sommers, Linda Flower, Andrea Lunsford, Sondra Perl, and Lisa Ede. As we know, three critical works by women researchers have been credited with influencing this trend toward feminization of the classroom—Mary Belenky’s et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering, and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice. All three have been used by scholars to suggest that women’s ways of relating to the world are different from men’s, and that this representation needs to be acknowledged and acted upon; scholars called for a restructuring of the phallocratic, oppressive classroom into a more nurturing one. Flynn stressed that teachers should encourage women students to be conscious of their experiences in the world and take note how their experience relates to the politics of gender. The initial pedagogical implication of feminist pedagogy was the practice of collaborative learning. Early advocates of feminist pedagogy considered collaborative writing a useful means to disrupt power relations in the classroom. As a pedagogical foundation, collaborative writing was, for the early advocates of feminist pedagogy, a kind of respite from the strictures of the traditional, phallogocentric, authoritarian approaches to teaching. Collaborative theorists pushed for this pedagogical approach, arguing that (1) traditional classroom methods have failed to teach students the ability to take a critical stance toward authority; (2) collaboration mirrors the social nature of language; and (3) empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of collaborative methods. The underlying assumption in collaborative theory is that each individual within the group has an equal opportunity to negotiate a position, but while there is an appearance of equity, the truth is, as David Smit notes, collaborative methods can in fact be construed as authoritarian and do not reflect conditions outside the parameters of the controlled environment of the classroom (46). Evelyn Ashton-Jones also confirms that marked “differences” made apparent in collaborative groups conceal “the extent in

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which collaborative learning is inscribed by this system and, thus, conceals its complicity in perpetuating it” (21). This concealment is particularly salient for women, who are often intimidated by the more vocal, assertive voices of males. Gender disparity in argumentation strategies immediately calls into question the ability of female students to actively assert position in a mixed-sex environment. Further, the female writing teacher who shares her authority in a collaborative environment does so at great risk: If she [the female writing teacher] chooses the non-directive approach and works to share authority, it might reinforce the men’s devaluation of her as an authority figure (and invite them to turn that power differential in their favor . . .) and it might send the women a signal that power and authority are inappropriate for women (even though the women might feel comfortable with a coequal teaching situation). (Payne 108–09)

It was this recognition—that women are already positioned at a political disadvantage within the dynamic structure of the writing classroom—that made feminist instructors reconsider the value of perpetuating a pedagogy based on essentialism, one that does not further enhance a female instructor’s authority nor enable women to become more competent at representing themselves in an agonistic environment. Within the last decade, however, feminist scholars have taken issue with what they perceive to be the dangers of essentialism. Alcoff attempts to articulate the two strains of ideology present in feminist theory: cultural feminism and poststructuralism (“Cultural Feminism”). In sum, cultural feminism argues that women have traditionally been described and evaluated by men, a group that has a contrasting set of interests from women, and the result has been a distortion of feminine characteristics. Cultural feminists contend that we need to “revision” what constitutes the category of “woman” through a female perspective. The poststructuralist response, which Alcoff calls “nominalism,” is the application of French poststructuralist theory. Feminist poststructuralists reject the possibility that the category of “woman” exists at all and insist that the category itself is a fiction. Further, when we engage in essentialism, we replicate misogynist structures, structures that seek to limit and define (and therefore, ultimately, oppress) women.

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Alcoff makes clear, however, that a nominalist position on subjectivity “has the deleterious effect of de-gendering our analysis, or in effect making gender invisible once again,” and she credits Teresa de Lauretis for posing a solution to this Manichean debate between cultural feminism and poststructuralism; it is de Lauretis’ analysis of the subjectivity of experience, rather than biology and history, that will shape and redefine feminist theory (“Cultural Feminism” 98). De Lauretis argues that it is “[t]hat experience, that complex of habits, dispositions, associations, perceptions, which engenders one as female” (182). If we accept de Lauretis’ position of the primacy of experience as the determinant for examining gender distinctions, then it is easy to see how women, accepting the role of nurturers, would find it difficult, if not impossible, to assert their own needs and desires. As the writing of Nel Noddings suggests, women have traditionally been charged with society’s emotional work. And while it is true that men too engage in emotional work, it has remained within the realm of “woman’s work” to manage others’ emotions. This social ethic of care has been transposed to the composition classroom, and, indeed, Flynn is correct in arguing that the nurturing mother figure has replaced the stern father—but when women tend to the emotional well-being of others, it has always been at their own expense; the feminine virtues of care and nurturance always empower others. Barbara Houston poses the rather astute question to this dilemma: “Can an ethics of care avoid self-sacrifice?” (qtd. in Noddings 171). The answer: Perhaps not. Bartkey seems to suggest the same when she argues that “women’s caregiving involves an unequal exchange in which one party to this exchange is disempowered by the particular inequalities that characterize the exchange itself” (117). Bartkey believes that women engage in this unequal exchange because we have fully assimilated male desires and are alienated from our own needs and desires. Further, she sees an analogue between female disempowerment with Marxist notions of the disempowerment of the wage worker, who is incapable of exercising autonomy, whose alienation is made manifest by “a prohibition on the development and exercise of capacities, the exercise of which is thought essential to a fully human existence” (117). On the surface, it seems wholly reasonable to argue that the teachers we remember fondly were undeniably nurturing and

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encouraging and that teachers of both genders have these magnanimous attributes in common. While this may be true, it is women who are more likely to teach first-year composition classes and who will teach without the benefit of job security. Theresa Enos, in a recent study of gender inequity in the academy, suggests that gender stratification is strongly apparent within rhetoric and composition, with men more likely to hold the rank of full professor and to have tenure. She found: Women are more likely to be assistant professors, lecturers, or instructors, even when these women are faculty members with doctorates. For example, at research and doctoral institutions, 47 percent of the men were full professors, but only 14 percent of the women. The associate professor rank split evenly, with 28 percent of each gender holding the rank of associate professor. Women are more likely to be assistant professors: only 20 percent of the men, but 42 percent of the women are assistant professors. Tenure is held by 68 percent of the men, but only 38 percent of the women. (7)

Enos discovered that women outnumber men in only one rank—lecturer—and she makes note that nearly 64 percent of the full-time lecturers are women (7). While the scope of this paper is not to address the issue of gender inequity in academia per se, I bring up this topic to foreground the discussion of authority and power in the classroom, since it is relevant to understand that if women occupy more tenuous positions within academic structures, their pedagogy is likely to reflect their economic uncertainty. Without the security of tenure or the support of their department, women are far more dependent upon positive teaching evaluations, and are probably less willing to challenge the curriculum or students’ values. How I am perceived when I assert a position, willingly engage in conflict, and take control, is filtered through socially constructed lenses of gender perception. And my students’ perception of me has a direct link to my effectiveness as a teacher. In fact, Koblitz’s 1993 study, “Bias and Other Factors in Student Rating,” supports this contention. He found, If female instructors want to obtain high student ratings, they must be not only highly competent with regard to factors indirectly related to teaching but also careful to act in accordance

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Emancipatory Movements in Composition with traditional sex-role expectations. In particular . . . male and female instructors will earn equal student ratings for equal professional work only if the women also displayed stereotypically feminine behavior. (qtd. in Schell 79)

Dale Bauer’s study of student evaluations of feminist teachers confirms Koblitz’s findings. Moreover, Bauer takes the observation a step further, arguing that women must not only display the stereotypical feminine behavior of nurturer, but their bodies must also conform to students’ expectations of femininity: “Many of the evaluations . . . address the literal embodiment of feminism: the site/sight of the teacher’s body. Whether addressing her clothes, her hair, or her body part, students often dissect the feminist professor, trying to find something somatic with which to contain her intellectual difference” (“Meanings” 66). Since teaching evaluations play a critical role in retention and tenure, feminist compositionists are placed in a precarious economic situation, since poor evaluations will naturally affect the advancement of their careers. Women who refuse to adopt the prescribed role of caregiver will face dire professional consequences that go “well beyond the classroom into the private spaces of women’s lives” (Lewis 174). By reinforcing the character traits of nurturance and empathy, academia constructs a hierarchy that does two things: it systematically positions women writing instructors at an economic and political disadvantage; and, by doing so, it fosters an atmosphere of compliance—women cannot truly teach resistance and agonistic discourse because we cannot, we dare not, display it, because modeling argumentative behavior, something students might perceive as “bitchy,” is, as Koblitz and Bauer suggest, fraught with job instability. I’d like to argue, however, that we have an ethical obligation to model and teach young women agonistic discourse, to teach them not to do what they are socially constructed to do—to yield, concede, make nice, smooth egos, avoid friction, take on the emotional work—but to push, assert, insist, remove emotionality and position themselves as authoritatively as possible in order to become critical thinkers, speakers, and writers, fully capable of meeting the demands of a democratic society. In an effort to counter the aims of cultural and institutional compliance, Nedra Reynolds offers a feminist approach to resisting such domination through the use of “interruption.” She suggests,

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Interruption is most effective in the spaces where physical presence heightens the effect—at conferences, in classrooms, around tables. Those of us who teach writing or women’s studies classes have the opportunity to discuss interruption directly—to share with students the research of linguistics, to analyze the possibilities for shifting power, and to encourage women and other students to interrupt the domination for students, both as a tactic of resistance and as overlapping support for a speaker. (71)

While I most assuredly agree with the theoretical value of Reynolds’ tactics, writing teachers need to be cognizant of the abundant research in argumentation theory that suggests that most young women are virtually incapable of enacting such strategies of interruption; they are incapable not because of some inherent intellectual or emotional flaw, but because they have not been trained in the art of argumentation and debate and have been acculturated into disbelieving their own ability to assert and maintain a position. Instead, they engage in what Bartkey calls “rituals of self-shaming”—speech that is marked by hesitation, false starts, questioning intonations, and excessive qualifiers (89). Interruption requires confidence, and, unfortunately, many women (faculty members included) seem not to have the same level of confidence and self-esteem as their male counterparts.4 The project of this chapter is to suggest that speech communication research in argumentation theory is applicable and useful to compositionists. Further, our own research in feminist theory and pedagogy can be used to augment the discussion and help us to reconfigure issues of authority and power in and outside the writing class. THE BITCH IS BACK: ARGUMENTATION AND THE FEAR OF ASSERTION

Susan Jarratt, one of composition and rhetoric’s more ardent advocates for the return of agonistic discourse, believes that feminist instructors, in an attempt to create a conflict-free environment, inadvertently do students a disservice, leaving them “insufficiently prepared to negotiate the oppressive discourses of racism, sexism, and classism surfacing in the composition classroom” (“Feminism and Composition” 106). Further, she calls the

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nurturing atmosphere of the collaborative classroom an “illusory fiction” that ignores real social divisions (110). Jarratt suggests that we can better prepare students to address these oppressive discourses by teaching the sophistic notion of eristic argumentation, dissoi logoi, and the ability to take on conflicting positions in an argument. Such practice in argumentation, Jarratt believes, enables students, particularly women, to resist dominating voices in the classroom. Study after study in argumentation theory supports Jarratt’s position. Skill at argumentation has been associated with several positive attributes, including greater communication competence, a capacity for increased learning, a stronger sense of social perspective-taking and higher self-esteem (Rancer, Whitecap, Kosberg and Avtgis 1). Argumentation and verbal aggression are often collapsed into a unitary category, but, in fact, they are distinctly different communication traits: “Argumentativeness involves attacking the positions that others take on given issues; verbal aggressiveness involves attacking the self-concepts of those others, rather than their positions” (Infante and Rancer 342–43). The locus of the attack is what distinguishes the two characteristics: verbal aggression is hostile and directed at an individual, argumentativeness is directed at a particular issue. There is strong evidence to suggest that men and women reveal significant differences in their abilities to engage in argumentation. Anne Maydan Nicotera and Andrew Rancer point out, While no biological differences were observed in argumentativeness, significant differences were found in argumentativeness when individuals were classified according to psychological gender orientation. Individuals (regardless of biological sex) classified as instrumental (i.e. masculine) were significantly higher in argumentativeness than those classified as expressive (i.e. feminine), androgynous, or undifferentiated. Persons with a “traditional masculine” psychological sex-role orientation exceeded all others in argumentativeness. (n. pag.)

Several prevailing explanations account for these gender differences in argumentation. For instance, Andrew Rancer and Robert Baukus’ study on sex and trait argumentativeness concluded that males and females do differ in their belief structures about argu-

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ing, with females believing that argumentation is a hostile and aggressive communication strategy designed to dominate and control others. Another explanation for these differences has to do with social conditioning. In general, men are encouraged to be more competitive, dominant, and aggressive than women, and such social factors get played out in communication interactions. Infante notes, “According to the cultural sex-role expectations models, arguing . . . is compatible with expectations for male behavior but incompatible with expectations for female behavior” (“Aggressiveness” 175). Women may simply be hesitant to be perceived as violating cultural norms of femininity. We already know that women are prone to maintaining silence in the classroom, and that those who have higher status, by virtue of their gender, race, occupation, or organizational rank, “make significantly more verbal contributions and consequently take up significantly more time talking” (James and Drakich 290). Teaching women to hone and cultivate argumentation strategies not only increases their ability to participate in the classroom, but also elevates their perceived stature, since women who engage in argumentation strategies are viewed as more competent (by both men and women) than their less assertive sisters (Lewittes and Lipsitz Bern 594). Similarly, Judith Anderson and her colleagues concluded, “both male and female observers perceive argumentative females as more highly credible than females who are low in argumentativeness” (59). Anderson et al. discovered that when female trainers were used as positive role models for displaying argumentative behavior, the women themselves were more likely to engage in what I had referred to earlier as rhetorical combat. Having a female instructor display behavior that is characteristically considered “unfeminine,” assertive, and risk-taking, and seeing the instructor showing a willingness to enter into conflict, the women in the group were more likely to mirror that assertive behavior. Further, and perhaps most interesting of all, Anderson’s research demonstrates that despite the cultural bias to the contrary, “argumentative women in leadership positions may be viewed as highly effective” (59). Consistently, studies in argumentation theory reveal that highly argumentative individuals are perceived more favorably when compared to individuals low in argumentativeness.5

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Nicotera and Rancer’s study of 174 undergraduates (ninety-one females, eighty-three males) at a Midwestern university supports previous findings that “[f]avorable perceptions of high argumentatives have been found to extend beyond any single argumentative episode, and tend to form a more lasting and global credibility perception” (13). They also noted that in an organizational context, superiors are viewed more favorably by subordinates when the superiors demonstrate high argumentative traits, and as a consequence, “females may not enjoy as favorable credibility perceptions due to their (general) lower motivation to argue.” Nicotera and Rancer conclude, “Since argumentativeness is associated with expectations for effective task behavior . . . women in organizations may be at a disadvantage” (14). However, there is a far more dangerous consequence for women than being at a professional disadvantage; women who do not know how to engage in effective argumentation often resort to verbal aggression to resolve conflict. The result is that verbal aggression is a catalyst to spousal violence (see Infante, Chandler, and Rudd), and I suspect other kinds of interpersonal violence as well. If we are to be engaged educators, as bell hooks urges us to be, then we have an ethical obligation to teach women and men how to resolve conflict without resorting to violence—an especially valuable lesson for men, since argumentation studies indicate that men score higher in verbal aggressiveness than women, and verbal aggression is often the precursor to physical abuse (Nicotera and Rancer). YOU OUGHTA KNOW: THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ASSERTION

What these studies suggest to me is that we need to reconfigure feminist pedagogical approaches by being aware that, 1) the character trait defined as “argumentativeness” as modeled by female instructors is viewed favorably by both men and women; 2) this modeling enables women students to assert more dominant positions inside the classroom, and 3) this ability to engage in effective argumentation empowers women and has significance beyond the boundaries of the classroom. The accumulation of research on argumentativeness conclusively indicates

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that skill in argumentative communication enhances persuasive outcomes. Those who are able to engage in effective argumentation strategies: • Are perceived as more credible persuaders • Use a greater diversity of influence strategies • Are less willing to use compliance-gaining strategies that create negative feelings in perceivers • Are more reluctant to use their power to force compliance • Encourage other people to express their views on controversial issues • Are more effective in upward influence situations • Are judged by their superiors as having more constructive persuasion styles • Are not easily provoked by obstinate opponents into using verbal aggression • Are judged as more competent persuaders • Are seen as leaders in group influence situations (Infante and Rancer 342–43) I have used the bitch figure as an obvious metaphor for the phallogocentric perception that female empowerment and authority are seen as inherently corrupt, but the fact is that unless we can help women resist the social stigma against employing argumentation strategies, they truly will never be able to have the same institutional footholds as men do. Bitch pedagogy takes into account an historical analysis of kairos, positionality, and I concur with James Laditka that our ability to be effective teachers lies in our willingness to “devise a college composition program, that will have ethical, epistemological, rhetorical, aesthetic and political dimensions” (368). As rhetoricians, we have the obligation to model advocacy— especially when we know that the risks are so great when we don’t. Karen Fitts and Alan France point out, “Advocacy itself is necessary to any dialogue—to any authentic, therefore rhetorical exchange” (“Advocacy” 14). But advocacy always entails a sense of authority, and as feminist writing teachers, we do not relinquish authority, but rather manage “the meanings it has for our students

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(and ourselves) in its classroom enactments” (LaDuc 163). One of the ways to “manage” authority in the classroom is to reconstitute it, and bitch pedagogy is the recognition that the authority the female writing instructor brings to her class—what she models, and what pedagogical practices she employs—aids in transforming student passivity. Ten years ago, Ellen Strenski recognized the enormous value in teaching students how to employ what she refers to as the “army” method of scholarly discourse: “Problems must be attacked, data mastered, evidence marshaled, theses presented and defended against disproof. The purpose is to persuade a skeptical, potentially hostile audience and thereby win” (138). I like Strenski’s military metaphor to express the rigorous, adversarial, muscular nature of scholarly investigation. For my own purposes, I would like to expand on her position by arguing that the appropriation of the robust character of what has traditionally been considered masculine discourse will not only fortify a woman’s ability to succeed in the academy by further enhancing her capability to argue from a position of strength and confidence, but will translate into other areas of interpersonal interaction. The acquisition of argumentative modes of discourse does not just assist female students in learning the craft of advocacy, it also empowers women faculty. Bartkey is not the only faculty member who wonders why she does not speak out at meetings; others—many other women—experience the same sense of selfdoubt in the academy and within other organizational structures. A telling commentary comes from a respondent to Enos’ study on gender roles in the academy. The woman writes: “Perhaps women don’t have the networks and interviewing savvy that men do, and we have to work on that. But it seems to me that women still are not taken very seriously at higher levels in the academic world” (67). In order to be “taken very seriously” by other scholars, Jane Tompkins confesses that when she was writing her book, West of Everything, she felt obligated to “become a man,” to adopt male modes of argumentation in order to succeed in the academy (qtd. in Olson, “Jane Tompkins” 14). If women academics—women who have been trained in articulating perspectives, in developing arguments, in defending positions—lack the confidence to assert their own authority,

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to speak with their own voices, how can we then expect to train other women, our students, to do so? It is the obligation of feminist instructors to oversee the emancipatory project of helping other women (as well as ourselves) learn how to speak out, how to have the ability, the rhetorical savvy and the confidence to assert positions—at our department meetings, with our partners, or to mechanics who want to overcharge us. We should resist the fear of assertion, and we should speak and teach others to do the same, despite the discomfort of hearing the ultimate epithet leveled against us, at any woman who dares to argue persuasively from a position of authority.

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CHAPTER FOUR

“Wat’cha Think? I Can’t Spell?”: Postcolonial Studies and the Narratives of Literacy

Out in the netherworld of advertising, they tell us we’re all Tiger Woods. He plays the emblematic white man’s game as good as anyone. Well, only one nigga on this planet gets to be that motherfucker, but we all swing the same cool, to whatever distant ends. —Donnell Alexander, “Cool Like Me”

Within the last five years, scholars in composition have come to question what Catherine Prendergast refers to as the “absent presence” of race in the conversation of literacy, and while teaching at the University of South Florida, I was forced to confront this presence when I experienced a heated racial encounter that irrevocably altered my perceptions of racial equity in the writing class and exposed my own prejudices and predispositions (36). I taught a course called Narration and Description, a beginning-level creative writing class. During each session, we would collectively peer edit two student-written stories. The class was required to read the student texts before class, critique them, and, with the guidance of four assigned student facilitators, discuss the texts with the author and the class. 69

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The story we critiqued that day was called “A Life in Harlem,” by an African-American student named James Jones (a pseudonym). Written in black, Southern dialect, in epistolary narration, it was the story of a young African-American woman, Kendalon, who leaves her family’s sharecropping farm in Athens, Georgia, to work in a New York furniture factory during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. The narration consisted of Kendalon’s letters to her sister, Mary, who remained in Athens. The story begins with Kendalon’s first letter home, which describes her transition to her life in Harlem. Kendalon begins: Hello, Mary, how have you been this past month? I am sorry that I didn’t get a chance to write you more these past two months, but I have been working very long hours at the furniture factory. The minutes seem to be as long as months, and the hours as long as years while I am at work. I reckon the time is as stiff as the bark of the old pecan tree. The tree that did not budge when last falls tornado’s harsh winds tore the outhouse off the ground and shattered it against the tree. I ain’t never gone get used to stitching up cloth for almost nine hours straight, but it’s hard to find a job that pays $2.40 an hour. (Jones 1)

As the story progresses, Kendalon’s exposure to the intellectual life and energy of Harlem begins a journey of ethnic self-discovery; she sees Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, and remarks that she “was so excited to see a play about black folks” (Jones 4). She has an opportunity to speak with the poet Claude McKay when he visits a local library, and she hears Marcus Garvey speak about returning home to the promised land of Africa. She writes to Mary, “He opened my eyes to a lot of things that I did not think about before” (Jones 5). The story ends with Kendalon’s letter home promising that she will try and get Mary a job in the factory so that the two women can finally be reunited. Like many of the students in the class, this was James’ first attempt at writing a short story, and it was remarkably thoughtful. His stylized effort at dialect and the pervasive use of metaphors and similes indicated that James was a literate writer, familiar with the tropes of narration. Additionally, his use of history as a narrative vehicle struck me as rather sophisticated for an undergraduate. His story had a few spelling errors, inadvertent

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tense shifts, and grammatical inconsistencies—not unlike most of the stories we had critiqued that semester. During the peer editing session, one of the student facilitators, Brian, a young, white man, asked James if the misspellings were “intentional.” In response, James glared at Brian, who sat across the room from him in our semicircle. He remained silent, refusing to answer Brian’s question. Brian, sensing that he had, in some way, offended James, went on to cite examples of the misspellings: “You spelled ‘ya’ll’ with two ‘L’s on this page but with one ‘L’ on the other.” In essence, Brian was asking James if the misspellings were an attempt on James’ part to construct black dialect, and, if so, he had used the vernacular misspellings haphazardly. In response, James locked his eyes with Brian and angrily replied, “Wat’cha think? I can’t spell?” Brian stammered, struggling to defend his position, but James repeated his phrase several times, “Wat’cha think? I can’t spell,” perhaps as a challenge to Brian to answer the question. Instantly, the class had divided along racial lines, with the African-American students erupting in shouts to Brian that he was racist and that his comment was inappropriate. Not surprisingly, the white students sided with Brian, arguing that his question was a legitimate one and that his job as editor and facilitator was to bring up all matters related to the text—including the more superficial, technical elements of writing, such as spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The same comments, they reasoned, would apply to any writer, regardless of race. Realizing that I had lost control of the class, I tried to placate James’ anger by suggesting that Brian’s question had to do with consistency rather than with the vernacular itself. But no matter how much I attempted to explicate Brian’s original comment, or my own position, the more volatile the discussion became. The palpable anger and resentment that permeated the classroom made it, it seemed to me at the time, impossible to continue with the editing session. Instead of attempting to confront, engage, or address the racial issue that had emerged from a seemingly innocuous peer discussion, I dismissed class early. At the next meeting, we did not discuss the paper, and James never returned to class, but he also did not officially drop the course. On the last day of class, a “friend” of his dropped off a slightly revised version of “A Life in Harlem.” I

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suppose James hoped he could somehow salvage a passing grade even though he had missed more than half the semester’s classes. I gave James an “F.” Before the end of the semester, when I collected my students’ journals, several African-American students expressed their dissatisfaction with my involvement in the discussion and insisted that I was complicit with the racism espoused by Brian. I was, at the time, deeply hurt and angered by the accusation. How, I wondered, could it possibly be racist to suggest that someone misspelled a word? More troubling, was it impossible for me, as a white person, to ever level intellectual criticism at African-American students and not have it reduced to a racist attack? Was I supposed to grade African-American students differently than I grade white students? Moreover, as these questions formed, I had to consider if I had, in fact, been more lenient with African-American students, more accepting of late papers, absences, language variations, than with my white students? And if so, why? I was certainly familiar with the scholarship of Lisa Delpit, bell hooks, AnnLouise Keating, Geneva Smitherman, Tom Fox, and many others in the field of composition who have made us aware of the conflicts of racial identity and language in connection to academic literacy. And so, in that context, I can understand exactly how the suggestion that a word was misspelled was construed as racist. However, what disturbed me then, and continues to confound me today, is that unlike other professions where the longer one does a task the greater one’s sense of proficiency, I find that the longer I teach writing, the more confused I am about what it is I am supposed to be accomplishing in the classroom. It was not a question about whether or not I acknowledged the Students’ Rights to Their Own Language,1 that was a given, since the story was written in black dialect (in fact, I would argue that it was what made the story so powerful in the first place). What occludes the issue is that even when students are intellectually free to use their home vernacular, they are still subject to unconscious racism—from other students, and, regrettably, from teachers like me. Further, what is my responsibility as a writing teacher? Peter Elbow succinctly addresses my discomfort: “On the one hand I feel an obligation not to force all my students to conform to the language and culture of mainstream English. . . . On the other

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hand, I feel an obligation to give all my students access to the written language of power and prestige” (359). How then to reconcile these two strivings? After the incident, I realized that it was my failing not to have drawn the class back into the discussion of race and to analyze what exactly happened in the classroom, and why, as a white, Jewish woman, I was afraid to confront black anger, and so, as ultimate authority figure, I had summarily dismissed it. But this analysis of the event is insufficient and does not explain why James had perceived the attack as racist in the first place, and why, at the time, I (and my white students) did not. I was smack in the middle of a “contact zone,” and despite the romanticized rhetoric of contact zones as an opportunity for teacher and students to interact and engage each other in a conversation about “difference” and “other,” and all the myriad terms we liberal academics bandy about, the racial conflict was frightening—both in terms of my ability to control the heated classroom environment and for my sense of failure, my inability to address what transpired that day. It was a short time later, when I read an article by Linda Alcoff called “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” that it occurred to me that what had happened that afternoon in my classroom had relatively little to do with spelling and much to do with the power to speak from a position of authority, a position which James and the other African-American students may have felt that they lacked. Alcoff reminds us, “Rituals of speaking are politically constituted by power relations of domination, exploitation, and subordination. Who is speaking, who is spoken of, and who listens is a result, as well as an act of political struggle” (293). It was with Alcoff’s insight, and my nascent familiarity with postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said, that the classroom incident began to become clearer. By recognizing the subject position of the speaker (in that case, the white student, Brian, and myself), and the sheer political act of peer critique, I suggest that the intensity of the racial rift had to do with the perception by my African-American students that Brian’s comment was an attempt to colonize their personal language—an effort, whether intentional or not, to diminish and denigrate their cultural, political, and social reality.

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Likewise, this incident must also be examined by looking at how “whiteness” functioned in the classroom that day—something I never originally considered.2 As Giroux recently noted, whiteness has become synonymous with domination and oppression, and the emerging scholarship on whiteness focuses “largely on the critical project of unveiling the rhetorical, political, cultural, and social mechanisms through which Whiteness is both invented and used to mask its power and privilege” (“Rewriting” 292). I share this incident as an invitation to examine the responsibilities students, teachers, and peers play in negotiating meaning in a text, as well as envisioning a means to construct a postcolonial pedagogy that takes into consideration Eurocentric rules of binary constructions and oppositions, and acknowledges that “all discourses—even those of freedom and liberation—carry with them ideological traces and selective interests” (McLauren 183). Further, the application of these interests in the classroom, as we encounter Others, is inevitably an ethical concern (Olson, “Encountering”), and one which postcolonial theory might be suited to address. THE POSTCOLONIAL BIND: WHO SPEAKS FOR THE SUBALTERN?

In analyzing the incident from the standpoint of postcolonialism, I am placed in an intellectually precarious position, facing the contradictory and paradoxical challenge of attempting to critique, define, evaluate, and ultimately “speak for” the AfricanAmerican students in my class, and by doing so, falling prey to the old colonizing sleight-of-hand of gazing outward at the Other as I inescapably replicate my own ideology. Molefi Kete Asante asserts, in The Afrocentric Idea, that this critical bind is unavoidable. He writes: If we examine the flow of rhetoric in Western thought, we will see that even when the rhetorician poses as a critic in the interests of the oppressed, that critic seems incapable of the divestment of Eurocentric views. Criticism becomes criticism within a European context, a sort of ruthless intellectual game in which scores are kept but the oppressed are not even represented. (167)

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While I do not dispute the validity of Asante’s position, I also find it harshly proscriptive and deterministic, never allowing the scholar an opportunity for engagement or reflection. It is this view of a limited voice, the inability to speak based on the restrictions of color or gender, which Spivak calls, rather derisively, “chromaticism” or “genitalism,” depending, of course, on the particular objection you are making toward speaking (61). Instead, I would like to offer a position that does not negate Asante’s argument, but instead renegotiates the position of authority. If the cultural critic’s magic trick, like the colonist’s, is the illusion of distance, the pretense of shifting the gaze, then the remedy is to show the trick from behind. Find where the magician stores the ace in the sleeve, the penny in the palm, or the rabbit under the table. Spivak believes that this repositioning of speaking is possible, saying that you will not speak in the same way as the Other, but rather through a “historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will see that you have earned the right to criticize, and you will be heard” (62). Part of the difficulty in articulating what went awry in the classroom that day involves the struggle over the definition of racial categories. As AnnLouise Keating warns, there is a danger in creating monolithic racial structures. She argues that theorists who attempt to deconstruct race often inadvertently reconstruct it by reinforcing the belief in permanent, separate racial categories. Although they emphasize the artificial, politically and economically motivated nature of all racial classifications, their continual analysis of racialized identities undercuts their belief that “race” is a constantly changing sociohistorical concept, not a biological fact. (902)

And so, even as I narrate James’ story, and attempt, in good faith, to locate myself within my own “racial” context, I can’t help but fall prey to Keating’s predictions—replicating and solidifying racial definitions and categories. However, postcolonial scholarship, like cultural studies and some composition theory, does attempt to interrogate the function of agency, history, and asymmetrical power relationships. Postcolonial studies traces a variety of colonial relationships, including cultural and aesthetic forms, as well as offering a critique of the

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institutionalization of the objective and scientific disciplines, with their claim of neutrality and “truth.” Postcolonial investigation reveals several things: First, [postcolonial theory] attempt[s] to show that particular discourses of knowledge or art are neither objective nor universal, but were constructed out of and in service of the project of colonial domination. Second, [it] seek[s] to reveal that these forms of representation are thus not specifically “European” in origin, but the creations of colonial interactions. (Buell 223)

If, then, the intellectual application of postcolonial scholarship is to unearth the ossified remains of colonial ideology, it seems wholly reasonable that such modes of inquiry will inevitably amplify our discussion in composition theory, where we continue to investigate constructions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Further, Gary Olson suggests that postcolonial theory is a useful tool for investigating how, despite our attempts to “empower” students, we invariably construct them as Other— whatever their ethnicity (“Encountering”). Additionally, as composition scholars have been positing for the last twenty years, it is the dominating nature of academic discourse that reinforces this marginalization, and it is evinced, as Homi Bhabha demonstrates, in the hegemonic structure of the English language itself (“In a Spirit”). As we have learned not only through postcolonial discourse but also through cultural criticism, the subjugation of indigenous language is a potent colonizing instrument of oppression. In fact, the debate regarding Ebonics and Students’ Right to Their Own Language (see Chapter Two for further discussion) addresses this issue head on. For instance, Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner, in discussing the Ann Arbor “Black English” court case, note that, “This case focused on the language barriers created by teachers’ unconscious negative attitudes toward students’ uses of African American English and the negative effects these attitudes had on student learning” (470). Ball and Lardner ultimately suggest that the approach to counteract such negativity is for teachers to be informed about diverse cultural patterns and rhetorical modes in order to assist students to become more literate writers, capable of critical thinking. However, in my classroom incident, being informed about

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diverse cultural patterns and rhetorical modes did not, I believe, prevent nor remedy the eruption. I am not negating Ball and Lardner’s suggestion that teachers need to broaden their understanding and familiarity with diverse rhetorics, but I am painfully cognizant that my awareness of rhetorical diversity did not enable me to confront the racial rift that erupted that day. Similarly to Ball and Lardner, Keith Gilyard and Elaine Richardson advocate the creation of alternative pedagogical environments for students who struggle with Standard English. At two different universities, they taught four basic writing classes from an Afrocentric perspective. Using fifty-two essays, the authors found that by making the African-American rhetorical tradition “the centerpiece of attempts to teach academic prose to African-American students, especially those characterized as basic writers, we believe that we increase the likelihood that they will develop into careful, competent, critical practitioners of the written word” (50). Gilyard and Richardson argue that by examining the patterns of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), teachers will be more aware of the rich rhetorical styles evident in AAVE discourse. But how does being aware of rhetorical difference in a traditional classroom (not one taught from an Afrocentric perspective) translate into a pedagogical space that creates a trusting, respectful environment that all students will honor? THE CONSTRUCTION OF LITERACY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

The incendiary response by the African-American students in the class—from what I perceived as a rather benign suggestion that a word was misspelled—leads consideration to Bhabha’s claim that the sentence itself “implies subjections, subordinations, [and] internal reactions” (“Postcolonial Authority” 57). James, it seems to me, was not merely angered by Brian’s suggestion that he essentially did not use language properly, but rather by Brian’s unintentional implication that James did not even possess the rudimentary tools of academic literacy to construct a narrative, and that a story written in his vernacular was immediately suspect. It is, in fact, this gentle mist of subtext that seeped into the classroom. The historical reality of African-American oppression—

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in all its sundry forms—merged in that moment, in what Bhabha has termed “enunciative agency,” the ability to articulate one’s subject position, not through the discourse of domination, but through the language of one’s culture, with its certain shifting of temporal and spatial boundaries. Enuciative agency is the relationship between temporality and meaning in the present utterance, in the performativity of a history of the present; in the political struggle around the “true.”. . . Our attention is occupied with the relationship of authority, which secure professional, political, and pedagogical status through the strategy of speaking in a particular time and from a specific space. (“Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt” 57)

I should note that, indeed, this incident did take place “in a particular time and from a specific space”—and that was that it came upon the heels of the Rodney King verdict that sparked rioting in South Central Los Angeles. Would there have been racial tension without this historical/political/social encounter? I cannot say, but the classroom atmosphere, combining my fear of racial confrontation and their anger at social injustice, seems, in hindsight, to have been a microcosm for the larger political environment outside the walls of the classroom. The very inscription of social power in the utterance of The Word is what Terry Eagleton has traced to lexical, syntactic, and grammatical structures. So, for example, the use of an abstract noun, or switching from active to passive voice, may “serve to obscure the concrete agency of a social event in ways convenient for ruling ideological interests” (196). This view is particularly applicable to the African-American community, who, as Asante notes, has faced the debilitating effects that Euro-American cultural ideology has played on its culture—in particular, teachers’ perceptions that Black students fail to achieve academic success, which Asante claims is an inescapable adaptation to white racism (McLauren 174). Moreover, Tom Fox suggests that schools’ failure to educate black students has to do with a “complex array of ‘forces’ that discourage success for African American students: testing, social lives, housing concerns, job availability, classroom discourse, all the points of contact between an African American

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student and the institutions and cultures shaped by white supremacy” (“Race” 77). Keith Gilyard concurs in his analysis of the John Singleton film Higher Learning, that “racism is part of the basic fiber of the university . . .” (“Higher Learning” 46). One need only teach a first-year composition class to recognize the worrisome increase in the backlash against civil rights, affirmative action, and the emerging “white” movement, comprised not simply of renegade militia groups, skinheads, or neo-nazis, but—even more frightening—of “regular” youth who see themselves assailed by the so-called privileges given to minority cultures. In fact, in the last year or so I have received several anti-affirmativeaction essays written by African-American students who contend that affirmative action is a racist policy. What accounts for this trend? Why are contemporary students more likely to be less politically progressive than their parents? Giroux surmises that this backlash may be attributed to the change of demographics in urban spaces and to the prominence of hip-hop culture on MTV, sitcoms, films, and the emergence of Black public intellectuals in the media. He suggests, “White youth increasingly become more conscious of both the ways in which subordinate others struggle to represent themselves and the necessity to define themselves in racial terms that take into account their Whiteness as a marker of identity, a point of cultural attachment and historical location” (“Rewriting” 293–94). And so, according to Giroux, whiteness has become a privileged “signifer of racial identity” (294). While, perhaps, hip-hop youth culture is cool, these students have come to recognize that “whiteness”—with all its attendant privileges— is even cooler. Because white racism functions as a dominating ideological influence, African-Americans have historically been unable to accurately reflect their own cultural representation, even at the very core of language, and while this observation is hardly startling, Bhabha has analyzed this representative split in traditionally marginalized groups as the disparity between “cultural diversity” and “cultural differences.” Cultural diversity is “culture as an object of empirical knowledge—whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of cultural as . . . adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification” (“Cultural” 206). Simply, cultural diversity, or multi-culturalism,

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attempts to exoticize the Other, or worse, creates, as Giroux has argued, an “identity politics,” which is separatist, essentialist, and thereby ineffective, since it fails to unify positions, and its unenviable demise is de-politicalization rather than social action. Conversely, cultural difference articulates cultural hybridity, which allows for enunciation of identity to occur, problematizing the division between past and present at the level of cultural representation. Postcolonial theory allows for a reconstitution of cultural representation, mediated through what Bhabha refers to as a “time lag.” It is the interruptive overlap between symbol and sign, between synchronicity and caesura or seizure (not diachronicity). He writes: In each symbolic structure of a “homogeneous empty time” there is the repetition of the iterative stoppage or caesura of the sign which is not so much arbitrary as “interruptive,” not so much a closure as a liminal interrogation “without” words of the culturally given, traditional boundaries of knowledge. (“Postcolonial Authority” 59)

This interruption, or caesura of the ideological signs which are used to construct identity, enables a shifting of perspectives, allowing, ultimately, for intellectual freedom and political empowerment. It is this “time-lag,” this break in the temporal representation, which allows for the process of agency “both as a historical development and as the narrative agency of historical discourse” (Bhabha, “In a Spirit” 330). Further, this sign shifting—inversions and subversions of dominating influences—is strategically employed as a means by subaltern groups to gain power. This linguistic tactical maneuvering has been particularly useful, as Henry Louis Gates makes clear, in the African-American community. SHIFTING THE SIGN

“A Life in Harlem” was indeed a subaltern text, both in terms of its stylized use of black vernacular and in its subject of a young woman (interestingly enough) confronting racism while she gains an emerging sense of black consciousness and pride. The story is profoundly paradigmatic of what Gates has analyzed as being a

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staple of African-American folklore and literature—the Monkey tales (see Chapter Two for further discussion), wherein the Monkey speaks figuratively and the Lion literally, and the Lion cannot comprehend the complexity of the discourse, the “double-voiced” utterance. James’ literary protagonist, Kendalon, uses such signifyin(g) to feign ignorance. She writes, “I sure do get a kick of pretending to be ignorant when I am around white folks. White folks are sure easily fooled, because they assume color folk can’t read no way. I reckon they would be pretty offended if they knew I could read” (Jones 4). By seizing the apparatus of value-coding— in this instance, proscribed forms of literacy—Kendalon has succeeded in shifting the agonistic terrain. The problem with disrupting dominant discourse is that, as bell hooks notes, the common language is “rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge” (“Yearning” 25). If Kendalon is subverting the dominate white culture by inverting the sign—i.e. blacks can’t read, she can read, she pretends she can’t read—then likewise, James has done the same. It is this “sly civility” that Bhabha claims characterizes subaltern discourse: the pretense of compliance. “Wat’cha think? I can’t spell?” was James’ challenge to Brian, to me, and to the predominantly white, academic, literate structure I represent. For that moment in my class, James was transformed into his literary character, Kendalon; blacks can’t spell, James can spell, white culture believes that James can’t spell, and the colonist desire to replicate its signs, create literacy (or lack of it) in its own narcissistic image, has once again been reinforced. But in that volatile instant, James wrenched me away from the mirror, forcing me to divert my gaze from the lure of my own reflection.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Emancipatory Politics and Composition: The Pedagogy of Liberatory Writing Instruction

If there’s one thing I hate discussing, it’s narcissism and all that gender shit. It seems every semester I have a class where we get into this big argument about this crap, arguing’s not going to change it, feminists should just shave their legs and pits and get over it. Sorry, I just really detest this subject. —Anonymous Student, Expository Writing Class, Listserv, 1998

The liberatory pedagogies of neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies have indelibly altered the composition classroom, creating a theoretical and pedagogical environment that undeniably promulgates a leftist political agenda. Those of us who are trained in rhetoric and composition have been taught to view the teaching of writing as a political act, an opportunity to teach students how to first “see” the world, next encourage them to consider various epistemological assumptions, and then have them research and write from this pluralistic, liberal perspective. The mission of rhetoric and composition, like 83

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other disciplines in the humanities, is to teach students a secular, humanistic perspective, and it seems that there are three distinct ideological assumptions disseminated in the theory and pedagogy of rhetoric and composition: 1. We must instruct students how to think critically, directing them in their ability to discern and recognize the dominant ideological forces in place which naturalize their (and our) understanding of the world. The goal is to make them conscious, if they are not already, that class, race, and gender do matter, and in fact inform and construct the way we think about literature and writing. Furthermore, writing instruction becomes a process of disruption, subverting ideological systems, all in an attempt to help students become aware that knowledge and the acquisition of literacy is a political act. 2. Such consciousness will invariably lead to a praxis of social action, where students will view themselves as agents for social change and attempt to redress social inequity outside the boundaries of the classroom. 3. Education must always have, at its core, an ethical dimension, taking into account both students’ lives and their literacy practices. While it is evident that all three of these assumptions are based on the premise of emancipation, what I would like to examine in this closing chapter is how this ideological perspective of emancipation has become the trope of choice for writing instruction, and I will attempt to assess if this position is truly useful in teaching rhetoric and composition. Moreover, composition and rhetoric’s absorption of the four emanicipatory movements that I explore in this book makes clear that the goals of writing instruction are designed not merely to inform, but also to liberate. But the obvious question, and the one that I would like to more fully explore, is whom are we liberating and from what? RADICAL PEDAGOGY: EXPORTING FREIRE

Radical pedagogy, as noted in Chapter Two, stems from the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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has been the impetus for inclusion of critical pedagogical practices in composition classrooms. In the Afterword of Ira Shor’s Freire for the Classroom, Freire suggests, It is my basic conviction that a teacher must be fully cognizant of the political nature of his/her practice and assume responsibility for this rather than denying it. . . . [A] progressive position requires democratic practice where authority never becomes authoritarianism, and where authority is never so reduced that it disappears in a climate of irresponsibility and license. (173)

It was Freire’s contention that those who are illiterate must indeed learn how to read and write and gain basic literacy skills, but they must also be taught to have a critical understanding of politics. For progressive teachers, pedagogy implies that the learners enter into the discourse of the teacher. Freire believed that education manifests itself into two extremes—as liberating or domesticating—and in order for education to be liberating it must be critical and reflexive. Freire’s pedagogy seemed particularly well suited for liberal education. And in the late 1970s, when collaborative writing and peer tutoring began making inroads in the composition classroom, Ira Shor, drawing from Freire’s work, argued that teachers should examine the way in which language can either assist or impede what Freire called the “communion” between teacher and student. Education, when not practiced through a critical position, becomes a form of violence.1 Shor has noted that there are many ways in which violence is perpetrated in a classroom environment—ranging from the proscenium design of the classroom (which silently confers authority on the teacher), to the teacher’s advanced discourse skills (which can be intentionally used to dominate and control students), to the books the teacher selects. He writes, “Weapons available to the teacher include the special terminology of the discipline, the use of obscurely conceptual language, and the sophisticated wording based in ridicule, sarcasm, irony, parody, and innuendo” (Critical 30). Shor has argued that the critical classroom can promote a democratic future by focusing on “Utopian” thought, seeing reality as it should be in relationship to how it really is.2

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There are critics, however, who have questioned the legitimacy of incorporating Freire’s liberatory agenda into American universities and who have argued that Freirean pedagogy is neither applicable nor even desirable for American students. Critics such as Victor Villaneuva and Henry Giroux have denounced the appropriation of Freirean pedagogy within academic environments, arguing that American Freireistas (Villaneuva’s term) not only dilute and often misconstrue Freire’s work, but have also commodified radical pedagogy for their own purposes. As Villaneuva notes, Freire’s work centered on the idea of counterhegemony, criticizing social and political institutions that invest in perpetuating and maintaining class stratification and oppression. But Villaneuva argues that, Here, in the American college composition classroom, where our interchanges with students are relatively short—four or five hours a week, ten to fifteen weeks, perhaps as long as a year or two; here, counterhegemony cannot be easily sold. (626)

Villaneuva is not suggesting that compositionists dismiss the pedagogical value of critique; rather, his concern is for the way in which Freire’s work has been contaminated by well-meaning academics who fail to recognize that most American students— including those who are traditionally marginalized—are so invested in the mythos of America, the individual as a vehicle for success or failure, the narrative of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, that is it nearly foolhardy to approach critical pedagogy without first recognizing that the audience one is preaching to may not be receptive to the message; let us not forget that Freire’s peasants had far more at stake than a mere grade. As Villaneuva sees it, the function of an American Freireista is to provide a way for students to discover traditions that are in need of change—not simply economic and political institutions, but cultural and social ones as well. Likewise, Giroux argues that what has been lost in the North American appropriation of Freire’s work is the radical nature of its theory and practice, primarily as an anti-colonial and postcolonial discourse. Put simply, postcolonial theory involves discussion about the experience of subjugation, migration, slavery, resistance, and representation, and how oppressed people speak

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and write under the reign of oppression. It is Giroux’s contention that Freire’s work must be read as a postcolonial text and that North Americans must engage in a radical form of “border crossing” to reconstruct Freire’s work in North American universities. Specifically, this means that Western academics need to make problematic a politics of location and must attempt to critique their own privilege, power, and influence and consider how this position constructs a reading of Freire.3 For Giroux, becoming a border crosser suggests that one has to attempt to reinvent oneself as a kind of itinerant—an attempt, somehow, to see oneself as Freire saw himself, as a stranger in a strange land, an exile for whom being home is often tantamount to being “homeless” and for whom his own identity and the identities of others are viewed as sites of struggle over the politics of representation, the exercise of power, and the function of social memory. (“Paulo Freire” 194–95)

For Giroux, “home” refers to those boundaries (cultural, social, and political) that demarcate spaces of comfort and security. In the metaphor of exile, Giroux suggests that until one situates oneself outside comfortable boundaries, one can never truly gain the perspective of difference. It is this plurality of the exile’s vision, of “seeing the entire world as a foreign land,” that will enable true enactment of change, and in reference to this article, allow North American academics to border-cross into the spaces of resistance (Said 366). Because Freire viewed pedagogy as an act of cultural practice, not limited or confined to school systems but branching out to all cultural spheres, North American academics must seek to transform themselves and their students into cultural workers, able to move within various borders as a means to enact social change. However, according to Giroux, North American intellectuals need to resist recuperating Freire’s work as an academic commodity. Instead, he suggests we should seek to demystify forms of privilege, and attempt to unlearn one’s own privilege—a grand, if not wholly unattainable, challenge. By reconsidering critical pedagogy as a postcolonial discourse, Giroux suggests that we need to be suspicious of academics who “talk about the disappearance of the speaking subject from within

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institutions of privilege and power” (“Paulo Freire” 201). Despite Giroux’s cautionary admonishments, those of us who are being trained to teach rhetoric and composition must actively consider how we will go about the daily task of teaching writing and critical thinking. Moreover, those of us who take critical pedagogy seriously, who see it as the “rhetoric of possibility” and emancipation, must consider the ethics of imposing such an unabashedly liberal agenda on students in the classroom. How do we balance the ardor and passion of transformative pedagogy with the rights, desires, and immediate academic needs of our students? I have struggled to find an answer to these questions, and in my attempt to understand Freire and the myriad ways his pedagogy has been interpreted and applied to subjects as varied as film studies and professional writing, I adapted an Expository Writing class to reflect the theoretical ideals embodied by the four emancipatory movements discussed in this book.4

EXPOSITORY WRITING: SERVICE-LEARNING AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

At the University of South Florida, a public university serving 35,000 students, located in Tampa, Expository Writing (English 3310) is an undergraduate course designed for English majors enrolled in the Professional and Technical Writing option, or for students looking for an advanced writing course. The university catalog describes the class as a course “teaching the techniques for writing effective prose, excluding fiction.” For the past several years, the required text for the course was Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, edited by Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. While that book is adequate for examining the myriad uses of “expository” writing in the fields of science, technology, and literature, it does not sufficiently consider what has become a ubiquitous topic of discussion in the field of rhetoric and composition: how the construction of social identity—class, race, and gender—impinge upon and influence the ways in which we think and write, not only about ourselves, but about others as well. Also, as noted in Chapter Two, composition studies is becoming further imbricated with the field of cultural studies, whose intel-

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lectual project is to examine the saturation and production of dominant ideological influences as they are filtered through the media—another area which is not fully explored in Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. With the permission of the Associate Chair, I discarded the Behrens and Rosen text and compiled my own reading packet, which was designed not simply to encourage students to interrogate the dominant ideological assumptions of race, gender, and class, but also invited them to wade through the strong currents of cultural forces—music, fashion, and the media. The readings, for most undergraduates, were highly theoretical and quite rigorous (see Appendix for course bibliography). However, they provided a strong informative foundation for the eventual production of the students’ original ethnographic research projects. The packet was organized into five general sections, and the class was structured around each of the five topics: Ethnographic Research Methods, Cultural Spectacle, Class, Gender, and Race. While the term “expository” is ambiguous enough to comprise a variety of writing assignments, I believe that ethnographic research permitted the students to embrace a multiplicity of rhetorical possibilities. Because ethnographies can be written “in many styles and in many formats” (Fetterman 22), students are given the opportunity to see themselves serving in various capacities: as anthropologists, critics, journalists, and, if done well, storytellers. Further, since the project of the class, as I envisioned it, was to interrogate the ways ideas gain dominance and become translated through cultural uses of style, ethnographic investigation allowed students to enter into communities as participantobservers, enabling them to study a group’s structure, style, rituals, and symbols.5 Ethnographic research methods permitted them the opportunity to enter into a community and discover for themselves the ways in which other groups construct identity, politics, and social relations. I had two objectives in mind when I adapted this course. First, I wanted to offer a service-learning class where students would have an opportunity to enter into local communities. Within the last decade or so, scholars like Bruce Herzberg, Paul Heilker, and Eli Goldblatt have created service-learning programs that have enabled students to make a transition “from the personal and

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intersubjective toward analyses of larger political, ideological, and institutional forces and processes that shape the social conditions governing personal experience and interaction” (AdlerKassner, Crooks, and Walters 5). Likewise, I wanted to devise a course that employed the pedagogy of service-learning with the applied research of ethnographic investigation, since my experience in ethnographic research convinced me of the pedagogical value in conducting original research.6 For most students, academic writing consists of recycling secondary source material, and students are trained to view themselves, their lives, their experiences, their knowledge(s) as subordinate to the experts—the “scholars” in the field. Ethnographic research allows students to have a writing project that relies on their literacies, their abilities to observe, take notes, listen, and then try to cogently place their data into a cultural framework. Second, I sought to offer a class that examined various readings and mediums of cultural analysis, hoping that the students would connect the readings to their research and not view the reading assignments as “school work” but as “research work,” designed to contribute to their ethnographic investigations. The reading selections covered a broad range of topics but were thematically tied to race, class, and gender. In particular, I wanted them to examine the myriad ways in which we (1) construct oppositional identity, and consider that such binary constructions of Us and Other are inherently pleasurable and are designed to serve those who are in a more politically and socially dominant position, and (2) create objectification of Otherness, which is almost always connected to capital and commodification. Originally, I conceived of the ethnographic project as complementing the overarching framework of the class, which was not simply to interrogate class, race, and gender constructions, but to actively resist the confinements of such narrow categorizations; to borrow Giroux’s phrasing, I wanted students to “border-cross” and view, for themselves, how members of their community create meaning, and how the theoretical readings we discuss in class tie into the lives of those in the community. The means toward student social activism is their participation in an organization which offers services to the economically, politically, and socially disenfranchised.

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On the first day of classes, I gave the students a handout from Hillsborough County Social Services, which lists local organizations that serve those in need (runaway teenagers, abused women, and the homeless) in the Tampa Bay community. The purpose of this jostle towards community activism was twofold: first, I believe that it empowers students to conceive of themselves as agents of social change, and it allows them to take the theoretical focus of the class and apply it to actual, real-world settings. Second, students, by volunteering at a community organization, have an opportunity to place their involvement on their résumés, making their project not only worthwhile from an intellectual standpoint, but from a practical one as well. By interrogating the cultural influences which construct our notions of race, gender, and class, students gain a vivid understanding of what Ferdinand de Saussure has referred to as the arbitrary nature of the sign, that our values and aesthetic appreciations are not innate, not essential, but structured along and within adherence to some dominant ideological system. Further, by having students conduct original ethnographic research and enter communities as participant-observers, they gain the necessary experience of defamiliarization—the experience of Edward Said’s “exile” and Giroux’s “homeless”—a critical perspective if students are to learn to investigate the world around them. CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

At the outset of the class, almost all of the students were unfamiliar with ethnographic research (most had never heard the word before), and so we spent the first week of the semester discussing approaches to conducting research. Many students found the idea of going into an unknown community terrifying, and so, as an attempt to allay their fears, we discussed the technicalities of conducting research: interviewing techniques, using equipment such as tape and video recorders, keeping a detailed, accurate, field notebook, and accumulating various “artifacts” from the community. Most students, once they recognized that the task of researching a community was within their grasp, that they had the skills and the knowledge to conduct original research, got

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over the initial fear of researching an unfamiliar community. Further, many local organizations, including Big Brothers and Big Sisters, The Spring (an abused women’s shelter), and Joshua House (a shelter for runaway and abused children), among others, require volunteers to undergo several weeks of specialized training in order to better serve the unique needs of their community. These training sessions also seem to alleviate the initial fear of entering an unfamiliar environment. The reading selections were also designed to support the students’ practical research experience. Of particular use to students was our discussion of the cultural construction of the “freak show,” especially as it was conceived and marketed during the nineteenth and twentieth century, and as it conformed to the dictates of capitalism. Previously known as sideshows, dime-store museums, and the more renowned Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, the freak show relied not simply on showcasing humans with physical abnormalities, but also on creating narratives about the exotic Others, usually conjoined, not surprisingly, to “blackness.” And so, for instance, a black man from New Jersey could be transformed into The Wild Man from Borneo, whose “savage” ways (often such modes of presentation would involve the “savage” eating the head of a live chicken or a snake) would serve the dual purpose of horrifying the predominantly white audiences, and at the same time reinforcing their sense of moral and cultural superiority. To contribute to our discussion, I showed Tod Browning’s classic 1932 film, Freaks. Browning used actual circus “freaks” to make his film, and so the audience is acquainted with Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet Hilton; Prince Randi, the Hindu Living Torso; Olga Roderick, the Bearded Lady; Slitzie the Pinhead; Johnny Eck, the Boy with Half a Torso; and Joseph/Josephine, the Half Woman/Half Man, who play themselves within a flimsy plot of a “normal” tightrope-walking femme fatale who exploits the freaks around her.7 We read Andrea Dennet’s essay, “The Dime Museum Freak Show Reconfigured as Talk Show,” which contemporizes the subject of freakery and illustrates to the students how even though the freak show is no longer part of the British and American popular culture landscape, we continue to manufacture Otherness, freakishness, through the media; in particular, through the medium of

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talk shows, which highlight human tragedy and physical abnormalities (fat women, short men, large breasted women, etc.). To complement Dennet’s essay, I showed an episode of Jerry Springer, which involved the crisis of a love triangle. Not only does the talk show serve the same perverse yet pleasurable function as the freak show—the ability to look at another’s tragedy and quietly murmur to yourself, “Thank God that’s not me”—but the programs are also carefully designed to depict those who are ostensibly from a lower economic class, a fact made evident by the guests’ dress and vernacular, another ploy to establish a binary between the audience and the guests. While there are never overt references to class stratification, this dichotomy is made evident when, for example, an audience member on the Jerry Springer episode I recorded asks the guests on the show, “I want to know what trailer park you all come from!” The producers of the show are intentionally exploiting class distinctions as a means to establish a fabricated agonistic terrain between the moral superiority of the show’s audience and its guests. Our cultural spectacle readings also examine the pornographic industry (Kipnis; Ross), a mass, capitalistic enterprise invested in the production of pleasure—specifically, male pleasure, with men gazing at the constructions of female sexuality— that (1) exploits and commodifies female sexuality (we acknowledge, but don’t fully address the ramifications of homosexual pornography, which exploits and commodifies male sexuality), and (2) radically attempts, particularly in the case of Hustler magazine, to invert, in Bahktinian carnivalesque fashion, societal rules of decorum and political correctness. Our discussion moved to our readings on class, beginning with bell hooks’ “Confronting Class in the Classroom.” Hooks’ essay makes evident to the students that “class” distinctions have little to do with money, but with social standing. How one interacts in the world—what one feels entitled to—is tied directly to one’s class roots. Next, we read Julia Stein’s working-class poem of labor organization, “Downtown Women,” and Todd Erkel’s discussion of returning to his working-class roots. I finished our discussion of class by showing Michael Moore’s hilarious documentary on the closing of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, Roger and Me. I then asked the students to write their

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own working-class narratives, either employing a more analytical tone, as hooks and Erkel do, or, if they preferred, modeling the poetry of Julia Stein’s “Downtown Women.” The purpose of this assignment was to make students aware, as bell hooks notes, that class is not simply a question of money, but “that it shape[s] values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received” (178). The stories the students told were magnificently moving, vivid, honest, and revealing. The Sandra Harding essay we read earlier in the semester, “Starting Thought From Women’s Lives: Eight Resources for Maximizing Objectivity,” seemed to prepare them for the task of storytelling. Harding’s essay advises listening to voices that have previously been silenced, and by exploring untold narratives, researchers gain more objective views of reality, since truths change within the matrix of the storyteller. Upon reflection, I was stunned that the class narratives of the female students almost exclusively conjoined class with gender issues—women as housewives, secretaries, factory workers, single parents, wives of alcoholics and abusers. While space considerations will not permit me to present all of the students’ class narratives, I think it is relevant to listen to a few of the voices, since they beautifully encapsulate one of the primary objectives of my version of Expository Writing: a more comprehensive understanding of the political, social, and economic relevance of class consciousness: I am the product of a hard-working mother and a drunk, overbearing stepfather. . . . I can’t remember a time where we were not on food stamps. . . . My stepfather spent more money on Jack Daniels than on clothing or food for us kids. We finally moved into a trailer one week before school started. I started the 9th grade wearing donated clothes from the Salvation Army. Six months later, I lied about my age and got my first job, determined to have new clothes for the next school year. At fifteen, I broke away from that awful existence and moved out on my own. The only way for me to legally move away was to marry my eighteen-year-old boyfriend. . . . Six months later, I hated my teenaged husband, but I stayed because the only other alternative was to go back to my family. . . . My beautiful eight-year-old son has new school clothes each year, thanks to the federal student loan program. I make $7.75

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an hour working at a reservation center for an upscale hotel corporation. I meet the requirement for food stamps. I will not apply. The harder I work for my food and bill money, the more satisfying it is to pay the bills, and the better our food tastes. *** Raised by my grandparents till the age of 7, I came from a woman who got pregnant young and had no youth. My mom and I are very close. I don’t think I have ever or will ever love anyone as much as I love my mom. At the age of 15 she got pregnant. No, I wasn’t born, my brother was. I came the year after, a man who was scum, the Biological Man, left mom when she was pregnant with me, even though she married him to do the right thing, it really wasn’t what was best for her or us. . . . I look back on her life and realize that is not how I want to spend my life. So with a lot of encouragement I am here today finishing up an education, so I don’t have to be stuck in a factory working my ass off like she did. I will be the first [one in my family] to finish college.

As the narratives illustrate, most students came from distinctly working-class backgrounds—field hands, factory workers, clerks, and secretaries; most continued, as their parents had, to work at low-paying, menial service jobs to help them with their college tuition and expenses. In addition to the packet readings on class, I also presented poverty statistics data from the Census Bureau to provide empirical information about class and the real-world implications of class and race divisions. Additionally, I found showing Fox’s television show Cops useful in discussing notions of power, institutional authority, race, class, and gender relationships. Cops teems with contradictory images, which the students must critically wrestle with; the “cops” are clearly working-class, racially diverse (at least as they are depicted in this show), yet their institutional authority is invested in representing, maintaining, and reinforcing the interests of the power elite. Second, while Cops does occasionally show female officers, the majority of the cops are male. Further, women are often depicted, and perhaps not inaccurately, as victims—prostitutes, casualties of spousal abuse, and the hapless, coerced cohorts of drug dealers. The show raises interesting issues not simply about the media’s portrayal of class, race, and

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gender (I make clear to the students that while this show is hyped as “real,” the truth remains that it is highly produced, contrived, and edited, and although it has elements of the “real,” the show is carefully considered and strongly orchestrated), but about notions of class resistance to authority and the ramifications of defiance to social order. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH WRITING?

By far, showing Dreamworlds II, an incisive video about the exploitation of women in the “male dreamworld” of music videos, brought the most controversy to the classroom, and urged me to question the radical project of critical pedagogy within the context of a writing class. While most students have grown up as part of the MTV music video generation, almost none were aware that the sole purpose of a video is not to entertain or to function as a work of art, but simply to sell the music. Second, while, they were aware, to some degree, of the sexualized presence of women in music videos, most students—both men and women—are stunned by the sheer excess of the portrayal of scantily dressed women as dancers, faux musicians, and inanimate objects waiting for a man to bring them to life (Tom Petty’s “Last Dance with Mary Jane” provides an acute example, with actress Kim Basinger playing a corpse, whom Tom Petty dresses up, dines, and presumably, has sex with). During the four years that I taught this course, the majority of students found the video not only compelling, but consciousnessraising. Their journal entries in response to watching the video suggest that they will never be able to view music videos in the same way, and most students find the experience stimulating and worthwhile. However, one semester, a female student ran out of the classroom crying when the video juxtaposed the rape scene from The Accused with the music video image of the hugely breasted and newly implanted Jessica Hahn rolling around on the floor with the late comedian Sam Kinison. The student returned to class the next session, and the entire class had a lengthy, incendiary discussion regarding the nature and purpose of the writing class. The student who ran from class admitted to being raped,

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and she argued that the scene from the video brought out vivid memories of the attack. That student, along with a friend of hers (a woman in her late 40s) who openly confessed to the class that she had been an alcoholic who was sexually abused by her father, protested that the showing of this video was inappropriate and in no way contributed to the improvement of her writing skills. Together, they strenuously argued that while the video was certainly thought-provoking, it did not enable them to become “better writers,” and they contended that gender theory has no place in a writing classroom. Further, those two women felt that I demonstrated great insensitivity to female students who may have suffered from sexual abuse. Their concerns were legitimate, and they genuinely compelled me to reflect on my motives in showing the video and to consider how, indeed, the viewing of this video contributed to composition pedagogy. I had asked myself the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: “Whom are we liberating and from what?” Before I could answer that question then, and before I can satisfactorily answer that question now, there are some attenuating circumstances about the incident that must be noted. First, the students were cautioned about the content of the video the day before I showed it and were told that if they found the material objectionable, they were free to undertake another writing assignment. Second, prior to showing the video on that particular day, I had warned them that the video contains the brutally violent gang-rape scene from The Accused. In fact, before I started the video, the woman who would later flee told me that she had seen the movie before and found it quite powerful. The incident became all the more curious to me because I could not understand why she did not opt for another writing assignment, as I had offered, but instead chose to attend class the day I showed the video. In class, during the video aftermath, I reminded the two women that the video was not about rape or sexual abuse, per se, but how the bombardment of sexualized images of woman influence the way we think about sex and sexuality, and that the more desensitized we get to seeing images of women being abused (lassoed, slapped, assaulted), the easier it is to view them not as human beings but as objects—a long-standing feminist

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observation. Second, I urged them to look for—and write about—connections between their own ethnographic research projects and the messages that are disseminated in music videos and other media depictions of female sexuality. Can parallels be drawn? In other words, how does symbolic (mis)representation become manifested in the “real” world? Those students whose projects were directly linked to abused women in shelters, literacy programs, and job placement training, immediately recognized the profound implications that media representation has in chipping away at women’s sense of competency and confidence. Those students whose projects were not directly tied to gender issues also felt that Dreamworlds II greatly contributed to their understanding of the media marketplace, and how desire is manufactured, marketed, and sold through the use of music videos and CDs. In the final analysis, I resorted to critical democratic practice and asked the students if they believed that the video should be shown to future classes or if I should discontinue its use in the curriculum. With the exception of the two women, the students voted to retain the video, and I have kept it as part of the curriculum ever since. I have indulged in this rather long tale of classroom disharmony as a tautological anecdote about the delicate glass menagerie of critical pedagogy. While, in the four years I have taught this class, only those two students have overtly challenged the liberal curriculum that I held as sacrosanct, the incident was disturbing enough for me to seriously reflect on what exactly it is I want to accomplish in my classroom, whether or not I’m accomplishing those goals, and if my passion for feminist consciousness, working-class studies, and cultural critique serves their needs as much as it serves mine. At the risk of seeming indulgent, it seems to me that the answers to my questions are reflected, ultimately, by the work produced by my students at the end of the semester. The ethnographies written during the course of a semester were, for the most part, examples of strong undergraduate scholarship. My students had shared four months of their lives in women’s shelters, children’s homes, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, church homeless shelters, AIDS organizations, Vietnam veteran services, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and group homes for

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teenage mothers. The course evaluations at the end of the semester indicated that although the class was far more rigorous than anticipated, they found the experience of conducting original research exhilarating. As a critical, pedagogical tool, I would have to argue that service-learning offers exciting possibilities within the confines of the rhetoric and composition classroom, allowing students to see themselves as active members in their own community, and helping them to broaden their understanding of the connection between the personal and the political. However, as Linda Flower notes, the relationships between “town and gown” have a checkered history, and it’s too easy for students and faculty to fall into the position of “cultural missionary,” with students and faculty as the “solvers” and the community as the “problem” (95). Bruce Herzberg warns that another hazard to service-learning pedagogy is that students become adept at recognizing a problem—the homeless—but fail to grasp the larger systemic, ideological, social, and economic factors that created the need for a homeless shelter in the first place. Moreover, Ellen Cushman in The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community, an eloquent, passionate ethnography about her experiences working with African-Americans in an impoverished community, speaks of the privilege afforded activist scholars, arguing that we need to be aware that our work functions as an commodity, and recognize the personal and professional benefits reaped from engaging in activist research. Even more recently at the 2000 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Cushman emphasized that as ethnographic scholars we consciously produce and consume products, and that intellectual properties such as articles and books function as “commodified stories—goods produced for academic consumers.” Cushman personally addressed this critical, ethnical dilemma in two ways: first, she let members in the community view her working text (what started out as her dissertation and eventually evolved into her book) and encouraged them to share their thoughts on her text; second, she shared a portion of her profits from the book with members of the community she investigated, since it was their stories that helped create the book in the first place.

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Bruce Horner has also expressed concern over this issue of commodification, but not in relationship to the narratives being sold, but rather to the “exchange value” placed on the inclusion of service-learning in the classroom. Applying Marxist theories of use- and exchange-value with Anthony Giddens’ notion of functionalism (whereby actions are perceived as filling the needs of social systems), Horner argues that discursive academic programs are treated as commodities, not associated with the labor expended in the production of that value—the specific teachers, administrators, students, etc.—but with the idea of the program itself—what is produced. He writes: The neglect of the use-value of work traditionally assigned to the composition class, such as the teaching of proofreading, or the rejection of such work on the basis of the history of its commodification and economic capitalization, has its counterpart in arguments to abolish the institution of freshman composition, at least as traditionally understood, in favor of work outside that institutional frame; work associated with writing in other academic disciplines or in the workplace, or work conducted in service-learning activities. (177)

Horner, by no means, argues against the incorporation of servicelearning programs, but he cautions us to be wary of the privileging of social writing over academic writing and to recognize the full potential use of academic discourse. And so, in answer to my question, “Whom are we liberating and from what?” I have to suggest that the liberal agenda apparent in the emancipatory pedagogies of neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies functions as a form of ideological liberation, creating localized disruptions and awareness of inequity. According to Thomas Deans, who studied several prominent service-learning programs in the United States, students who participated in service-learning projects “were more likely than nonparticipants to strengthen their commitment to promoting racial understanding, to participating in community action programs, and to influencing social values” (4). Student engagement and research of local communities not only enhanced their—and my—understanding of the world, but in this strongly dialogic, symbiotic, dynamic relationship, students and teachers

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learn what Mary Belenky, Lynn Bond, and Jacqueline Weinstock refer to as “a tradition that has no name”—the caring for people and communities. As a teacher, Protagoras understood that he had a responsibility not only to teach his students rhetorical skills, but also to enable them to enter into their communities as better men—presumably more compassionate, intelligent, and justice-minded. Likewise, in the sophist tradition, the emanicipatory movements that have filtered into the domain of rhetoric and composition seek to assist students in not only becoming more proficient writers and thinkers, but to truly transform them into menschen, critically aware, socially responsible human beings who are invested in their communities and in promoting literacy and social justice.

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APPENDIX

Syllabus for Expository Writing: ENC 3310—Explorations in Class, Race, and Gender

What would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. —Michel Foucault

COURSE OVERVIEW

This class will examine cultural influences that construct our conceptions of gender, race, and class. As a course in composition, we will look at writing as a social act, and understand that to be educated means to critically explore the world around us. The mode by which we achieve this understanding will be based upon the assumption that theory influences practice, and our readings will

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buttress our ability to create new knowledge through a field research project. As Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert note in Composition and Resistance: “Writing shapes and is shaped by classroom experience, but the classroom must be a site of, not the sole reason for, the struggle that compositions invoke” (173). REQUIRED TEXT

Reading Packet from Custom Publishing, which includes the following selections: Bauer, Dale M. “The Meanings and Metaphors of Student Resistance.” Styles of Cultural Activism. Ed. Phillip Goldstein. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1990. 64–75. Bogdan, Robert. “The Social Construction of Freaks.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thompson. New York: New York UP, 1996. 23–37. Clarke, John. “Style.” Resistance through Rituals. Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. New York: Routledge, 1994. 175–91. Dennet, Andrea Stulman. “The Dime Museum Freak Show Reconfigured as Talk Show.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thompson. New York: New York UP, 1996. 315–26. Dyer, Richard. “White.” Screen. 29.4 (1988): 44–65. Erkel, R. Todd. “The Mighty Wedge of Class.” Utne Reader. Nov.-Dec. 1994: 100–03. Fetterman, David M. “The First Step: An Overview.” Ethnography: Step by Step. Newbury Park: Sage, 1989. 11–25. Fielder, Leslie. “Introduction.” Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. 13–36. Greenbaum, Andrea. “Women’s Comic Voices: The Art and Craft of Female Humor.” American Studies 38.1 (Spring 1997): 117–38. Harding, Sandra. “Starting Thought From Women’s Lives: Eight Resources for Maximizing Objectivity.” Styles of Cultural Activism. Ed. Phillip Goldstein. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1994. 17–31. hooks, bell. “Reconstructing Black Masculinity.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End P, 1992. 85–113. ——— . “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992. 338–46.

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——— . “Selling Hot Pussy.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End P, 1992. 61–77. ——— . “Confronting Class in the Classroom.” Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge, 1994. 177–89. Jung, Carl. “UFOs as Rumours.” Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1978. 8–23. Kipnis, Laura. “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grosserg et al. New York: Routledge, 1992. 373–91. Messner, Michael. “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18.4 (Jan. 1990): 416–44. Murdock, Graham, and Robin McCron. “Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation.” Resistance Through Rituals. Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. New York: Routledge, 1994. 192–207. Ross, Andrew. “The Popularity of Pornography.” The Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993. 221–42. Solanis, Valerie. “Excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto.” Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Random House, 1970. 514–19. Stein, Julia. “Downtown Women.” Working Classics 5.2.1 (1997): 6–7. Walker, Lisa M. “How to Recognize a Lesbian: The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You Are.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993): 866–89.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Project Proposal You will write a project proposal (5 pages) detailing the community you wish to study for the entire semester. Field-Based Research Paper On the last day of class you will turn in your ethnography (20 pages). This paper will reflect the quality of your research, and will account for 40 percent of your grade. Throughout the semester you will be turning in drafts of this project.

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Research Journal You must keep a research journal/field notebook. While it is useful to use your journal exclusively for your research, you are permitted to take liberties in format and style. Oftentimes you will be asked to write a journal entry on a given reading assignment. Journals will be collected at random times throughout the semester, so make sure to bring it with you to each class period. Brief Oral Report At the end of the semester, you will briefly give an oral presentation on your research project. Failure to show up for your scheduled presentation will result in an automatic F for the assignment. Class Participation Since we will be engaged in a dialogue, everyone should come to class prepared to discuss the reading assignments. Unannounced quizzes will be given. Peer Workshops You will always have an opportunity to revise your writing through the peer workshops. You must bring your draft on those days. Without a draft, you cannot receive an “A” on the project, since it has not been revised. Conferences We will meet several times during the semester to discuss individual assignments. This allows us to get to know each other, and gives me an opportunity to give you personalized guidance with your project. Classes are suspended during conference appointments. If you miss a conference appointment, it will count as two absences. Attendance This class is structured around our discussion of our projects and the reading material, therefore, student attendance and participa-

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tion is essential. You may miss three classes (a week and a half of school) without penalty. For each additional class absence, you will drop 10 points off your final grade. If you arrive after I take attendance, you will be marked late and have 5 points taken off your final grade. Any missed assignments, quizzes, and other class activities cannot be made up. Grading Grades will have numerical values and will be averaged to determine your final grade: Project Proposal Quizzes/Oral Presentation Journal Final Project

10% 20% 30% 40%

Late Work Papers must be turned in on time. For each day that a paper is late, you will lose 10 points off the paper. Writing Etiquette All journals, drafts, and papers must be typed. CALENDAR

This class is designed to draw from the experience of student knowledge, and therefore you are encouraged to bring in texts, videos, articles, comics, art, music, and any other forms of cultural artifacts that you believe will augment our class discussions. Given the opportunity for student participation, it is reasonable to assume that this syllabus is mutable. Week 1: Introductions and Research Methods Read “Intro” from Fetterman and discuss ethnographic methods and possible student projects. Read Harding’s “Starting Thought From Women’s Lives” and Greenbaum’s “Women’s Comic Voices.”

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Week 2: Ethnographic Research Discuss “Starting Thought” and “Women’s Comic Voices.” Discuss Harding’s notion of feminist standpoint theory, and how feminist research methods may be a useful means for conducting ethnographic research. For next class read hook’s “Confronting Class in the Classroom” and Stein’s “Downtown Women.” Week 3: Class Consciousness Discuss “Confronting Class” and “Downtown Women.” Watch Roger and Me and discuss the ways class is rendered invisible in American culture. Read Erkel’s “Mighty Wedge of Class.” Inclass assignment: In imitation of Erkel and hook’s essays, write a narrative about your “class.” Consider how you are constituted by the resources you have available to you. Read Clark’s “Style” and Murdock’s “Consciousness of Class.” Week 4: Peer Workshop & Conferences— Drafts of Project Proposals Make sure to bring three clean, typewritten, drafts. Read and discuss Fielder’s “Intro” to Freaks, and “Social Construction.” Week 5: Freaks and the Construction of Other Project proposal due. Discuss notions of “freakery” and analyze how freakery is constructed in our culture. Watch the film Freaks and critique the way Other is created. Read “Dime Museum Freak Show Reconfigured.” For next class: bring in magazines and discuss “narrative” structure. Ask yourself what ideologies are present in the magazine; what values does the magazine support and perpetuate? Week 6: Popular Culture Give a five-minute analysis of the magazine you have critiqued. Read Ross’ “The Popularity of Pornography” and Kipnis’ “Male Desire and Female Disgust.” Watch Jerry Springer. In-class writing assignment: how does the construction of “freak” manifest itself on TV talk shows? Ask yourself who benefits from the representations shown on television?

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Week 7: Pornography Discuss both the Ross and Kipnis essay and the construction of both men and women in pornographic films and magazines. Inclass writing: analyze the arguments in both the Ross and Kipnis essay. How do concepts of class and gender structures enter into the debate? Watch Dreamworlds II. For next class: Watch MTV, VH1, or BET, and pick a music video. Analyze its narrative. What story does the video attempt to tell? Week 8: Resistance Discuss student selections of music videos. Watch Cops. In-class writing: how is the medium of video used to manipulate the images we see? What forms of resistance is apparent in the show? How does the show reify class distinctions? Read and discuss Solanis’ “Scum Manifesto,” “No More Miss America,” and hooks’ “Selling Hot Pussy.” In-class writing: how do these texts demonstrate forms of resistance? Week 9: Gender/Women Continue our discussion on resistance. Read and discuss Bauer’s “The Meanings and Metaphors of Student Resistance.” In-class writing: What arguments does Bauer make regarding student resistance to feminist teachers? Peer Workshop. First five pages of project are due. Week 10: Gender/Sexuality First Five Pages of Report are Due. Open forum on reports. Read “How to Recognize a Lesbian.” In-class writing: how does the notion of “style” influence our perceptions of gender? Are these styles mutable, or fixed? Week 11: Gender/Men Discuss hooks’ essay “Reconstructing Black Masculinity,” and Messner’s “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities.” Bring in cultural masculine icons. How do these objects and images construct male identities?

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Week 12: Spring Break Week 13: Race Read Dyer’s “White” and bell hooks’ “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Look through any popular journal and find an article that discusses race (either centrally or peripherally). Discuss what that article articulates about race, particularly in the United States. Week 14: Religion & the Supernatural Read Jung’s “UFO’s as Rumors.” Watch UFO documentary. Inclass writing: What arguments could be made about the myths of UFOS and the idea of government conspiracy in contemporary popular culture? Week 15: Peer Workshop on Final Project & Conferences Week 16: Presentations on Final Ethnographic Projects

NOTES

PREFACE

1. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock’s study of “public homeplaces”— communities that engage in emancipatory projects—provides an indepth analysis of the creation of localized leadership programs as developed by women. CHAPTER ONE

1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Greek texts are taken from Diels-Kranz, Die Fragments der Vorsokratiker, which has been translated by R.K. Sprague in his text, The Older Sophists. 2. While Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” inaugurated the discussion of contact zones in rhetoric and composition, MinZhan Lu’s “Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?,” Richard Miller’s “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone,” Joseph Harris’ “Negotiating the Contact Zone,” and Patricia Bizzell’s “The Teacher’s Authority: Negotiating Difference in the Classroom,” along with other essays too numerous to list here, have attempted to address the means by which students can be participants in negotiating their literacies within the strictures of the academy. 3. It is worth noting that Giroux makes that comment in his book, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope, which seems particularly apt, given that the rhetoric of the possible, the desire for future change, is almost always optimistic and hopeful. 4. She suggests students, (1) model different kinds of writing, (2) write for their intended audience—i.e. the teacher (“we would admit that this is school”), and (3) write as an “intentional” act, through a progression of assignments. 111

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1. Two other pivotal essays on this subject appeared during the same year: Joseph Harris and Jay Rosen’s “Teaching Writing as Cultural Criticism,” which, like the Berlin essay, was in Composition and Resistance, edited by C. Mark Hulbert and Michael Blitz, and John Schlib’s essay, “Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Composition,” which appeared in Contending with Words, edited by Patricia Harkin and John Schlib. 2. A contemporary analogue to Willis’ work in working-class studies is Patrick J. Finn’s fine study, Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest. CHAPTER THREE

1. A version of this essay appeared in my edited collection, Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies. 2. Later, Hillary recanted her scandalous remark—perhaps a halfhearted attempt to de-bitch herself—and as proof of her domestic savvy, published her own recipe for chocolate chip cookies. 3. In the last several years, “bitch” has been reclaimed by American singer Meredith Brooks, who in her rant anthem, “Bitch,” gleefully asserts that she’s “a bitch” and proud of it, and by Elizabeth Wurtzel in her pop-feminist treatise, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. 4. This gender gap in self-esteem as it relates to academic achievement is well chronicled, becoming apparent to educators as early as pre-adolescence. For a more thorough discussion of this topic, see the American Association of University Women’s publication Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, and Peggy Orenstein’s book (also commissioned by the AAUW) SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. 5. An extensive review of argumentation literature can be found in Dominic Infante and Andrew Rancer’s article, “Argumentativeness and Verbal Aggressiveness: A Review of Recent Theory and Research.” CHAPTER FOUR

1. I am referring to the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s draft of its 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution, which attempted to respectfully acknowledge, according to Geneva Smitherman, the disparity between student literacy and academic discourse, especially among nontraditional students (see Smitherman; also see Chapter Two for further discussion).

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2. Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race and Fred Pfeil’s White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference are good examples of the recent scholarship in this area. Of course, bell hooks and Richard Dyer have both been addressing this issue since the 1980s. CHAPTER FIVE

1. Worsham and Stuckey offer useful, contemporary discussions of the connection between violence and education. 2. In my 1998 interview with Shor, he stressed the importance of utopian thinking in constructing a critical classroom environment. He explores this idea more fully in When Students Have Power. 3. Chapter Two offers a more thorough critique of a “politics of location,” especially as applied to ethnographic research. 4. While I do not formally incorporate neosophistic rhetoric into my Expository Writing class, I use some key argumentation strategies to discuss issues of ethics, refutation, and persuasion. 5. Although feminist cultural studies critics like Angela McRobbie have taken issue with the myopically masculine perspective of Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the text is particularly useful in its analysis of subcultural style as intentional communication and would make a useful addition to any class that intends to explore the possibilities of ethnographic research. 6. I conducted a year-long ethnographic investigation of comic culture, studying both rhetorical principles and gender distinctions in stand-up comedy. See “Stand-up” and “Women’s.” 7. While I show Browning’s film during our discussion of “cultural spectacles,” I also find the film instructive in analyzing the media’s portrayals of gender distinctions.

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INDEX

Adler-Kassner, Linda, xiii, 90 advocacy women and, 66 African-American Vernacular English, 35, 37, 76 Afrocentric Idea, 74 Against the Sophists, 12 aggressiveness in argumentation, 63 Alcoff, Linda, 57–58, 73 Alexander, Donnell, 69 Althusser, Louis, 33 Anderson, Judith, 63–64 Antidosis, 20 Antiphon, 3, 7, 9 Antithenes, 3 argumentation theory consequences of verbal aggression, 64 Aristotle, 5 definition of rhetoric, 12, 16 definitions of virtue, 20, 21 Arnold, Matthew, 26 Ashton-Jones, Evelyn, 56–57 Ball, Arnetha, 76–77 Barthes, Ronald, 43

Bartkey, Sandra category confusion, 55, 58 women as caregivers, 61, 66 Bauer, Dale, xiii, 17, 51, 52, 60 Behrens, Laurence, 88 Belenky, Mary, 56, 101 Berlin, James, xiii, 23–24, 52 Bernstein, Basil, 36 Berthoff, Ann, 56 Bhabha, Homi, 38, 73, 76–77, 79, 80, 81 bitch definitions of, 54 Bizzell, Patricia, 18–19, 52 Blitz, Michael, 25 Bricolage, 35 Branscomb, Eric, H., 40 Browning, Tod, 92 Chodorow, Nancy, 56 Chung, Connie, 49–50 Clarke, John, 27 class narratives, 94–95 struggle, 32 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, A, 54 Clifford, James, 44

129

130

Index

Clinton, Hillary, 50 Cole, Michael, 37 collaborative learning, 56–57 Composition and Resistance, 25 Cool Like Me, 69 Cooper, Marilyn, 51–52 Cops, 95–96 critical pedagogy, 14–16, 24 critical theory, 33 Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, 41, 85 Critios, 3 Crooks, Robert, xiii, 90 Crowley, Sharon, xiii, 4, 17–19 cultural feminism, 57 cultural studies as a form of resistance, 41–42 Culture and Society, 26, 28 Cushman, Ellen, xiii, 99

ethics of care, 55–61 ethnographic research autoethnographies, 40–42 in composition, 39 critical research, 91–96 as cultural critique, 38–47 early accounts, 26–29 establishing collaborative relationships, 47 ethics, 41 exclusion of women, 29–30 in expository writing 89–101 influences of, 39 methodology, 44 as resistance, 41 Ethos, 20–22 expository writing, 88–91

Daniell, Beth, 38 de Lauretis, Teresa, 58 de Romilly, Jacqueline, 4 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 31–32, 91 Deans, Thomas, 100 Delpit, Lisa, 72 Dennet, Andrea, 92–93 Diogenes, Laertius, 7 Dissoi Logoi, 13 “Downtown Women,” 93–94 During, Simon, 26

Feminism and Composition, 39, 62 feminist pedagogy, 55–57 sophistics, 16, 51–52 standpoint theory, 29–30 Fetterman, David, M., 89 Fitts, Karen, xiv, 52, 66 Flower, Linda, 56, 99 Flynn, Elizabeth, 55–56, 58 Fox, Tom, 36–37, 72, 78 France, Alan, xiv, 23, 52, 66 Freire for the Classroom, 85 Freire, Paulo, xiv, 24, 84–87

Eagleton, Terry, 32–33, 78 Ede, Lisa, 56 Elbow, Peter, 72 Emig, Janet, 56 Empowering Education, 41 Encomium of Helen, 8, 16–17 engaged pedagogy, 51 Enos, Theresa, 59, 66 Erkel, Todd, 93–94

Gage, John, 52 Garber, Jenny, 28–30 Gates, Henry Louis, 35, 80–81 George, Diana, 51–52 Gibson, Walker, 13 Giddens, Anthony, 100 Gilligan, Carol, 56 Gilyard, Keith, 4, 77, 79 Gingrich, Kit, 49–50

Index Giroux, Henry, xiii, xv, 15, 24, 39, 41–42, 74, 79–80, 86–88, 90–91 Goetz, Judith, 39 Goldblatt, Eli, xiii, 90 Gorgias, 3, 7–9, 16–17 Graff, Gerald, 18–19 Gramsci, Antonio, 34 Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, The, 4 Grossberg, Lawrence, 26, 33

Kelly, Edward, 54 Kennedy, George, 14 Kent, Thomas, xiii, 4, 10–14 Kerferd, G. B., 6–11 King, Rodney, 78 Kinneavy, James, 21–22 Kipnis, Laura, 93 Kirklighter, Cristina, 40 Kirsch, Gesa, 46–47, 50 Koblitz, N., 60

Hairston, Maxine, 56 Hall, Stuart, 15, 27, 33 Haraway, Donna, 42–45 Harding, Sandra, 29–30, 94 Havelock, Eric, 2 Heath, Shirley, Brice, 37, 56 Hebdige, Dick, 30, 34–35 Heilker, Paul, 89 Herzberg, Bruce, xiii, 90, 99 Hilton, Daisy and Violet, 92 Hippios, 3, 7 Hippocrates, 5 Hoggart, Richard, 25, 28 hooks, bell, 51–52, 64, 72, 81, 93, 94 Horner, Bruce, xv, 44–46, 100 Hurlbert, C. Mark, 25

Laditka, James, 66 Lauretis, Teresa de, 58 Learning to Labour, 26 Literacy as cultural conflict, 36–37 narratives of, 38 cyborg writing, 42 as cultural identity, 77 Lives of the Sophists, 5 Lives on the Boundary, 40 logos, 8 Long Revolution, The, 28 Lu, Min-Zhan, 44–46 Lunsford, Andrea, 56 Lycophron, 3 Lynch, Dennis, 51–52

ideology, 32–35 In a Different Voice, 56 Infante, Dominic, 53, 62, 64–65 Isocrates, 12, 20 Jarratt, Susan, xiii, xiv, 2–4, 12, 16, 17, 22, 39, 47, 51–52, 62 Jefferson, Tony, 27 justice, 21 kairos, 13 Kantor, Kenneth, 39 Keating, AnnLouise, 72, 75

131

Maistre of Game, The, 54 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 32 McRobbie, Angela, xiii, 28–30 Meno, 6 Miller, Susan, 19 Moore, Michael, 93 Morley, David, xiii, 27 Moxley, Joseph M., 39 Mythologies, 43 mythos, 12 Nationwide Audience, The, 27 Neel, Jasper, xiii, 4, 22

132

Index

Nicotera, Anna Maydan, 62–64 Noddings, Nel, 58 nomos, 16 North, Stephen, 39 Ohmann, Richard, 36 Olson, Gary, A., 42–43, 45, 67, 74, 76 On Nature, 9 On Sophistical Refutations, 5 On the Nonexistent, 9 On Truth, 9 Ong, Walter, 36 Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 36 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 24, 84 Perl, Sondra, 56 Phaedrus, 10, 16 Phidias, 5 Philostratus, 5 Plato, 4–7, 9–13, 16 politics of location, 46 possibility of rhetoric, 13–15, 88 postcolonial studies, 69–81 Poulakos, John, xv, 2, 12–14, 21 Prendergast, Catherine, 69 prepon, 12 Prodicus, 3 Protagoras, 3–8, 12, 19, 53, 101 Quintilian, 18 race, 69–81 racist assumptions, 72–73 Rancer, Andrew, 53, 62–65 Reproduction of Mothering, The, 56 Republic, The, 11

Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 27 Reynolds, Nedra, 22, 61 Rich, Adrienne, 46 Richardson, Elaine, 77 Ritchie, Joy, 46–47 Rorty, Richard, 2 Rose, Mike, 40–41 Rosen, Leonard J., 88–89 Schell, Eileen, 60 Schiappa, Edward, 2–3, 12 Scribner, Sylvia, 37 semiotic guerilla warfare, 30, 35 service-learning, 88–101 Shakespeare, 54 Shaughnessay, Mina, 56 Shor, Ira, xv, 24, 41, 85 Signifying Monkey, The, 35 Singleton, John, 79 Sipiora, Phillip, 13 Slack, Jennifer, 28, 33, 38 Smit, David, 56 Smitherman, Geneva, 37, 72 Social Uses of Writing, 36 Socrates, 5, 6, 16 Sommers, Nancy, 56 sophistic rhetoric, 1–22 sophists, 3 Spivak, Gayatri, 44, 73, 75 Sprague, Rosamond, Kent, 1, 5, 9 Springer, Jerry, 93, 108 Statement on Ebonics, 37 Stein, Julia, 93–94 Strenski, Ellen, 66 Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literal Strategies in an Inner City Community, The, 99 student evaluations of feminist teachers, 60

Index Students’ Rights to Their Own Language, 37 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 30 Talkin and Testifyin, 37 Tannen, Deborah, 37 Tetralogies, 7 Thrasymachus, 3, 7 Tompkins, Jane, 50, 66 Uses of Literacy, 25, 28 Villaneuva, Victor, 86 Vincent, Cloe, 40 Vitanza, Victor, 4 Voices and Visions: Reflecting Ethnography in Composition, 39

133

Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence, 40 Voloshinov, V.N., 32, 34 Wardy, Robert, 17 Warshauer, Susan, 21–22 Weinstock, Jacqueline, 101 West of Everything, 66 When Students Have Power, xv, 41 Whitt, Laurie, 28, 33, 38 Williams, Raymond, 26, 28 Willis, Paul, xiii, 26, 45 Women’s Ways of Knowing, 56 working-class culture, 27–29, 36 Worsham, Lynn, 38 Xenophron, 5