Order Number 9401290

The self in motion: The status of the (student) subject in composition studies

LeCourt, Donna Louise, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1993

UMI SOON.ZeebRd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106 THE SELF IN MOTION:

THE STATUS OF THE (STUDENT) SUBJECT IN COMPOSITION STUDIES

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Donna Louise LeCourt, B.S., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1993

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Andrea A. Lunsford

H. Lewis Ulman Adviser Nan Johnson Department of English To my parents

u ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I express sincere appreciation to my dissertation committee, whose advice and comments have become so intertwined with my own thoughts they are no longer distinguishable. To Dr. Andrea A. Lunsford, I offer heartfelt thanks for her guidance and insight throughout the research as well as her friendship and support over the past years. Thanks also go to the other members of my advisory committee, Drs. H. Lewis

Ulman and Nan Johnson, for their suggestions, comments, and faith in me. The technical assistance of Tess Lundgren is also gratefully acknowledged, particularly for her patience in transcribing frequently undecipherable tapes. I also owe a great debt to my study group—Mindy Wright, Kelly Belanger, Sarah Sloane, Susan Kates, Heather

Graves, Amy Goodbum, and Carrie Leverenz—for their continual support and insightful suggestions. Most especially, I appreciate the time and effort Carrie Leverenz and Amy

Goodbum put into endless conversations with me about my work. Thanks also go to some special friends: Aneil Rallin, Todd English, and D. Matt Ramsey for their ideas, time, and critical readings, and Susan Glatki and Kim Town for their emotional support.

I am also more than grateful to the students who allowed me to use their texts in this study and contributed their time to my research. To my students in 367.06, I owe a great debt for their continual challenges and insights into the course I discuss in these pages. Finally, and most importantly, I offer sincere thanks to my parents, Doris and

Charles, who never stopped encouraging me in any way they could.

iii VTTA

December 14, 1963 ...... Bom - Worcester, Massachusetts

1985 ...... B.S., Fitchburg State College, Fitchburg, Massachusetts

1987 ...... M.A., Washington State University, Pullman, Washington

1987-1988 ...... Composition Instructor, Northern Illinois University DeKalb, Illinois

1988-1989 ...... Instructor, Jobs for Youth, Boston, Massachusetts

1989-Presen t ...... Teaching and Administrative Assistant, Department of English, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

"A Re/Inter/View with Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology." PrelText 12.1-2 (1991): 97-112. With Robert Davis, Todd English, Heather Brodie Graves, Carrie Shively Leverenz, and H. Lewis Ulman.

"Old Wine in New Bottles: Approaching Error in the Expanded Roles of Writing Centers." In Conference Proceedings of the 13th Annual East Central Writing Ceraer Association, May 3-41992, Lexington, Kentucky. With Pamela Ensinger- Antos.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

VTTA ...... iv

LIST OF FIGURES...... viii

CHAPTER PAGE

I. CULTURAL DISCOURSES, THE (STUDENT) WRITER, AND COMPOSITION STUDIES...... 1

Introduction ...... 1 The Acculturating Function of School and tlie Emergence of Difference...... 5 The (Student) Writer as a Site of Conflict...... 23 The (Student) Writer as A gent ...... 28 The (Student) Writer as Subject ...... 43 The (Student) Writer as Agent/Subject or Subject/Agent ...... 52 Summary, Or Begging the Question...... 61

n. INVESTIGATING THE STATUS OF THE (STUDENT) WRITER IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE ...... 65

Background ...... 65 Investigating the Question...... 70 The Site of Investigation ...... 75 The Texts in Context...... 83 Analyzing the Texts ...... 113 The Discourse-Based Interviews: Another Text for Analysis...... 121 Limitations of the Study...... 126 m . ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AS A TECHNOLOGY OF POWER: TOWARD A THEORY OF THE SUBJECT...... 128

Characterizations of Academic Discourse: Identitication and Division...... 132 Identification...... 133 Division ...... 142 Implications for the Status of the (Student) Subject ...... 177 Social Construction...... 177 Poststructuralism: Foucault’s Theory of Discourse . . 181

IV. TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF: THE ATTEMPT OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE TO INSCRIBE A UNIFIED SUBJECT...... 201

Technologies of the Self, Or Subjugating Ourselves to Discourse...... 203 The Will to Knowledge and the Literacy Autobiographies . 212 The Will to Knowledge and the Institution: The Attempt to Unify the Subject ...... 225 The Will to Knowledge and the Erasure of Other Cultural Subjectivities ...... 232 Implications for Composition Theory and Pedagogy 249

V. PLAYING THE GAME OF TRUTH: TOWARD A MULTICULTURAL PEDAGOGY OF RESISTANCE ...... 255

Fragmentation and the Literacy Autobiographies...... 257 Implications for Pedagogy...... 273 Resistance from Within Discourse...... 276 The Construction of Discursive Perception ...... 286 The Results of Deconstructing Autonomy...... 295 Making a Space for the Other in Academic Discourse .... 301 Conclusion: The Promise of Pedagogy ...... 317

VI. AFTERWORD...... 325

APPENDICES...... 332

A. Letter to Basic Writing Teachers...... 332 B. Permission Slip for Participation...... 334 C. List of Students by Gender and Ethnicity ...... 336 D. Course S yllabi ...... 340 E. Interview Questions...... 360

VI F. Themes Discussed in Chapters 3 -5 ...... 364 G. An Attempt at a Pedagogy of Resistance...... 370

WORKS CITED...... 375

vu LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURES PAGE

1. Discursive Elements ...... 189

vm CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

CULTURAL DISCOURSES, THE (STUDENT) WRITER, AND COMPOSITION STUDIES

Our modem Sioux language has been white-manized. There’s no power in it. I get my knowledge of the old tales of my people out of a drum, or the sound of a flute, out o f my visions and out o f our sacred herb pejuta, but above all out of the ancient words from way back, the words of the grandfathers, the language that was there at the beginning of time, the language given to We- Ota-Wichasha, Blood Clot Boy. If that language, these words, should ever die, then our legends [culture] will die too.

“ Leonard Crow Dog, Lakota medicine man. (qtd in American Indian Myths and Legends xiii)

Introduction

In the preface to Composition as a Human Science, Louise Weatherbee Phelps begins with a bold assertion: "Theory is autobiography. Exposition is narrative"

(vii). She validates her seemingly odd equivocations by explaining that all of us working with theoretical discourse are working with the power to represent what we intuitively believe and feel about the world. Theories attract us because of the explanatory power they give to experience; scholarly exposition and inquiry tell the stories of our intuitions while frequently hiding, or disguising, their personal nature.

I begin with these observations because this exposition, while theoretical and at times, argumentative, is in the end (and beginning) very much my autobiography. I, like 2 Phelps, am searching here for a "form of intelligibility" to give to a "personal dilemma, deeply felt" (viii).

The "story" of this dilemma parallels the history of my interactions with composition studies. I, unlike many more experienced scholars in composition, began my graduate education in a program speciAcally designed for composition research. I sought such a program out after becoming certified to teach secondary English because I felt that I knew little, if anything, about how to teach writing. While my purposes were ultimately pragmatic, my two years in an M.A. program produced a desire, one I was unable to articulate at the time, to explain the dissonance I felt between what I was learning and what I was feeling. Like many graduate programs in the mid 80’s, mine focused most of its study on process pedagogy, expressivist theories, and quantitative research paradigms. While I latched firmly onto the idea of teaching "process and not product," I had more trouble swallowing a theory that asked students to write a truth that, as James Berlin describes it, "is always discovered within, through an internal glimpse, an examination of the private inner world" (145). I knew that if I wrote like that, even in that graduate program, my

work would receive only negative responses and not be taken seriously. To be fair, I

could perhaps write what I thought, but in the writing of it, the thought changed,

losing what, to me, felt like its most essential elements. My language and discursive

forms were not what I was reading, did not reflect the way we all spoke in seminars,

and did not seem to have any place in the project of scholarly work. Whenever I

wrote for "school," I always envisioned it as a painstaking process of translation. 3

Schooled writing and discourse were not mine, so how could I accept that in the teaching of writing, I should encourage students to explain a "private and inner world"? I could not have even explained this much then; I only knew that the theories I was reading did not seem to explain how the act of writing in the academy took place. They did not explain why 1 always felt I was translating.

These feelings were most disturbing because they did not seem to make any

"logical" sense. Unlike Crow Dog in the epigraph with which I began, I was not encountering a new language or a new culture. I was speaking and writing English in the United States. Why should I feel such conflict and dissonance with academic language? All I knew at the time was that this entire enterprise of English studies felt wrong and pointless. As a result, I left the world of the university after receiving my

M.A. "never to return," as I told my advisor. None of my fellow graduate students in composition seemed to feel the disillusionment, and indeed deep anger and resentment, I felt toward English studies. As had been made painfully obvious to me in seminar discussions, my perspective was "different." Of course, I felt that difference to be some failing that arose out of something individual about me.

What I know now, seven years later and back in the academy, is that my anger toward graduate school was lodged in my difference; however, that difference is not necessarily individual. My "difference" emerged out of my background as a child of working-class parents who grew up in a low-income neighborhood in an industrial city in New England. As a result, my discursive practices reflected different values, mores, and ways of seeing the world than those of the academy-that is, a 4 different culture. Since I had attended a small, public college whose student population all looked like myself, this conflict in discourses did not make itself felt until it hit me in the face upon entering a graduate program. The expressivist theories

I was learning only made me more aware of how "inadequate" my "inner" language seemed compared to what I was reading and being required to write. Although I still cannot describe this conflict in concrete terms, cannot tell those who ask what speciAc ways my parents’ discourse seems "different" from the ways I write and speak in the academy, I feel and know the difference exists. Although this difference gets less and less marked as I near the end of my Ph.D., it has emerged, instead, with family and friends at home, and the conflict is no less disturbing in this new context.

It is to understand the nature of this conflict-my own and that of my students— then, that my search for explanation begins, and out of which my work with theoretical discourses emerges. This narrative beginning reflects the type of public disclosure of personal information about economic issues that my remaining ties to working-class discourse is, even as I write it, telling me to cut when I revise. Yet I submit this narrative in order to serve as a reminder that behind the analysis, abstractions, and theorizing resides a writer not only with a certain perspective, or terministic screen, but one who, like all of us, is also seeking to understand better her own history. This search, of course, began long before I began writing this dissertation as I read the work of others in composition and rhetorical studies about the relationship between culture and academic discourse and began to form questions 5 based on that reading. Thus, it is with the stories others have told with which I begin in order to provide shape to the story I want to tell in this dissertation.

The Acculturating Function o f School and the Emergence o f Difference

Any story of composition studies, including how it has shaped mine and our students’ stories about the effects of literacy education, is inextricably linked to the story of education in the United States: how we envision the relationship of language to culture in the academy is always influenced by the societal function of "school," and the ways in which the teaching of writing is imbricated within that educational ideology. Although an educational history of the teaching of writing is beyond the purview of my project, looking briefly at the ways in which the function of school has been described is necessary to contextualize the teaching of writing, and its concern with culture, within a larger institutional and cultural context.

Traditionally, American education, more often than not, has been viewed as

supporting an egalitarian and liberatory agenda that smoothly intersects with our cultural mythos of democracy and individualism. Hence, some educational historians

interpret the move to public education in America as a way to extend social benefits

to the lower social classes. Under the rubric of "equal opportunity," education

provided the venue for any American to live the American dream. Not surprisingly,

this "egalitarian turn" in education, as Andrea Lunsford points out, also affected a

change in the nature of rhetorical education (cf. Homer). Lunsford ties this change to

the development of land grant institutions through the Morrill Act of July 2, 1862: The land grant universities welcomed a much broader spectrum of the American public than had heretofore had access to higher education, and these students were by and large untrained in Latin and Greek—the traditional languages of the Academy. As the vernacular slowly became the language of choice in all universities, instruction in composition emerged as a powerful means of immersing students in the skillful use of English, at least partially in the belief that the ‘right and proper’ use of the English language was requisite to participation in the intellectual and economic life of the republic. ("Nature" 6)

Thus rhetorical education prepared students, or at least gave them the language, to become part of the dominant culture, providing them with the means for social acceptance within that culture. The value of the discourse taught in the schools can be read as an inherent good if education is viewed as providing the linguistic resources with which to become an active member of a valued society. To achieve this status, the student not only learns academic discourse but also becomes a member of the dominant culture through her facility with its language.

Min-Zhan Lu points to a similar "egalitarian turn" in her analysis of the composition pedagogies that emerged because of the Open Admissions policies at

CUNY during the 1970’s. Lu points out that the pioneering pedagogies of Kenneth

Bruffee, Thomas Farrell, and Mina Shaughnessy worked either on models of acculturation, wherein the student takes on and becomes a part of academic culture, or accommodation, wherein the student is reassured that learning academic discourse will "accommodate" rather than weaken his/her relationship with a home culture. In both models—acculturation or accommodation-the goal of education is still seen as the way in which students learn to adjust or become part of the dominant culture. Any fear of acculturation on the students’ part was viewed as a "deficit," while the 7 accompanying conflict such fear might evoke was to be resolved as quickly as possible. As Lu points out, these models were the dominant ones of open admissions education because teachers "recognized teaching academic discourse as a way of empowering students" ("Conflict" 890). As in the mid-nineteenth century, a change in access (and student population) necessitated a change in pedagogy but not in the goals of education. When education is seen as liberatory, or the means by which a student can enter a valued culture that allows him success in the economic and civic realms of everyday life, instruction in academic discourse can only be seen as empowering and beneficial.

Yet, while such a liberatory view of education is still prevalent in the 1990’s

(particularly among our students), other educational historians tell a different story about the purpose of the "egalitarian" education in the U.S. Rather than reading education as serving to liberate the "masses," these historians view the rise of

American schools as in concert with the desires of the elite who needed a population to serve the needs of a rapidly growing industrial nation. (Spring 57). The function of school, then, was seen as a way to train a workforce that would support and facilitate such industrialization. As Jean Anyon has demonstrated in her 1979 study of five schools in New Jersey, not only is the course content geared toward training a workforce, but the presentation of a learning process, an approach to the "work of the classroom," and even the time schedule serve to train a modem workforce at all

striâtes of the economy. 8

Such a function of school is also closely tied to discourse education and the teaching of writing. As E.D. Hirsch notes, for example, literacy education serves as a way to strengthen the nation’s economy: "To meet the needs of the wider economy, the modem industrial nation requires widespread literacy. At the heart of modem nationhood is the teaching of literacy and a common culture through a national system of education" (73). Academic literacy is equated, in this formulation,

with marketable skills. While Hirsch supports such a function of school, other

educational theorists have begun in the past 20 years to critique this reading of the

function of school (e.g. Freire, Giroux).*

Whatever view we take of the function of education, however—whether

liberatory, serving the needs of a capitalist economy, or a combination thereof—the

goal of education is the same: to teach students the knowledge and values of the

dominant culture. Only the focus of this goal is different in the two readings: in

one, education benefits the student; in the other, education benefits the industrial

complex. In both views, discourse education is central to achieving such an

acculturation because of the crucial role language and literacy skills play in the

maintenance of cultural norms.

For the most part, acculturation has been the story of education in the U.S.,

particularly in the teaching of writing. Most teachers of writing have accepted the

* * This brief summary, of course, overlooks educational reformers such as John Dewey, or the radical educators of the 1930’s who put forth their views in The Social Frontier (see Giroux 13), yet few of these reforms took hold. And, with the possible exception of Dewey, most received little attention by mainstream educators. 9 liberatory view of education, seeing ourselves as the group who works to keep

"marginalized" students in the university by instructing them in the language of an academic culture. John Schilb characterizes composition as an historically modernist enterprise for these very reasons, pointing out that historians of the field (e.g. Berlin,

Crowley, Douglas) agree that composition "was invented purely to train students in the mechanics of language, to help them face the newly specialized demands of higher education and supposedly prepared them as well for the emerging circumstances of corporate life" (177-78). Thus, composition studies is immersed in an ideology that chacterizes education as liberation and in an institutional context that has historically defined its purpose as serving the needs of industry. One way to envision the educational project that is composition’s past—the trace of which grounds and delineates our present—is to think of teachers of writing as providing the "keys to the kingdom." Little attention need be given to the language of our students outside of the academy because we can concentrate only on the value of the kingdom itself. As

Richard Ohmann pointed out over 15 years ago, composition texts, for example, imagine student writers as having no identity previous to their identities as students

(148). Student writers were learners, not knowers; novices, not expert language users in any realm.

Despite the fact that, as Lu pointed out, the accomodationist pedagogies of educators during open admissions still work toward helping students participate in the dominant culture, the challenge offered by open admissions marked a change in the way a student’s language was seen. While some viewed open admissions students as 10 the "end of education,"^ other educators attempted to understand the marked difference between open admissions students and those they were more accustomed to in order to find ways to make higher education accessible to this new population.

Emerging out of this environment, the seminal work of Mina Shaughnessy,Errors and Expectations y marks a signiAcant change in the direction of composition studies.

As Patricia Bizzell has pointed out, Shaughnessy’s work initiated a move in composition studies to "outer-directed" theories and explanations for writing conventions and difficulties; Shaughnessy’s pedagogy seeks conventions common to both academic discourse and the discourse of students "far removed from" the academy ("Cognition" 218). Such outer-directed theories force us to look more closely at the context surrounding the writer/student. In Shaughnessy’s chapter,

"Beyond the Sentence," we see the beginnings, or what Bizzell calls the "subtext," of a move toward acknowledging how a cultural way of knowing can be embodied within language.

Such a move to outer-directed theories, however, does not emerge solely out the open admissions policies instituted in the 70’s. It is also linked to the cultural response to such policies and the perceived decline in discourse education brought about by the influx of such "different" students and declining SAT and ACT scores. I write, of course, of the "literacy crisis." Epitomized by the 1976 Time magazine article, "Why Johnny Can’t Read," mainstream media, politicians, and educators alike began in the 70’s to accuse the educational system of failing to teach its students to

Geoffrey Wagner, for example. (See Lu 891-893) 11 read and write. Many responded to this criticism with a "back to basics" approach, which put increased attention upon the teaching of writing. Such criticism and its responses are, in part, responsible for the growth of composition studies.

Yet, a "basics" approach, generated by a belief that the institution had indeed failed in its mission to teach students to read and write according to accepted values, is only one account of the literacy crisis’ effects on composition studies. Another account of this crisis, as Patricia Harldn and John Schilb have demonstrated, would see the results of such a crisis differently. In Harldn and Schilb’s "story," this

"other" response to the literacy crisis resulted in greater attention to the cultural backgrounds of students and a critique of the function of school. Instead of merely accepting the "crisis" as stated, Schilb and Harldn examine the construction of a crisis state itself and the implications of the term, crisis. Relying on Paul Noack’s analysis of crisis and revolution in "Crisis Instead of Revolution: On the Instrumental Change of Social Innovation," Harldn and Schilb point out that the term crisis lacks analytical precision. By calling the situation of higher education in the 1970s (and presently) a crisis, educators and government agencies "tended to obscure both the variety of explanations for students’ writing and reading behavior and the multiple reasons for the culture’s perceptions. The termliteracy crisis isolated the human beings it designated by assigning one name, one diagnosis, to their disparate situations and conditions" (Harldn and Schilb 2). The term literacy crisis, then, functions as an

"umbrella term" for all those who, for whatever reason, "did not have ‘normal’

standards for discourse" (3). 12

Rather than obscure and homogenize a diverse group of students, others then responded to the "crisis" by seeking to examine this difference more closely, to understand the "abnormal" discourses making their way into the university. As

Lunsford points out in her summary of the Geld, composition studies over the past 25 years has created a space in which difference in literacy and literate behaviors can be studied ("Rhetoric" 89). Much of this research explores the nature of literate behaviors outside of the academy in order to understand more fully what it means to be literate in the U.S., thereby closing the umbrella to expose the difference it seeks to cover up.

Multiple Literacies and Difference

It is in this milieu, then, that compositionists and researchers in education began to explore the idea of cultural literacies, attempting to understand the different ways in which language is related to the culture and worldview of individuals. For

these researchers, there exists no single literacy, no immutable value to a certain type

of "essayist" literacy, as has been postulated by some literacy theorists (e.g.. Goody

and Watt, Olson, Ong, Havelock). The work in literacy studies tries to avoid the

academic ethnocentrism of the "hyperliterate" that, as Keith Walters puts it, took a

"poorly articulated constellation of beliefs, our society’s ideology of literacy," and

used academic literacy as the "standard by which the Other-other groups, other

cultures, other times-is judged and always found wanting" (174).^

* Although I will discuss the work of literacy researchers, particularly ethnographers, in positive terms, I should note that these same ethnographies have been criticized for the same biases I attribute only to certain literacy theorists. Heath, for 13 Much of ÜÎÔ recent work in literacy studies has served as a corrective for a myopic academic and cultural ethnocentrism that links academic literacy with cognitive abilities and potential. Theories postulating a connection between cognitive ability and literacy assume that the writing and reading which developed from Greek literacy restructured consciousness. The theorists thus assert that writing, specifically academic writing, is necessary for the development of the fullest potential of consciousness (see Ong and Havelock). This type of literacy, it is argued, also creates the circumstances under which a fixed meaning can be embodied in a text (see

Olson). Thus texts, which embody meaning within themselves, can be judged purely on how well a text communicates its meaning to all audiences, and the brand of writing-academic writing or essayist literacy-that leads to such texts can be considered invaluable and the only standard by which the ability to write should be judged.

The corrective of studies in "different" literacies emerged out of their consideration of context. Attempting to refute the idea that a fixed meaning is located in a text, Martin Nystrand, for example, points out that texts do have a context because they are produced for eventual use in a specific context. Their examinations of these "uses" lead literacy theorists to posit a link between social practice and

example, still seems to offer a deficit model in her study, despite her attempt to provide a thick description of her three communities. She compares Trackton and Roadville continually to a school-based notion of literacy, a definition she finds in the homes of the townspeople. Similarly, in their study of Athabaskan literacy, Ron and Suzanne Scollon use their own toddler as a basis for comparison when discussing the literate practices of much older Athabaskan children. 14 reading and writing. Although most literacy research has concentrated on demonstrating the many types of literate behaviors present in our society, we can also see the ways in which discursive practice is inseparable from the cultural values and perspective that generates it in their descriptions of practices within specific communities. Literacy theorists who acknowledge that literacy is always context- bound examine how reading, writing, and speaking are interwoven with community practices, beliefs, and ideology. These context theorists assert, as Andrea Fishman puts it:

that literacy is a cultural practice, not a decontextualized, universal set of skills and abilities automatically transferable across contexts. It is not the technology or isolated skills that count, but the understanding and application of those technologies and skills within particular cultural frameworks that truly matter (3).

The contextual work of literacy theorists helps us see how discursive practices reflect the culture—with its ways of thinking, seeing the world, and relationship to material reality—of those who live, speak, and write within a cultural discourse. In their study of the Vai in Liberia, for example, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole demonstrate how certain cognitive skills, useful within their cultural context, result from the practice of specific types of literacy. They explain their results thus:

The consequences of literacy that we identified are all highly specific and closely tied to actual practices with particular scripts; learning the Qur’an improved skills on a specific type of memory task, writing Vai script letters improved skills in a particular communication task. Vai literates and Arabic literates showed different patterns of skills, and neither duplicated the performance of those who had obtained literacy through attendance at Western- type English schools (85). 15

Andrea Fishman’s own ethnography of the Amish community also illustrates this culturally-bound definition of literacy. For example, within the Amish culture, or at least the group of families with whom Fishman interacted, the relationship between reader and text is one of trust and community. Authority is granted to a text based on faith, as with the Bible; on familiarity with the publication, as with the Amish newspaper; or even on the fact of its publication alone (45). Community readings take precedence over individual interpretation, and meaning is posited in the text itself

(37). The value the Amish place on the community over the individual, and on a religion based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and other religious texts, creates a cultural literacy practice in which almost all texts are considered authoritative.

Amish literacy, then, can be seen to serve the needs of a particular community with a unique set of circumstances. More important to note, however, is the connection between the worldview and values of the Amish community and their literate practices.

Although it might be easy to claim that Fishman could demonstrate this connection so well because she studied a community that has purposely cut itself off from mainstream culture, it is possible to see literacy operating as social practice within less autonomous communities. Denny Taylor and Catherine Dorsey-Gaines, for example, studied four families living in an inner-city neighborhood they label

Shay Avenue. Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines describe how literate practices function within the context of these four families, compiling an incredibly long and varied list of reading and writing practices according to their uses within this context. For 16 example, they include "fînancial types and uses of reading" as a category, which includes reading apartment ads with attention only to rent prices, a use tied closely to the families’ economic and political situation (179). Shirley Brice Heath, in her study of three communities within the Carolina Piedmont region, also illustrates how each community practiced a certain way of reading and writing that fit their communities’ worldview. Heath’s study demonstrates how a child growing up in one of these communities learns to use language in these culturally-determined ways from birth.

Ron and Suzanne Scollon demonstrate how the worldview—including religion, and orientation to time and nature-of Athabaskans is reflected in their reading and

writing.

What has emerged from this research is a perspective that acknowledges the

link between social practice and literacy. Social involvement becomes the key model

for the ability to read and write, forcing us to define literacy differently. Deborah

Brandt’s definition of literacy as "a growing metacommunicative ability—an increasing

awareness of and control over the social means by which people sustain discourse,

knowledge, and reality" is a useful one here (32). By acknowledging the connection

between discursive and social practice, we must also recognize the ways in which this

discursive practice reflects the culture (i.e., knowledge, worldview, and relationship

to reality) embodied in that social practice. As Brian Street puts it, "literacy can only

be known to us in forms which already have political and ideological significance"

(8 ). 17 While work in literacy theory, particularly that done by educators, was originated to facilitate the teaching of academic discourse through a better understanding of students’ literate practices (e.g.. Heath), recognizing the ways culture can be embodied in literate practices had a more profound effect: composition studies began to look at the effects teaching their own brand of literacy might have on the culture of their students.

Academic Discourse as a Site of Conflict

What composition studies and educators have increasingly begun to realize is that, in the words of Heath, "the school is not a neutral objective arena; it is an institution which has the goal of changing people’s values, skills, and knowledge bases" (367). While a liberatory view of education has always implicitly recognized this lack of neutrality, it has only recently begun to question how that goal of change

might be oppressive rather than empowering. As the institution and, indeed, the

entire Western tradition has come under censure by under-represented ethnic groups,

women, and gay and lesbian activists, educators are beginning to question the

seemingly empowering nature of their curriculum and practices. Added to these

critiques are the projections of a radical change in the demographics of the student

population and the varying cultural perspectives they will bring with them. Both

these factors, of course, intersect and are not separate issues. As Renato Rosaldo

writing in The New York Times very pointedly shows, curriculum and demographic

issues are interrelated. Renato writes: "Try beginning to teach a diverse classroom 18 with; "We must first learn our heritage. It extends from Plato and Aristotle to Milton and Shakespeare.’ The students ask, ‘Who’s the "We"?”’

The dissonance a student asking this question probably feels represents a crucial challenge to educators. As many research studies in education have shown, success in school seems to be determined primarily by cultural match; that is, students whose cultural values and knowledge are not reflected in school have a much harder time succeeding (e.g.. Heath, Ogbu, Philips). Further, many of those who do succeed feel pressured to give up their ties to other cultures in order to achieve that success (e.g. Mitchell, Rodriguez, Rose).

Given the challenges such a diverse student population will bring to the academy and the critiques by groups previously written out of the history of knowledge, the educational project is gradually turning away from its implicit goal of turning up the fire on the "melting pot" and teaching a Hirsch-like cultural literacy which only acculturates students to mainstream America. Instead, the move to what has been termed "multicultural education" has as its goal teaching a respect for difference. The multicultural project in education has primarily surfaced in two ways at this point: 1) changes in the curriculum, and 2) increased sensitivity to students of under-represented groups.

In English studies, the multicultural education movement has surfaced pedagogicaliy most often at the level of course content. Most calls for multicultural education focus on "deconstructing" the canon in order to include the previously 19 marginalized writing of women, gays and lesbians, and non-white races/ Other courses, many of them in composition, look to culture for their subject matter, asking students to write papers that analyze how difference is treated in our society. While both of these manifestations of the multicultural education movement have been immersed in controversy—the recent fiasco with the University of Texas at Austin’s

English 306 course is an ideal case in point-composition studies is facing an even more difficult challenge.® For composition studies what has become the more pointed challenge is the very heart of the field: the teaching of writing.

If, as Linda Brodkey asserts, "words constitute worldviews," then the very act of teaching writing is teaching a specific way of seeing reality, one that is bound up in the same critiques directed at the institution which values that writing

("Transvaluing" 598). Terry Dean in "Multicultural Classrooms, Monocultural

Teachers" puts it more bluntly: "When we teach composition, we are teaching

* Seeing the deconstructing of a white, patriarchal canon as a move toward multicultural education is, of course, only one "reading" of the impetus behind such a move. The influence of poststructuralist definitions of Text, while a related move in its attempts to localize the way power infuses our definitions of authors and texts, is also frequently cited as the impetus behind these changes in the canon.

® The English 306 syllabus at UT-Austin proposed to make the topic of the first-year English course "Writing about Difference" by reading and writing about U.S. Supreme Court decisions and civil rights commentaries as well as selections from Paula Rothenberg’s Racism and Sexism. According to Utmost, the university’s magazine, the controversy centered around the issue of what the course "might do. TTiat ‘might’ refers to indoctrination to a leftist perspective" (27). The controversy and arguments about the course quickly moved beyond university publications into public forums such as The Daily Texan. 2 0 culture" (24). Dean continues by explicating the nature of this culture in more detail:

Depending on students’ backgrounds, we are teaching at least academic culture, what is acceptable evidence, what persuasive strategies work best, what is taken to be a demonstration of ‘truth’ in different disciplines. For students whose home culture is distant from the mainstream culture, we are also teaching how, as a people, ‘mainstream’ Americans view the world. Consciously or unconsciously, we do this, and the responsibility is frightening (24).

The issue of teaching a certain "monoculture" is especially relevant to composition studies, as Dean points out, because of the status of writing in the academy. Writing is viewed by many as a way of thinking, a mode of learning, and an evaluation of knowledge: how we know as well as what we know is caught up in our writing. For the most part, the way academic culture defines itself is through its texts: we write them, read them, position ourselves against or with them, and base most of our claims to knowledge on them. In very few disciplines, if any, can a student be said to know without having to demonstrate that knowledge in written form. If culture is inextricably tied to the discursive forms it produces, as literacy researchers have demonstrated, then learning to write "academic discourse" must be seen as instruction in academic culture as well. Rejecting such a link would be a return to the now defunct notion that writing is only a neutral medium for thought.

Much current research in composition studies is beginning to explore how

"frightening" teaching academic culture through the teaching of writing might be for students from different home cultures. As in the educational research on the conflict of cultures, what has emerged from this research in composition is the tension and 21 dissonance our students confront when discursive practices, and the culture they embody, do not mesh. While many composition pedagogies still emphasize what

Dean calls "cultural mediation"--the integration of home and academic cultures-this research demonstrates that such an integration is not always possible when the academic culture is "too different" from the home culture of a student.

For example, in an unpublished dissertation, Valerie Balester discovered that for her two subjects, both speakers of Black English Vernacular, there were no appropriate or available means in the written code equivalent to the oral strategies they employed to present a strong ethos within their own discourse community. Their attempt to apply these oral strategies to their academic writing resulted in an

"alienating hyperstyle" for one and "uncommitted and impersonal prose" for the other. Linda Brodkey’s work with Adult Basic Education (ABE) students and teachers in a teaching basic writing class points to the detrimental effect a teacher’s tacit desire to control the content of a student’s writing can have. Although the teachers were engaged in written correspondence with the ABE students, allegedly negating any power relationship between them, the teachers still valued only the concerns deemed relevant by the academy and implicitly rejected the class concerns the students valued. By "frenetically protecting] educational discourse from class concerns," the teachers "distanced" and "alienated" themselves from the students

("Literacy Letters" 139). The students ceased writing about class issues, and some even stopped corresponding altogether. For those who continued writing, this alienation resulted in theif writing becoming progressively worse. 2 2

The ramiücations of the clash between and among cultural discourses, unveiled in Balester and Brodkey’s studies, demonstrate the impossibility for some students of cultural mediation. Because the cultural values that surfaced in the ABE students’ writing about class issues elicited no response from their correspondents, the students’ subsequent inability to write should not be surprising. Issues dealing with class are constitutive of valued knowledge for these students, yet the teachers effectively closed the door on the students’ discourse without opening alternative avenues of written expression. Similarly, because a culture’s ways of knowing and its language are inseparable, dialect and style also reveal and create the valued knowledge of a culture.

By prohibiting a specific style, academic discourse has equally slammed the door on

Balester’s students, resulting in their inability to communicate the concept inscribed

by their stylistic structures. It seems unlikely that these students could keep these two

cultural discourses—that of home and the academy—from impinging upon each other.

In her essay, "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle," Min-zhan Lu

articulates this inability to keep cultural discourses separate by describing her

experiences growing up with a humanist education in English at home and the societal

education of Mao Tse Tung’s Marxism at school. She describes her education as

"dominated by memories of confusion and frustration" (437). While Lu managed as a

young child to switch languages and ways of knowing like clothing, this type of

switching became more diffîcult as she became older and moved beyond a purely

literal response to reading and writing. As an adult, writing for Lu became a painful

deliberation and a constant effort not to mix her two "languages" in either context. 23 but she found she could no longer keep the two separate. Similarly, John Lofty

shows how his students in a small, Maine, Ashing community could not keep their cultural conceptions of time and work, forged in a culture that organizes itself around

natural time and a concept of work "done right the first time," from impinging upon

their writing processes.

What this research shows, then, is not only that differing cultural discourses

do not always interact easily with that of the academy but that writing education can

frequently become the space in which the dissonance among cultural discourses can be

recognized. As Lu points out, such research and its positive reception, indicates that

the field is "taking seriously" that "the writer writes at a site of conflict rather than

‘comfortably inside or powerlessly outside the academy’" ("Conflict" 888). The issue

of "writing on the margins," the title of an essay by David Bartholomae, has become

a central issue for composition studies, so much so thatCCC devoted an entire issue

to the topic in February 1992. How composition studies imagines the nature of this

conflict and how it should be addressed pedagogicaliy, however, differs radically

from theorist to theorist. What most compositionists seem to agree about, though, is

that the writer, in particular the basic writer, is constantly being called upon to

negotiate competing cultural discourses and to live on the margins of conflict.

The (Student) Writer as a Site o f Conflict

The preceding "story" brings us back to the present and the current challenge

to composition studies. Compositionists have come to recognize two basic

assumptions that guide our work: 1) academic discourse, rather than being the 24

"right" way to write or the "only" way, represents only one cultural discourse in the

U.S. among many, and 2) academic discourse embodies a certain cultural way of knowing that is linked to the role of the institution within our larger cultural context.

The challenge now facing those of us interested in pursuing the goals of a multicultural education lies in articulating the relationship between academic discourse and other discourses. How we articulate this relationship will guide both our theory and our pedgagogy, determining how we imagine the goals of the teaching of writing.

If we are seeking to make education more than an acculturation into the dominant worldview, we must ask ourselves how our pedgogies and theories imagine that the conflict between academic and other discourses gets negotiated, and more importantly, what effect that negotiation has on our students’ relationship to other cultural discourses.

What I am asking, then, are basically questions about how learning a new discourse affects the people who use it. If learning academic discourse is, in effect, an education in another culture, can our students retain the worldview and ways of knowing forged in other discourses after/during their initiation into academic discourse? How we answer this question will center around how we articulate the relationship of discourse to those who use its language. In other words, I suggest, the challenge of articulating a multicultural writing pedagogy focuses on questions of the status of the (student) writer in discourse. The success of a multicultural pedagogy relies on how we imagine humans interacting with the discourses surrounding us. In 25 sum, we need to examine what effect learning academic discourse has on other cultural ways of knowing.

If we imagine that the writer uses language as an autonomous agent, then we need not worry that learning academic discourse could displace or erase the sense of

self forged in other cultural discourses. Such an autonomous agent could then choose among his/her multiple languages, using only those that are appropriate within certain contexts because she/he remains unaffected by the languages she/he uses. On the other hand, if we imagine the writer as a product of a discourse that is beyond human control, as one who is used by language, the possibility that learning academic discourse would mean inscription within the discourse of the academy becomes very real. Such an inscription would inevitably lead to a change in the sense of self forged in the frameworks of other cultural discourses.

While the question of the status of the subject and his/her relationship to discourse has become a central one in humanities and philosophy, in composition we have rarely addressed this question and its implications directly."^ Despite this lack of explicit consideration, our pedagogies and theories doimply such a relationship through their articulation of the pedagogical and theoretical goals of the teaching of writing. Particular to my goal are those pedagogies and theories that attempt to

* While composition studies has become increasingly interested in the viability of the construct of the individual author (e.g. Ede and Lunsford, Miller, Sullivan, Crowley, Phelps), this question takes a different approach than the question I ask here. The focus of these discussions is much more interested in the nature of texts as representative of singular, originary thought than in the influence writing/reading such texts has on the writer him/herselL This distinction will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. 26 articulate academic discourse’s relationship to other cultural discourses and/or explain the place of academic discourse within a larger cultural scene. ^ It is to these pedagogies and theories that I now turn in order to examine how they have implied the interaction of (student) writer and academic discourse. Rather than discuss this work according to the classifications proposed by others (e.g. Berlin, Young,

Faigley), I employ a classification system based on the position of the writer in discourse, using a terminology derived more from the critical/rhetorical theory than from composition. I rely on this terminology because, quite simply, the majority of work on the status of the subject and its relation to identity politics can be found in critical theory rather than composition.

In my review of the work in composition dealing explicitly with the issue of cultural discourses, I have devised three categories useful for an analysis of the writer’s relationship to discourse: agent, subject, and agent/subject. The following definitions, which rely heavily on the work of Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault, guide my use of these terms throughout the subsequent analysis:

Discourse: Discourse is ahistorical, always existing in a state of becoming, although certain manifestations of it may be absent (Foucault, Archaeology 117). Discourse manifests itself in formations. Although the irruption, or emergence of certain formations, can be linked to certain times in history when the formations became embodied, they still existed prior to this emergence. Discursive formations, then, are tied to a particular culture and can change in form with time. Such fbrmations-or a regularity of statements, forms of knowledge, and the expression of these statements through humans

^ My discussion here will, of necessity, not be a review of all of composition studies. Instead, I focus only on the work that explicitly deals with cultural discourses, a selection which leaves out, according to Berlin’s taxonomy, both the expressivists and cognivists, focusing much more heavily on a portion of the "social-epistemics." 27 and institutions--are not found in the thoughts of men and women nor in institutions; they reside in discourse itself. For my purposes here, the term "discourse" will refer to particular discursive formations, especially academic discourse. Discourse, then, refers to a phenomenon of culture and power of which language is a manifestation. Language is only that which supports a discourse’s power, yet that power is not found in its language but in the discourse itself which embodies the institution, culture, objects of knowledge, and human subjects.

Agent: If the writer is depicted as an agent, she/he is seen as in control of discourse. Humans are seen as the creators of discourse, and individual humans use the language created by themselves and others in history, achieving consubstantiality with those in history who have also created the ideas represented by language. The motives for a linguistic act, and the power of that act, are situated in the human agent (Burke, Grammar o f Motives, 117; 172). Agency, or the ability of language to exert power (instumentality), may come partially through the discourse itself; however, agents have the ability to use the agency of discourse self-consciously. In sum, agents are users and creators of discourse and not used by that discourse.

Subject: If the writer is depicted as a subject, she/he is seen as controlled by discourse. The ability to use language is granted by the discourse. The speaking subject produces purposeful language within a discourse, but the language, or statements issued by the subject, are not caused by the writer or speaker him/herself. Instead, the discourse creates a space that may be filled by different individuals. Discourse creates a space that can be seen as "a dimension that characterizes a whole formulationqua statement" (Foucault, Archaeology 95): the discourse itself "defines the possible positions of speaking subjects" (Foucault, History 122). In other words, discourse functions as a discursive agent that uses humans as the agency of its own power. Humans are an instrument of a discourse that goes beyond the uses of language by humans. The definition of subject is analogous to an inscription in discourse, whereby humans are products of discourse.

Subject/Agent: Simply put, subject/agent is a combination of the above categories. Depending on the situation and context, the writer is seen as the originator and manipulator of language and/or a product of discourse. This category is characterized by a continuum in which the language user is given varying degrees of power to change and manipulate discourse, even though discourse is also given the power to partially inscribe individuals. Humans are given limited power to use language in certain situations wherein they remain immune from the inscribing power of discourse. 2 8

The (Student) Writer as Agent

The majority of theories and pedagogies that attempt to address the influence of other cultural discourses while depicting the (student) writer as agent emerge from the philosophical perspective referred to in composition as "social constructionism."

Quickly becoming the reigning paradigm in composition studies, this philosophical position was introduced to composition almost a decade ago by Kenneth Bruffee and others. Using the work of Lev Vygotsky, Thomas Kuhn, and especially Richard

Rorty, Bruffee argues that thought is not "an essential attribute of the human mind" but "an artifact created by social interaction" (640). Relying on Vygotsky, Bruffee views thought as a conversation; if thought is socially constructed as conversation, then to understand thinking, Bruffee explains, we must understand conversation.

Understanding this conversation necessitates a recognition of the nature of community life that generates and maintains conversation. Bruffee goes on to assert that if knowledge is socially constructed by communities of knowers who share the "same paradigms and the same code of values,” then in order for students to become knowers, they need to learn to "converse better” using the "normal discourse"

(Rorty's term) of these established communities (641). Normal discourse, according to Bruffee and Rorty, is "pointed. . . explanatory and argumentative. Its purpose is to justify belief to the satisfaction of other people within the author’s community of knowledgeable peers" (643). As Gregory Clark, another social constructionist, explains in Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation, this view of a socially-constructed 29 discourse requires that the writer is able to be "answerable" for what she communicates to others (9).

Such a description of a constructed discourse implies that the self operates as an agent with discourse; she can use language intentionally. For such answerability to be present, the self, as a communicator of language, must be able to stand outside of the discourse produced in some objective way to know what she has said and what the implications of her communication are. Further, the discourse that the self uses as an agent also derives its agency, or power to affect others, from other human agents. In a social constructionist philosophy, human agents populate the communities that generate discursive norms; thus, insofar as humans create discursive communities, they remain in ultimate control of discourse, consensually determining the rules that will define the power of a specific discourse. Clark probably epitomizes this control over the creation of discourse most clearly when he defines this process as being accomplished by a "group of people who use discourse according to agreed-upon rules to maintain a body of knowledge and society that will support their common efforts"

(40). Here, the use of discourse must be intentional, an attempt by human agents to actively alter/support the shared knowledge of a group in response to a shared need.

By requiring "agreement" for these discursive rules to be made, human agents make the ultimate decision over where power will lie in the discourse they have created.

Given the emphasis of a social constructionist philosophy on control over the creation and use of discourse by a human agent, albeit a group who comes to know, it is not surprising that the pedagogies based on this philosophy, including Bruffee’s 30 own, would reflect a similar image of the writer as agent. Bruffee’s pedagogy, usually referred to as collaborative learning, has been extremely influential in classrooms throughout the country, especially his emphasis on group learning through consensus. Our job as teachers, according to Bruffee, is to teach the normal discourse of "most academic, professional, and business communities" by creating a community of peers where the conversation of normal discourse can take place (643).

For Bruffee, collaborative learning groups become this community. The goal of collaborative learning groups, then, is "to provide a context in which students can practice and master the normal discourse exercised in established knowledge

communities" (644). The students, in their groups, mimic what Bruffee describes as

the process by which normal discourse is created by the academic or business

community, engaging in the process of creating such a discourse through tasks

assigned by the teacher.

The students, then, do not collaboratively develop a new discourse, for they

are not given the power of validating a discourse as the communities in Rorty’s

formulation are. Instead, they pool resources in order to "make accessible the normal

discourse of the new community they together hope to enter" (644), thereby becoming

"reacculturated" into the discourse of the academy. Such a pedagogical goal-

reacculturation-would imply that the self becomes inscribed by this new discourse;

however, since Bruffee assumes the self to operate within a discursive community as

an agent, one who creates the discourse itself, "reacculturation" takes on a different

meaning. Academic discourse does not change students’ cultural perspectives through 31 its power; instead, students make conscious decisions to become part of this new culture. As Bruffee puts it in "The Way Out," students need to overcome their

"rampant individualism" and learn the "normal discourse of the academy" (464). Or, in "Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind," he puts it another way: "students undergo a sort of cultural change. This change would be one in which they loosen ties to the knowledge communties they currently belong to and join another" (651). Students, then, make a decision to accept new discursive norms and ways of knowing because academic discourse is literally "the way out" to successful jobs and careers.

In his discussion of "abnormal discourse," or discourse that occurs when

"consensus no longer exists with regard to rules, assumptions, goals, values, or mores" (648), Bruffee does allow for the possibility of challenges to the discourse learned. Such challenges, however, are again located in the human agent since abnormal discourse, Bruffee explains, comes from the individual. Implicit in this discussion, then, is the assumption that individuals, even once part of a new discourse, can retain other perspectives. Thus, by emphasizing the student as an agent in discourse, even if the agency of the discourse has been pre-determined by a

group of which students are not yet a part, collaborative learning implicitly assumes

that initiation into academic discourse does not affect the students’ ability to retain

other cultural discourses. Although these discourses might be silent when

inappropriate in the academic community’s context, they do not disappear. 32

In "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning," John Trimbur, on the other hand, critiques Bruffee for assuming the student should merely accept the

"conversation" of academic discourse as it currently exists. Trimbur makes an attempt to acknowledge academic discourse’s power to limit a person’s ability to be

"counted" in certain situations. Trimbur’s pedagogy is based on an idealized consensus that is always deferred. Consensus, for Trimbur, need not be limited to a stable community; it can also work as a "counterfactual anticipation of fully realized communication," rather than a conformity to a previously constructed consensus

(614). His pedagogy asks students to "interrogate the conversation. . . interrupt it in order to investigate the forces which determine who may speak and what may be said, what inhibits communication and what makes it possible" (612). By examining what is silenced or seen as Other by the consensus of a current conversation of power, his students consider the "differences" such a consensus margnalizes. In this way,

Trimbur hopes to allow students to change and interrogate the discourse of which they are becoming a part. Presumably, the other ways of knowing students bring with them to the academy allow them to perform this critique. By maintaining the validity of "conversation" and "community" as metaphors, however, Trimbur still places the power to create and control the discourse in the student as agent. The student, as autonomous agent, can particapate in changing academic discourse by deferring their consensus to the community during their initiation into the disocurse.

Although the issue of other cultural discourses is never addressed explicitly in

Bruffee or Trimbur’s work, those who have extended Bruffee’s theory have made the 33 interplay of cultural discourses their primary concern. I refer, of course, to discourse community theorists. The discourse community is perhaps the most well-known concept available from composition theory that attempts to explain the relationship of academic to other cultural discourses. First coined by Patricia Bizzell in her 1986 article, "What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College," it has since become almost a god term in composition studies, generating numerous articles and appearing as a new category in the topical index for the 1992 CCCC. Part of the appeal of discourse community theory lies in its ability to value the multiple discourses present in the U.S. in such a way that teaching academic discourse does not result in the imposition of a hyperliterate, monocultural standard.

Expanding upon Bruffee’s link of knowledge to conversation, Patricia Bizzell, like Clark, defines a discourse community as "a community that coheres because of common language-using practices" ("What Happens" 296). Bizzell, then, places the definition of community in discourse, emphasizing the discursive manifestations and artifacts of a community’s epistemology. James Porter explicates this concept in more detail; "A ‘discourse community’ is a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated" ("Intertextuality" 38-39). A text or any manifestation of discourse is defined as acceptable within a certain forum. Porter writes, "insofar as it reflects the community episteme" ("Intertextuality" 39). The concept of discourse community, then, goes beyond surface conventions; it is inextricably tied to the community’s ways of knowing, valuing only those discursive practices reflective of its community’s 34 epistemology. Further, inextricably tied to q>istemology and language use are that community’s culture and ways of viewing the world that produce and validate certain types of knowledge.

Despite its more explicit recognition of other cultural discourses, however, discourse community theory also imagines the (student) writer as an agent in its reliance on the community-model of consensus derived from social construction.

Such an emphasis on the agent, as controller of language, allows discourse community theorists to recognize the validity of other cultural discourses in the U.S., while remaining dedicated to academic discourse. In an educational climate concerned with recognizing difference, the growing status of discourse community theory, then, might be explained as a result of its seemingly broad explanatory power. Discourse community theory challenges the common conception that discursive structures and dialects different from those of Edited American English or academic discourse constitute "bad" writing. Instead, the theory asserts that language use only occurs in the context of specific communities which determine communal criteria for language specific to the cultural epistemologies and ideologies of these communities. Academic discourse, in this formulation, becomes another discourse among many, albeit one constituted by the socially powerful community of the academy.

Because of its conception of the self as agent, however, discourse community theory only skirts the issue of how learning academic discourse might impinge upon other cultural discourses. While discourse community theory goes further than social constructionism by implying that the agency of language might be embodied within a 35 discourse that may or may not be within human control, the possibility that learning academic discourse might negate other discursive perspectives is circumvented because the theory holds that an individual can be a member of several discourse communities simultaneously. An irreconcilable tension, then, seems to exist in the way discourse community theory articulates a discourse’s relationship to those who use it. The self in discourse community theory can move fairly freely among various discourses because it is the self, or agent, that controls these discourses. Hence, although discourse community theory implies that the self might achieve its culture and ways of knowing from discourse, the theory also presumes a self that can remain immune to the effects of discourse.

Perhaps the best example of the ways in which discourse community theorists articulate a self able to move among cultural discourses can be seen in Bizzell’s work.* In Bizzell’s definition of a discourse community—a community that coheres in their language practices-she also explains the ramifications of this "common language." Using the academy as an example, she explains the implications of a discourse community: "... the academic community uses a preferred dialect (so- called ‘standard’ English) in a convention-bound discourse (academic discourse) that creates and organizes the knowledge that constitutes the community’s world view"

("What Happens" 297). In this formulation, discourse both reflects and constitutes thought. With her term "world view" Bizzell implies that discourse affects not only

* Although I refer to Bizzell’s work summarily here, I should note that my discussion in this section represents only her work with discourse communities and not her more recent publications. 36 intellectual structures but cognitive, ethical, and cultural ones as well. Hence, Bizzell tells us, it is not only the language of the academy with which basic writers (or any student writer) are unfamiliar but also academic ways of thinking and viewing the world.

Despite her assertion that discourse can define and delineate cultural perceptions, Bizzell still maintains that learning a new discourse does not have to result in a loss of other cultural perspectives. While Bizzell admits that academic discourse, because of its societal status, "makes a strong bid to control all of a student’s experience," she still claims that the goal of pedagogy is to make students

"bicultural," able to move between academic and a "home" discourse (299, 298).

Even though she concedes the power of academic discourse and refers to the school

"as an agent of cultural hegemony," Bizzell continues to argue that the dominance of a certain discourse community does not have to equal a conversion ("Cognition,

Convention, and Certainty" 237). By denying the inevitability of total acculturation, or "conversion," Bizzell implies that the self can resist a potentially powerful

discourse, yet the site of this resistance is never articulated explicitly in her work.

Because her argument does not locate this site in discourse, the underlying assumption

is that this resistance lies in a part of the self that remains somehow free of the

discourse community(ies) of which it is a part. Although Bizzell places the meaning

and communicative power of language in discourse, she also seems to imply that

ultimate power over language is localized in the writer herself. In other words, her

theory tries to acknowledge discourse’s influence on thought and culture, yet she still 37 gives humans the ability to control this discourse and not be subsumed by it. This seeming contradiction, or tension, is resolved by articulating a self that can remain immune from discourse while it accesses the agency, or power of language, that may

(or may not) be located in the discourse itself.

Such an emphasis on a self that stands outside of discourse’s influence can be seen even more clearly in the work of other discourse community theorists. James

Porter, for example, tries to respond to the possibility that learning academic discourse could lead to a totalization of the self within this community’s discourse.

For Porter, however, a transition need not be so problematic because he argues that discourse communities are not static. Instead, the boundaries of communities are constantly shifting; individuals "cross and recross" boundaries continually, "joining other communities one moment, returning to a ‘home’ community the next" ("This is

Not a Review" 216). Like Bizzell, Porter presumes here that the power over discourse is located in the user of that discourse. He or she is not changed or altered in the movement between and among communities. Communities may not be static for Porter, but he suggests that individual users of discourse are. Porter’s emphasis on a self that stands outside of discourse surfaces in his assumption that humans can access the world view and language of a certain discourse despite their participation in other discourses.

Similarly, Joseph Harris responds to his own criticisms of other discourse community theorists, especially Bruffee, with much the same answer. Harris criticizes those who describe acclimation to academic discourse as a process of being 38 "bom again" (16) by arguing that such a description falsely polarizes the academic

■ community and other "common" communities. Instead, Harris argues, we need to see

acclimation to academic discourse not as initiation but as an addition to a student’s

already complicated language. In Harris’ formulation, the power over discourse is

again located in the self. The self’s present state remains unaffected by the new

discourse he or she enters; the writer/speaker simply increases his or her linguistic

abilities without those new abilities impinging upon other cultural discourses.

In all these discussions, discourse community theorists reflect the way in

which culture is embodied in discourse, but they also seem to back off from the

possibility that this embodiment might also give discourse power over the self. In her

later work on discourse communities, Bizzell attempts to explain this seeming

contradiction between a concern for the power of academic discourse to validate

selectively a certain world view and the assertion that academic discourse need not

change the self’s relationship to other cultural discourses. She notes that the

dominance of one discourse is frequently challenged by those who have managed to

enter the community while still retaining their "cultural treasures" ("Arguing" 141).

It is these challenges to the status quo, Bizzell explains, that keep the discourse in

flux and better able to meet the needs of its community. In this way, other cultural

discourses are integrated into the new discourse so that neither the world views

embodied in other cultural discourses nor the facility with a socially powerful

discourse are lost. 39 It is in the insistence on an ability to "add to a language" (Harris) or retain

"cultural treasures" (Bizzell) that I believe we can see discourse community theorists skirting the very issues their theories bring to the fore. By locating the power over discourse ultimately in the self, discourse community theorists can ignore the possibility that learning a new discourse might result in cultural displacement; that is, both a physical removal from a cultural context and an erasure of cultural ways of knowing from the locus of the self. Yet their own assertion that particular communal discourses embody a world view and a culture seem to imply that such a displacement might be inevitable. If a discourse does construct a particular world view, can it be possible for a student ever to fully be a member of another discourse after she gains a facility with academic discourse? This question is particularly pertinent given the cultural force of academic discourse. If academic discourse makes "a bid to control" a student’s experience and acts "as an agent of cultural hegemony," then can we assume that there is no concomitant loss of other cultural discourses? What if learning a new discourse does result in cultural displacement, or worse, in a loss of self? These questions, which derive from the apparent tension in a theory that both acknowledges that cultural ways of knowing are embodied in discourse and places power over discourse in the self, remain largely unexplored in discourse community theory.

Such an emphasis on the (student) writer as agent, however, does not emerge solely from pedagogies which rely on social constructionism as a philosophical base.

Perhaps because the concept of the self as agent has been the predominant one in 40 rhetoric for so long (at least since Descartes), a return to the self as agent appears in the most unlikely places—even in theories relying on deconstruction for their philosophical perspective. Perhaps the best example of a work with a radically different theoretical base that returns to the (student) writer as agent can be found in

Sharon Crowley’sA Teacher's Guide to Deconstruction. Crowley provides an amazingly accessible summation and introduction to deconstruction in the first part of her book and uses this summary to deconstruct several of the pedagogical assumptions in current composition theory. She critiques cognitive and expressivist theories for their reliance on the concept of an originating author, deconstructs the idea of modes and genres, points to "purpose" and closure as convenient fictions, and finally discloses the linear-stage model as a method. Despite the promise of these cogent critiques, she fails to maintain her deconstructive perspective when she turns to the issue of the (student) writer. Crowley does address the issue of an autonomous, intentional writer, but, in an interesting move, she uses her deconstructive analysis of

the concept to move us back to the issue of discourse communities.

Crowley notes that any focus on the individual writer relies on the absence of

readers from the composing act as well as the many "voices of the community" to

which one’s language belongs. The term, voice, links her discussion of a

community’s discourse to the creation of human agents. This concept of the human

agent is continued in her description of the act of writing, an act which requires a

"pluralization" of the writer in which he or she must become the audience. While

pluralization implies the interpolation of the self into a discourse over which the 41 writer has little control, Crowley again renders this discourse a concrete construction and mediation among human agents by making this pluralization occur with an audience—presumably the community that created and maintains the discourse—rather than the discourse itself. Even the language the individual uses and "innovative ideas" belong to a community and a long textual history (35).

Crowley further uses these descriptions of the writer’s relationship to discourse to make statements about pedagogy reminiscent of Bizzell and Bruffee. Experienced writers manage to hold onto the idea of a solitary writer because "they know how to submit themselves to the flow of the community’s language" (35). Inexperienced writers, on the other hand, "find their own voices simply drowned out by those teachers and other sources of discursive authority" (35), the discursive authority derived from already being members of this discursive community. Implicit in these statements, of course, is the metaphor of insider and outsider, of "acculturated" and

"non-acculturated," if you will. Not surprisingly, then, she asserts that a deconstructive pedagogy would center "on readers and the common language of the community" (35).

Crowley, however, like Bizzell, also recognizes the power of academic discourse to inscribe preferred knowledge and its ability to seek to control a student’s perception. As a result, her pedagogy would also have students and teachers

"examine the institutional ideology that governs their work: why ‘academic discourse’ is preferred in school to whatever discourse(s) the students bring to school with them; why students might want to learn it (or not); why teachers are invested 42 with institutional authority. . . " (47). Despite her recognition of the authority academic discourse gains through its links to the institution, implying that its discursive power may not be solely linked to the community of agents that use it, she, like Trimbur, places the power over discourse in the student as agent, one who can critique the current consensus. Once again the agency, or the power of language to serve as instrument of an act, is placed in the student; she or he is given the decision­ making power. If I were to play Crowley here, I might note that it is in what is marginalized (i.e., parenthetical) in her text that we can begin to find what is absent: a reliance on "or not" as a conscious act that can be made despite the power she imputes to discourse in her deconstructive philosophy.

Jasper Neel also returns to the (student) writer as agent in his conclusion to

Plato, Derrida and Writing. Neel is more overt about his reasons for doing so. He rejects Derrida in favor of the sophists because they allow writing (rhetoric) to be generative, something that can be created. By positing speech as a "prior" medium, the sophists escape the Derridian impulse to work backwards to unwork discourse in order to show that what is required to begin a discourse is already gone. Thus, humans are freed up to use language as a prior medium "in which the possibility and impossibility of truth play out in endless struggle," a truth that humans, through their construction of it, can also overturn (203). Neel implies that the teaching of writing must include a concept of the agent as able to manipulate language, even if it is only to produce a contingent, mutable truth, if our pedagogy is to allow students to write at all. Otherwise, we are caught forever in an unending movement of critique. 43 In Neel, perhaps, we find at least one underlying reason why the majority of composition studies has retained the image of the (student) writer as agent: the belief that the discourse students produce must have the possibility of exercising power. The ability to exercise power through language is axiomatic to the teaching of writing; however, as we will see in the next section, academic discourse is not seen by all as the way to gain this power. Rather, it is depicted as an inscription within a power structure that is oppressive, and the goal of teaching writing is to resist such an inscription. The power of language is lodged in this resistance rather than in the

(student) writer as agent.

Ttæ (Student) Writer as Subject

A relatively small number of composition theorists, frequently termed

"radical" by more mainstream scholars, have rejected both the implicit value of academic discourse that those espousing the (student) writer as agent suggest, and the ability of students to choose or manipulate this discourse into which they are being initiated. While these scholars acknowledge the inevitability of (student) writers writing at a site of conflicting discourses, they are unwilling to depict this conflict as a place in which the subject may reside without being subjected to the ideological power of discourse(s). They further impute academic discourse with significant social and cultural power, thereby depicting the "struggle" among discourses as frequently an unequal one in which academic discourse has a distinct advantage. Academic discourse for this group is not only an embodiment of a certain culture but also a means of social control and reproduction by the dominant culture. By acknowledging 44 the long history of how education has intersected with the needs of the dominant culture—either as training a workforce to serve an industrial complex or as acculturation into dominant values-this group of composition scholars rejects the notion of a liberatory education implied by theories who depict academic discourse as an "addition" to a student’s cultural discourses or a creation by a community of human agents. Academic discourse is not empowering itself; instead, it is a means of social control.

This view on the relation between academic discourse and culture emerges from both literacy and composition theorists and relies on poststructuralist and neo-

Marxist theories for its critique. Jenny Cook-Gumperz’ reading of the historical work on literacy probably best demonstrates how this reading of the educational project emerged. Relying on her reading of the historical work on literacy education, Cook-

Gumperz asserts that literacy education is a form of social control and discredits the notion that high literacy rates can be linked to industrialization and the introduction of systematic schooling. High literacy rates, Cook-Gumperz asserts, were not a result of schooling; rather, schooling was a result of increasing literacy. Literacy had an immediate social value and was thus taught by whomever in the community possessed some knowledge of reading and writing. This commonplace literacy became part of a movement for social change (27); thus, the major goal of schooling as a result of mass literacy wasn’t originally to promote it but to control it (28). The introduction of professional schooling in the twentieth century provided organizational conditions through which schools became the arbiters of literacy standards, thereby controlling 45 not only access to literate skills but also their definition through their links to dominant ideology.

Elspeth Stuckey, another literacy scholar, critiques this link between school and state-control even more vehemently and ties her discussion more explicitly to how control through discourse affects the self. Stuckey’s definition of literacy is similar to that of many literacy theorists: "a function of culture, social experience, and

sanction" (19). Yet she adds to this definition how education in literacy is also conformity: "Becoming literate signifies in large part the ability to conform or, at

least, to appear conformist" (19). This conformity is implicitly violent for Stuckey

because it is conformity, through literacy, to a "society bent on unequal distribution

of wealth and power. . . Literacy is part and parcel a relationship that involves the

vertical and horizontal exchanges of the means of livelihood in a literate society" (59).

Literacy is further not something that imprisons or frees people; "it merely embodies

the enormous complexities of how and why some people live comfortably and others

do not" (68). In both her descriptions of literacy here, we can see how "literacy"

functions for Stuckey in much the same way as I have been using discourse-a

phenomenon of language that goes beyond human intention, embodying the values,

worldview, and epistemology of a culture (here, the dominant culture). She is even

more explicit when she describes the "agent" of the values embodied in "literacy" as

"the written word" (66).

While Stuckey limits literacy, or discourse, to social class relationships, and

the discourse’s language only to writing, her depiction of the relationship between the 46 self and discourse is similar to those who operate from a broader definition of discourse. Stuckey asserts that the words literacy and English, especially the teaching of English, have become synonymous. Thus, English teachers, including teachers of writing, are, in Stuckey’s view, perpetuating a discourse which seeks to inscribe their students in an oppressive culture. Because of academic discourse’s power, achieved through its link to the institution of school, the discourse has the ability to change the student’s self to fit the discourse; in other words, academic discourse inscribes the

(student) writer, making him a subject of its discursive realm. Although Stuckey herself does not use these terms, she depicts education in academic discourse as creating subjects who then exert the power of the discourse over others. The discourse not only possesses the agency behind the power of language to affect others, it also uses humans as its agents. As Stuckey puts it, "We must understand the extraordinary power of the educational process and of literacy standards not merely to exclude citizens from participating in the country’s economic and political life but to brand them and their children with indelible prejudice, the prejudice o f language”

(122, my emphasis).

Those in composition studies who depict discourse as possessing the power to inscribe human subjects are more explicit in their use of the critical discourse I have applied to Stuckey. Although these theorists would probably view Stuckey’s discussion as limited in its description of the power of "literacy," their views of the effect of academic discourse on the (student) writer are the same. John Clifford in his recent article, "The Subject in Discourse," has dealt more explicitly with the issue 47 of the student as subject than any of these theorists. Relying on the tenets of postmodern philosophy, Clifford argues that the teaching of writing is "inevitably an ideological act and thereby one part of any culture’s attempt to reproduce itself, by creating accommodating students who are eager to fill designated positions of influence within various institutional landscapes" (39). By defining the teaching of writing’s function in this way, Clifford gives academic discourse the agency to create subjects who will then be agents of its ideology. Clifford explains further how this production of acceptable subjects is linked to the teaching of writing later in his text.

Using Louis Althusser’s claim that the ideology of discourse always has a material existence in the language that we use, Clifford ties academic discourse’s ability to inscribe (student) writers to the forms that we teach. Although there exist many discursive options within academic discourse, Althusser claims that these positions merely create the illusion of choice. Further, Clifford explains, any of these options leads to a similar view by which the subject "comes to internalize the ideology of academic success, individual achievement, and rhetorical competence,

‘decides,’ because it is the normal course, to write appropriately and to have appropriate attitudes about the discipline of work, about evidence, syntax, form, and so on" (43). In this way, academic discourse can be seen as the inscription of a certain cultural worldview, one that takes a certain perspective on the individual and the nature of work. Quoting Althusser’s "Ideology and Ideological State

Apparatuses," Clifford explains the implications that the internalization of such a worldview brings about: 48 The myriad ways in which writing subjects can make the world intelligible have already been carefully proscribed so that the dutiful subject, true to ideals already internalized, believes it is possible to ‘inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the action of his material practice. If he does not do so, "that is wicked"’ (43).

Despite Clifford’s assertion of a subject produced by discourse, he, like most composition theorists, is concerned with the way in which the subject can achieve power to change academic discourse, even though she is inscribed by it. He finds this power in his definition of the subject as a decentering of the self. He defines the self as a linguistic construct—a decentered site of multiple discourses—which is overdetermined by historical and social meanings that are in constant conflict and internal struggle (40). Since students are "always already subjects"(45) whose discursive positions are constructed by "conflicting, partial, interesting codes" (50), the alterity between shifting subject positions can provide a site of resistance to the inscribing power of academic discourse. Thus, (student) subjects, for Clifford, need not be merely spaces upon which academic discourse writes itself. They may not function as agents, yet they can possess an agency that comes from multiple, conflicting subject positions. The site of this resistance, Clifford implies, comes from the other cultural discourses that students bring with them to school and the academy-

-their multiculturalism.

Unfortunately, Clifford does not articulate how pedagogy can encourage such a resistance beyond a suggestion to encourage a self-consciousness about who students are and can be in their world (51). Bizzell, in "Marxist Ideas in Composition

Studies," offers a slightly more concrete pedagogy. Taking a more politicized 49 perspective that argues for a movement toward a more "just" social order, Bizzell proposes a pedagogy based in cultural criticism. Such criticism would start wtih the school itself and have "students imagine liberatory alternatives to the unjust status quo by drawing on the knowledge they possess from their membership in groups at some remove from those who enforce this status quo" (65). This critical perspective, then, would make apparent the subjective contradictions of various discourses in order to construct more just discourses.’ Other theorists, working from the assumption that academic discourse has the power to inscribe (student) subjects, similarly advocate a pedagogy that makes cultural production its topic and argue for re-envisioning the

autonomous agent as a collective, shifting subject. However, like Clifford, these

theorists do not describe how students can access, or where they derive, the alternate

subject positions they assert as the basis for such a pedagogy (e.g. Schilb; Crowley).

John Trimbur’s article, "Composition Studies: Postmodern and/or Popular,"

stands out as one of the few discussions that has attempted to provide an explanation

of where alternative subject positions are derived that has implications for writing

pedagogy. Rather than rely on poststructuralist or postmodern theory for his

perspective, Trimbur turns instead to cultural studies because of its emphasis on lived

experience. Trimbur defines cultural studies as follows:

’ Bizzell’s reliance on a more "just" order does recognize the inevitability of never escaping ideological discourses. She uses the Utopian vision of Marxism as a construct to acknowledge the validity of ethical choices constructed by current ideologies. The (student) subject, then, can imagine a more utopian world, while still acknowledging the inevibility of a new order inscribing new inequities. In this way, Bizzell retains the "sense" of a Marxist Utopian world free of power relationships without depicting a future reality free of ideology. 50 Cultural studies, that is, portrays spectators and consumers not only as subject positions created by the discursive apparatus of the state, the media, and the culture industry but also as active interpreters of their own experience who use the cultural practices and productions they encounter differentially and for their own purposes (127).

Although Trimbur describes subjects as "active" interpreters of experience, he does not return to a concept of the agent; instead, he portrays the subject as that which exceeds its inscription through the mobilization of competing discourses and experiences. "The viewer as social subject," Trimbur explains, "will always exceed the subject implied by the text, mobilizing a specific and historically concrete repertoire of reading strategies that are determined not only by ‘the performance of the subject by the text’ but also by other texts, competing discourses, and extra- discursive social relations and experiences" (128). The lived experience, labeled the popular, then, operates at the micropolitical level of everyday life. For cultural studies to maintain the subject as able to exceed its inscription, it must depict

"hegemonic discourses” as "‘leaky’ sites of struggle and ongoing negotiation where no outcomes can be guaranteed in advance" (Trimbur 130).

Thus, although discourse may seek to inscribe subjects similarly, the subject may resist differently through its variety of lived experience in competing discourses.

Trimbur describes this resistance as a self-formation engaged in "not as an autonomous activity but as a practice of everyday life, of poaching on the dominant culture to create popular spaces of resistance, evasion, and making do" (130-31).

Much like Clifford, then, Trimbur sees the subject as one that can affect the inscribing power of a discourse through subjectivities constituted in others, a subject 51 that can at least change the way a particular discursive event gets played out on the locus of the self. By localizing the power of the subject in the "popular," Trimbur also values competing cultural discourses and the lived experience of individuals in these discourses. Although he is wary of articulating a pedagogy at this point, he is one of the few who pinpoint how the (student) subject might exceed its inscription in academic discourse.

Still other theorists who imagine discourse as both the agency and agent of power refuse altogether to articulate a pedagogy based on this theoretical position

(Vitanza; Worsham). For example, Victor Vitanza resists any move to turn theory intopraxis because such a move inevitably results in a totalization, or unification.

"Theory," Vitanza tells us, "cannot help as a resource, because theory of this sort resists finally being theorized, totalized" (159). Because of theory’s resistance to totalization, he finds the rush to turn theory intopraxis a resistance to theory itself.

Instead, he advocates not a "metadiscipline," linked to metatheory, but a

"nondiscipline," linked to microtheory. Such a nondiscipline would have as its only goal the constant disruption of any move towardlogos', it would exist instead in a constant play of language games, of continual dissensus, of playing and gaming with language (164-167). Such a game "never allows anyone to go outside that secretly dreamed-of ‘perfect control over a system’ in search of any possible counterlegitimation from another, but ‘incommensurable,’ system (166). Thus,

Vitanza rejects the idea of shifting subjectivities (constructed in "incommensurable

systems") as a site of resistance; any concept of interacting with competing cultural 52 discourses is forever deferred, making Vitanza’s "pedagogy" acultural rather than multicultural.

Vitanza’s emphasis on "language play" distinguishes him from most of the other theorists here; in fact, his position is definitely a minority one in composition studies as a whole. Like those who position the (student) writer as agent, the majority of composition theorists who depict the student as a subject of academic discourse also seek a way to give the student power to use language to effect a change in the discourse. The key difference is that academic discourse is not in itself empowering and the ability for change is localized in discourse itself. This desire for the (student) writer to have power with language also appears as a strong theme undergirding theories who depict her as both agent and subject.

The (Student) Writer as Agent/Subject or Subject/Agent

Like Trimbur and Bizzell, many other composition theorists have begun to advocate pedagogies and theories that acknowledge the politically and ideologically- charged nature of both academic and other cultural discourses. What these theorists

share with those who position the (student) writer as subject is the desire to use the

composition classroom as a site for social change through discourse, and/or a place

Attempts at the type of (post)pedagogy Vitanza advocates have been made, particularly in literary studies. The goal of such pedagogies is to teach students to "see differently." Presumably such a goal, similar to the one Vitanza implies, might also accomplish the resistance to the inscribing power of academic discourse Clifford and others seek. However, these pedagogies, surprisingly, seem to ignore the student, especially student writing, focusing instead on the teacher’s presentation, the use of models, and experimentation with texts. (See Gregory Ulmer’sApplied Grammatology and "Textshop for Post(e)pedagogy; " also Leitch; Atkins and Johnson.) 53 where a student’s discourse(s) get valued. Some of these theorists also believe that academic discourse embodies an oppressive cultural worldview that students should resist; however, that resistance is placed in a partially autonomous agent. In other words, this group of theorists acknowledges the inscribing power of discourse, but for them, it is not a totalization of the self. Others in this group view academic discourse more benignly, imputing it with the power to critique other, oppressive cutlural discourses; thus, the inscribing power of discourse is determined by context.

Although this group of theorists is similarly categorized because each of them allows the self to stand outside the inscribing power of discourse, the degree of power given to the (student) writer as agçnt differs fairly widely.

The perspective of the (student) writer as both agent and subject emerges primarily from compositionists working out of two different theoretical perspectives: discourse community theory, and Girouxian/Freirean Marxist theory." Because of their differing theoretical perspectives, the degree to which the (student) writer is depicted as an autonomous agent is relative to each theory. Not surprisingly, pedagogies and theories derived from discourse community theory give the (student) writer much more power as an agent than do most of those relying on interpretations of Marxism. For this reason, my discussion here will take up each group separately as agent/subject and subject/agent.

" My analysis will focus upon appropriations of Giroux and Freire by compositionists, not on their theories themselves or the integrity of their appropriations in composition. See the discussion of Bizzell in the previous section for an appropriation of Giroux that remains more closely aligned with his recent work. 54

The (StudenO Writer as Agent/Subject

Many compositionists have recently focused upon the (student) writer as agent,

localizing the power to negotiate competing discourses in the individual, while also

implying that academic discourse has the power to construct the student as a subject

(e.g., Ritchie; Geisler; Clark and Wiedenhaupt). David Bartholomae, however, is

arguably the best known of this group, and his pedagogy, put forth in Facts, Artifacts,

Counterfacts, perhaps most fully articulates this position. The way in which

Bartholomae acknowledges the self as both subject and agent is caught up in how he

describes initiation into academic discourse. For Bartholomae, the transition to

academic discourse is a "dialectical struggle for all students" ("Writing" 79). He

values the discourses students already possess, but his acknowledgement of varying

discourses serves only as a "stepping stone" to academic discourse, the first step

toward a transition. Bartholomae describes this process as a:

shuttling. . . between languages-theirs and ours-between their understanding of what they have read and their understanding of what they must say to us about what they have read. (Our language is the language of written academic discourse. . . Their language . . .is something in the margin, belonging neither here nor there and preventing their participation as speakers with place, privilege and authority.) (FAC 4)

Bartholomae’s goal, then, is to move students from their marginal position to one in

which they can speak with authority. His pedagogy accomplishes this by having

students analyze the images of readers and writers in their own textual performances

"so that they can imagine themselves as readers and writers" within the "closed

community" of academia (FAC 8). Students come up with their own terms for

analyzing essays and come to see reading as always mis-reading. 55 In his description of this "dialectical struggle" Bartholomae places the power over language both in students and in the discourse itself. He is even clearer about this both/and position in "Inventing the University": "a student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse" (135). While he gives the student the power to be an agent in that she can be the one to "appropriate" and "mis-read," he also implies that the discourse can appropriate (inscribe) her. Seemingly

Bartholomae’s pedagogy focuses upon giving the student power to "invent" academic

discourse herself, thereby making him appear as if he positions the (student) writer as

an agent who can access the agency of the discourse; however, even if the (student)

writer accomplishes this appropriation, there is a "price" to pay.

The goal of writing education, Bartholomae explains, is to "acquire an

unnatural artiricial discourse for purposes of assimilation (where intention and

experience are displaced or translated by a language that is not one’s own)"

("Writing" 71). The displacement results in a "writer’s sense of loss, his sense that

whatever he has written is not quite right," that may have a more far-reaching effect

than a single piece of writing ("Writing" 73). The transition into academic discourse,

Bartholomae tells us, will always result in such a loss: "A translation, then, is also a

loss, a displacement of the original, a definition of oneself in another’s terms"{FAC

9). Such displacement and loss implies that the discourse also has power over the

student, positioning him as a subject of its discourse. Thus, in Bartholomae, we can

see a tension whereby students are both subjects and agents, although the subject

position is usually only parenthetical (i.e., hidden, marginalized). He implies that the 56 transition into academic discourse is an accommodation resulting in a synthesis by which the student retains part of the self forged in other discourse(s) and a new self constructed by academic discourse. In other words, the student retains some parts of other cultural ways of using language while others are wiped away by their displacement. This sense of loss is what distinguishes Bartholomae from other discourse community theorists who posit academic discourse as only an "addition," or place the silencing of other discourses(s) in the decision of an agent.

For Bartholomae the conflict in his "both/and" position is unproblematic because he sees an inherent value in the language of the university, a language which values "‘counterfactuality,’ ‘individuation,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘freedom’" {FAC 5).

His reliance on both the power of students and academic discourse guides his entire pedagogy. His pedagogy, as he puts it, "is not a course designed to make the academy—or its students-disappear" {FAC 9). His course, then, focuses on the

(student) writer as agent because of this emphasis. His theoretical position implies a pedagogy that could focus on the tension between his students’ languages and that of the academy, but, as Susan Wall and Nicholas Cole note in their critique of his work, this critical stance "remains more a promise of his pedagogy than anything he demonstrates in his work to date" (16). Min-zhan Lu, one of Bartholomae’s students, does advocate a pedagogy that focuses on maintaining the student at the marginal site of conflict in order to keep the student from being appropriated by academic discourse

(see Lu, "Conflict). However, it is not clear whether Lu imagines this position of 57 conflict as allowing students access to a multiplicity of subjectivities (like Clifford), or as an autonomous agent who orchestrates a continual negotiation.

The (Student! Writer as Subject/Agent

The theorists who fall into this category are probably more concerned than any others with using the composition classroom as a site for social change (with the exception of Bizzell’s Marxist work). Each of these theorists tries to grant the

(student) writer a critical distance on discourse whereby she can change and challenge a potentially oppressive system, whether that system be lodged in the institution or other cultural scenes. Through providing the student with such a critical ability and recognizing the power of discourse to act upon those who use its language, these theorists have a remarkably similar agenda to those who position the (student) writer as subject. The key difference between these groups lies in where they place the source of such a critique. The critical distance necessary for discursive critique, for this group, comes from something in the self, not from another subjectivity. The ambiguity regarding the source of critical distance reveals this group’s reliance on a partial agent/agency lodged in the (student) writer himself.

Interestingly enough, the majority of those who make up this group are not interested in the effects of academic discourse on the student. Instead, academic discourse is a way for students to gain control of the oppressive discourses that make up their environment. Because they use the critical power of academic discourse as a way to liberate students, this group is frequently referred to as advocating a "radical" or "critical" pedagogy. Quoting Ira Shor and Freire in his definition, Charles Paine 58 defines the goal of such a pedagogy as follows: "It must help students transcend culturally imposed consciousness, allowing them to exit their circular, self-enclosed, and self-perpetuating ‘uncritical immersion in the status quo’" (558). Critical pedagogues, then, acknowledge discourse’s ability to inscribe individuals, to reify the consciousness of the individual and make her, as George Lukas puts it, "a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system" (qtd. in Paine 559; cf. Freedman). Yet this ability to inscribe does not apply to academic discourse.

The way in which writing pedagogy and academic literacy can give students the power to achieve a critical distance on their own subjectivities within other cultural discourses can be seen clearly in Kyle Fiore and Nan Elasser’s well-known essay "‘Strangers No More’: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum" (see also Shor;

Finlay and Faith; Wallerstein; Zimmet). Fiore and Elasser’s pedagogy is based, they tell us, on Freire’s assertion "that students caught by their own subjectivity can break through personal walls and move to a collective social perspective through investigating generative themes" (119). By investigating the generative theme of marriage with their basic writing class of Bahamian women, Fiore and Elasser poignantly trace how their students, through reading articles, talking and writing with each other, conducting research, and writing in different rhetorical modes, move beyond their own private perspectives on marriage to one that indicts the institution of marriage as constructed by Bahamian men. The ability to critique the cultural discourse constructing marriage in the Bahamas is placed in the (student) writer as agent, even though the power (agency) to enact that critique is derived through 59 academic discourse. Fiore and Elasser’s curriculum helped their students "understand the connections between their own lives and society, and empower them to use writing to control their environment" (117). The (student) writer as agent, then, can control another cultural discourse which has the power to inscribe her through the conscious use of the agency found in academic discourse’s critical distance.

Whether academic discourse also then creates the student as a subject is not discussed, which is surprising given the original impetus for Fiore behind experimenting with such a pedagogy. In the introduction, he tells us that he and his colleagues at the University of New Mexico became interested in critical pedagogy because of their concern for their diverse student population (Chicanos, Blacks,

Anglos, and Native Americans) who were "confronted by a course that negated their culture" (116). The result of such a negation was such that the students left "their own customs, habits and skills behind, they participated in school and in the world by adapting themselves to fit the existing order. Their acquisition of literacy left them not in control of their social context, but controlled by it" (116). Thus, Fiore and

Elasser imply that academic discourse too has the power to control students, but, presumably, only when it is not taught in a context that uses the discourse to achieve distance on other discourses.

Geoffrey Chase, another scholar working with critical pedagogy, however, does apply this critical perspective to students being initiated into academic discourse.

Although Chase relies on the concept of an academic discourse community, he also

acknowledges that writing is a "form of cultural production linked to the processes of 6 0 self and social empowerment," implying that discourse creates this empowerment (i.e. provides its agency through the inscription of agents). Despite Chase’s comments on discourse’s power to situate or exert power over students, he simultaneously places accommodation, opposition, or resistance-Giroux’s categories—to that power in the student. Resistance, for Chase, "grows out of a larger sense of theindividual’s relationship to liberation" (IS, my emphasis). His example of resistance comes in the form of his student, Karen. Karen, according to Chase, made a conscious choice to take a personal, rather than an objective, view of history in resistance to a faculty member telling her she must distance herself from her subjects. While Chase considers how the institutional power of academic discourse wielded an insurmountable influence on his other students. Bill and Kris, he fails to consider why

Karen is allowed to resist the power of academic discourse exercised by her professor, functioning as the discourse’s agent. We can only presume that Karen, for whatever reason, had an ability to step outside the discourse and remain immune from

its effects in order to be given the power of resistance.

In many ways it is not surprising that Chase and other critical pedagogues

place some of the power to control discourse in an agent. While acknowledging the

force of discourse upon the individual in terms of marginalization and oppression and

also locating the ability to change that discourse and liberate themselves in individuals

seems contradictory, it makes perfect sense in terms of Marxist theory. In order for

the revolutionary vision of a Hegelian end of History to be attained, the theory needs 61 a subject who can critique and change culture without being inevitably caught within a discursive inscription.

However, not all theorists who depict the (student) writer as subject/agent work from a Marxist philosophy. Kurt Spellmeyer’s pedagogy, in "Foucault and the

Freshmen Writer," is a good example of a pedagogy based on a theory asserting the self as a subject of discourse that also maintains vestiges of an agent. Spellmeyer articulates well how the conflict or tension between a student and the language of the academy gets laid out. He describes how the "speaking I" (subject) of discourse is the locus of conflict and transgression, providing us with a cogent picture of how a subject negotiates the tensions between Inclination and Institution. Although

Spellmeyer’s discussion is extremely useful in articulating how a subject can still speak and effect change within a discursive formation, he faUs to consider a central component of his discussion fully: the construction of Inclination. Spellmeyer presupposes Inclination (i.e. authentic voice) as a given without reflecting on how that

Inclination might also be constructed by the discourses in which the "I" speaks. As a result, he implies that Inclination may be the result of a part of the self that stands outside of discourse, in the position of autonomous agent.

Summary. Or Begging the Question

While my analysis suggests that composition studies, as a field, has yet to articulate a coherent position for the (student) writer in relationship to academic discourse, the ways in which each group presented has attempted to grapple with the issue points to the importance of the question. With the possible exception of 6 2

Vitanza, all the compositionists here are concerned with constructing a pedagogy that allows students to use schooled language with power while retaining some sense of other cultural discourses. Achieving power through language is, of course, axiomatic to composition’s enterprise and closely linked to its historically liberatory agenda.

While the concept of liberation changes—from the ability to resist academic discourse to achieving critical distance on other discourses to providing a means of social advancement—the composition classroom is still depicted as a political site whose goal is providing students with a language of power.

However, how well we achieve that goal, as we have seen, is caught up in the question of the status of the (student) writer in discourse. The disparity of positions on this question has serious consequences for our students. As long as we maintain a concept of the student as an agent with discourse, whether partial or total, we can continue to uphold academic discourse as empowering because a student’s other cultural discourses are not threatened, or at the very least, not erased. But, what if those in the subjectivity group are accurate? What if academic discourse is simply a cultural reproduction into an oppressive discourse? Or, even if we allow that academic discourse is not oppressive, what happens to a student’s other cultural discourses if initiation into academic discourse is an inscribing process? What if the critical distance academic discourse might allow the student on other cultural discourses also inscribes her in a new one that may be equally as oppressive?

The answer to these questions is deceptively simple: if initiation into academic discourse results in the inscription of a unified subjectivity within this one discourse. 63 continuing to teach writing as if the student can stand outside of this inscription or control the negotiation of discourses risks marginalizing other ways of knowing and using discourse. More simply, we risk erasing a student’s culture, undermining the goals of a multicultural education. Admittedly, we may not want to preserve the worldview of another cultural discourse in totality; education will always be a change in perspective. Further, these cultural discourses frequently embody values, such as racism and sexism, diametrically opposed to our political agenda, and we may decide to challenge those views. Yet decisions such as these need to be overt, and in some

feminist pedagogies are usually presented to the class as such (e.g. Jarratt); the more

implicit effects of academic discourse, however, need more attention. If we do not

inquire further into the status of the student in academic discourse, we may risk losing valuable cultural perspectives, and may come to realize that we are participating in

the negation of our students’ culture that has already distanced too many from the

academy.

In sum, if the (student) writer is positioned as a subject within academic

discourse, is in fact inscribed by it, the liberatory nature expressed in almost all

composition pedagogy becomes suspect. As we have seen, the majority of

composition theories that attempt to account for and value other cultural discourses

only manage to value these other ways of knowing through preserving the status of

the (student) writer as agent. Yet, if I we account for all of Berlin’s categories,

almost all of composition studies operates with this conception of the writer, since

cognitive and expressivist theories position the writer even more obviously as agent 64 than those I’ve discussed in this chapter. Composition’s focus on the (student) writer as agent further deflects attention from the possibility that academic discourse itself may be oppressive, particularly given its ties to the dominant power structure through the institution’s status within this structure. Maintaining a concept of an autonomous self allows us to uphold academic discourse, instead, as a universal good because the concept of a self outside of discourse allows us to believe our students have the ability to choose and move among many discourses. By not considering the power of discourse to situate and inscribe individuals, we avoid the challenge that our pedagogical practices, which we presume to be liberatory, may actually be

oppressive. Rather than providing students with a way to "move up the social ladder"

and achieve the "American dream," we may be participating in perpetuating the

fiction of a "dream" that only serves to oppress our societal others.

The risks of blindly assuming a position for the writer within academic

discourse are, I believe, simply too great for composition to continue any longer

without questioning this assumption. While composition’s attempts to articulate a

pedagogy that benefits its students by providing access to the societally-powerful

discourse of the academy are laudable, I believe we are one step ahead of ourselves

when we try to retain this historical goal while simultaneously trying to create a

multicultural pedagogy. Before we can attempt such a multicultural pedagogy, I

argue, we need to step back and learn more about how humans interact with the

discourses that surround us. We need, in other words, to theorize and interrogate

further our current conceptions of the (student) writer in discourse. CHAPTER n

INVESTIGATING THE STATUS OF THE (STUDENT) WRITER IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Background

At the English Coalition conference in 1987, Peter Elbow describes a

"remarkable consensus" that occurred among the sixty participants, all teachers of

English from kindergarten to college. In their discussions, position papers, and meetings, the participants reached an agreement on how to define the teaching of

English: what characterizes the enterprise of English studies is "the making o f meaning and the reflecting back on this process o f making meaning-not the ingestion of a list or body of information. At all levels we stressed how this central activity is deeply social" (18, his emphasis). This definition of English studies is striking in its resemblance to the definition of composition studies as the inquiry into an "act" or

"action" to which almost all the authors refer in the recent collection,An Introduction

to Composition Studies (Lindemann and Tate).

Given the similarity of these definitions, it should not be surprising that most

of the composition research conducted on the status of the writer has focused on the

nature of writing as an act. This emphasis on composing as an act of meaning

making has resulted in research that looks at how the writer comes to make meaning

65 6 6 in a text, concentrating primarily on how the writer constructs meaning and where such a meaning comes from, rather than looking at the text itself as the artifact of this activity (e.g.. Flower and Hayes; Flower; Berkenkotter; Pianko; Emig). The goal of such inquiries is to help us, as teachers, better understand the processes we seek to. teach. As a result, research focusing on the writer, as does most of composition theory, begins with the presumption that (student) writers have the ability to control the discourse they employ. But, as Robert Brooke asserts, this focus on understanding better how teachers can help a student control their writing processes has kept us from looking more closely at how these processes "are dynamically beyond control" (407, his emphasis).

Recently, work on collaborative writing has complicated this conception of composing and the writer’s role in the act of meaning-making, exposing how the nature of ideas and meaning is not subject to a single author’s control. InSingular

Texts/Plural Authors, for example, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford explore the relationship among authors, texts, and intellectual property. Lunsford and Ede* describe not only how much of the writing done in the workplace is collaborative; they further interrogate the concept of authorship itself, demonstrating "how

‘constructed’ our concept of authorship is-not commonsensical or inevitable at all but a complex reflection of our culture" (73). Through a historical look at the position of the author, Ede and Lunsford show how the modem concept of a single author

* * I am self-consciously alternating the position of Lunsford and Ede’s names to reflect the collaborative nature of their work as they do on the title page ofSingular Texts/Plural Authors. 67 holding rights to her intellectual property emerged out of the epistemological shift in the Renaissance, via Descartes, that separated subject and object in such a way that

"situates knowledge within the self, one [epistemological shift] that provides a necessary condition for the development of the concept of ‘originary authorship”'

(Ede and Lunsford 79). Over the next 200 years, this "condition" was further codified through the onset of copyright laws—encouraged by an emerging capitalist economy tied to an epistemology which values the individual—that allowed the originary author to "own" ideas. Yet, through their look at contemporary discursive practices, including corporate authorship and electronic media, Ede and Lunsford point out that such a single author is not a concept always reflected in practice.

Further, they assert that even texts purporting to be written by "one" author rely on other texts, conversations about the writing, institutional or corporate forms, and so on.^

While Lunsford and Ede’s historical critique of the originary author points to the socially-constructed nature of any writing act, their focus remains on how the writer(s) create a text, albeit one which can never be considered their own singular, intellectual property. Yet acknowledging the social nature of the writing activity, whether it be with people or the heteroglossia of voices embodied in an (non)originary idea, also suggests how the act of writing puts the self into a discourse. In other

^ Patricia Sullivan in "The Myth of the Independent Scholar" argues this point further by demonstrating the collaborative nature of dissertation writing, a form which, she argues, includes the voices of institutional norms and authorities as much as that of any "author." 68 words, although the work on collaborative writing points to a self that composes collectively rather than autonomously, it also demonstrates how the self interacts with a discourse and is, in fact, inescapably immersed in it. The self, then, must interact with the history of language in order to write, implying that the self might be immersed within this history, rather than simply able to stand outside of it accessing these pre-existent languages. The effects of this immersion, however, have received little attention because of the emphasis in composition on how a text gets produced- the act of writing texts and how this process of meaning-making occurs—rather than on how texts might write the writer. Yet if we switch our terminology, we must consider the effects of this immersion on the writer. If we look at textuality itself as part of the act, as an action rather than artifact, how the action might also influence the actor becomes central. Such a switch in terms brings us back to the question posed at the end of Chapter 1—how writing within a certain discourse affects the writer. This question has received little attention in composition research with the notable exception of Susan Miller’s work.

Although answering this question is not Susan Miller’s expressed purpose, her

attempt to articulate a textual rhetoric inRescuing the Subject implies that the act of

writing does affect the writer. Miller argues that textuality and the history of texts

radically alter the concept of presence we’ve received from classical rhetoric. Like

Ede and Lunsford, Miller points out that prior texts, cultural codes, and the forms

and genres of writing constrain and influence what a writer can say. The textual and

cultural settings, then, create positions into which the writer must insert herself. This 69 positioning effect of the writer, however, has distinct advantages for the power of language according to Miller. By setting up its own frames that continually become coditied and inscribed in time, writing actively participates in creating possibilities for the presence of language to disperse itself endlessly: "From the first inscription of language to the Renaissance construction of vernacular ‘authorship,’. . . we see established a set of possibilities that proliferate sites for the written subject" (S3).

While Miller notes the advantages of these sites for extending the power of language to build and shape itself beyond a particular rhetorical act or agent, she also discusses how textuality, by circumscribing the writer’s position, affects the writer

herself. Because writing "stops time," it "requires an active consciousness to divorce

it from the flow of everyday events" (43); in other words, writing forces the writer to

become "conscious of writing" and the need to present a voice within the text, to

establish a presence that will only exist in those moments in time during which the act

of writing occurs (44). This presence, for Miller, is always fictional because it is

only a transitory construction of self further constructed by the text. Thus, "the

presence in student texts," Miller explains, "remains an actual and overt, not only

theorized fiction of stability" (163). For Miller, then, the act of writing requires the

writer to construct a unified, stabilized self that is in accordance with the discourse

being written (also see Crowley, "Audience"). As a result, the (student) writer is

continually asked to forge a momentary self that is acceptable in academic discourse.

Such a continual reformulation of self through writing could, if we extend Miller’s

argument, be requiring the student not only to "invent the university" but also to 70 "invent themselves" in accordance with the university’s values, worldview, and ideology. Miller, however, does not take the implication of her argument this far, partially because she does not apply her new rhetoric to any specific students.

Thus, while Miller’s discussion sheds light on the possible effects of learning to write in a new discourse, she does not address the implications of her argument for the (student) writer’s relationship to discourses beyond the immediate texts being written. In other words, by focusing solely on the writer with a text. Miller does not inquire into the results of her argument for the student’s position as subject in a larger discursive world populated by multiple discourses of which textuality is only one

manifestation. Despite recent research on the writer as an object of study, then, we

still need to know much more about how humans interact with the discourses

surrounding us, especially how competing discourses interact with the locus of the

self.

Investigating the Question

In order to investigate these issues, I argue, we must turn to how actual

students describe interactions with academic discourse rather than attempting only to

theorize this interaction as Miller does. We need, instead, a double perspective which

includes both theory and material reality. As a result, in my own investigation into

the status of the (student) writer, I seek to borrow the explanatory power of critical

theory while simultaneously putting that theory and the material reality of student

descriptions into a dialectical relationship so that each may inform the other. Looking

more closely at how academic discourse affects students learning the discourse in a 71 certain institutional context will allow me, I hope, to perform the type of cultural study that Gayatri Spivak calls for, one that tempers the totalizing tendency of theory with an examination of "the post-modern space-specific subject-production" (i.e., how specific discourses affect specific people at specific times in specific places) (171).

Despite my argument for the need to further theorize the position of the

(student) writer in the previous chapter, my goal in this project, then, is not to do what is commonly referred to as "strong" or "pure" theory—a metadiscursive inquiry that somehow exists apart from practice. Rather, I admit to engaging in what Stanley

Fish has disparagingly labeled "theory hope:" the presumption that theory can be applied to actual situations in the hope of altering current realities. By so doing, I hope to resist what Elbow refers to as "the tempting and pervasive connotations about theory and practice: theory looks up and practice looks down; theory is lofty and practice is grubby" (77). As James Sosnoski notes in his critique of Vitanza and

Worsham in Comending with Words, theories are valuable "as hypothetical notions about problems that affect persons. . . it is of interest to me only if it can be transported into my situation" (2(X)). Like Sosnoski, I see no reason to "protect theory" from the "contamination of persons" (200); thus, I happily "muddy up" philosophical theories with the material reality of students’ lives.

In order to start such an investigation, however, I began by determining my perspective on the topic of inquiry, namely academic discourse and other cultural discourses. While academic discourse is a phrase frequently used in composition studies, it usually refers only to the amalgamation of discursive forms produced by 72 the various disciplines of the academy. Because I sought a definition of academic

discourse that did not presuppose the writer to be the originator or controller of the

discourse, I turned to the more theoretical discussions of discourse to construct the

working definition of academic discourse that would both guide the set-up of my

investigation and inform my derinition of other discourses. Although I turned to

critical theory, and in particular to Foucault, for these definitions, it is important to

note that I attempted to defme these discourses without presuming either where or

how certain discourses originate, or who or what has control over their language. In

other words, I attempted to reserve judgment on the subject/agent debate outlined in

the first chapter.

Academic Discourse: Academic discourse refers to a discursive formation, as

defined by Foucault,^ that limits and defines a certain discursive realm that is

. inseparable from other discursive realms. These discursive realms form the presence

of the discourse of our history and rely on the absence of other discourses in History.

In other words, academic discourse is not a totality unto itself; instead, it is a

segment, a formation, of a larger discursive presence that operates within Western

culture. Yet this formation is distinguishable in its production of a regularity of

^ I should note that I am departing from Foucault’s definitions quite significantly in order to simplify my terminology. For Foucault, a discursive formation is what I refer to as the discourse of history, while discourse indicates the endless possibilities for formations in History. For Foucault, discursive formations, then, encompass the totality of linguistic manifestations within a certain point in time. Because of Foucault’s broader socio-historical emphasis, he pays little attention to the conflicts within a formation unless they result in the irruption of a new formation. I believe his terms are still useful, however, because they provide distinctions between the levels of discourse necessary for my analysis. My adaptation simply restricts them to a more reduced period of time. 73 statements (the uses and forms of language), and objects of knowledge. The formation thus characterizes and embodies the ways of coming to that knowledge and the means by which people can speak with authority about what can/should count as knowledge. Further, the institution of school is included within this discursive formation as a cultural artifact perpetuated by academic discourse. While academic discourse is not created by an institution, the institution can become defined, at least partially, by the formation.

Academic discourse, then, can be defined through its links to the institution rather than only through its discursive forms and linguistic manifestations. To prevent confusion, I will refer to the manifestations of academic discourse in writing and speaking, then, as schooled language, rather than academic discourse as is frequently done. Schooled language will designate anything written or spoken within the institution for an authority of that institution (e.g., teachers, journals, professional communities, etc.) and serve as a signifier for the type of literacy other discourses

(e.g., business, etc) value because it is perceived as "schooled." Although I will refer to "schooled language" as a general, coverall term, schooled language is not monolithic. Instead, schooled language might more appropriately be thought of as referring to the languages of the academic institution, or "dialects” of a similar language. In sum, schooled language designates the various manifestations of academic discourse, the latter being that which embodies certain ways of knowing, worldviews, and values that might manifest itself in that language. Thus, academic discourse, not its various manifestations, transcends disciplinary boundaries. 74 embodying all the language used within the institution. It is further a discourse of power within the larger culture, a power achieved through its links to the institution and its goal of socializing the "good citizen.”

Competing Cultural Discourses: Like academic discourse, these discourses are formations that determine ways of using language (statements), what counts as knowledge (objects), and how authority can be recognized. Because these discursive formations are not linked directly to an institution, they are harder to define and distinguish, although the research in literacy studies and sociolinguistics points to their presence. I presume, because of the research into their manifestations, that they are linked to culturally-determined groupings of persons, most probably influenced by race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Like academic discourse, they do not exist separate from other discursive formations within our culture; instead, they participate in making up the totality of the discourse of our history.

Thus, although I am forced by the nature of our language to depict these discourses in my discussion as separate entities, they may, and probably do, share similarities with academic discourse because of their imbrication within the larger discursive world that is our history and culture. These discourses do not, however,

define the same fonnation as academic discourse because they manifest themselves in

different language uses, ways of knowing, worldviews, and values. I presume

throughout this project, then, that indications of other ways of knowing from those of

the academy, manifested in language, indicate other cultural discourses. I further

assume that these cultural discourses compete with academic discourse because I can 75 only determine them through their indications of difference. Thus, determining the exact nature (if it were even possible) of these formations will not form part of my project; instead, I look only for indications of what is "other" to academic discourse, not their quite probable similarities.

The Site o f Investigation

While there are many research methods that could tell us more about how competing discourses play themselves out on the student, I believe that student writing is one of the most productive places to start such an inquiry. As David Bartholomae puts it, student writing provides an intriguing site for research because "the drama of a student’s essay, as he or she struggles with and against the languages of our contemporary life, is as intense and telling as the drama of an essay’s mental preparation or physical production" ("Inventing" 162). Although many scholars in composition have attempted to look at the negotiation of students learning the discourse of the academy (e.g. Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman; Balester;

Canagarah; Clark and Wiedenhaupt), few have looked to student writing to examine this relationship. These few limit their examination to texts that do not explicitly ask students to address interactions with discourse: placement essays (Bartholomae

"Inventing"), letters (Brodkey "On the Subject"), or literary interpretations (Hull and

Rose "This Wooden Shack"). As yet, there is little information on how students themselves describe their interactions with academic discourse; the only examples available are personal histories written by educators, such as Mike Rose and Richard

Rodriguez. Rose and Rodriguez’ stories argue strongly, through the power of their 76 narratives, for how much people can tell us, even more than they are consciously aware, about the effect of competing cultural discourses.

Perhaps due to the influence of these written histories, many students have been required to write their own histories of literacy in a class assignment called a literacy autobiography. These literacy autobiographies became the focus for my inquiry into competing discourses because the texts themselves are not only artifacts or manifestations of academic discourse (schooled language) but also textual discourses that discuss the effects of larger discursive relationships. As Janet Carey

Eldred and Peter Mortenson have argued in a recent article, reading texts through the lens of literacy studies can reveal much about discursive relationships because "the text constructs a character’s ongoing, social process of language acquisition" (513).

Although Eldred and Mortenson apply their reading to fictional literacy narratives, such as Shaw’s Pygmalion, and thus impute the construction of this character to an author not implicated by the narrative, I believe student literacy narratives construct a similar character. Student writers create and inscribe a self for their narratives, a self which reflects upon the process of acquiring academic discourse. Further, if we follow Miller’s argument, the texts circumscribe a position for the writer that requires them to establish a presence which confronts their own immersion in language head- on. That presence is further constricted by the fact that the student writers confront this immersion in schooled language, a manifestation which requires the self to interact with academic discourse. 77 In many ways, then, the term "autobiography" is a misnomer for these literacy narratives. The self presented in the autobiographies is self-reflexive only in its representation of "selP allowed by the discursive constraints of the context and culture in which the texts are written. In fact, autobiography, as a genre, can no longer refer to the self-conscious narration of an autonomous being’s actions and thoughts if we assume that the act of writing creates a space and structure for the self that is different from the totality of the author. Although the term autobiography becomes suspect when we consider how discourse and self might interact, I continue to use it here to refer to both the writing of self by exterior discourses and the writing about self that the (student) writers presume.

Because of their potential for illuminating discursive relationships, I chose to examine student literacy narratives for what they can tell us about the position of the

(student) writer in academic discourse. Student literacy narratives, I argue, can tell us not only about how academic discourse positions the student but also about how this discourse affects the student’s ability to retain competing cultural discourses. The presence of a "writer" in the autobiographies is telling both in what it acknowledges consciously, and what the text itself, through its ability to supersede that presence, implies about the nature of discursive relationships disallowed by the texts’ context and/or the writers’ ability to recognize these relationships. By explicitly asking the students to examine the acquisition of academic literacy, the assignment further forces a text that brings together a multiplicity of discursive relationships in a single space.

The institutional context in which the texts were written may circumscribe a position 78 for the writer regarding competing cultural discourses, making this position (i.e. ethos) interesting for analysis both in what it says and what it "hides" through the

"not-said," in omission and disjunctures, or transgressions, in the text. Finally, the

"selection of reality,” or details and anecdotes chosen to form the text may tell us much about how the writer interprets the context of the text and/or his relationship to academic discourse as well as providing insight into what this selection might be deflecting.

Subject Selection

In this study, I examine the ways two student populations—English graduate students and basic writers—present their interactions with school discourse in literacy autobiographies written for basic writing courses or graduate seminars at a large, mid- western university. I chose these two groups because they represent distinct points on a continuum of initiation into academic discourse. If we define academic discourse as a discursive formation linked to the institution of school, both these groups have

experience with the discourse and are seeking to enter previously unexplored regions

of the discourse. In other words, they are in a position to begin acquiring new

positions of authority within the discourse by seeking to learn to write the texts

(artifacts) that indicate this authority. Further, achieving this textual authority, I

presume, will include becoming familiar with unexplored ways of knowing that lead

to these textual manifestations.

Institutionally, basic writers at this university are defined not by an inability to

manipulate the grammar and usage of Edited American English but a failure to 79 negotiate the larger rhetorical concerns of academic textuality. According to Amy

Bush, the assistant director of the basic writing program, placement in a basic writing course is determined by a holistic reading of a placement essay that looks for lack of development, "surface" or "formulaic" responses to the prompt, and/or lack of control. In sum, the essays of students placed in a basic writing course don’t show, in her words, "evidence of choices about how to respond in complex ways to questions," a lack of complexity indicated by the characteristics listed above. The nature of this complexity, while ambiguous, serves to characterize at least one of the requirements of schooled writing for first-year students at this university.

The nature of their placement also suggests that these basic writers are currently engaged in the struggle of figuring out what is expected of them in this new manifestation of the discursive realm that is academic discourse. While the basic writers have had experience-and frequently success—with writing tasks in school up to this point, college writing is a different thread of that discursive realm, one that requires learning a new discursive position within its texts. Similarly, the graduate students also have a two-fold relationship to academic discourse. Like the basic writers, they are an integral part of the discourse due to their success with it in the past and have integrated and successfully negotiated the "thread" of academic discourse that is college writing. However, by seeking to become professionals in the academy, they are also on the margins of the more scholastic manifestations of this discourse, in particular the aspect of this discourse that is English studies. 80 Thus, I argue, both these groups of writers have a special insight into the nature of academic discourse. When writers approach a new manifestation of discourse, or when difficulties with using a discourse’s language arise, they become more aware of a discourse that is separate from them and exterior to their sense of self. Becoming aware of this separation of the self from a certain discourse, I believe, allows the writers more insight into the ways in which academic discourse may be seeking, or has sought, to act upon them. This type of analysis follows

Sharon Crowley’s assertion inA Teacher’s Introduction to Deconstruction that writers unfamiliar with certain manifestations of a discourse are "more in touch with the flow ofdifference” than are more experienced writers (35). Crowley hypothesizes that

"inexperienced writers" perceive difference more clearly because they "find their own voices simply drowned out by those of teachers and other sources of discursive authority" (35); in other words, the self is more easily erased by the intertext into which it is trying to write itself. Such a sense ofdifference also gives the writers, particularly the graduate students, a perspective from which to view their on-going immersion in academic discourse and the consequences of that immersion on their current sense of self and use of language.

Because of their similarly marginal positions with academic discourse, then, these students’ literacy autobiographies may provide us insight into the way the

(student) writer negotiates or is negotiated by the conflict of competing discourses.

Further, by illuminating two different points of entry into the discourse, these writers’ 81 descriptions of interactions with academic discourse will be especially telling in their possible similarities.

Participation in the Study

Since I wanted to examine not only what students overtly write about their past interactions with academic discourse but also how the nature of the autobiography as schooled writing might influence that depiction and presentation of self, I sought out classes in which a literacy autobiography was already a class assignment. In this way, I could contextualize the assignment within the course’s goals, other assignments, and teacher expectations much better than if I had prompted the writing myself.

The basic writing program at this university recommends a "standard" syllabus to all new instructors and teaching assistants organized thematically around the issue of "language and community." In keeping with this thematic course, modeled after

Bartholomae’s "growth and change in adolescence" course theme, one of the suggested assignments is a literacy autobiography. Thus, finding basic writing classes assigning a literacy autobiography was a fairly simple task. I distributed a memo to all the basic writing teachers, explaining that I was conducting a research project for which literacy autobiographies were the primary data source and requesting permission to ask their students to use their texts in this project (see Appendix A).

Surprisingly, only two teachers responded; hence, my choice of classes was made solely through convenience. 82

I visited each of these two classes to explain briefly the purpose of my research. The students were told only that I wanted to use their autobiographies in a project that was attempting to report on how students felt about learning to read and write in school and how their out-of-school reading and writing practices may have differed from in-school practices. I explained that participation in the project was strictly voluntary and that their teacher had no investment in their participation whatsoever. The students were further informed that participation would require all drafts of the autobiography, including any comments by teachers or peers, and could possibly require them to be interviewed on their text. Finally, I explained that both their writing and interview responses would most likely be quoted in my report of the research, which might be published, but that their anonymity would be protected through the use of pseudonyms. I then distributed permission slips throughout the class and asked only those interested to fill them out, although I collected all the slips

so that those who did not want to participate would not receive any undue attention

(see Appendix B). In both classes all but four students agreed to participate,

providing me with 24 literacy autobiographies from the two basic writing classes.

The English graduate students were approached more directly. I was familiar

with only two graduate courses that had required or were requiring literacy

autobiographies, both composition courses, one on the politics of writing instruction,

and the other in the teaching of basic writing. The latter course, however, had been

taught twice in the past year and had included literacy autobiographies each time.

Since I had been a member of one of the sections of the teaching basic writing course 83 and was currently auditing the politics of writing instruction course, I approached each of the students myself, either in writing or verbally. I provided the graduate students with the same explanation given to the basic writing students, and they signed the same permission slip. With the exception of those who had chosen not to write a literacy autobiography—it was presented as one option in one section of the teaching basic writing course-everyone I approached agreed to participate, resulting in a total of 21 graduate student texts.

The Texts in Context

The context in and for which the 45 literacy autobiographies were written

includes many layers, not the least of which is the background of the writers

themselves. In fact, personal experiences both in and out of school, particularly with

the nature of narrative, most probably influenced how many of the writers chose to

interpret the assignment. Given the number of texts in the study, however, it is

impossible to provide much detail on each writer’s background. I relied, then,

primarily on the background details given within the autobiographies themselves to

contextualize the content, requiring only minimal background information on race,

class, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class from the participants (see

Appendix C). Being a graduate student myself, though, I am privy through my

personal relationships to more background information on many of the graduate

students than the basic writers but chose not to include these details unless they were

directly relevant and the student willingly allowed me to use such information.

Because of this decision and the number of participants, then, personal details about 84 the writer are presented in the following chapters only when necessary to explain my analysis.

The institutional context in which these texts were written also provides an important context given that the texts were produced as class assignments. Course goals, content, and discussion could and probably did influence much of what was written in the texts not only in terms of content but also in terms of the ethos the writer determined appropriate for the assignment. As such, I provide a fairly detailed description of each class below to help provide the "big picture" for the autobiographies.^ In the discussion of my analysis in subsequent chapters, however,

I will refer to each individual class only if necessary to explain differences in the texts since, despite the uniqueness of each class context, the texts themselves reveal a remarkable number of similarities.

EN 700: Issues of Difference and The Politics of Writing Instruction (graduate)^

According to the fall 1991 course description, EN700, a special topics course in composition theory, was organized around the issue of "what should (and should not) be taught in Freshman Composition classes and on a larger question of how the

* The sources for my description here differs fairly radically from class to class. As an auditor of English 700 and a member of the summer, 1991 section of English 800, I have direct experience with the nature of discussion and verbal presentation of the literacy autobiography assignment. I have no such experience to rely on for either the summer, 1992 section of English 800 or the two basic writing classes and, instead, rely on the descriptions provided by the instructors and students in the class. To account for the disparity in my source of information, I relied primarily on student accounts of the classes for my descriptions.

* All course numbers are fictional. 85 University can and should recognize and respond to difference. " The areas in which difference is at issue in this debate were described as "gender, race, and class." The expressed topic of the course was mirrored in its primary texts: Gabriel and

Smithson’s collection onGender in the Classroom, Rose’s Lives on the Boundary,

Gates’ The Signijyin(g) Monkey, and Bullock and Trimbur’s collection on The Politics of Writing Instruction as well as a packet of articles put together by the instructor.

The assigned readings, which concentrated on the political and ideological nature of writing instruction and literacy, gave particular emphasis to how race, class, and gender are addressed in research on writing. As such, the course began with readings addressing the politics of literacy in general, examining the recent controversy over the University of Texas-Austin’s "multicultural" first-year course. The course then focused more closely on the topic of gender, addressing readings on women’s writing, feminist pedagogy, and masculine rhetoric. The discussion of gender, however, also took up the issue of sexual orientation and race from a gendered perspective, including, for example, readings by Minh-ha and bell hooks. An examination of race and class as categories of difference followed the section on gender, culminating in a

final section on the pedagogical response to difference in composition.®

Almost all the issues discussed throughout the quarter (10 weeks) in this

course could have influenced the nature of the students’ literacy autobiographies. The

assignment was introduced on the second day of class, with the final copy being due

See Appendix D for a complete syllabus of all the classes discussed in this section. 86 seven weeks later. Thus, students were expected to be writing their autobiographies throughout the sections of the course concentrating on gender, race, and class. More important to the context of these texts, however, is the nature of the discussion in this course. Given the topic of the course and the instructor’s teaching style, the course discussions quickly became very personal and anecdotal.

The course began on this personal note when the instructor introduced the course on the first day partially by situating herself as a Southern, female academic, discussing how her own race, class, and gender influence her work. Further indications that the course would probably cross the private/public boundary frequently found in graduate seminars was the introduction of the literacy autobiography so early in the course, suggesting that personal narratives were an integral part of the course content. Because of the tone set in these first few days, the group of students in the class, or a combination thereof, class discussion frequently became what one class member called "story-time,” especially "stories" related to painful, personal experiences dealing with the students’ race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. While some members of the class indicated to me outside of the seminar that they felt too little time was being accorded to the readings, no one took the initiative to change the focus in the discussions themselves. Despite their intermittent frustration, almost all the class members felt the nature of the discussion produced a strong sense of community within the seminar, one that they had never experienced in a seminar environment before. 87 While the "sharing" nature of class discussion might have influenced the students to feel more free to include private and personal information in their autobiographies, the talk which surrounded the assignment itself seemed to have had the most impact on some of the students. The assignment was introduced to the class verbally and in such a way as to indicate a diversity of approaches to the assignment.

The only general direction given was to write an autobiography on "your experiences with reading and writing," although the instructor’s discussion of the exigency for the assignment focused on how "painful and powerful" early reading and writing experiences can be. The majority of the presentation of the assignment focused on a discussion of how previous students had written on the topic, including one extended example of a previous student who had discovered that his literacy was intertwined with his grandfather’s. As a result, this student produced a two-column text, chronicling his own literacy experiences in one column and paralleling his experiences

with his grandfather’s in the other column. The instructor also commented on how,

after reading these assignments, she was struck most by how much pain is involved

with early literacy experiences; thus, she warned the students that writing these

autobiographies could be painful.

The nature of the assignment as a painful process surfaced again many times

throughout the quarter, although in these instances, the students introduced the topic.

Particularly memorable was the frustration Margaret discussed in class about being

"blocked" because of the way her autobiography was insq)arable from her

experiences with sexual abuse. On another day, Carole discussed how her text was 88 taking a non-linear form because of its intersection with her experiences as an incest survivor. In all cases when students introduced the difficulties of writing the autobiographies because of how much their personal pain and literacy experiences were intermingled, both the instructor and other class members responded in very supportive ways. The instructor further encouraged a variety of non-linear, textual forms, such as hypertext and intertext, emphasizing that the narratives need not present an ordered progression, particularly when no such progression might exist.

Given the communal nature of the class, the personal nature of discussion, and the painful experiences linked to the autobiography assignment^ it is probable that the students felt comfortable to write about almost any experience in whatever discursive form or organization they deemed necessary. This "openness" resulting from the class content might have been complicated, however, by the students’ perception of the instructor. As a well-known scholar in composition and an administrator within the department, some students reported feeling a tension between writing a text for

themselves and writing for the instructor. On the other hand, other students told me

that their perception of the instructor made them feel safe writing about such personal

information.

Further, the assignment was presented from the outset as possibly an

"ungraded" paper. The instructor mentioned that she was not sure whether or not to

grade these texts when the assignment was introduced, which led many students to

assume the autobiographies would be ungraded. This flexibility about evaluation

presented perhaps the clearest message, especially for graduate students, that there 89 would be no repercussions about making more experimental choices. This supposition seemed to be proven most clearly when the instructor, after commenting on the first drafts of the autobiographies, mentioned to the class that they would be graded. While the class members seemed to accept this change, the following class session demonstrated how much this decision upset them. On this particular day, the instructor was approximately 30 minutes late for class, giving the students time to discuss among themselves the ramifications of grading the autobiographies. Almost to a one, they agreed that grading the autobiographies would require that they almost totally revise their original plan for their texts. A few of the students commented on how they resented being graded on such a personal assignment and would now probably have to "tone down," "cut out some details" or "change the voice" in their current drafts. The majority of the class, however, mentioned changes in the

structure of their current narratives as the inevitable effect of grading, particularly

those who had attempted more free-associative or non-linear narratives. As a result

of this discussion, the class elected one member to initiate a discussion about grading

when the instructor arrived, and after a ten-minute discussion, she agreed not to grade

the autobiographies. Most striking to me as an observer, however, was the

vehemence and anger the students expressed during that half-hour discussion. The

reaction to grading the narratives seemed to be more than simply frustration over the

instructor’s decision; the tension caused by such a change seemed extremely personal

and deeply felt for those who talked the most during this discussion, almost as if a

boundary previously deconstructed had been resurrected. 90 While my description of the class implies that the students felt a great deal of freedom to pursue this assignment in whatever way they chose, the nature of the discussion surrounding the assignment also served to create expectations about the content of the texts for some members. Margaret and Carole’s discussions of sexual abuse and incest, for example, strongly influenced what Tanya, another student, felt had to be accomplished in her autobiography. Asked about how she interpreted the assignment, Tanya recounts these discussions and then describes the effect they had on her:

And so I walked out of there knowing I had soul searching to do and that these people, even though I wasn’t necessarily going to read this out loud to these people—these people were playing for keeps. And I walked out of there thinking I’m going to have to really dig and found out how I learned to read. How I learned to write and how that influenced my life. Because that’s what Margaret was going to do. It’s what Carole was going to do. And it’s what they had inspired other people to do. And if I didn’t do it [the instructor] would read mine and know it was superficial.

Tanya further told me that she ’’resented" the expectations she felt for this assignment. When I asked her why, she explained:

Because it was for a public forum. It was for people I didn’t even know. You know if I was in a CAP class [an activities course] with [the same instructor] now and I had to write a literacy autobiography that she was the primary reader for I wouldn’t mind. I’ve known her for 3 quarters. But that time it was brand new. Everything was brand new. But for some reason it stuck in my craw to try to be as honest as possible in this document. And so instead of just doing what I usually do which is, you know, writing a work of fiction, I tried to write the truth and, but I think that I resented being forced to write the truth.

While the other students I spoke to (about half the class) did not express the resentment Tanya does about the assignment, many of them describe the "soul- searching" and focus on painful experiences that Tanya mentions. For some this 91 expectation became a frustration rather than a challenge. For example, Mary felt her own experiences were "boring" in comparison to other class members. As a white, middle-class woman, she felt she hadn’t had enough obstacles or problems with reading and writing and thus her narrative was too "seamless" in comparison with others. As a result, she decided to include a metadiscursive section that interrupted her text at different points in which she reflected on the effect of her seamless narrative. She attributes the inclusion of the metadiscursive element to the expectations to do something "different" or "risky" that she received from class discussion. Still other class members, though a much smaller minority, reported not being influenced by the class context. As Rich put it, "I would have written what I wanted no matter what happened in class." Finally, even those who attempted to write experimental and "risk-taking" texts reported being disappointed in the results.

Stephanie, for example, told me that she felt she had written an extremely "non-

academic" autobiography but realized she hadn’t after she had a friend from home

read her text. Her friend’s first comment was "this was an assignment, wasn’t it?

It’s so academic."

Thus, despite the apparent "freedom" to write almost anything attempted by

the instructor, most members of this course still felt restricted by the context created

by other class members and/or influenced by constraints on their writing they hadn’t

realized were there. Because of the way in which the students interpreted the

expectations of the literacy autobiography assignment, this course did present a very

different context than the other classes from which 1 collected autobiographies and 92 thus has received a much more detailed discussion than will the other three classes.

In the other classes, the students also report being somewhat influenced by other class members but much less so than did the English 700 students.

English 800: Teaching Remedial Writing (graduate)

English 800 has a dual purpose: it is an introduction to the scholarship on basic writing and also a pre-requisite for teaching assistants who want to teach basic writing in the future. As such, students enrolled in the course at times have very different agendas. Some students enroll only to qualify for teaching basic writing, while others, particularly those pursuing a degree in rhetoric and composition, use the course to expand their knowledge of issues in composition studies. The instructor for the course, the director of the basic writing program, remained the same both quarters

(Summer 1990 and 1991).

Although the readings for English 800 differed slightly the two times it was taught (Summer 1990 and 1991), the goals of the course remained the same as did the issues addressed in the course content. The goal of the course is described in the two syllabi as an investigation into "undergraduate basic writing courses" (Summer, 1990) by trying "to understand who basic writers are, what characterizes their writing, and what the classification ‘basic writing’ designates" (Summer, 1991). The readings for the course, then, center on the following issues and how they address the questions of the course: the history of composition and basic writing’s place in that history, the writing of basic writers, collaborative learning, and theoretical and general views on basic writing pedagogy and research. The required texts for the course include: 93 Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, Enos’ collectionA

Sourcebook for Basic Wriung Teachers, Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, Shaughnessy’s

Errors and Expectations (Summer 1990 only), and Farr and Daniels’ Language

Diversity and Writing Instruction (Summer 1991 only) as well as a course packet of articles.

The only significant change in the course readings between the two classes is

the shift in the discussion of error from Shaughnessy’s pedagogical approach to Farr

and Daniels’ sociolinguistic one. This change also reflects the slightly stronger

emphasis given to questions of literacy in the articles for the Summer 1991 course,

resulting in the literacy autobiography playing a more significant role in that course.

Since the nature of the literacy autobiography assignment changed fairly radically

from 1990 to 1991,1 describe each separately below.

Summer, 1990

The literacy autobiography assignment was originally presented in the syllabus

for this section as a requirement for all class members. In addition to the literacy

autobiography assignment, the class was to write a journal entry for each classes’

readings, take responsibility for teaching one class, and write a more scholarly paper

at the end of the course. On the first day of class, however, the instructor gave the

students the option of changing or challenging her syllabus. Before the following

class, three students (myself included) approached the instructor about the purpose in

separating the literacy autobiography from the journal, suggesting that we combine the

two. After the discussion, the literacy autobiography became an option for the 94 journal. The journal could concentrate on relating reading and writing experiences,

combine reading responses with personal literacy experiences, or focus only on

responses to the readings. The journal was collected twice at different intervals

throughout the quarter for comments and was graded upon completion of all entries.

As a result of the course change, only three students, all participants in this study,

wrote literacy autobiographies for the course: Barbara, John, and Cathy.

The literacy autobiography was originally described in the syllabus as "a journal" in which the students chronicle their "on-going thoughts on two matters," one

of which was "a record of your recollections of past and current experiences that have

had an effect on your reading and writing." The expectation for such journal entries

was described as being useful "as we try to develop a theory of reading and writing

for students whose experiences may or may not have been like our own." Because

of the immediate change in the syllabus, however, the literacy autobiography/journal

was not discussed in class, giving the students only the description and purpose

described in the syllabus. Barbara and John report trying primarily to focus either the

majority or the entirety of their journal entries on literacy autobiography. In fact,

John’s journal became a linear narrative of his history with reading and writing.

Cathy, on the other hand, describes her literacy autobiography as a conflation of

reading response and personal reflection. As a result, Cathy’s text frequently uses a

prompt from one of the readings as the focus and purpose for relating her

experiences. While this resulted in a less progressive narrative than Barbara or

John’s texts, Cathy engages in more meta-analysis of her experience than these two 95 by trying to relate the issues in the readings to her experience. Thus, Cathy’s text is markedly different from any other I studied. To account for this, I attempted to only include the narrative portions of her text in my analysis, discounting her more argumentative sections.

All three writers felt that the instructor was the only audience for their texts and did not feel influenced by other class members. While each student assuredly interpreted this audience differently, it is important to note that as the director of the basic writing program, the instructor also had the power to decide if the writers would become teachers in the program, although I should note that Cathy was not a teaching assistant. The nature of class discussion probably influenced how the writers interpreted the "teacher as audience" as well and thus deserves some description here.

On the first day of class, the instructor expressed her desire for a "student-centered" classroom in which the students took the lead in discussion. The design of the course parallelled this desire. Readings for only the first three class sessions were pre­ assigned. After the instructor got what she described as "a feel for the students," she assigned other readings from the edited collections and put together a course packet.

She told us that her revised syllabus reflected her sense of us as a class, resulting in her reducing the readings on error and including more readings on cultural issues.

Further, after the first two weeks of class, each student was responsible for leading a discussion of t^e essays on a certain day in whatever way she deemed most appropriate. As a result, the students, more frequently than the instructor, set the agenda for class discussion. 96 Discussions themselves, perhaps because of the nature of the student presentations, focused primarily on the articles read for class. Students frequently related the essays to personal experiences, but these experiences were almost totally based in our history as teachers. Infrequently, a student devised a presentation/workshop that required students to reflect more on their own educational experiences (one of which was my own presentation), thus altering the nature of the discussion that quickly became the "norm" in the class. These more personal discussions, however, were rare, and when they did occur, personal histories were only discussed in an educational context.

Throughout the course, the instructor made an attempt to value everyone’s comments, even if they reached far afield from the topic. As a result, almost all the students, to my knowledge, felt that their responses would be heard by the instructor.

Despite the very supportive model the instructor set, however, the class members did not form a community in the way the English 700 students did; instead, we were much more likely to challenge and argue with viewpoints expressed. In fact, most of the class members report feeling as if "camps" within the class were formed almost from the outset and maintained throughout the quarter. For example, I was placed

with four other students in what the other students referred to as "the politically-

correct," or "neo-Marxist" group. Each of the three students who wrote literacy

autobiographies were grouped by the rest of the class in separate "camps" and thus

report feeling little influence from the other writers and the class as a whole except

for how the readings reminded them of various experiences. 97 Summer, 1991

The literacy autobiography assignment was required of all class members in the Summer, 1991 section and was introduced during the first week of class. The students received no written instructions and only a brief verbal explanation that told them to write a narrative about their experiences with "reading, writing, speaking, and listening" both in and out of school. As Sheila explained to me later, "[the instructor] made it real clear from the beginning that pretty much anything goes; even

your mother’s educational background had a place in this." The feeling of "anything

goes," the students explained, was encouraged by the class set-up and the accepting

atmosphere created by the instructor. By the second class, the instructor began

making "private jokes" about each student’s interests and personalities, indicating that

"she recognized and valued the differences in our personalities" (Sheila’s interview).

Each class began with either a freewrite or a brainstorm on each class

member’s personal reaction to a reading to prompt discussion. The discussion then

proceeded from the issues brought up by the students in this writing. In this way, the

class discussions, like the previous year’s class, were dominated by student interests.

The discussion focused primarily on the issues brought about by the readings, then,

but all the students felt that they were able to comment freely. Perhaps because the

class only had four members, Sarah describes them as "feeling comfortable with each

other quickly." Discussions rarely addressed aspects of the students’ literacy histories

or personal backgrounds; instead, background information became a topic of

conversation primarily as it related to past or present students of the class members. 98 Sarah and Janet recall that, in particular, they were both concerned with "problem" students in their classes that quarter and that the class devoted a lot of time to discussing these issues. As Sheila put it, "it felt a lot like a community of teachers helping each other out." Mark adds that "none of us were real big on getting deep and personal, I just don’t think we were that kind of class, but still I didn’t feel I couldn’t say anything if I had wanted to." The literacy autobiography assignment itself was not discussed after its introduction in class, although the instructor volunteered to talk about it if the students wanted to. None of the students picked up on the invitation, however.

While class discussion created a "comfortable" atmosphere, the students report that their literacy autobiographies were primarily influenced by Mike Rose’s work, reading each other’s drafts in class, their own perceptions about writing in a graduate class, and discussions with members of the Summer 1990 class. As Mark put it, "it was hard to think of what to include in it because we didn’t set too many boundaries."

Thus, Rose’s work helped give a purpose to the autobiography, one they defined during peer response as a way to "empathize with students in college-writing situations" (Sheila) and to "describe my evolution into being a scholarly, academic writer" (Sarah). All four students reported being frustrated by what they called the

"revolutionary" nature of the assignment. Sarah, for example, constantly felt pulled to "have some intelligent, epiphanic observation about writing or else it would be boring. I couldn’t just ‘barf up’ experiences about writing like I did in the first draft." 99 Part of Sarah’s concern at not just "barfing up experiences" came from reading

Mark and Janet’s texts which she felt were much more focused than hers. When she revised, she began to "get a focus, so I could comment on how each experience fits into my total literacy." In fact, all the students report being more influenced by each other’s autobiographies than any other factor. Sheila also felt concerned about being

"too anecdotal and indulging in cute stories from my past" but felt another expectation emerge from the peer responding session. She felt that, unlike the other three members, she had no stories of anxiety about reading and writing and felt herself searching her past for some negative experiences to add to her autobiography. By the final draft, which the four students later compiled into a collaborative autobiography,

Mark reports that "they [the texts] looked more alike than dislike whereas before they weren’t very much alike."

Summary of Graduate Student Classes

Despite the variety of contexts in which these autobiographies were written, the graduate students surprisingly report similar influences on their expectations.

With the exception of the Summer, 1990 section of the teaching basic writing course, the graduate students felt more expectations generated by other class members than by the instructor of the course. In particular, these expectations frequently seemed to ask the students to do what Tanya referred to as "soul searching" about painful or anxiety-laden experiences. The content of both courses, of course, probably influenced this expectation since in both courses, the students were seeking to understand "difference" in student writers, whether or not the students had been 100 labeled basic writers. Both courses focused overtly on the cultural influence of and impact on literacy, almost requiring the students to probe further their previous labels of "good writers," granted, if for no other reason, through their status as English graduate students. Further, since the ultimate goal of both courses was to understand student needs better, particularly in terms of curriculum and pedagogy, the impetus to explore or search for negative experiences was perhaps an implicit one created by the course context.

The graduate students also expressed a similar concern about the "non- academic" nature of the assignment, a label the English 700 students frequently used in class and the English 800 students in their interviews. While the English 700 students all reported trying to resist in some way or another writing "too academically," the English 800 students were more concerned about maintaining the focus or larger analysis they felt was a part of writing for a graduate seminar. This difference might be explained by the difference in the nature of discussion as well as the fact that the English 800 students were graded on their autobiographies. In fact, the graded nature of the assignment seemed to have the greatest influence on the graduate students, especially given the discussion about evaluation that took place in

English 700.

English 101 - Smith (basic writing)

English 101 represents the higher of the two possible placements for basic writers at this university. Credit for the first-year writing requirement is granted through this course; the primary difference between English 101 and the "regular" 101 first-year course is the addition of a two-credit tutoring sequence through The

University Writing Center and a course syllabus constructed to better meet the needs of this student population. The English 101 course for all sections is organized around a theme of language and community, although each instructor assigns his/her own readings and paper assignments. This section of English 101 was taught by a twenty-six year old teaching assistant who was teaching the course for the second time in Winter, 1992. Having just taken the English 800 course in Summer, 1991, Smith’s particular interpretation of the literacy autobiography assignment may have been influenced by her own experiences in that class.

Smith’s syllabus describes its aims as exploring "the power and force of the written and spoken communication we encounter each day." The syllabus continues to expand on what this may mean:

Perhaps there is more to these forms than meets the eye. Do you speak differently with one group of people than you do with another group? Do you use ‘code words’ in your community that an outsider might not understand? Even in a culture like ours that speaks one language, there are many ‘languages’ that operate. Most of us are part of many ‘discourse communities’ as they are called, and in this course, we will investigate the nature of language and community by doing an intense amount of reading and writing and by sharing our work with each other.

The course readings, then, focus on the issues of language in community, from the

language of a cocktail waitress to gendered communication to ethnic and racial

language communities, including readings by Robin Lakoff and Maya Angelou among

others. In the course, the students began with a written response to the readings that

explored their own reactions, while the class discussions aimed at generating a similar

vocabulary with which to analyze the essays. Part of this analysis included applying 102 the analytic terms to experiences in their own life as well as that of the reading. For example, after reading the essay, "Cocktail Waitress," the students looked at the essay

to see if any of the author’s language in the essay represented "insider" terms that

indicate a certain community the author belongs to as well as reflecting upon their

own experiences with language in a bar/restaurant.

Much of the discussion was conducted in small groups of three students each.

The groups were formed at the beginning of the quarter and were maintained

throughout the course, both in class and in The Writing Center. As a result, most of

the students I talked to (about 1/3 of the class) reported feeling comfortable discussing

personal events with their group members. Although Todd pointed out that he

sometimes resented being forced to talk about his past experiences, he added that

"most of the time, it was o.k." All the students said that they felt comfortable

discussing things with the instructor. Denzel, for example, mentioned that "she was

so laid back in class, you felt you couldn’t say something that she’d hate." Although

most of the other students I spoke with agreed with Denzel, Joe commented that he

felt silenced a lot in the class: "I felt like if you didn’t have the right opinions about

race and stuff then you better keep quiet." Although Joe’s was a minority opinion

among those with whom I spoke, the students all agreed that they were more

influenced by wanting to satisfy the teacher and get a good grade than they were by

anything their fellow students said in discussion.

The readings preceding and during the literacy autobiography assignment-the

second formal assignment in the course—focused on how language can create insiders 103 and outsiders and what role language plays in the formation of a group. This focus included the issues of power achieved through language and its connections to gender and education through reading LakofTs "Language Bosses" from Talking Power and

Mellix’s "From Outside, In." Smith feels that the "Language Bosses" essay and the previous writing assignment, which asked students to describe a language community to which they belonged, had the most influence on what they chose to write about.

"Some of them," she told me, "would go back to their community essays as a place to start their literacy autobiographies." But she designates "Language Bosses" as a bigger influence:

I think that [essay] set the tone for the whole course. I mean understanding, having this new awareness that some people are language bosses and why they may be doing it and what power relationships are involved may have influenced their choice about literacy and choosing to write about the teacher who screwed them over or the teacher who ragged [on them]. . . they would talk about, ‘Oh you’re not going to grade my paper like a language boss are you?’

Smith also wonders how much the students’ placement in a basic writing course might have influenced their autobiographies. She reports asking herself, particularly in discussions with other teachers using the same assignment, "whether or not these particular students are just telling this story that they want to tell for themselves, that they want to have. They already feel insecure about being in a university that has placed them in this course. They want to prove that they deserve to be here so they tell you a story of ‘Oh, I’ve always been such a good student.’"

The students themselves did not mention either the essays or their placement as influencing their texts; instead, they were primarily concerned with completing the 104 assignment and achieving a focus in their autobiographies. Smith passed out the following written assignment in the third week of the quarter:

For this assignment, you will be writing your own literacy autobiography. How do you feel about yourself as a language user—as a speaker, writer, listener, reader? How has your language knowledge been shaped by those communities of which you have been a part?

As a class, we will generate some questions about your literacy experiences that you might want to consider, but here are some ideas to get you started thinking. Was the language you used at home different from the language you used in school? What positive and/or negative reading and writing experiences have you had? What connections can you make between your current feelings about yourself as a writer/speaker and your past experiences. The more detail^ you can be about specific incidents, the better.

Although Smith’s written assignment did not ask specifically for a focus, her assignment does point to some possible organizational schemes, particularly comparison/contrast and cause-effect. She also reports that in class discussion, she concentrated on getting the students’ to discover a focus. She required a brainstorm list of questions for a conference the day after the assignment was given and read

(along with the students’ group) two drafts of the assignment before the final draft was due (two weeks after it was assigned). Smith explains that she recommends using the first draft to "just start from the first time they remember being read to or the first thing they can remember," but she points out to them that "that’s just basically a narrative like telling a story from beginning to end." Thus, she suggests that in the second draft "they go back and look for patterns and look for, you know, significant events instead of just rambling or whatever." Besides focusing on significant patterns, she also suggests concentrating on their single, most memorable experience and expanding on the implications of that experience. 105 Smith’s focus on organization in conference, responding, and class discussion seems to have impacted the students as well. In their "self-analysis" after their second drafts, almost all the students comment upon their organization—making a conclusion, tying events together as a whole, or finding a focus—as what they felt they needed to work on in their next revision.

English 100 - Jones (basic writing)

English 100 is the second half of a two-quarter basic writing sequence.

Students less proficient than those placed into 101 begin in English 99, a course which primarily aims at developing fluency with writing in terms of detail and purpose. English 100, on the other hand, is very similar to 101 and aims to help students begin positioning themselves as more authoritative readers and writers in their texts. English 100 students, however, do not receive credit for first-year writing and take the first-year course after successful completion of 99 and 100. Both

English 99 and 100 are usually organized around the "growth and change in adolescence" theme, although the language and community theme exists as an option.

Jones, a middle-aged, female instructor who has been teaching for many years, did use the "growth and change in adolescence" theme in her Winter, 1991 section of

English 100 but decided to include the literacy autobiography assignment as well.

The course’s work with the adolescence theme was a continuation of that begun in

English 99, since the students, whenever possible, keep the same instructor for both courses. 106 The course itself was described in the syllabus only as a continuation "of our examination of adolescence through both reading and writing. However, our readings will be more abstract, and our discussions will be student led rather than teacher led."

Because the literacy autobiography was the first paper assignment, however, both the students and the teacher felt that the discussions surrounding the assignment continued to be teacher-led as they had the previous quarter in English 99. In English 99 the students had gained experience writing a variety of narratives: their two major paper assignments were narratives of a significant event and an event that changed the course of their lives in some way. Because their previous assignments had focused on single events, some students reported that they tried to focus the literacy autobiography assignment in the same way, but, as Neil commented, "one event didn’t seem like enough this time."

The literacy autobiography assignment was introduced during the first week of the course and discussed in class throughout the next four weeks. Simultaneously, the students continued reading about adolescence, using John Knowles’ A Separate Peace and Gail Sheehy’s Passages to prompt this discussion. Although the readings were never tied explicitly to the literacy autobiography assignment-in fact, the students report seeing no relation between the two—the instructor described the literacy autobiography as an extension of the autobiographical writing the students had done the previous quarter. She felt that by asking students to focus their autobiographies on the "connective thread" of literacy, the literacy autobiography assignment forced

the students’ reflections on their adolescence to become more pointed. As a result. 107 the students’ "reflections about school told you a lot about how they developed as people both in and out of school."

Despite Jones’ articulation of these connections, the written assignment does not attempt to make links between the exploration of adolescence and literacy. I have included the assignment sheet in full below:

Literacy Autobiography

Seven to ten pages typed. (It takes 10 to twenty five pages of handwritten text to equal this much typed text. Double spaced.)

This is college level work. Be as technically correct as you can. This means proof-reading, copy editing, looking up rules and spellings you don’t know. Take pride in what you produce, this will be looked at by not only your classmates, but it will be used in a research project read by others.

We will be doing some in-class writing and talking in a series of pre-writing exercises. Your informal writing and note taking should serve as a source for your paper. Every class you miss or homework assignment you shrug off will hurt you in your progress toward a final product.

What follow are questions that will give you some idea of appropriate kinds of things that go into the biography.

1. What was your favorite book when you were a child? 2. Can you remember the first book you ever read? 3. Can you remember the first thing you ever wrote? 4. Did you ever recite anything to an audience? 5. Did you ever memorize a poem? 6. Were you ever in a play? 7. Did you ever keep a journal or diary, either for class or for yourself? 8. Did you have any family traditions concerning literacy? (Like Dad always reading the comics aloud on Sunday, or family Bible study, or traditional bedtime stories.) 9. Did you ever correspond with anyone on a regular basis? 10. Did you ever have anything published? (School newspaper, competitions, club projects) 11. Do you remember any time when you wanted to become, or had to join, a discourse community different from your own? 108 12. Have you ever read something that has stayed with you and become a part of who you are? (Like a poem, a novel, a quote, a Bible passage, maybe a letter from someone.) 13. Is there any kind of literature you enjoy reading? 14. Have your tastes changed in reading? 15. What have you found most difficult in language studies? 16. What is your concept of a literate person? 17. Which language community are you most comfortable in? 18. What in your home life has influenced you the most in terms of language and how you use it? 19. What in your academic life has influenced you most in terms of language and how you use it? 20. How is literacy related to learning?

The class time dedicated to the literacy autobiography was almost always structured by the teacher, resulting primarily in teacher-led discussions. For example, on the day the assignment above was introduced, the instructor led a discussion on the heuristic questions included in the assignment. In almost all cases, she began with an experience of her own that answered one of the prompts and then opened up the discussion to include student experiences. Jones says she uses this format because "if

I don’t get them started they just sit back and look at you, saying nothing." Perhaps as a result of the teacher-centered discussions, almost all the students I spoke to report the teacher as the biggest, if not sole influence on how they wrote their autobiographies. In fact, many of the autobiographies included similar narratives to the ones Jones presented during the discussion of the assignment (e.g., reading comic books, memorizing a poem) and/or the prompts included on the assignment sheet

(e.g.. Dad reading the comics, keeping a diary).

That Jones influenced how the students wrote their autobiographies is not suiprising, given that she provided perhaps the most direction of any instructor 109 discussed here. Work toward drafting the autobiographies was carefully proscribed through a series of assignments devised by the instructor. The first homework assignment following the introduction of the literacy autobiography required the students to interview one of their parents, usually their mother, about their early reading and writing experiences. Each student wrote up the results of this interview and shared the information they had learned with their group members. Similarly, for a series of fîve class meetings the students responded to a prompt about literacy in their journals and shared these entries in small groups in class. The prompts centered on the following topics: 1) first memories of reading, 2) earliest memories of writing, 3) incidents with reading and writing in elementary school, 4) incidents from junior high or high school, and 5) the students’ favorite English, reading, or writing teacher. With these prompts, Jones again provided examples of what these experiences might include, limiting the incidents from elementary, junior and senior high school to ones the students "really liked or really hated."

While the students report that their autobiographies were primarily influenced by these assignments, Jones told me that she also hoped sharing these journal entries might spark similar memories in other group members. As a result, the students quite probably were influenced by other students’ experiences, yet these experiences were always kept within the parameters of the instructor’s prompts. Although Jones told me that she hoped the students would "move beyond" her prompts, she also feels they had a great influence over what students wrote. In particular, she feels the 110 journal entry on past English teachers became the focus for many of the students’ texts:

The journal entry that generates the most discussion is the one on good and bad teachers. They really want to blame or credit teachers more than anything else for their literacy attitude-teachers not expecting enough from them, how it’s the teacher’s fault for them not turning in enough in high school, for them not reading a book or turning in a book report. They want to blame the teacher for grades they know they didn’t earn; it’s one way of explaining the A’s or B’s they got in high school while still ending up in remedial writing.

Because of the central role the instructor played in defining the context of the literacy autobiographies, it is important to note that Jones, an ABD in English

Education, is also working on a dissertation that uses literacy autobiographies as its primary data source. As a result, her needs in the dissertation may have influenced the nature of the assignment in this course since she also collected her students’ autobiographies. Perhaps because her dissertation is looking for similarities in the

reading and writing histories of students who become designated "basic" in college,

her suggestions for the assignment focus primarily on school experiences, mentioning

out-of-school experiences only in terms of "earliest" experiences.

Jones, however, like Smith, thinks that the students’ placement influenced their

autobiographies more than any expectations she may have communicated to the class.

She feels that almost all the students used the literacy autobiography as a motivation

to explain their placement: "Most of them feel compelled to justify or explain-I’m

not sure if justify is the right word-why they’re in remedial writing. Only less than

1/3 are willing to say it’s my fault rather than a teacher’s or athletics, or their social

life." In fact, all but two of the autobiographies I collected from this class end with a I l l narrative of surprise and shock at their placement in English 99, a much greater percentage than the English 101 students.

While the students, like Smith’s, do not mention their placement as an issue in

their autobiographies, they did feel that Jones’ insistence on a focused, structured

narrative and her emphasis on "early experiences" influenced how they wrote their

narratives. Charlie, for example, told me that "because we spent so much time

talking about early stuff, I felt like I had to make some sort of connection between

where I was now and what happened to me in the past. I’m not sure if I really felt

there was a connection but I knew I had to make it to get a good grade." As

Charlie’s comment indicates, focus or purpose did become a central concern for Jones

during the drafting process. Jones mentions relating a concern for purpose, or what

she called the "so what," throughout her discussion of the assignment:

I see the whole purpose of the assignment as helping them learn reflection, how to gather data about themselves, make decisions about what to put in or out, take reflections to a logical conclusion. It’s just like how writing and learning takes place in say, sociology; you don’t learn it till you collect it, write it, and come to a conclusion.

This emphasis on a focused narrative is also reflected in the "revising

checklists" Jones gave the students to use in responding to the first and second drafts

of each others’ papers. Questions such as "Did the conclusion make sense? Did it

refer back to elements discussed in the paper?," or "Was there a logical flow of

ideas" are the central focus of these checklists. Although only a few of the students

with whom I spoke (about 1/4 of the class) could tie the content of their

autobiographies to class discussions, almost all of them told me, as Tom puts it, that 112

"the hardest thing about the assignment was finding some theme or something that would make all the experiences make sense."

Summary of Basic Writers

While the basic writers were probably infiuenced by reading each other’s texts in small groups and discussing experiences in class, they do not consider these events significant infiuences on their expectations about what the assignment required.

Instead, in both the English 100 and 101 classes the students seem more concerned about meeting the requirements of the assignment as put forth by the instructor in order to receive a good grade. Although a few students mentioned that the literacy autobiography was one of their favorite assignments, it seemed to exist for them always as a paper assignment rather than a text they wrote for themselves or their classmates.

In many ways, the students’ designation of the assignment and their instructor as the greatest influences on how they chose to write the autobiography is not surprising given that both instructors provided a lot of direction about writing the assignment, limiting the students’ options much more so than the assignments in the graduate courses did. This shift in focus and expectation, of course, is a result, in part, of the nature of undergraduate versus graduate courses. Another factor influencing expectations is the fact that the basic writers were enrolled in a required course, which frequently can affect the attitude with which students approach the work of a course. 113 Perhaps the most important layer of context for the basic writers, however, is found in their placement. Although the students do not indicate their placement as an influence on their autobiographies, both teachers were concerned about how their placement in a basic writing course could lead to narratives that try to position the writer as a good student. In fact, most of the teachers in the basic writing program that I’ve spoken to on different occasions feel that their students’ literacy autobiographies tend to focus more on positive experiences and present the ethos of "a good writer placed in the wrong class." While such an institutional context seems a unique influence on the basic writers, it may not distinguish their context from the graduate students’ as much as might be expected. Although none of the graduate students mentioned feeling the need to present a good "graduate student ethos" in their autobiographies, it is quite probable that their narratives were also influenced by their position in the institution. As graduate students, there may be a perceived need similar to the basic writers’ to position oneself as an historically strong reader and writer, especially given the power both graduate instructors could possibly have over the graduate students’ futures both within the university and the profession.

Analyzing the Texts

Because my project focuses upon the textuality of literacy autobiographies as its primary source of inquiry, my analytical method most closely parallels what

Stephen North describes as hermeneutical inquiry in composition studies. North defines hermeneutical knowledge as "knowledge about the meanings of texts, derived from the act of reading, articulated as critical analysis, and refined by dialectic" 114

(119), While North describes the nature of dialectic in hermeneutical inquiry as a juxtaposition and conversation between the results of other inquiries and the hermeneutical analysis, the nature of my dialectic occurs both before and during the analysis itself as well as subsequent to the analysis through its intersection with composition studies. Like other researchers in composition attempting to conduct hermeneutical analysis (e.g., Flynn; Recchio)—and as North points out, there are few-

-my critical reading of the literacy autobiographies embodies a certain stance or terministic screen derived from my reading in critical theory. Thus, the first layer of my dialectic integrates critical theory with student texts, with each tempering and altering the other. Since I sought to put these texts and critical theory into a dialectical relationship, my emphasis on the perspective of selected critical theories was influenced throughout the analysis by the "reality" presented in the autobiographies.

My critical perspective emerges from my "practical or tacit knowledge" that, as Elbow tells us, "is always in advance of our theoretical knowledge" (87). It is grounded in my own experience of the loss of knowledge and perspective of my working-class roots and of the frustrations of my more marginalized students in both high school and college settings. Not surprisingly, then, my theoretical perspective presumed the ability, and the quite possible reality, of academic discourse to act upon students, to quite possibly erase other ways of knowing and using discourse that might contradict with academic discourse. My reading of the literacy autobiographies, then. 115 looked explicitly, with as much as an open mind as possible, for any indication that such a force of discourse was operating upon the writers of the texts.

This perspective further influenced how I presumed a text’s language can function. Since my analysis does not distinguish between "Author and author, between Writing and writing" (North 118), I assume that student texts can be read much like literary ones through the screen of theories that do not presuppose the author as originator or controller of her text. I read these autobiographies, then, as artifacts, produced within a certain context, that not only comment on the writer’s past and present experiences with schooled writing but also serve as indicators of particular discursive relationships with academic discourse. Assuming that the texts could indicate discursive relationships requires that I also assume that a text’s language can provide insights into these relationships beyond the conscious intent of the writer. The texts’ language itself, then, brings with it ideological, cultural, and institutional traces that influence the writer but are ultimately beyond her control.

Thus, my reading strategy throughout the analysis looks not only at what the writer says but also what the text speaks, examining the absences, sentence constructions, metaphors, and contradictions in the texts as well as their more explicit content.

Reading Method

Because my purpose in this project is ultimately to understand more about how academic discourse may or may not inscribe students, I first analyzed the texts for similarities rather than differences. I assumed that these similarities would point to how, on a generalized level, academic discourse interacts with the (student) writer. 116 My reading strategy was of necessity inductive and sometimes haphazard. In an attempt not merely to see how these texts would support an already formulated idea, I looked to the texts themselves to focus my analysis. I began by reading all 45 texts through to get a sense of what was being expressed in the autobiographies. I then read through the texts another time, taking notes on whatever seemed to indicate a relationship to academic discourse as well as indications of what portions of the text

(or the entire text itself) seemed to be influenced by the class context in which it was produced. Most of my notes at this initial stage concentrated on the following areas, which I assumed would tell me something about the selfs relationship to a variety of discourses:

a) sections of the text in which experiences with schooled language are interfused with more personal events or feelings

b) any anecdotes expressing frustration with literacy education

c) moments when the language of home and school intersect or conflict

d) disjunctures in the texts where the writing seems to contradict itself or become confused

e) any metaphors used for school writing or employed to explain a reaction to a literacy event

f) terminology surrounding descriptions of teachers or authority figures

g) abrupt changes in topic, indicating a possible omission

h) words or phrases used in apposition to describe the writer

After generating fairly detailed notes on these aspects of all the texts as well as

others I merely designated "fruitful for analysis?", I began to look for similarities in

my notes, generating a list of themes that seemed to be in common among many of 117 the texts. I then returned to my notes, looking for any indications of which texts exhibited these themes. Next, I came back to the texts themselves to look for other indications of these themes, refining them along the way as well as discovering new ones. Finally, I read through all the texts again to look for indications of these new themes. The process itself took approximately three months, during which time I alternated between ferreting out quotes, terms, and sections of the texts; and stepping back to create generalizations. This process obviously was not meant to be scientific or experimental in any way, relying on my interpretations throughout. Thus, my own

situatedness as a reader became an important context for the analysis.

Situating the Reader

The second layer of dialectic operating in my analysis becomes evident in the

constant tugging between the voices in the texts and my own. As North points out,

hermeneutical inquiry "provides access to voices, our own and others: access to the

nature of consciousness, in effect, and the way it makes the world in words" (131-

32). My focus in the analysis, then, was concerned not only with how the writers

constructed their relationship to academic discourse—their world in words—but also

with how my position in the world affected my reading of their texts.

Because I was aware of how much my own terministic screen could and would

influence my reading of the autobiographies, I attempted to keep track of my personal

reactions to the texts throughout my reading process. Although there is no way for

me to assess all aspects of what led me to read a text in a certain way, it quickly

became obvious that my background as both a teacher and a working-class woman 118 was influencing my reading of the texts. This background, of course, also led me to my perspective on critical theory because of the ways in which the theory helped explain my history. Thus, both my critical perspective, as I discussed earlier, and my interpretation of the literacy autobiographies are inextricable from my own situatedness within the cultural scene which I sought to analyze.

My feelings of frustration throughout my post-secondary education about losing something seemingly related to my worldng-class background most obviously made me sympathetic to students who overtly expressed similar feelings. I was particularly drawn to texts including narratives of painful or negative experiences and, as a result, tried harder, I believe, to understand what connections these experiences might have to the relationship between academic and other cultural discourses. As I read, I seemed to fixate on any term, phrase, or section of a text that seemed to depict academic discourse as a negative force in these students’ lives. My own experiences frequently caused me to almost pick apart, word by word, texts that I knew had been written by an African-American or working-class student.

In contrast, I found myself becoming quickly bored with texts that, at first, gave no such indications, reading them much more quickly and cursorily than I had the others. Having never been read to as a child, I became almost angry each time I saw a list of books that someone had been read as a child, particularly when the writer assumed everyone had read titles such as Green Eggs and Ham. I began to realize that my frustration was resulting in more than a momentary distance from a particular text. After reading approximately half the basic writing texts, I began to 119 read graduate student literacy autobiographies and encountered the first narrative,

Patty’s, that discussed a childhood of privilege, private schooling, and consistent success with schooled writing. I noted at the time that "reading these texts [by graduate students] are doing some strange things to me. Mostly, they’re bringing up memories of reading and flashes of childhood, some pleasant and others not, while other [texts] make me feel totally Other, mostly those seamless wonderful, academic ones like Patty’s." After reading John’s text, for example, I noted how angry I felt at what I termed at the time "his incredible arrogance about his privilege." Becoming aware of these reactions forced me to look back over my notes. I was surprised to find that I had taken only the most sketchy notes on texts written by upper or upper- to-middle class students, especially those written by white men. As I tried to remedy this situation, I was aware that it took me much longer, with many more breaks, to conduct an analysis of these texts than any of the others. I had to constantly battle with my assumption that students from more socio-economically advantaged backgrounds would not also bear evidence about the relationship between academic discourse and other discourses of which they may be a part.

Becoming aware of my problematic attitude toward some texts also led me to look more closely at what particular experiences I had been marking down as fruitful for analysis. I discovered that my notes, not surprisingly, were centered upon negative experiences, rarely, if ever, chronicling student descriptions of successes with school writing. While my cultural background may also have influenced this, I believe my history as a teacher is more likely suspect. Since the beginning of my 120 teaching career in high schools, I have always requested the "lower-level" classes and found myself more drawn to the "problem" students in my classes than any others. I originally became a teacher because of a desire to help students that resembled my friends from the neighborhood in which I grew up. I felt the educational system was not prepared to help students like those from my neighborhood, evidenced by the fact that only two of us out of the twenty-six who graduated from my grammar school ever finished high school. The eventual result of my interest in more marginal students was my teaching position at an alternative high school in Boston for recovering addicts, teen parents, and other Boston Public High School students who were given the option to attend the alternative school or be expelled.

My focus on students who somehow did not fit the school’s definition of

"traditional" quite probably influenced my perspective on the literacy autobiographies.

Because I felt I had learned so much about teaching from this student population, I have created a screen for myself which assumes that we leam more about the nature of education through its failures than its successes. Further, based on these teaching experiences and my own history with education, I have a tendency to resist believing

that school serves a liberatory function, although my own teaching, admittedly, aims

at meeting a liberatory agenda. As a result of my conflicting attitudes toward the

educational project, I again had to consciously return to the autobiographies to look

closely at narratives and anecdotes about success in order to round out my analysis.

While I attempted in my reading to be as self-censoring about the

presumptions I might make while reading, it is impossible to know how well I 121 accomplished this task. I believe, however, that monitoring my own situatedness as a reader led to a much richer interpretation of the texts. By consciously attempting to read against my culturally-determined patterns, I tried to become what Judith

Fetterley refers to as a "resistant reader." Although my interpretative strategies are grounded in more than my perception of a simple, gendered binary, I tried to resist the "reader" that both the texts and my background created for me, much like

Fetterley explains a woman resisting the male patterns that are an inevitable result of a patriarchal cultural context. Obviously, even given my awareness about my situatedness, the meaning I made of what details and parts of the essays I did inevitably focus on-my "selection of reality"-is still a meaning dependent upon my interaction with the texts. Yet, I firmly believe, as reader-response theory has demonstrated, that texts only come to mean anything through such an interaction.

Because of this inevitability, I have tried throughout this chapter to expose my agenda and terministic screen, but ultimately only you, the reader, will be able to read me

through the lines of my argument.

The Discourse-Based Interviews: Another Text for Analysis

After my initial categorization of similar themes running throughout the

autobiographies, I determined what texts seemed to exhibit the majority of these

themes. I was particularly interested in texts that expressed different relationships to

academic discourse: those with an ambivalent relationship to academic discourse as

well as those that expressed little ambivalence. The texts that exhibited an ambivalent

relationship were primarily written by students who had a strong sense of other 122 discourses at work, whether those discourses were related to the student’s class, race, gender, or sexual orientation; or experiences the students felt designated them as

"other" in some way (e.g., a learning disabled student, a recovering alcoholic, etc.).

At the opposite end of the spectrum, texts exhibiting little ambivalence were primarily characterized by success with schooled writing and little overt mention of conflict between in-and out-of-school literacy experiences. Seeking to achieve an equal balance between basic writers and graduate students, I selected four texts from each student population that At one of these relationships and conducted interviews with the writers.

My purpose in conducting the interviews was two-fold. First, I wanted to gain a fuller picture of the home and school background of these writers in order to contextualize my analysis further. Although relying on self-reporting for background information can be unreliable, self-reports were essential for my purposes in this study since it is the participants’ opinion about and perspective on these discourses that helps to determine their relationship to learning academic discourse. Thus, the veracity or accuracy of the descriptions is moot. Second, I wanted to give the writers a chance to expand upon what they had written in their texts, particularly those sections that I had designated as useful for analysis. I did not use these interviews, however, as a "check" for my analysis; rather, they served as another text that might reveal different information. Because my method presumes that (student) writers are not completely in control of language, but that language may also control them, I assumed that even if comments made by the writers contradicted my reading of their 123 texts, that reading would not negated. In other words, I did not use these interviews to assess the intentionality of the writer. Instead, the text-based portion of the interviews helped me present the student’s relationship to academic discourse as an ongoing process that the texts only fix in a single space and time. Hence, the writers’ opinions about their own texts as presentations of self after a period of time provide additional information about the picture of self they committed to writing and how subsequent events may have altered that picture. These interviews, I hoped, would provide a third layer of dialectic, refining not only my interpretations but also the texts themselves.

I contacted and interviewed the sixteen writers (4 basic writers and 4 graduate students in each of the two categories) during Spring, 1992. All the interviews took place at the student’s convenience and in a setting that would make them feel comfortable. For example, I frequently talked with the basic writers at a picnic table in the campus’ central, grassy area, while I talked to the graduate students in my apartment, at a coffeehouse, or sometimes their offices. The interviews themselves ranged in length from one hour to four, depending on how much the student wanted to say. The students were all informed that I would be transcribing their interviews and that they had the option to not respond to any question with which they did not feel comfortable. Particularly with the basic writers, I spent about 10-15 minutes in idle chat about home towns, the weekend, and so on before beginning the interview to help make the students feel more comfortable with me. Most of the students did not even glance at the tape recorder after the first ten minutes, so I do not believe the 124 taping influenced their responses to any significant degree. I received the sense that the basic writers, despite their unfamiliarity with me, responded honestly to the questions I posed even if they did not think I agreed with them. For example, in response to an initial "chatty" question about how he Uked English 100, Joe laughingly replied that I wouldn’t like what he had to say and went on to tell me how he hated the "liberal" nature of the class because he "was prejudiced" and "didn’t like reading or talking about black people." Similarly, the graduate students seemed quickly to forget the artificiality of the situation, evidenced by the fact that we frequently strayed off the topic into other areas of conversation.

All the interviews began with a series of standard questions that I asked every student. These questions were constructed to explore three issues: 1) the relationship the students felt to academic discourse in general; 2) the relationship of academic discourse to their sense of self; and 3) any conflict between other cultural discourses and academic. Because of the difference in familiarity with discussing these issues, the nature of the questions themselves differed for the graduate students and basic writers. The questions alternate between those asking for specific information and those left purposefully open-ended, requiring the student to interpret them in any way she wished. Although I list both sets of questions in Appendix E, it is important to note that the entire interview, including the text-based portion, was much more free- flowing than these lists indicate. Frequently the student would add more information or mention a point that caused me to ask other questions. Further, I sometimes 125 volunteered my own stories or comments during the interview to make the process seem more like a conversation than a formal interview.

After exploring these more general questions, the interview focused on the student’s autobiography. Prior to the interview I had designated sentences, paragraphs, or portions of the text upon which I had centered my analysis by marking each section with a number in the margin. The student and I both had copies of the marked text to refer to during this part of the interview. Although each text-based interview was unique, I primarily asked two types of questions during this part of the interview. Many of the questions were similar to those put forth in a more traditional discourse-based interview, asking the writer to explain why he or she chose a particular word or phrase to describe something, or why he or she included a certain anecdote. Just as often, however, I simply asked the student to "talk more" or "tell

me more" about a section I had designated, trying to get more information on and

context for the details in the text. This portion of the interview frequently included

many more questions for the graduate students than the basic writers since their texts,

as expected, were much longer.

Finally, the interview concluded with ten questions about the writer’s

background. Again, these questions remained the same for each student I talked to

and inquired about the student’s ethnicity, socio-economic class, family and personal

educational background, home community and neighborhood, and nature of previous

educational institutions (see Appendix E). While the information gained from these 126 interviews was used to supplement my discussion of the analysis of the body of texts, they become one of the primary foci for the discussion of fragmentation in Chapter 5.

Limitations o f the Study

While I obviously believe that texts, particularly literacy autobiographies, are a

fruitful site for an investigation into the relationship between academic and other cultural discourses and its impact on the (student) writer, I must note that my choice of method does restrict what I will be able to say about this relationship. First, any

analysis I make, and hence conclusions based on them, will be limited only to the 45 texts I studied. Thus I do not attempt to generalize beyond these 45 students in my

discussion, except to note the implications such analysis has for discursive

relationships in general and their ramifications for a multicultural composition

pedagogy. Second, because I analyze the texts after their production, I can only

interpret the "presence" of the writer in the text through its written manifestation.

While the "presence" in a finished text tells us a great deal about what persona the

student feels it necessary to construct, a study examining a smaller number of texts

could take a more ethnographic perspective on individual students and complicate this

picture of presence. By endeavoring to provide a "thick description" of the "talk

around" the literacy autobiographies in small groups and outside of class, as well as

more closely examining the production of the text, an ethnographic perspective could

furnish more information on the writer’s decisions throughout the text’s production.

While self-reporting on how context influenced the writing of the autobiographies

provided detailed information from the graduate students, who are more accustomed 127 to such self-reflection about writing, the context surrounding the basic writers may have influenced their texts more than they are able to explain. Self-reporting serves my purposes here since my focus in on student perceptions of academic discourse; however, a thicker description of context would enhance such self-reports.

Finally, I should note that my hermeneutical method is not the only possible methodology for investigating how the (student) writer interacts with discourse.

Especially given a multicultural focus, a methodology that could provide a detailed description of a student’s other cultural discourses while simultaneously examining her interactions with academic discourse would be very insightful. Getting such detailed information on other cultural discourses, however, would be difficult unless the researcher can become an integral member of the student’s home and school communities. (See Amy Shuman’s Storytelling Rights for an attempt at this relationship.) A longitudinal study that examines a student’s cultural context both at home and in school, such as the one Heath attempts inWays With Words, could provide much needed information about an on-going interaction with academic discourse and how any possible conflicts with other discourses get negotiated.

I do not present these other research perspectives to undercut my own research. Instead, I wish to stress that my project provides only a partial picture, one that only textuality can provide. This project, then, is but one way to inquire into the status of the (student) writer in discourse and should serve as the impetus for further research. CHAPTER III

ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AS A TECHNOLOGY OF POWER; TOWARD A THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

I feel like English isn’t worth my time in some ways, but I kmw there isn’t a easy way out as long as I live. I would like to know how English and our writing styles came about and how every day in society they change . . . I know these questions are stupid but I can’t help to think about them.

-Hm , a basic writer’s, Literacy Autobiography

As discussed in Chapter 1, in spite of their emphasis on a socially-constructed discourse that both uses and is used by humans, "epistemic" rhetorics have only tangentially considered the effects discourse may have on an individual’s sense of other cultural discourses as she or he moves through various discursive communities or attempts to become a part of what we characterize as the "academic" discourse community. Some of these rhetorics characterize the (student) writer’s relationship to discourse as a fairly unproblematic movement among communities, others, as a process of translation that may involve a loss. Neither of these explanations, however, seems sufficient to explain the more fragmented and shifting relationship of

(student) writers to academic discourse uncovered in my analysis of the forty-five literacy autobiographies. These students’ explicit and implicit statements about the nature of discourse and their relationship to it, in fact, include all the explanations

128 129 discussed in the previous chapter-acculturation, movement between discourses, translation, loss-and more: a loss of control, the inability to speak with power, and the submersion of the self within discourse. Yet within these images of stricture, I also find a belief in the power of language to effect change, in the ability to write and speak in order to communicate productively. In sum, these writers evince a similar tension to that found in the more abstract discussions of relationships to academic discourse. These writers constantly shift between images of restriction and distance from discourse and images of the power they wield when using language. As a result, the texts present a startlingly clear picture of a self that both uses and is used by language, a picture that reveals in dramatic detail what "translation" or "shifting" from one discourse to another may mean in terms of how (student) writers construct their relationship to discourse.

In an attempt to paint this picture, I will highlight what these writers describe about the nature of language/discourse, the power that discourse embodies, the changes the writers feel are required by academic discourse, and the shifting relationship between being used by and using discourse that results from the nature and power of discourse. In my analysis of these texts, I explore one question that

subsumes all others: where is power over discourse localized-in the writer/agent, in discourse itself, or in some combination thereof?

This question parallels the analysis in Chapter 1 in which I asked whether

composition theory posits a discourse in which humans become agents of its power,

or whether humans self-consciously access, control, and create the agency of 130 discourse. The autobiographies, however, complicate the seeming simplicity of this either/or question. An answer that locates itself on one side of the issue is difficult to discern. In fact, rather than portraying a picture of a unified self in some concrete relationship to discourse, the texts I examined are characterized primarily by contradiction. Discourse is at once an expression of the self and a force that shapes the self, simultaneously a way of exerting power to achieve personal purposes and a force that embodies the power to restrict, marginalize, and shape humans. In sum, the self moves between a sense of using language and being used by language.

In rhetorical terms, the texts articulate a bifurcated relationship to academic discourse that includes both identification and division. On one hand, in certain contexts or moments in time, the writers do feel as if they can wield the power of academic discourse self-consciously to exercise their intentions. The identification between the language they use and their ability to realize their intentions with it are so strong that the writers become almost consubstantial with it. On the other hand, when the writers encounter a new manifestation of this discourse, or fail to succeed in

school reading and writing tasks, their texts depict academic discourse as an entity

somehow separate from their use of its language. In this divided relationship-one

that distinguishes between academic discourse and the writers—academic discourse is

seen as possessing a power, or agency, of its own apart from those who use its

language.

While this characterization of a shifting relationship to academic discourse-

one in which the agency of the discourse is located alternately in the human agent or 131 in the discourse itself—seems to support much of the composition theory that depicts the (student) writer as an agent who accesses the agency of academic discourse, I suggest in this chapter that this characterization seems false. By examining more closely the ways in which the writers characterize academic discourse when they feel divided from it, we begin to see how the discourse possesses a power of its own, a power that exists beyond the writers’ control. Part of this power, I argue, is its ability to create its own agents, to inscribe the (student) writers as subjects of its power. The (student) writers can use a discourse’s language with power, but that power is granted through the discourse rather than because of the writer’s intention. I will argue, that when the texts bespeak an identification with academic discourse, they are merely voicing part of what Althusser calls the ideals already internalized by the

"dutiful subject," one who "believes it is possible to inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the action of his material practice" (qtd. in Clifford 43).* In sum, my analysis of the literacy autobiographies points to a need for a theory of the subject, despite the students’ articulations of using schooled language in purposeful ways.

Because of the complexity of this move toward discursive inscription, my discussion will attempt to characterize the nature of discourse implied in these texts by describing a process rather than providing a definition. I will first examine the ways the texts characterize academic discourse when the writers feel either

* * Of course, my own argument presumes that I too can control schooled language in such a way that it embodies my own purposes. My position as a "dissertation writer" who asserts a seemingly original idea in "my" language only reflects my own position as a "dutiful subject" of academic discourse as well. 132 identification with it or divided from it. I then look at the consequences of this division, examining how the texts connect this characterization to academic discourse’s power to produce subjects.

Characterizations of Academic Discourse: Identification and Division

Almost all of the writers suggest that language can be used intentionally to achieve their purposes and that certain types of language seem natural, that is, a

"true" expression of their "inner selves." Surprisingly, the belief in the ability to use schooled language in effective, and indeed even powerful ways, is fairly strong with both basic writers and graduate students. For most of the basic writers, however, this purposeful use of schooled language is more commonly expressed as a promise of the future or a fact of their pasts rather than a reality in the present, a reflection of their real or perceived marginalized position within the university’s expectations regarding discourse. Yet at the same time these writers overtly express their ability to use schooled language, to be the controllers and manipulators of it, they also feel as if academic discourse is distanced, totally inaccessible, and outside of them and their control. In keeping with this seeming contradiction-as personal and empowering, while simultaneously Other and restricting-the themes^ that generally characterize the

^ Although in my analysis I generated categories that refer to particular themes and computed percentages for the proportion of texts that reflected those themes, I will primarily refer to themes in terms of "a lot," "many," "most," and other less specific descriptors in order to acknowledge the non-scientific way in which the texts were analyzed; that is, an analysis filtered through my own interpretive screen as in a literary analysis. I recognize that the statistical numbers generated for each theme are only approximate; the percentages were computed only to provide an impression of how commonly the themes occurred. Hence I will rarely mention exact percentages or 133 writers* relationship to academic discourse organize themselves into the categories of identification and division.

Identification and division refer to relationships with academic discourse; however, these relationships can be discerned only through the writers’ discussions of using schooled language. When the writers report how schooled language serves to exercise their intention or express their "true" voice, they indicate an identified relationship with academic discourse. Their use of schooled language becomes, inseparable from their own thoughts and actions, implying that they have become almost consubstantial with the discourse that embodies this language. When schooled language no longer serves their purposes in this way, the writers imply a divided relationship to its discourse. In a state of division, the writers describe schooled language as separate from their "inner voice" and intentions, as something that needs to be "taken in" from another space in order to be used. The writers’ relationship with academic discourse-division or identification-results in very different depictions about the nature of the discourse.

Identification

Identification with academic discourse is discernible through the writers’ comments about their ability to use its language. When this language is depicted as a natural "expression of self," or an unquestionable means of achieving a writer’s intention, the texts imply a close alliance between the writer and academic discourse.

numbers in my discussion of these themes, although I do occasionally. For percentages, or a general impression of how prevalent these themes are with both groups, see Appendix F. 134 In sum, the language has become their own. Although both the graduate students and basic writers feel identified with academic discourse, they manifest this relationship in different ways in their descriptions of using schooled language. Not surprisingly, these differences seem to be a result of their relative positions within the university.

The basic writers demonstrate their identification with academic discourse almost exclusively through stories of success with its language, manifested by high grades and teacher praise. In particular, the basic writers report many successful experiences with writing in English classes, commenting on the A’s and B’s they have always received or mentioning in detail a paper a teacher especially liked. By noting the ability to use schooled language to achieve the approval of the school’s authority, the writers point to their identification with academic discourse, an identification that results in being able to use the discourse’s language self-consciously to achieve an end—good grades. When success stories are being retold, there is no mention of difficulty or frustration with schooled language; instead, it is depicted as a natural expression of the writer’s voice. The basic writers’ ability to succeed in school writing tasks is linked directly to themselves as people. Cassandra’s text^ clearly illustrates this type of identification. When she relates success stories and reports

receiving consistently good grades, Cassandra puts herself in apposition to her facility

^ All the names used in this discussion are pseudonyms chosen by the researcher. Please note that names are provided for ease in reading at this point rather than a means of gaining a general picture of one particular writer. The discussion seeks to focus attention on the connections between the students’ comments, not the students themselves. For a list of pseudonyms indicating the class taken, and the race and gender of the writer, see Appendix C. 135 with schooled language. She refers to herself during successful times in school as "I,

Cassandra, the great essay writer," equating herself with the language she writes.

Such an identification provides a striking contrast to the discussions of attempting to facilitate a "problematic" or "troublesome" language that appear in the discursive relationship characterized by division.

Although all the basic writers indicate their identification with academic discourse through stories of good grades and teacher praise, a large number of them also express this identification by pointing to creative writing assignments. Creative writing in school is designated as a venue for their most "natural" voice.

Intriguingly, creative writing is also juxtaposed with other types of school writing, what we might term critical writing, whenever it is mentioned in the texts. While

"critical" writing can be used to exercise the writer’s intention only at certain points,

"creative" writing is the manifestation of academic discourse with which the basic writers consistently identify. For the majority of the basic writers, creative writing is the only type of writing about which they express enthusiasm and pleasure.

Charlie, for example, writes that he loved creative writing because "we were allowed to let our thoughts and feelings run free and write whatever we wanted. That appealed to me greatly because I had a unique imagination. " This unique imagination manifested itself in what Charlie terms "blood and guts" stories as opposed to the

"sissy" writing required in non-creative contexts. In Charlie’s description of letting his thoughts "run free" and in writing "whatever we wanted," he implicitly ties this type of writing to an expression ofhis thoughts, something which drew upon what 136 was inside of him. Similarly, Zeeva loved to "write creatively," especially the mystery stories she wrote in elementary school. Swati is proud of the "descriptive papers, poems, and essays" she wrote in eighth grade and was disappointed when she was no longer allowed to write in this way upon entering high school. Writing, she laments, was no longer "fun." Tom almost expresses antagonism toward the "other" type of writing required by school; he writes that he loves to make up his own stories and does not want to get them from "someone else." Aretha loved "creative journal writing" because she could put down her thoughts and feelings as they occurred.

Even in her description of what seemed a more natural way of writing for her, Aretha feels it necessary to designate this writing as "creative," acknowledging a distinction between creative and critical writing, a distinction which is made in most of the texts.

Although the basic writers reveal their identification with academic discourse through the attainment of their goals (evaluation) and expressing their "natural selves"

(creative writing), they also occasionally mention the power schooled language gives them in other contexts. In these examples, recognized success with schooled language seems to signify a type of literacy that is acknowledged as powerful in other realms.

For instance, Joe links his ability with schooled language to proving to the "rich kids" that he was just as good as they were: "I figured that if I could persuade the rich kids in our school that I was as smart as them, heck, I could persuade anybody into doing anything." Again, there is no mention of using a specific type of language to accomplish this persuasion. Instead, the reader only perceives that this persuasion was accomplished through the way others identified Joe with schooled language by 137 connecting Joe’s persuasive abilities with his success on schooled writing assignments narrated earlier. When he explains the consequences of his linguistic acts, Joe takes the nominative position in the sentence. The implied referent of "Joe, the successful user of schooled language" is expressed only with the pronoun "I," indicating Joe’s identification and consubstantiality with this language, and, by extension, with academic discourse.

Examples like Joe’s of using the signifying power of ability with schooled language to affect someone beyond school authorities, however, are rare. Further, even the identification with academic discourse achieved through successful evaluation is transitory in all the basic writing texts. Not surprisingly, the basic writers rarely feel the ability to achieve their purposes with schooled language. It is highly probable that these writers may feel more powerful with language than is apparent from their texts, yet they do not overtly refer to this power because they lack the ethos to do so in this context-a text written for a class in which they were placed due to what they interpret as their inability to use schooled language effectively. This "lack of ethos," however, may be precisely what has affected their identification with academic discourse at this point in their history as writers. In other words, the context in which the autobiographies were written cannot be separated from the institutional authority embodied in the discourse firom whose language they now feel divided.

Like the basic writers, the graduate students rarely make overt reference to exercising power with schooled language in academic contexts. Further, this lack seems to emerge, as with the basic writers, from the graduate students’ institutional 138 positions. The different position of the graduate students, however, yields a much different reading of this absence. Rather than giving the impression that the graduate students do not feel they have control over schooled language because of their new position, this absence implies the strength of their power with it: such power is so assumed it need not be spoken (written). Power with schooled language is a non­ issue except in the case of graduate school, and in this instance, as we will see below, the inability to use this language to serve their intentions comes as a surprise. While the ability to use schooled language for their own intentions is rarely made the topic of overt discussion, this assumption runs as a theme undergirding the texts. Such lack of overt commentary can be interpreted as a tacit recognition that the writers have firmly identified themselves with academic discourse.

Nevertheless, in one of the only two explicit references to the power schooled language has to effect change, Mary does tie her example to a school context. Mary writes an essay to a math teacher who frequently uses essay writing as punishment to convince her that this practice is unjust because it punishes all for the actions of the few. Mary’s essay gets results-the teacher never used that form of punishment again-because the teacher "acknowledged the sense of my argument," even though her topic was "not exactly what she (the teacher) had in mind." Yet even in this school-related example, Mary is not commenting on her power to use academic writing to achieve status or success; instead, she focuses on changing the rules of the school itself. Tellingly, Mary links this example to her subsequent uses of writing to try and effect change in the political realm-letters to members of Congress (the first 139 in junior high) and instructional materials on environmental issues. Her power with language in these contexts reflects the way language recognized as being affiliated with school can wield a certain influence outside of an academic context.

Significantly, it is the power of schooled language in realms other than school Mary

feels it necessary to comment on. In a similar move, Margaret writes extensively

about her belief, frequently tempered by cynicism, in her ability to "change the

world" through poetry.

The assumption that schooled language is their own to use intentionally is

much more hidden in the texts; the graduate students make only passing reference to

their ability to use this language in purposeful ways. These references, in fact, are

frequently found only in transitional statements. For example, in the concluding

statement to one paragraph. Rich writes: "I now wonder how my love of books ever

translated into a desire to create my own voice, to become a writer myself." His

facility with school reading translates to a desire to use language in purposeful ways,

yet that desire to be a writer is a presence in the text that goes unwritten; his power

to be a purposeful writer is assumed throughout the text. In Toulmin’s terms. Rich’s

presumption of his ability with schooled language functions as the backing for claims

and warrants throughout the text, but a backing that is so accepted it need not be

made explicit. Instead, it appears only in inadvertent references, like the one above,

reminding the reader of its presence.

Similarly, Janet uses her facility with schooled literacy as a transition from the

period of school to that of work: "As I moved from childhood through the 140 educational system and into the working world, I was always fortunate enough to be labelled as literate." Here, her facility with schooled language signifies accepted literacy in other realms. Janet never comments on where her literate abilities came from or how she realized she had them; rather, literacy and the power that comes with it is presumed. Tricia takes this power so much for granted that she does not even notice it as the central theme of her text; one of her peer respondents has to point it out to her.

The implication here is that the graduate students’ identification with academic discourse is so strong that their facility with its language can go unquestioned. The writers’ assumption that schooled language can express their thoughts and exercise their intentions points to how "natural" schooled language has become for them, how inextricably a part of the writers academic discourse is. This strong identification with academic discourse can be seen clearly in both Sarah and John’s inadvertent remarks. Sarah briefly mentions that "in grade school I was the smart one in class.

By the time I got to junior high and high school, I became more interested in my social life than really wanting to leam. This was also around the time I stopped reading so much and I just relied on the headway I had gained in grade school to get me through." Her ability to use the language of school to meet with success in that context does not need to be discussed because it was already a part of her. In an interesting move, John only comments on frustration with schooled language because it was not challenging enough for him. He could easily manipulate school writing and do exceptionally well on standardized tests (he actually looked forward to the Iowa 141 testing in grade school), so much so that he began to do the homework of his brother’s friends two grades ahead of him. Identification comes through most clearly, however, in Patty’s text, which provides the only overt reference to identification in all the graduate student autobiographies. Patty is the only writer who explicitly ties the expression of her own voice to academic writing, perhaps because she has been involved in an academic context as a student, teacher, and administrator for over twenty years. Patty writes that because of this long involvement with school, she believes her writing upon her acceptance into the Ph.D. program had finally become her own: "The words on every page were now mine. "

Out of all the overt and implicit references to identification with academic discourse, Sheila perhaps puts it best when she remarks that her difficulty in graduate school was "really the first time when I’d felt any sort of prolonged inadequacy in my ability to communicate." The ability to communicate in a school context was taken for granted until this point, although she, unlike the other graduate students, does posit a reason for this assumption. "Perhaps because there were so few struggles," she writes, "I have little memory of school" or, in particular, of school writing.

Sheila’s telling comment reveals how little we leam about the nature of academic discourse when we examine only the writers’ identification with it. Because of the nature of this identification—one in which the discourse’s language becomes their own-the writers do not comment on what this discourse embodies. Further, I suggest, in their identification with this discourse, they are not able to perceive an agency in the discourse itself because it has become so much a part of them. It is to 142 the writers’ divided relationships with academic discourse, then, that we must turn to understand more clearly how the writers intuit the agency of discourse, and indeed, its power over them.

Division

As might be expected, the themes characterizing a divided relationship are more prevalent in the basic writers’ texts than in those of the English graduate students. Because of their placement, the basic writers do not yet see themselves as powerful with schooled language in the new context of college. Thus, academic discourse emerges as distanced, exterior, restricting, and inaccessible. On the other hand, the graduate students generally identify with academic discourse and therefore see its language as a part of the linguistic repertoire that allows them to exercise their intentions. The basic writers’ marginal position regarding this "new" discourse makes the already constructed and powerful nature of the discourse more immediate and distinguishable, even though most of these writers, if any, would undoubtedly be unable to describe their relationship in this way. In fact, when asked about the metaphors and terminology that imply distance, the writers I interviewed usually responded that they "hadn’t meant to write that" (Denzel’s interview). It is their position as writers attempting to "master” academic discourse that makes the basic writers more aware of the shifting nature of identification and division. In A

Teacher’s Guide to Deconstruction, Sharon Crowley refers to this phenomenon in more explicitly Derridian terms, asserting that beginning writers are "more in touch 143 with the flow of differance" than are more experienced writers (35) because they reside on academic discourse’s boundary.

The way in which the depiction of discourse shifts from one of identification to one of division is further supported in the graduate student texts. Although these texts do not display distance with schooled language in general, a similar divided relationship appears in some of their texts when the narratives begin to center on graduate school and the professional language of English studies. While their relationship to academic discourse might predominantly be one of identification because they can use certain manifestations of it to achieve their intentions, as soon as this ability is taken away upon entry to graduate school, the discourse permutâtes in unexpected ways. As a result, the graduate students are distanced, feeling as if the familiarity of the discourse has been stripped away in this new context. The graduate students’ experiences serve as a useful reminder that schooled language serves only as a general descriptive term for manifestations of academic discourse, which are neither singular nor monolithic. Instead, academic discourse embodies many different levels of schooled language and positions of authority achieved through those levels. Thus, while the graduate students remain identified with certain manifestations of academic discourse, they feel divided from the ones they are encountering for perhaps the first time. The similarities between the way the professional language of English studies is discussed by the graduate students and "college-level" language is presented by the basic writers are striking, yet not surprising given the marginal position of both 144 groups to these manifestations of academic discourse. As a result, the institutional position of the writer seems to dictate their relationship with the discourse.

In both cases, encountering a "new" discourse results in a clearer sense of differance^ a sense which might not otherwise have been felt. The separation of academic discourse from the writers, and particularly the discourse’s ability to embody its own agency, becomes most clear when the (student) writers are in a marginal position with certain manifestations of the discourse. Further, this relationship of division is precisely what allows the (student) writers to characterize the nature of academic discourse most fully. The nature of academic discourse is characterized as an entity that is (1) separate from human control, (2) able to withhold its agency—the instrumentality of its power-from humans, (3) capable of restricting other ways of using language, and (4) able to influence all aspects of the students’ language use. I discuss the specific nature of these characteristics below under the headings of distance, inaccessibility, restriction, and influence respectively.

Distance

Much like the ways in which the graduate students quickly passed over inferences to their ability to use schooled language to achieve their purposes, most of the images of distance in the basic writers’ texts are embedded and can be found only in apparently inadvertent references, structural moves at the sentence-level, noticeable absences, or metaphors. More intriguing is the fact that the texts rarely belabor these points; that is, once a brief reference might be made to the distanced relationship of 145 discourse, the texts quickly move on to a positive experience with literacy or an overt statement about why learning schooled language is good and necessary.

In fact, even though the themes of distance and exteriority are pervasive throughout the basic writers’ texts, they also write texts that are predominantly glowing accolades to the need for "good writing" and their own success with it in the past. The tension between the need to see oneself as successfully part of a discourse and the perception that this discourse is not one’s own is much more prevalent in the basic writers’ texts than in the graduate students’; the latter only speak of these themes in the localized time period of beginning graduate school. Intriguingly, the basic writers, much more so than the graduate students, highlight their positive experiences with literacy and only make brief references, if any, to previous problems in English classes. Rarely did an autobiography by a basic writer focus primarily on negative experiences or difficulties (only 5 texts). The need to present an ethos of a person who has the ability to use language well and succeed in school, however, should not be surprising given the fact that being given the institutional label of "basic writer" has called that ability into question. Success in this realm becomes defined as the ability to overcome this unexpected obstacle. (The nature of their placement as

"obstacle" or a "shock" is expressed explicitly in all but six of the texts.) There is a lot at stake in presenting and believing in oneself as a writer capable of doing college- level writing-a testament in itself to the power of the discourse.

For example, Charlie, a basic writer, writes that he finally realized why his mother and father, "and countless number of teaching aides" had forced him to 146 struggle with "this eccentric language" (i.e., schooled language, emphasis mine). Yet immediately after conjuring up this image of a distanced, quirky, fairly incomprehensible language with his allusion to "eccentric," Charlie returns to validating the language of school immediately. His next sentence begins: "I believe that communicating properly is one of the most important concepts we must all learn at an early age . . . Yet the distance from an exterior discourse that Charlie’s text tries to submerge-by immediately contradicting its articulation-recurs in other images as well. Significantly, Charlie also alternatively uses the terms "literature" and

"English" in his discussion of literacy. "Literature" refers to all reading and writing done in school; "English" refers only to his outside reading and the short, horror stories he likes to write for fun.

Whether these quick switches from suggestions of division to maxims on the need for identification are results of the context in which the text was written is impossible to discern (i.e., a university class on writing which would obviously value learning this type of writing). Yet it is more likely, given the nature of his text, that

Charlie did not intentionally choose to present schooled language as distant and incomprehensible. His text does not overtly report negative experiences; his narrative primarily focuses only on why schooled literacy can be and is a positive force in his life. As a result, I read his use of the term "eccentric" as an example of a perception about discourse that does not reach the conscious level for the writer (i.e., a sense of

"differance"). In other words, insights, like Charlie’s, into the writers’ own divided relationships with academic discourse seem inadvertent because this relationship 147 contradicts the control the basic writers want to have over this discourse. Further, these images of distance and division occur throughout the autobiographies.

Like Charlie, Tim also makes a consistent—and surprising—switch between the terms "British language" and "English language" in his autobiography. The descriptor, British language, is invoked whenever he speaks of schooled language;

English language is reserved only for references to home language and, like Charlie, non-assigned reading and writing. In Tim’s text, we see more clearly than in any other text the separation being made by many of these writers between characterizations of schooled language as "distanced" (i.e., a divided relationship) and more personal language (i.e., an identified relationship). The other texts do not explicitly use nationalistic terms to invoke the foreign, distanced nature of school discourse, yet these images are evoked just the same. Bruce’s text, for example, presents a more implicit, visual image of distance. He writes that "Mrs. Parks showed patients with my reading and . . . writing. " The ellipsis serves to separate

Bruce, indicated by the possessive pronoun "my," from schooled writing. It is important to note that this is the only instance of an ellipsis in Bruce’s entire ten-page text. In fact, the use of this ellipsis is so striking as a departure from Bruce’s usual style that his teacher comments on it in every draft. Yet, despite these comments,

Bruce retains this structure in his final, graded version, implying that whatever he felt was being communicated by this structure was too important to cut or could not be expressed in another way. 148 While Bruce presents an image of distance related only to schooled writing,

Aretha focuses on speech. In a discussion of how she tried to correct her dialect and

"talk straight and correctly" in school, Aretha includes several examples of what she means by dialect. Although she discusses other aspects of dialect (e.g., double negatives), the only concrete examples that she chooses to set off by quotes involve personal pronouns in which she is implicated. When she writes of her eighth grade

English teacher discussing people "with a terrible use of language," she explains that

"he would mainly be talking about how people would say ‘you be, I be’." A few lines earlier in the text Aretha ties her own speech with her teacher’s description of the way "people" talk. In contrast, when she discusses her boyfriends’ use of dialect her example is "we is, they is." Significantly, in these examples she sets up a consistent distinction between two groups, one personal and one removed. Further, by using plural pronouns in her boyfriends’ example, she aligns herself ("we") with him and his language rather than her teacher’s. Her teacher’s example implies blame and separation (I, the teacher, be; you, the student, be) while her boyfriend’s quote includes her and only excludes "they." In these apparently innocent examples of speech patterns, Aretha’s text implies her distance from the language of the teacher.

Yet, like Charlie, this discussion is located within the larger context of a discussion of the need to learn to "talk straight."

While the writers predominantly present themselves as people who are a successful part of academic discourse, or are attempting to become a part of it

("talking straight"), they simultaneously comment on how this language (or 149 alternately, knowledge) can also be more than distant. In a second theme related to division, the writers present academic discourse as something almost tangible that comes from outside of them. Frequently, metaphors of tools and gifts are invoked.

Todd writes that he received his "literacy tools from other people," while Dan mentions that he does not yet have enough language "tools" and needs to "collect more." Diane has also taken language from others in that she "acquired" her

"English skills" from her teachers. All-of these references conjure up images in which the writer him/herself has the power to take language, as a physical, definable entity, from others, whose province it is presumably to guard and distribute it. But just as frequently the writers refer to an entity beyond the human control that is given only to the privileged. Swati speaks of schooled language as confusing; she couldn’t

"find the answers" as if the answers existed in a space separate from her, a space she couldn’t access. Both Latisha and Tim speak of facility with schooled language as a

"gift from God." Latisha writes: "No one is bom with knowledge; it’s a gift from

God that gradually becomes a part of your life."

It could easily be argued that these writers are merely invoking cultural commonplaces for describing literacy: tools, innate ability (i.e., God-given), finding answers. This is undoubtedly true, yet I find their invocation, as well as the cliches themselves, significant in defining the perceived nature of academic discourse for these writers: its language is not theirs but something that they must take, earn, or find because, and here’s the crux, it is somehow being held away, or hidden, from them. Only Diane writes of "acquiring" the tools from her teachers instead of taking 150 or searching on her own, and even in this construction, the verb "acquire" places the responsibility for receiving such tools on the subject. The nature of schooled language as something outside of the writers that they must find is tied to human agents (i.e., teachers and "other people") or the language itself.

While the basic writers connect their images of distance and exteriority to schooled language in general, the graduate students discuss these discursive characteristics only in terms of "graduate school language"—both the writing and speaking of it. Although not all the graduate students overtly express the entrance to graduate school as representing a marked difference in their relationship to discourse, over half of them comment on a new feeling of distance and exteriority from the new forms required in graduate school.^ In these discussions, all the issues expressed in the basic writers’ texts come together in a single locus. However, there is a fairly marked difference in the ways the graduate students characterize the nature of "grad school" language. The graduate students primarily focus on issues of structure and jargon rather than ideas and knowledge. Even though they perceive that this new manifestation of academic discourse is separate and foreign, resulting in feelings of severe discomfort, they rarely tie this perception to an indictment of the quality of their ideas; instead, they focus upon a skills-related image of writing and reading that

* Although only half the texts comment on this feeling of distance and powerlessness with graduate school discourse, anecdotal evidence suggests that these feelings are nearly universal. In my five years of graduate school, I have yet to discuss this issue with anyone who does not admit to at least some feeling of powerlessness when writing their first few seminar papers, even if they do not have these same feelings about contributing to class discussions. 151 appears nowhere else in their texts. Their past successful experience with reading and writing seems to allow them to deflect their discomfort with this discourse from impinging on their ability to think in complex ways; it is only the expression, or writing and speaking of these ideas, that is called into question. This separation is intriguing in itself given that, as teachers of writing, these writers would likely label such a division false. It almost seems to serve, instead, as a defense mechanism, allowing them to deflect the feelings of inadequacy such a division from academic discourse has brought about.

The most pervasive image evoked in these discussions of graduate school writing is one of disempowerment; any previous perceptions of using schooled writing in purposeful ways has been taken away from these writers. Tricia writes in a note to her professor that one of her peer responders commented that the "central thread" in her text is that "reading and writing have been altogether very empowering experiences for me. I agree, at least until graduate school. I’m not sure it’s that simple anymore." Here, Tricia implies that reading and writing in graduate school have moved into another space for her, a space in which she no longer retains the power she previously felt over schooled language. Patty similarly implies that graduate school discourse is something different for her when she comments that she really only learned to write in graduate school, an assertion that is undercut by the report of exclusively successful experiences with writing in her primary, secondary, and undergraduate classes. 152 Other writers, however, are less covert about the effects of encountering a new way to write and express their ideas. Sarah writes that her course. Introduction to

Graduate Studies, "was an unnerving experience. . . After [this course] I tried to avoid writing courses because I was afraid my writing skills were not adequate for the graduate level." Janet’s text employs even more vehement terminology about the effects of this new language: "My safe, happy,, unassuming attitude toward myself and my abilities as a reader and writer of texts was shattered when I started graduate school." For Vicki, a recovering alcoholic, graduate school language (i.e., literary criticism) was a source of pain: "I did the best I could, but writing anything academic was still painful for me, because when I wrote, my body cried out for a drink and a cigarette." In all these examples, the sense that schooled language is theirs to use in purposeful ways to express their ideas has been stripped away. The nature of this language has turned a previously "natural" discourse into something other, something distant that is frightening and disturbing.

In sum, the images in both the graduate students’ and basic writers’ autobiographies speak to how a (student) writer can exist in a divided relationship with the language they seek to use, and thus to the discourse that embodies that language. Not surprisingly, a relationship of division between the (student) writer and academic discourse emerges in all these texts when the writers are attempting to master a new manifestation of the discourse, whether it be "college" writing or the professional language of English studies. More surprising, however, is the way in which the writers in their current marginal positions, particularly the basic writers. 153 reflect back to a similar divided relationship in the past, implying that such feelings are not new but rather were forgotten when they again achieved identification with the discourse.

Further, perceiving academic discourse as an entity separate from themselves as writers leads the students to characterize the power of this discourse much differently than when they felt identified with it. Rather than discerning academic discourse as their own to exercise their intentions—something over which they have control—the discourse is now presented as having power over them. Part of this power includes the ability of the discourse itself to withhold its language from them.

Inaccessibility

One of the ways in which the writers imply that academic discourse possesses its own agency is through their assumption that the discourse can restrict their access to this agency. The texts demonstrate the unattainability of academic discourse primarily through their confusion and frustrations with it; its language seems so

distant and perplexing that the writers feel they will never become a part of this

discourse. For example, LaVonne, an African-American woman who has been

consistently corrected for using dialect in school, remarks that "I try to speak in

quote, unquote ‘proper English’ which in itself is ironic because I’m not even sure

what ‘proper English’ is." The way in which she links schooled language to

textuality and distances herself from it in her emphasis on the "quoted" nature of

"proper" English is remarkable, given that she is referring to her speaking rather than

writing or reading. By placing schooled language within a textual realm, LaVonne 154 implies that the language of school is somehow spoken writing and therefore divided from her "natural" way of speaking. Further, by admitting that she isn’t "even sure what [it] is," LaVonne indicates how inaccessible it appears to her. Dominic more explicitly links his confusion to the textual nature of academic language when he complains that works of literature appear to him only as "a clutter of words." He later wonders if literary texts would make more sense read backwards.

Such allusions to a discourse created from somewhere beyond the (student) writers’ control—a space they must now access in order to speak, read, or write in the academic realm—is taken beyond the lexical and textual level in Lori’s text. In the majority of her text, Lori links her use of schooled language with her and her friend’s search to find out "what was real." After reading much philosophy, their conclusion was that "it’s all just a ball of confusion." In all these instances, schooled language, through its links to a discursive realm separate from the writers, forces these writers to depict that realm as inextricable, and therefore inaccessible.

In fact, Dan feels this inaccessibility so strongly that his text conflates literacy with a battle whose outcome is practically predetermined: he portrays Michael Jordan as a "language boss" because he "fights against the odds." Latisha implies that even hard work does not seem to matter in overcoming such odds. She wonders why everyone always says that "practice makes perfect" because this adage does not seem to apply to her language education: "I’ve been practicing for eight consecutive years and nothing has changed." She comments that consistent practice with sports has always worked for her and asks "what is the difference" with language. Seen in the 155 context of the other writers’ remarks, the difference seems to be the way in which academic discourse exists in an exterior space, a space that somehow gives it the ability to withhold its language from them.

Even though the unattainable nature of academic discourse results in frustration and confusion for these writers, most of the texts do not link the withholding of this discursive power to their teachers, or any human agent; instead, it is the discourse itself that restricts their access. Cassandra’s text demonstrates the absence of individual humans as controllers of such an unattainable discourse fairly clearly.

Cassandra links the discourse she feels she can’t access to a tradition and history that goes beyond her teacher. According to her narrative, she had always been a successful writer until she was moved into an honors class. On the first paper assignment, she worked for hours attempting to interpret a quotation but failed to come up with a draft for conference day. She describes her walk to the teacher’s desk for her conference as follows: "I walked from my desk to hers as if I was in a tunnel surrounded by Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Richard Wright screaming ‘You don’t have your paper complete. HA! HA! HA!’" Cassandra not only places the agency of the discourse she has failed to write outside of her teacher’s province; she also depicts the historical embodiments of the discourse as antagonistic and mocking, as a heteroglossia filled with the disembodied voices of famous men.

Further, these historical embodiments are only too happy to withhold their language and the power that comes with it. 156

A little further into the text, Cassandra does implicate her teacher more personally but again does not make ownership of discourse the province of humans.

During her conference, the teacher, Mrs. Jones, spends a period of time correcting

Cassandra’s grammar. Cassandra describes Mrs. Jones during this correction as a

"robot" and even writes that "I sat there thinking, ‘Is she human?’" The "correct" nature of language, here, becomes mechanical, something that is programmed from someplace outside, a programming that is not human. Again, as in the "great writer" example, this "programmed" language is depicted as something that does not simply exist in a space beyond Cassandra; it is also something that has the ability to restrict her access. Cassandra describes herself as being "stuck": "I was as they say,

‘working with the best’ but, the best had gotten the best of me." Similarly, LaVonne writes of an "outside" language that is not linked to human agency but has the ability to act upon her. LaVonne’s narrative is characterized by alternatively successful and unsuccessful interactions with schooled language. Her sophomore year in high school marks a turning point in a short period of unsuccessful attempts at school reading.

She describes reading Lord of the Flies and Julius Caesar as "two books [which] combined to break through my reading defense shield." Reading these two texts marked the beginning of a love for literature assigned in English classes with the exception of a”Beomilf siée swipe" her senior year. In both these sections, LaVonne places the books in the subject position; it is they who "break through" and "side swipe" her, not the classes or the teachers. Significantly, not only do the books influence her, but they also have a potential destructive power. She obviously felt at 157 one point the need for a "defense shield" against certain texts, and perhaps rightly so, given the "side-swipe" she is later dealt by Beowulf.

Like the basic writers, the graduate students also comment on this ability of academic discourse to restrict their access to it. While the graduate students are primarily concerned with how attempting to write the professional language of English studies has disturbed their sense of power with language, they also comment on how their divided relationship with the discourse removes it to a space of exteriority that can withhold its power from them. Sheila’s text most clearly states this sense of being outside the discourse due to a hierarchy implicit in the language, thus her text deserves to be quoted at length. She writes:

I resented this language because it excluded me from participating. In most of my early seminars, my attempts to understand the content of the discussions was distanced by unfamiliar words, names, and jargon I didn’t understand. . . The hierarchy implicit in this system [which is tied to the egoism of professors later in the text] can be stifling. . . My ideas seemed naive in the forms in which I expressed them. . .1 still suffer from the insecurity that my ideas are inferior—or rather, that they are inferior because I don’t communicate them in required ways.

Significantly, Sheila does not question the quality of her knowledge or assume that knowledge is exterior as many of the basic writers do, but she does imply that this language exists in order to keep her, and others like her, outside of the hierarchy, to prevent them from accessing the power to express their ideas in a form in which they would be listened to. Like Cassandra and LaVonne, she intuits a power structure that seeks to omit her, but unlike the two basic writers, she ties the structure to human agents-egotistical professors. 158 Not all the graduate students place the responsibility for exclusion in the teacher’s lap. In contrast, Janet also feels as if the knowledge she needs to express her ideas "correctly" exists outside of her, but she links this exteriority to a more amorphous location: "I felt sure everyone knew ‘secrets’ that I didn’t know, and I longed to find some big, black book in the library that contained all the answers about

how to ‘do’ graduate school." Although other humans possessed the facility with

writing that she desires, she does not perceive a human intention in keeping access

from her; instead, she invokes an image of the institution-"a big black book in the

library."

In these allusions, both in the basic writers and the graduate students’ texts, we

begin to see how the writers unconsciously perceive power existing within academic

discourse itself, although they also occasionally place this power within a human

agent. In one of the most provocative images of this power, Ben does not see the

hierarchy embodied in academic discourse as inevitable; instead, he imagines it

breaking down in a dream. On a day in English class in which the topic seemed

particularly removed from anything to do with him, Ben begins to daydream about the

destruction of the school. In the dream, not only is the school on fire, but the result

of the fire is that the ceiling tiles begin to fall down. Despite Ben’s fantasy, however,

the power of academic discourse to embody its own agency recurs constantly in the

autobiographies. The way in which academic discourse can exert power over the

(student) writers without the presence of human agents becomes most clear in the next

section. While the writers occasionally place the power of discourse in the hands of 159 institutional authorities (i.e., teachers) when they discuss its inaccessible nature, they consistently place the power within the discourse itself when they discuss its ability to restrict other ways of interacting with language.

Restriction

The texts depict the ability academic discourse has to restrict other ways of using language in all the areas of language use: reading, speaking, and writing. By requiring what the writers intuit as a certain type of reading process, the institution, and therefore its discourse, disallows processes and interpretative strategies that the writers feel are more "natural" to them. Similarly, the requirements for speaking and writing in school are portrayed as impeding the writers’ ability to speak and write in languages that feel somehow closer to their "true" sense of themselves. In sum, academic discourse itself is imbued with the power to determine what may be written and spoken, and how texts may be read. By setting up its own parameters for language use, the discourse can simultaneously restrict other ways of using language that do not fit within these parameters. The results of academic discourse’s restrictive ability are quite serious for the students. Disallowing their "other" reading and writing practices asks the students to give up the language practices about which they

feel most confident, placing the students in not only a position of division with the discourse but also one of powerlessness.

The ability of academic discourse to restrict other ways of reading is exhibited

primarily through descriptions of "home" reading practices that reflect different

attitudes toward texts than those presented in school. For Aretha, the restrictive 160 ability of academic discourse surfaces not in different ways of reading but in the

move from oral to textual authority. The way meaning is communicated in the orality

of her home culture becomes distant and confusing when converted to textuality.

Aretha’s text conveys a feeling of distance caused by the language of texts, causing

her to find the language evocative of a different meaning than that she learned at

home. This distance comes out in her characterization of finding the meaning of the

King James version of the Bible "confusing. " She loved the Bible stories and prayers her grandmother taught her as a child, but when these stories are moved into the

space of print with an antiquated language, the stories and prayers become something different, and more significantly something she doesn’t like or understand. Her original way of interpreting Biblical images is restricted by the textual nature of the

Bible, and she must now learn a new interpretative strategy.

Latisha does not feel restricted by the way she searches for meaning; instead, her text expresses a frustration with institutional reasons for reading. Latisha presents reading as something valuable only if it leads to practical and concrete results.

Latisha comments that reading was not a part of her home life; she saw people reading all the time on TV, but she never saw anyone reading at home simply to

"occupy time." "Reading in our household was consider* an option . . . But you hardly ever saw anyone reading a novel or those love books to occupy time."

Reading was never used recreationally or simply to gain information that might one

* Errors in Edited American English are retained in all student quotes. I have chosen not to mark these "errors" in my text as is common practice in order not to interrupt the students’ language. 161

day be useful because there were more pragmatic concerns to be dealt with

immediately. Hence, the only reading she sees as valuable are those books that

"taught something through experience" and were immediately applicable to her own life, Reading in school, then, which is primarily characterized as gaining information for the future or for a love of literature, is entirely foreign to Latisha and seen as useless.

Although other basic writers express a similar discomfort with thereasons for reading in school, most of the texts suggest a differentrelationship to texts. In their characterizations of home reading and the reading experiences they found pleasurable, a more collaborative and interactive relationship with texts is invoked. Neil, for example, writes about loving the early reading he did with his parents, a type of reading which was always interactive. His parents asked questions, listened to his reading, and all three of them created new endings to stories. Such an interactive model of reading as a preferred mode does not disappear for Neil as he grows older as it does for most children, perhaps as a result of the influence of school. Even in high school, he writes that the only time he could come up with a "good" reading of a poem and enjoy the process was when he and his mother worked on it together, talking out different interpretations. Like Aretha, Neil finds meaning in verbal interactions, but he transfers this way of discovering meaning to texts as well.

Similarly, LaVonne depicts her home reading as interactive and describes her two most successful reading experiences as collaborative interpretations of the Bible with 162 her parents and a book starring Oscar the Grouch she read as a child in which the reader becomes a character in the story.

In both Neil and LaVonne's texts, there is no mention that this interactive reading model is allowed with school reading. In fact, Neil even juxtaposes the way he generated reports about poetry with his mother to the individual reports expected of him by his teachers, remarking that he never does well on the latter. The limitations put on their interactive reading practices have intriguing consequences for

Neil and LaVonne’s subsequent relationships to texts assigned in school, and the ways of reading they construct as a way of dealing with this limitation. Both Lavonne and

Neil, as well as many other basic writers, report that their ways of reading in school were primarily characterized by memorization. The nature of memorization in their descriptions emerges as almost a "cover tactic" and is almost always linked to a fear of teachers discovering their "tactic." If they expected to read aloud on a certain day, they would memorize passages in advance because, as Neil put it, they "can’t read," an assertion undercut by their descriptions of reading at home. This fear of discovery, however, is very real, and the descriptions of it are almost reminiscent of an alcoholic’s fear of someone discovering their drinking. The nature of memorization as "cover" is probably best described in LaVonne’s account of having to read a portion ofThe Life o f Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. over the P. A. system in high school for Black History month, and deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

I had a week to prepare for the big day, so every night after school I would go home and memorize a paragraph. When the day came for me to read, I walked into the P.A. room to get it over with. When my turn came to read, I pulled out the paper for the sake of not being discovered as a fake, and began 163 reciting. When I was finished I was commended by my teachers and classmates about how well I read. If only they knew.

Although it is impossible to discern the direct cause of reading becoming primarily memorization for these writers, such memorization techniques could be

connected to the restriction of their interactive reading styles. The individual nature

of school reading presents texts as autonomous; that is, what the text says is more

important than any interaction people can have with the text. It almost seems as if

these writers have taken this presentation of texts to the extreme: if they cannot bring

the texts into an environment with other people then neither will they interact with the

text individually. Instead, such an autonomous way of reading can only be seen by

them as meaning memorization, a pure repetition of another’s words in which they

are only a vehicle. Thus, the schooled model of reading not only restricts their home

reading styles, but it also seems to force these readers into a totally oppositional

relationship with texts.

Although the way in which school discourse attempts to change reading

practices through its restriction of "other" ways of reading is highlighted to the

extreme in these examples of memorization as a "cover" for "not reading," other

autobiographies express a similar dissonance about writing book reports. Nearly half

the basic writers report disliking reading because of the reports and papers required

about the texts. These recurring statements about hating the interpretative act forced

upon them by papers imply that writing about books in certain ways forces a different

relationship to the text. In fact, most of the people who relate their hatred for the

reports link their primary pleasure in reading to escapism. Analysis, then, negates 164 and restricts their escapist models from entering schooled reading. For example,

Zeeva writes that she "loved reading for fun," particularly romance novels and fantasy works, but "when it came to reading for school, I hated it. That’s when we got into book reports.At least we were able to pick the books out ourselves. I hated having a time limit and writing about the books we read" (my emphasis). In this quote, we see that Zeeva does not dislike reading, or even the books read in school because she can choose them; it is the writing of the report itself that moves reading these texts into a space that is more distant and restricting, as it denies her escapist reading tendencies.

Restriction, then, is closely tied to change in that when the students’ way of reading and/or reasons for reading are restricted from school discourse, they feel as if the discourse that has already withheld them from access to its power is further attempting to change their successful and pleasurable relationships to reading. This is not to say that reading styles or relationships to texts are monolithic, or that two models of reading cannot be used by the same person. In fact, many of the graduate students also comment on reading differently in non-school contexts but report that they can maintain more than one reading style simultaneously. Yet the graduate students do see this "other" reading as illicit because of its content or context.

Reading non-assigned, or "inappropriate," texts invokes feelings of guilt similar to those expressed by the basic writers about their memorization of texts. For example,

Mary refers to her outside reading as "illicit" in grade school, but she only saw this reading as unacceptable when she read something not assigned while physically in the 165 classroom. It is not her reading and writing practices that are restricted, only the amount and times she can read. Tricia ties her feelings of "guilt" or "inadequacy" to reading texts deemed "unsophisticated" by school, particularly romance novels.

Similarly, Mahesh does not feel restricted in his way of reading in school, but he does feel distanced by texts that do not acknowledge his own sense of self. As a gay male,

Mahesh constantly feels betrayed by characters in texts assigned in school because their assumptions about sexuality never reflect his own feelings. His frustration surfaces in questions: "Why does the princess always have to marry the prince?

Why did Emma have to marry Mr. Knightley?"

What is most striking about all these descriptions, especially given how prevalent they are in the autobiographies, is that in none of them is the restriction of reading practices, processes, and interpretative strategies linked to human agents.

The texts never refer to a particular teacher, or even a single class, that prompted their feelings about these practices being inadequate to a school context. Instead, the texts connect the restriction of these more "natural" reading practices only to the institution of school. If we define the institution as the primary embodiment of academic discourse as I have done, the restriction of these practices is linked, then, to the discourse itself. In other words, academic discourse, not a human agent, is given the agency, or ability, to restrict other ways of approaching texts.

This depiction of academic discourse as the agent of restriction continues in the autobiographies’ descriptions of speaking and writing. Although only two of the texts-one by a basic writer and one by a graduate student-designate speaking as their 166 most "natural" expression of self, both these texts indicate that this type of speaking is restricted by school. For Denzel, his "language communicating skills" are the strongest and least affected when he is speaking with his friends, using what he alternately terms "black dialect" and "slang," which he defines as the language of young, black men based on the terminology of Rap musicians. Denzel realizes, however, that such speaking in school is inappropriate; he mentions that this language is usually perceived as being "ununderstandable" by white students and teachers. He further comments that his "language communicating skills" are most inappropriate in schooled writing assignments. For Denzel, this restriction is particularly frustrating because he places his persuasive power in his "language communicating skills."

Denzel is proud of what he terms his "persuasive" ability. He has always been told by his mother and other family members that he is a persuasive person. He provides examples of being able to persuade his mother to allow him to do things she normally would not. As he moves into the present, his persuasive abilities are discussed within the context of women and his ability to persuade women of many things, although he writes that he prefers not to go into detail about what these "things" might be. By restricting these "communicating skills" within a school context, then, Denzel is rendered silent—powerless with language in a way he has not been in other contexts.

Mary, like Denzel, refers to language that expresses her "true" self as taking place in conversation. In fact, talking, she realized early, was a way of giving a part of her self to others: "I soon realized that if I talked, the other person would talk back. We would learn something about each other. The more I gave of myself 167 through language, the more (at least ideally) I would get back." It is only through speech that Mary expresses this exchange of selves, a communication that expresses her inner voice. Unfortunately, she comments, such an exchange rarely happens in class discussion; instead, this type of communication is described as occurring only in out-of-school contexts.

It is important to note that the only examples of restricted ways of speaking are linked to what are normally described as racial or gendered communicative styles.

Denzel’s description of his "language communicating skills" parallels descriptions of

African-American English, while Mary’s description of the "exchange of selves" through conversation is reminiscent of "women’s ways of using language." The only overt example of how schooled writing restricts other ways of using language, however, comes from a white male. Tom provides perhaps the clearest image of the ways in which schooled writing attempts to change the writer’s language by restricting other uses. Throughout Tom’s text, he writes of searching for an avenue within language that would express his thoughts. He finds that avenue in unrestrained uses of speech; however, his father-a symbol of power-tries to force a more acceptable, schooled language upon him. Tom writes, "I was never afraid to express myself no matter what I was thinking, I would just blurt it out. This made my dad worry because he always put a major emphasis on having to learn to write a coherent paragraph." Tom becomes increasingly frustrated with his father’s emphasis on this

"coherent" logic because he does not believe such a structure would allow him to express himself. It is important to note that Tom sees the "coherent logic" of a 168 paragraph as that which restricts his ability to express himself in other ways, not his father’s admonitions. Similarly, he expresses anger at the school system for concentrating on reading and writing rather than valuing "thinking." Schooled reading and writing restricts Tom from expressing what he sees as his true thoughts.

In his connection of the paragraph with his own uses of speech above, he suggests that the structure of schooled writing would restrict his ability to express what he was thinking.

Influence

The autobiographies illustrate academic discourse’s power not only to restrict other ways of using language but also to encroach upon the ability to access these

"voices." The texts attribute this ability to academic discourse’s power to influence their thinking to such an extent that it becomes their own. While the writers primarily discuss the way that schooled reading has influenced their thinking, they also suggest that this influence may come from other types of schooled language as well. In particular, the texts comment on how academic discourse has encroached upon and defined both their thinking and writing in ways they were unable to prevent.

Their perceptions about this influence and encroachment again result from their divided relationship with academic discourse. For the most part, they can only discuss academic discourse’s influence on them in terms of past experience. Only when their present realities have changed can they reflect on how they received ideas and ways of using language from their interactions with academic discourse that are no longer desirable. Again, as in the images of restriction, the writers do not tie 169 academic discourse’s influence on their language use to any human agent, or even, to the institution. Further, in their references to its influence, the texts imply that academic discourse does not remain in the exterior position described above; it also has the ability to become interior, an inextricable part of the writers.

The primary way in which schooled language is seen as influencing the way these writers think is found, not surprisingly, in reading.® Reading as a means of constructing a worldview and changing thinking is apparent in over half the basic writers’ texts and all of the graduate students’. Their divided relationship with academic discourse allows the writers to perceive the ways in which their earlier identification with schooled texts has influenced them. While most of the writers see this influence as a positive aspect of their discursive interactions, some now wish they could escape it.

Even very early reading experiences have the power to become part of the

"reality" separate from the text. Mary, like all the graduate students except one, read voraciously throughout her life. The appeal of these early readings were the new worlds they presented, yet these worlds did not remain in the text. Mary remarks that "as I read these books, even my own surroundings became suffused with the potential for the fantastic. " Especially in a school context, the language and content of these books work their way into the lives and selves of the writers. As Patty puts it, texts, specifically the Aenid, are "part of me for life. " Janet begins her essay with

® I should note, however, that some basic writers tie this more explicitly to writing, particularly rules of grammar and usage. Charlie, for example, writes that "the art of grammar shaped me." 170 the statement that reading and writing "have shaped my identity." Reading becomes not only an activity and an exercise in escapism, but, as Rich depicts it, "a journey, a following in others’ words, " particularly in the "words" he defines as achieving their status through assigned school reading. This journey leads to different ways of thinking. John portrays his favorite book. Dune, as something he loved not so much for the content but more for "the complexity it brought to my view of the world and people in general."

The examples abound in the texts: books bringing a new perspective, books creating an identity, quotes becoming the manifestos by which people define their lives, and so on. In all these discussions, however, one image remains-that of taking in a text from the outside in such a way that it shapes thinking and perspective so that the writers of these autobiographies become part of the text. The text and the self become conflated in a single space. This image of "taking in" a discourse is nowhere more poignant than in the recurring images of eating: Swati, a basic writer, "devours books," while Margaret’s books are "comfort food" that she also "devoured." The perspective, knowledge, and changes gained through these books are viewed predominantly as a positive aspect of literacy because these changes bring about power in terms of school and societal respect and acceptance. Owning books becomes one physical symbol of this status. Mahesh wept when his mother gave half his books to charity when he was an early adolescent; Margaret feels her books are

"owed to her" because she has read them. Lori, a basic writer, perhaps best depicts 171 the cultural power embodied in texts when she calls libraries "the last strong holds of civilization."

Despite the fact that the influence of schooled reading (most of the comments on "books" are those assigned by school) gains the reader power and status, academic discourse’s power to influence the students in this way is not always depicted positively. A handful of texts lament this power because it has forced them to see the world in ways they no longer find adequate. Not surprisingly, most of the texts expressing this frustration come from graduate students. Perhaps for the first time, their divided relationship with academic discourse has forced them to reflect on the results of their identification with schooled texts that had served them so well in the past. These writers’ current circumstances now allow them to perceive not only the influence of schooled reading but also the way it has become inseparable from them.

Because of the inextricable ways in which the writers feel they have merged with the worldview of schooled texts, they find this worldview difficult to escape.

For example, Kim comments that her immersion as a child in school texts featuring male adventurers has led her to implicitly accept men as dominant in ways she is only beginning to become aware of now, thirty years later. She feels these texts’ perspectives have become so much a part of her that she took on their view as her own. Even her own stories as a pre-adolescent, she tells us, featured male protagonists and leaders. Similarly, Vicki recounts how her assumption of male privilege in the realm of language continued up until her second stint in graduate school when she was in her mid-thirties. Although, as an undergraduate, she was the 172 one who desired to be a reader and writer, she explains that during this time, she allowed only men to tell her what to read and write. She links this to reading assigned texts that place males in dominant positions. As a result, she sought out only male teachers. Through these experiences with schooled texts and male teachers, she inherited a "flawed sense of my female self that further "translated into a flawed perspective of other women."

Latisha, a basic writer, implies that she has internalized not only the perspective of texts but also their linguistic structures. As she becomes aware of these structures’ effects, she comes to resent this influence on her speaking. In a seemingly innocuous reference, Latisha reports her frustration at the basal readers she absorbed as a child because she now feels that sentences like "Dick and Jane played" caused her, and her fellow students, to "begin talking like robots."

The frustration of trying to escape the perspectives gained from schooled

reading comes out most clearly in Tricia’s text. Like many young women, Tricia

spent much of her early years reading romance novels, NaiKy Drew mysteries, and

Cherry Ames chronicles, the latter two being encouraged as "outside" reading in

elementary school. Her reply to her own question of "was all this reading beneficial

to me?" is telling in that it expresses the tension between the power she gmns through

reading and a perspective with which she is not entirely happy. "I know I can

attribute my strong verbal skills to it," she writes, "but at the same time I certainly

internalized a highly romanticized world view-swallowed it hook, line, and sinker,

and went back for more. And as much as I’ve grown since then, vestiges of the 173 romanticism still lurk insidiously somewhere and surprise me." The "insidious" effects of this immersion in an exterior discourse is what frustrates all these writers.

Vicki and Kim, like Tricia, are most uncomfortable about the fact that they do not know how much of these views they no longer accept are still lurking around to surface in yet unrealized manifestations.

It’s important to note that all these references to frustration with internalizing an academic "perspective" come from women. Although the evidence is by no means overwhelming, this observation might also imply something about the "male" nature of academic discourse. Not surprisingly, then, most of the autobiographies which comment on how schooled writing serves to restrict a "true" voice come from women as well. In these descriptions, however, academic discourse does more than simply restrict these other ways of writing; the discourse is perceived as capable of impinging upon the writers’ ability to access this voice. While all the previous

examples refer to schooled reading specifically, these texts invoke only the term

"other voices," linking these voices to those "spoken" in schooled writing, reading,

and speaking in other parts of their autobiographies.

Kim, Cindy, and Margaret discuss their most "natural" voices as

communicable only in creative writing, a type of writing that takes place only out of

school for these graduate students. Yet even in this non-school context, academic

discourse intervenes. Margaret writes that she discovered her "most authentic voice"

as a young adolescent when she composed a poem. Nevertheless, she senses a

tension between this authentic voice and her ability to judge the nature of this voice: 174

"The voice of that writing experience is, and has been, the strongest part of whatever

I have tried to define as ‘me’." Throughout her text, Margaret is never sure where the voices she defines as authentic have come from, although she obviously prefers and feels more closely tied to some voices. Hence, she worries that the voice representative of the "strongest part of whatever . . .[is] me" might someday disappear.

Similarly, Cindy, a published poet, links her love of poetry (and fiction) to a

"desire to express myself." Yet, though she provides many examples of what she feels are poems in which she expresses this "self," she also is concerned about taking on voices that she’s "uncomfortable with." Cindy, like Margaret, expresses a tension between a language that is her own and the voices of others that may impinge upon that language. Kim’s text presents the encroachment of other languages and voices more explicitly. Kim, a singer and songwriter, writes that "one of the things it’s been my pleasure to remember [in writing this autobiography] is how much I love to write-to create worlds and to people them or decorate them. Something I’ve always done-ever since forever is to write songs. But suddenly I realized that over the past six years I’ve come to a gradual stop . . . Sometime along the way I began to listen to so many other voices I could no longer hear my own." Unlike Cindy, Kim does not wonder if her own voice is a construction-she clearly believes it exists-but she is concerned that it can be lost. Later in the text, Kim explicitly ties her reference of

"so many other voices" to critical writing—it is critical (schooled) writing that she feels has limited her ability to access her own "natural" voice. 175

Despite its exteriority, academic discourse in all these examples—whether of reading or writing—is depicted as capable of becoming inextricably a part of the writers’ perspectives. While not all the writers feel such an internalization has had negative results, they all speak to its reality. Perhaps the most intriguing examples of this ability, however, don’t come from specific references to reading and writing.

Instead, they are invoked through metaphoric images which describe how an exterior discourse can shape, change, and become a part of the writer.

For example, Ben describes people as "sponges soaking up the knowledge about the world around us." School and teaching, particularly English classes,

"form" a student "just like . . . a sculpture." When "we start out in our first years of school all we are is a ball of clay . . . Hopefully when we graduate from college we will be an outstanding work of art." The clay itself has substance but no form. It exists to be molded by an exterior force. Even the notion of a substance which makes up the self apart from discourse, however, begins to fade in Margaret’s startlingly poetic images of the way in which an exterior language acts upon her. Margaret writes that "everything, including my reading and writing, seems to happen to me from somewhere outside. I always picture ‘me’ as a form-bluish with speckles, within a body, not really connected." Margaret’s text invokes an image of a fluid, almost gaseous, form for the self shaped by discourses, a self which is enclosed only in a physical skeleton.

On the other hand. Rich describes a self tied to a physical body, but it is not this self that interacts with discourse. Instead, the non-corporeal self exists only in 176 relation to outside discourses. "As long as I can remember I’ve strained to hear other people’s voices, to take in words wholesale—and say them back. Other people’s words are like drugs to me, an ecstasy in the old sense of the term, an out-of-body experience" (emphasis mine). Seen in the context of the rest of his autobiography, we can discern that Rich’s references to "voices" are those of his teachers and assigned texts. Later in the autobiography. Rich describes how he’d rather take on the voices of authoritative texts than use his own:

Most significant to me now is the fact that early on I couldn’t make this artificial distinction between other people’s voices and my own: without any sense of wrongdoing I was for years a felonious plagiarist. In fifth grade, I wrote long reports on dinosaurs and on monster movies that I invariably got A’s on . . . In writing about Tyrannosaurus Rex, for example. I’d go to one of my several dinosaur books and transcribe sentences piecemeal—not because I couldn’t come up with my own words but simply because I liked the feel of those book words, (his emphasis)

Taking on "those book words" was part of the way Rich tried to "forge for

myself a like voice." He reports that now, as a graduate student, "the words I speak

come from all these voices, and they are me” (my emphasis). Taking in those voices

was once an "out-of-body experience," but now such an exterior discourse is

inseparable from Rich’s definition of himself as a language user. Rich’s text in many

ways sums up the effects of academic discourse’s influence that most of the writers

only imply. He provides the clearest example of how academic discourse not only

influences thinking and impinges upon access to "other" languages, but also becomes

internalized in such a way that it is inseparable from those who speak its language. 177

Implications for the Status of the (Student) Subject

In their divided relationship with academic discourse, the writers seem to depict the discourse as possessing its own agency. In their portrayals of it, the discourse has the power to remain separate from them, withhold access to its power,

and restrict other ways of using language from its discursive realm. Further, the

perspective embodied within the discourse has a significant influence over the writers’

thinking and language use: it can, in fact, become a part of them despite its

exteriority. Academic discourse, then, seems to possess power not only in itself but

in its ability to influence those who use its agency by employing its language. The

writers believe it can influence them to such an extent that they fear its impingement

on other ways of using language and despair of ridding themselves of its past

influence.

But what does this discussion suggest about the (student) writer’s relationship

to academic discourse? Before looking further into the consequences of the agency

the writers seem to place in academic discourse, I wish to consider what explanations

current philosophical perspectives on discourse can provide for these portrayals of the

nature of discourse. Otherwise, we risk getting mired in specificity. I suggest that

two philosophies of discourse-social construction and poststructuralism-could account

for most of the depictions I’ve analyzed.

Social Construction

A social constructionist philosophy holds that discourse is constructed within

communities by a group of human agents who are seen as knowledgeable within that 178 community. As a result, humans can use language intentionally as agents, accessing the agency of the discourse that is derived through the construction of other human agents. If we assume that academic discourse is socially-constructed, then its distant, inaccessible, and restrictive nature becomes a problem of entrance into the "normal discourse" of the academy. Because the academic discourse community is made up of

"knowledgeable peers," the students could be seen as not yet members of this community. Thus, academic language would be an already present entity for them, one they must learn more about before they can access its power. Its inaccessibility, then, would be eliminated once the students were members of the community.

Teachers and other authorities within this discourse community could be seen as advocating a language that seems foreign or distant, and thus inaccessible. A community’s discourse, further, includes its own ways of speaking and writing within its membership; if one is to learn to speak and write to that audience, he or she must also follow the rules of the community for its language. Restriction of other ways of using language, then, simply becomes an issue of audience. These "other" practices do not mirror the ways of knowing and rules of language use pre-determined by the

already constituted academic community, and therefore they are inadequate to

expressing ideas to other members of that community. This explanation seems to be

further supported by the way academic discourse is depicted when the writers feel

identification with it. When they express identification with the discourse, the writers

enter, albeit momentarily, into the community; thus, they are able to exercise their

intentions, becoming agents by using the community’s language. 179

Yet, despite the seemingly broad explanatory power a social constructionist philosophy gives to the autobiographies’ depictions of discourse, social construction fails to explain some of the contradictions embedded within these depictions. While social construction helps us understand why some of the writers attribute the distant nature and inaccessibility of academic discourse to institutional authorities, it does not account for those texts which place these characteristics within the discourse itself. In other words, it provides no explanation for the way in which academic discourse is described as an entity beyond human control in its division from the writers, nor for the way the discourse is given the power to withhold its agency from them. Further, social construction fails to explain why all the writers place the ability to restrict other ways of using language in the institution rather than in human authority. But perhaps the most important depiction left unexplored by social construction is the writers’ portrayal of academic discourse’s influence. Particularly troubling is the writers’ depiction of the discourse as able to become a part of them in such a way that it could impinge upon their ability to access other languages. If we follow composition’s applications of social construction discussed in Chapter 1, such an impingement should not be possible. According to social constructionists, the writers should be able to move freely among discursive communities, changing their language and perspective within each different context.

Of course, a social constructionist would probably explain these contradictions as anomalies or a result of the students’ marginal position within the academic community. Because the students do not yet participate in the maintenance and 180 creation of academic discourse’s rules, they see the discourse only as an institutional entity. The way in which the discourse becomes a part of them would simply signify their adherence to the community’s worldview, one which they’ve decided to take on as their own as a way of achieving membership. This response, however, is inadequate for several reasons. First, the (student) writers have been and continue to be a part of academic discourse; they have been interacting with different manifestations of academic discourse for thirteen to twenty years. As a result, I resist seeing their portrayals of academic discourse only as misconceptions based on inexperience. Second, the prevalence of such contradictions, especially the writers’ unanimous placing of restriction in the institution, might point to an intriguing insight into discursive relationships that cannot simply be discounted. To account for these apparent contradictions in the students’ portrayal of the nature of discourse, then, we must move beyond social construction to poststructuralism.

Not surprisingly, poststructuralism would explain the autobiographies’ characterizations of academic discourse much differently than social construction, for the theories differ in two key ways. Unlike social construction, poststructuralism localizes the agency of language and the ability of humans to use this language in discourse itself. Poststructuralism’s assertion, that humans who would use a discourse’s language become subjects of that discourse’s agency, not only distinguishes it from social construction but also provides the explanatory power I am seeking. That the very discourse we use to communicate and act upon other people may also be acting upon us and regulating the ways in which we speak and act is at 181 the crux of theories of the subject. Although social construction considers the influence of culture on the language used by agents, it fails to consider how that same agent is also an object of cultural discourses and how those discourses controlits agents and determine when they may speak.

To describe how a subject might be controlled by the very discourses she uses, we might best turn to Michel Foucault, who has arguably done the most work on the agent/subject distinction. Foucault’s theories are of direct relevance here because of his overriding interest in the way discursive relationships are played out in the material world. Although Foucault’s theories also discuss how human subjects participate in and may resist a discourse’s power, for the purpose of this chapter, I would like to focus only on the ways in which he describes discourse’s ability to exert power over humans and the process by which this subject-production occurs. In

Chapter 4, I will examine the subject’s role in this production and its relation to the literacy autobiographies.

Poststructuralism: Foucault’s Theory of Discourse

Foucault’s relevance to understanding subject-production is caught up in the nature of his project, which could be described not so much as a theory of discourse as a theory of power. His consuming interest in power results from his assumption that "power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" {History 93). Because of the inevitable pervasiveness of power,

Foucault’s project, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, is to articulate not "What is power and where does it come from?" but "How is it practised?" (72). In trying to articulate 182 how power is practiced, Foucault turns to discourse, asserting that power is exercised through discursive relationships. Foucault’s emphasis on power results from his observation that "the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the overall unity of a domination" are not given at the outset as that which formulates power relationships; instead, "these are only the terminal forms power takes" {History 92).

In other words, where we conventionally locate the causality or beginnings of power are only its results. Foucault explains this thesis in more detail in an interview with

Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino:

the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The State is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth. This meta-power [of the State] with its prohibitions can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power ("Truth and Power" 122).

It is these "multiple and indefinite power relations" that Foucault places in discourse. Discourse itself is ahistprical; it has no beginning or end, no formal unity

{Archaeology 117). Foucault’s conception of non-origin has affinities with Derrida’s definition of arche-writing, the writing before writing. For Derrida, there is neither sign nor symbol but a becoming of sign and symbol because the idea of the trace, or arche-writing, must itself be possible before (simultaneous with) any idea of presence or linguistic representation. Similarly, discourse for Foucault always exists in a state of becoming. This always present/absent discourse manifests itself, Foucault

explains, in discursive formations. 183

Discursive Formations and the Production of Knowledge

Discursive formations order certain aspects of discourse in such a way that the power of discourse can be exercised. Discourse itself, as Manfred Frank points out in "On Foucault’s Concept of Discourse," is not "orderedper se." Instead, "the order of discourse [in] its being-status is purely virtual, whilst its reality involves the permanent change and re-creation of discursively constituted meaning (yet not in a way which can be tied down to any will to power)" (114). Thus, the ordering of discourse, or its formations, cannot then be tied to any human will that constructs it.

Discursive formations are found neither in the thoughts of men and women nor in institutions; they reside in discourse itself {Archaeology 100). Because of his interest in how "power is exercised," Foucault provides no explanation for how this ordering occurs. Through his analyses of asylums, prisons, and sexuality, however, he demonstrates that formations emerge at certain points due to the way certain historical realities converge. Thus, although discourse is ahistorical in that it is always present in History, the ways in which discourse exerts its power is tied to a particular culture through discursive formations that do change in form in history.

Discursive formations, then, are the key to understanding how a particular discourse embodies its own agency and produces its own agents. The primary characteristic of discursive formations is their ability to produce and define what will be counted as knowledge. It is by controlling the production of knowledge that discursive formations order the "indefinite and multiple" power relationships within discourse. Such an ordering allows them to exercise this power strategically. In fact. 184

it is only by this production of knowledge that discursive formations can be

distinguished. Formations, Foucault explains, can only be defined by their presence, by a discernible unity in the way they order the production of knowledge. "Whenever one can describe a system of dispersion," Foucault tells us, "we have a discursive

formation"{Archaeology 37). Such a system of dispersion is defined by a regularity

or unity among the objects of knowledge, types of statements which make

authoritative claims to knowledge, the concepts produced by that knowledge, and the

theories (or statements) grounding these claims to knowledge. In contradiction to the prevalent conception that knowledge is produced by a specific epistemology agreed

upon and created by human intervention, Foucault places the production of an

epistemology in the discursive formation: "it should be noted that the strategies (i.e.

theories) thus described are not rooted, anterior to discourse, in the silent depths of a

choice that is both preliminary and fundamental. . . one must not relate the formation

of theoretical choices either to a fundamentalproject or to the secondary play of

opinions" {Archaeology 69-70).

The way in which discursive formations embody knowledge and all its avenues

of production is inextricably linked to the way discursive formations exercise power.

In his discussion of Foucault, Deleuze explains this inseparable relationship between

knowledge and power: "knowledge {connaissance) never refers back to a subject who

is free in relation to a diagram of power; but neither is the latter [power] ever free in

relation to the forces of knowledge{savoirs) which actualize it" (75). In other words,

knowledge is produced through power relationships, and power is actualized only 185 through knowledge. Although in many ways this observation is not new, what

distinguishes it from other theories is how power and knowledge are produced and

exercised through discourse apart from human intervention. Foucault attributes this

change in the way power can be exercised through language to a departure from the

Classical episteme (i.e., discursive formation’) in his explanation of the emergence of

the human sciences in The Order o f Things. In the Classical episteme, language was

governed by representation or the ability to name, creating a link between the power

to designate and thus articulate. But with the inception of formal grammar in the

Enlightenment, the representative power of language became secondary to the study of how the modification of language itself created meaning{The Order o f Things 234-

36). The study of language as a system unto itself, particularly with the discovery of morphemes, allowed humans to view language as that which could create meaning apart from the representative function they controlled by naming. The conditions of language thus moved to considerations exterior to its representative function exercised by humans. This change in how language was perceived goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of the human sciences through which man, society, and language became entities, and thus objects which could be studied. Foucault links the production of the human sciences to the ability of power to be exercised through its relation to this knowledge.* He explains this most succinctly in "On Power: "

’ After The Order of Things, Foucault replaces the term "episteme" with "discursive formation" because of the structuralist overtones invoked by the former term.

* Please note that Foucault views the power of representation also as a discursive power. The shift he describes in The Order of Things is not the beginning of discursive 186 generally speaking, the fact that societies can become, from a certain point on, a problem to be analyzed and resolved, all that is bound up, I believe, with mechanisms of power—which, at a given moment, indeed, analyzed that object (society, man, etc.) and presented it as a problem to be resolved. So the birth of the human sciences goes hand in hand with the installation of new mechanisms of power (107).

These new mechanisms of power come through its links to knowledge about

"all that is human." The production of knowledge conducted by discursive formations, then, also becomes an instrument of a power that is embodied within the formation. As Francois Chatelet puts it, we can imagine "power as exercise, [and] knowledge as regulation" (qtd. in Deleuze 74). Discursive formations, through their regulatory function, order the force present in discourse in such a way that it can act upon humans. As Deleuze explains, the ability to be affected by power is simply a

"matter of force, and the power to affect is like aJunction of force" (71-72). The force itself exists as a "pure function" that is directed to specific ends through discursive formations. In sum, discursive formations exert this power by functioning as "brutal restrictions and systems of exclusion, which owe their unity to the ties of their ‘disseminality’" (Frank, 114).

The way in which this power is exerted on humans is caught up in the formation’s ability to restrict and exclude an individual from access to knowledge and authority. Put simply, our ability to speak is defined by the discursive formation itself. It is the play of discursive strands (i.e. the ordering of discourse within formations) that constitutes the grounds within which we can be thought to speak (or

power itself but an explanation of how knowledge becomes power’s primary discursive instrument. 187 write) authoritatively on a subject, can be said to "know." Since the formation embodies the production and routes to knowledge, it also prescribes the "rules" for speaking about that knowledge. Foucault labels the spaces created by a formation in which humans are allowed to speak "enunciative modalities."

The key term here is modality, or method and form. The speaking subject, certainly, operates and produces purposeful language within a discursive formation, but the language, or statements issued by the subject, are not caused by the intention of the author or speaker. Instead, the constant series of operations of a discursive formation are manifested on the surface of discourse, creating a "vacant place that may be filled by different individuals." This space can be seen as "a dimension that characterizes a whole formulationqua statement" (Foucault, Archaeology 95). In other words, a formation orders discourse in ways that embody the production of

knowledge by producing strategies (theories) and concepts (ideas) that need human

subjects to articulate them. Thus, the formation provides, and indeed circumscribes,

positions through which humans can speak its knowledge. The ability to speak on a

topic, then, does not reveal a transcendental subject or a psychological subjectivity;

rather, a discursive formation is, Foucault explains, "an anonymous field whose

configuration defines the possible position of speaking subjects"(History 122). It is

the conditions of enunciative modalities as they are influenced by history, culture, and

context, that Foucault terms discursive practice (Archaeology 117).

It is important to note that Foucault always refers to enunciative modalities in

the plural, signifying the plurality of discursive practice. A single discursive 188 formation creates many modalities; thus, the language a discourse produces can take many forms depending on the specific nature of a certain modality. The writers’ descriptions of academic discourse in the autobiographies demonstrate clearly the plurality of these modalities. Schooled language, or the language of academic discourse, has multiple manifestations: "college-level" writing; the differences in disciplinary writing, such as the professional language of English studies; the variability of certain instructors’ expectations about the forms of enunciative modalities in their classes, and so on.

The relationship among discourse, discursive formations, enunciative modalities, and discursive practice is perhaps most easily perceived visually. The diagram below attempts to simplify the relationship among these complex elements: 189

DISCOURSE (ahistorical, always present/absent much like arche-writing)

Manifests itself in

DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS (The presence of discourse, its manifestations within culture and history. Both defines and is the instrument of ideologies, institutions, governments, and so on, but unable to be tied specifically to any person or institution)

Part of a formation is the presence

ENUNCIATIVE MODALITIES (The space created within a formation in which subjects speak. Defines the rules for what may be said and who can speak with authority.)

When a speaker fills the space created by an enunciative modality it results

DISCURSIVE PRACTICE (The seemingly intentional use of language by agents.)

FIGURE 1: Discursive Elements 19 0

When an individual fills the "vacant place" created by the discursive formation, she then becomes what Foucault calls a "speaking subject," the "speaking

I," or the "knowing subject." Thus, the speaking subject becomes yet another instrument by which a discursive formation perpetuates its power. Foucault perhaps expresses this function best in "What is an Author?" where he explains how the author functions as a speaking subject’. The author, Foucault implies, serves a discursive formation by only writing what is acceptable to that formation, thus repressing other possible meanings not in line with it:

The author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the work; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a fîgure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning (118-119).

In sum, speaking subjects perpetuate the power of discourse by speaking (writing) within the rules it exerts to produce knowledge. Once a subject has "filled" an enunciative modality, then, she becomes an instrument of the discourse’s power over others, becomes quite simply an authority within the epistemological realm expressed by that modality.

’ Foucault never uses these terms explicitly in "What is an Author," but reading this essay in relation to his larger corpus points to such a connection. 191 Given the way poststructuralism explains how humans can speak a discourse that they do not control—one of its chief distinctions from social construction-let’s return to what explanatory power this assertion can provide for the literacy autobiographies in this study. Although Foucault applies his theory only to broad cultural and epistemological shifts—ignoring the effect of discursive relationships on particular subjects—his articulation of the role subjects play in discourse can illuminate much of what goes unexplained in the literacy autobiographies. In particular, I suggest that the relationship between discursive formations and enunciative modalities clarifies the seeming contradictions in the students’ depictions of discourse as distant and inaccessible.

In these depictions the writers alternately place the power of academic discourse within the discourse itself or with the authority of teachers. In a poststructuralist formulation, the distanced nature of discourse, in fact even the divided relationship’s existence, would be due to the formation’s exteriority from humans. Teachers, as authorities within the discourse, could also be viewed as the agents who maintain this exteriority because they function as subjects who speak with academic discourse’s power. Because the students have not yet become speaking subjects within academic discourse, the power within this formation would remain inaccessible to them. However, when they fill a space created by the formation, they can seemingly exercise its power intentionally; hence, when the students are

’’identified" with the discourse, depictions of using schooled language intentionally emerge. Further, even in their exterior relationship, they would be able to bear 192 witness to this discursive power because the formation, by restricting its valued knowledge from them, also exerts power over them. This relationship makes them perhaps more aware of academic discourse’s power than their teachers who are part of the discourse.

In many ways, this explanation is remarkably similar to that provided by social construction. It would seem that in Foucault’s formulation, "discursive formation" merely replaces the term "community," and "speaking subject" replaces "community member." The key differences, however, emerge in the explanatory power poststructuralism gives to the students’ depictions of restriction. When describing academic discourse’s ability to restrict other ways of using language, the students unanimously place this ability in the institution rather than in the human authority of teachers. This seeming anomaly is remarkably consistent with Foucault’s theory because the institution resides within the discursive formation. Institutions function within formations as regulators of knowledge production and as the linkage to other formations and impositions of power. Like the rules for knowledge production, institutions are manifestations of a discursive formation that help to organize the way power is exerted. The great fantasy of institutions, Foucault asserts, "is the idea of a

social body constituted by the universality of wills. Now the phenomenon of the

social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals" ("Body/Power" 55).

In particular, institutions ensure a particular formation’s ability to exercise its

power through their connection to the State. Institutions, then, serve to organize the 193 power relations of various discursive formations. As Deleuze explains:

If...we try to define the most general character of the institution, whether or not this is a State, it seems to consist of organizing the relations which are supposed to exist between power and government, and which are molecular, or ‘microphysical’ relationships, around a molar agency: ‘the’ Sovereign or ‘the’ Law, in the case of the State; the Father in the case of the family; Money, Gold or the Dollar in the case of the market; God in the case of religion; Sex in the case of the sexual institution (76).

Or, knowledge in the case of the academic institution. The academic institution, then,

becomes yet another instrument of academic discourse’s agency, serving to regulate

access to its knowledge and organize its relationship to the State and other discourses

of power.

While the nature of discursive formations, then, serves to explain why the

students place the restriction of other ways of using language in the institution, two aspects of the student’s descriptions still remain unexplained: academic discourse’s ability to (1) impinge upon the ability to access other ways of using language, and (2) become an inextricable part of its subjects. In order to understand academic discourse’s ability to affect its subjects in these ways, we need to examine the consequences of becoming a speaking subject in a discourse of power.

Subiectivation in Discourse

As agents of a discursive formation, subjects exercise the formation’s power by repressing meanings contrary to its definitions of knowledge. However, subjects also perpetuate and help maintain the existence of this power by believing in their own autonomy. According to Foucault’s theory, as long as humans continue to believe they control power relationships and their own access to knowledge, the 194

"reality" of power can produce itself endlessly on human subjects. Thus, subjects also perform a productive function in relationship to power by perpetuating its existence. Francois Ewald explains this relationship in terms of the disciplinary nature of discursive formations, disciplinary both in its sense of the exertion of force and its reference to the compartmentalization of knowledge. The "ordering" of discourse, Ewald explains, "operates according to a principle of production (and not of repression)-producing, raising value, intensifying rather than constraining, forbidding, stopping [the exercise of power]." However, Ewald points out:

this ordering also occurs according to the logic ofindividualisation. Foucault continually returns to this point: discipline ‘manufactures’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power which t^es individuals at one and the same time as objects and as the instruments by means of which it is exercised (171).

The success of discursive power, then, depends on its subjects, particularly on a subject who does not recognize himself as such.

Foucault describes this entire process of subjectivation, which includes the position of "speaking subject" as a pre-condition, as a "technology of power. " The technology is that which produces objects (i.e. subjects) in such a way that they become useful to the discourse. Thus, a technology of power determines and controls

"the conduct of individuals" by submitting them to domination and "an objectivizing of the subject" ("Technologies" 19). The majority of Foucault’s work, in fact, can be described as an attempt to illuminate these technologies of power.

Although Foucault has no ostensible interest in the results of an individual’s subject positions within discourse, his work implies that there are significant consequences for humans when we become subjects. While these consequences are 195 not spelled out in Foucault’s work, my reading of the literacy autobiographies in this study suggests what the specific nature of these consequences might be. The autobiographies’ descriptions of how academic discourse and the self become inextricable imply that becoming a subject in a discursive formation has an inevitable effect on an individual’s sense of identity, or constitution of self. It is important to note that the terms "self and "subject" are not synonymous in poststructuralist theory. As subjects, humans fill the enunciative modalities created by discursive formations. In this way, we become part of the formation and thus a functional part of how it produces knowledge and exerts power. On the other hand, the self is that which is tied to our sense of our own autonomy and identity. When the autobiographies speak to a conflation of the self and discourse, then, the writers imply that discourse affects their sense of identity as well as their ability to be speaking subjects.

The construction of self, then, seems inseparable from the positions we hold as

subjects within discursive formations. As Ewald points out, part of the way a

technology of power operates is by maintaining our belief in the individual, or an

authentic and "true" self. In fact, discursive formations not only produce our belief

in identity, or individualization; they also use that belief to produce a subject who will

seek to interiorize a discourse’s perspective. Foucault implies this relationship

between the self and the subject in his definition of discourse. In the Archaeology of

Knowledge, Foucault explains that "discourse is not the majestically unfolding

manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a 196 totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed" (Archaeology 55). Thus, discourse always exists in an exterior position to its subjects; even when they fill the positions created for speaking subjects, they have become part of something exterior to them. Yet, as the autobiographies suggest, this exteriority also becomes internalized such that the discourse becomes an inextricable part of the self.

Although Foucault does not comment onhow humans come to interiorize an exterior discourse, linking his comments about the dispersion of the subject with the information in the literacy autobiographies points to our role in this process. Because humans see ourselves as individuals, or autonomous beings, we seek identification with the discourses we speak. Our belief in our own autonomy cannot allow us to accept the dispersion Foucault refers to. As a result, we seek to erase our sense of discontinuity by internalizing the discourse that makes us aware of this dispersion through its exteriority from us. We seek to internalize a discourse’s perspective in order to submerge our sense that this language we speak is somehow separate from us, or not a "real" reflection of our thoughts: our sense that a discourse may be controlling us rather than us controlling it. By internalizing the discourse, we can perceive its language as our own and that which serves our purposes. The need to internalize a discourse in order to feel in control of certain of its manifestations is expressed clearly in the autobiographies, particularly in the students’ comments about the discomfort and frustration caused by academic discourse’s seemingly inaccessible 197 nature. As Patty mentioned earlier in this chapter, she believes she really only learned to write in graduate school. The new manifestation of academic discourse that is "grad school" language must become internalized for Patty to again feel she is a writer, an autonomous producer of language. Each new manifestation of discourse re-defines our notion of what is real and should feel authentic, creating a discontinuity between our sense of our selves and the discourse. Because of this discontinuity, we need to identify with the discourse—need to internalize the portion of it apparent in a manifestation that distances it from us—in order to become part of what we perceive as real.

Quite simply, part of our self becomes constituted by the discourse in order to escape this feeling of discontinuity. The internalization of discourse, then, is essential to maintaining a belief in the authentic self, a belief which discourse also helps to construct. Internalization goes hand-in-hand with being a subject because without it, we could not continue to see ourselves as autonomous beings. Ironically, it is also this sense of ourselves as autonomous, or individual, that helps the discourse create subjects.

Foucault only implies the necessity of such an internalization in his articulation of discourse’s reliance on our belief in the individual; however, Deleuze’s reading of his work makes these implications more clear. In his explication, Deleuze describes

Foucault’s concern with subjectivation, the process by which the exteriority of discourse becomes internalized. While Foucault is most interested in the subject,

Deleuze concentrates on the consequences becoming a subject has for the self. As a 198

result, Deleuze’s reading of Foucault is essential here because he points to what is

frequently overlooked in Foucault’s work: his interest, particularly in his last three

books on sexuality, that the inside, or consciousness of humans, is only "an operation

of the outside," or the exteriority of discursive formations (Deleuze 97). In other

words, Deleuze suggests that human identity itself is determined through the

interiorization of discourses and the positions they inscribe for speaking subjects, a

suggestion supported by the autobiographies.

Deleuze designates Foucault’s concern for subjectivation as being characterized primarily by the theme of the double. He goes so far as to say that this theme is that which "haunted" Foucault. Deleuze describes the theme of the double as follows:

the double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different. It is not the emanation of an ‘I’, but something that places in immanence an always other or Non-self. . .1 do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me (98).

More simply, that which we see as our individuality or our "self is not something psychological or transcendental about us; instead, the "I" that is "us" is merely the interiorization of the exteriority, an exteriority which is discourse. The very notion

of "self then becomes one that is constructed through discourse. Because humans

can be subjects in different formations and/or be positioned differently in the same

discourse simultaneously, the interiorization of discourse, or "self," is multiple. It is

this multiplicity, or fragmentation as it is frequently called, that allows us to continue perceiving ourselves as individuals, as different from those around us. 199

Such an interiorization of an exterior discourse, then, is what lielps explain

why the literacy autobiographies depict academic discourse as something which

becomes an inextricable part of its subjects. Given the relationship between

exteriority and interiorization, it is not surpriring that the (student) writers only

comment on the ability of discourse to become a part of their selves when they

perceive its division from them. Only when they sense the discourse’s exteriority

can the students reflect on the results of their past identifications with it. Simply put,

the influence of academic discourse on the writers’ thinking and worldview can be

explained as the necessary result of becoming a speaking subject. Being a subject,

the autobiographies suggest, inevitably leads to interiorizing academic discourse in

such a way that its perspective becomes the students’ own. In the autobiographies, such a merging of discourse and "self is referred to only as a fact of the past, or, for

some of the writers, a fear in the present. This time line makes perfect sense.

Because the writers operated as speaking subjects within academic discourse in the past (i.e. in their identification with it), the discourse was positioned in such a way that interiorization could take place. The writers must first become an instrument of the discourse before they can double or interiorize it. The effects of these past interactions further give the writers the insight to perceive future encroachments by academic discourse on their sense of their "natural" voices.

While the process of interiorization explains how academic discourse has become a part of the writers, it does not account for the discourse’s ability to prevent access to other ways of using language. Particularly troubling are references, like 2 0 0

Kim’s, to being unable to write in what once seemed a "natural" voice. In fact, Kim mentions that she "can no longer [even] hear" this voice. According to a definition of the self as multiple and fragmented, accessing these "other" languages should not be a problem. Such a multiple self, however, can exist only if interiorization in one

discourse is not totalizing. If it were totalizing, the writers’ inability to access other

voices would make sense because their selves would be defined only by their

subjectivity in academic discourse, erasing any other discursive subjectivities (and

their languages) from the locus of the self.

Although such a totalization is not the necessary result of interiorization, it

does exist within poststructuralist theory as a viable possibility. For (student)

subjects, this possibility would imply that academic discourse may be able to incite its

subjects to interiorize its perspective such that the students’ selves are defined only by

one discourse. Such an ability, if it exists, could have a devastating effect on the

students’ relationships to other cultural discourses. Given the possible consequences

of interiorization. Chapter 4 examines this phenomenon more closely, paying

particular attention to the process by which it occurs with academic discourse and its

effects on the students’ other cultural discourses. CHAPTER IV

TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF: THE ATTEMPT OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE TO INSCRIBE A UNIFIED SUBJECT

/ feel like my story is breaking down in places. 1 wonder if the further my story gets immersed in an academic context, the less I am able to tell the stories o f my emotional connections to reading and writing. As I ’ve progressed through my years o f literacy, I ’ve felt a tension-the tension to "write my age, " to let go of the child-language I love, and write like a "twenty-two year old" (academic-a title that doesn’t fit-why?)—whatever that means. I think this tension is pulling my story apart. There are too many interpretive voices at various ages-I don’t know which one to record.

—Margaret, a graduate student’s Literacy Autobiography

If we accept the interiorization of a discursive formation as a necessary result of becoming a "speaking subject" within academic discourse, then we must also ask what the results of such interiorization might be. As noted in Chapter 3, becoming a subject of academic discourse’s agency results in the (student) writer defining at least a part of her subjectivity in ways that mirror the perspective of academic discourse.

Given that their past identification with academic discourse has resulted in partially constituting the students’ worldview, their desire to return to an identified relationship could have significant consequences. I should note that a return to identification is not so much "re-entry" into the discourse as the move into another subject position.

The (student) writers, as we saw in Chapter 3, already exist as speaking subjects within certain enunciative modalities of academic discourse. A return to

2 0 1 2 0 2 identification, then, indicates the ability to fill yet another space within the same formation. Whether or not this ability to become identified in this new way requires that the student’s worldview again be changed, however, is an important question that remains to be answered.

As we saw in Chapter 3, a student’s self need not totally double academic discourse; interiorization does not have to mean that the subject of a particular discursive formation will see only through the lens of that particular discourse.

Instead, the primary characteristic of the self is its fragmentation, characterized by its multiple subjectivities interiorized from multiple discourses. Yet the possibility exists that a particular discursive formation’s worldview can become totalizing. This possibility, I argue, seems even more probable if the discourse in question embodies a generalizable power within the culture it partially defines, as academic discourse does.

The literacy autobiographies in this study suggest that such a possibility is, in fact, a reality. When the writers discuss what they feel is necessary to regain their identification with academic discourse, they bear witness to academic discourse’s attempt to unify the selfs fragmentation by forcing the students to become subjects only within its discursive realm. The texts demonstrate time and time again how each shift or "re-entry" into an identified relationship with the discourse requires that the self be re-constituted in ways that change its relationship with other cultural discourses. Such a shift to identification involves, most significantly, academic discourse’s attempt to put the students’ other subjectivities under erasure, submerging 203 them so that they do not interfere with its attempt to unify the self within its discursive realm.

But how can this erasure take place? If we follow Foucault’s theory, such an erasure of the subjectivities interiorized from other cultural discourses should not be necessary for accessing the power of academic discourse. What I suggest in this chapter, however, is that academic discourse possesses a forcible power to inscribe subjects not necessarily found in other discourses. The status academic discourse gains through its links to the State alters its relationship to other cultural discourses not possessing this strong connection. In other words, the students’ other cultural discourses do not exist in an equal power dynamic with academic discourse because they are marginalized in a way academic discourse is not within the dominant culture.

As a result, academic discourse can create a will to knowledge that seeks to make the students desire only its power. The (student) subjects, however, also play a role in this subjugation to academic discourse. Thus, understanding how academic discourse can attempt to inscribe a unified subjectivity requires that we examine not only how discourse can act upon its subjects but also what role those subjects play in their own subjugation.

Technologies of the Self, Or Subjugating Ourselves to Discourse

While Foucault concentrated primarily on technologies of power throughout most of his life, in his later work he became more interested in the role humans play in the power of discourse to act upon them. For example, in one of his last works.

The Use o f Pleasure, Foucault self-consciously admits to a change in his project. He 204 describes his new project as a genealogy of how the self constituted irself as subject

(11). In his last seminar before his death, given at The University of Vermont, he gives a name to this project: technologies of the self. In the introduction to this seminar, he comments that his primary motivation has always been to describe "the organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self" (18). But, he now admits, "perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power" (19).

Despite Foucault’s declaration of a major shift in emphasis, technologies of the self are, not surprisingly, inextricable from the technologies of power he spent most of his life describing. The choice of technology as a primary term is again reflective of production. A technology is a process or means by which something—in this case, subjects—is produced. Thus, Foucault describes technologies of the self as those which permit "a human being [to] tum(s) him or herself into a subject" ("The

Subject" 208). This technology, however, cannot exist apart from the other technologies that participate in subject-production, in particular technologies of power.

Foucault asserts that four technologies exist that rely on each other in order for discursive subjects to be produced:

(I) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immorality" ("Technologies" IS). 205 Each of these technologies, which do not function separately, "implies certain

modes of and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes" ("Technologies" 18),

The production of "certain attitudes," my main concern here, is conducted through the

interplay of technologies 3 and 4: power and self. Technologies of production and

sign systems serve as the necessary pre-conditions through which the technologies of

power and self can exert influence. It is just such an interplay between the

technologies of self and power that the literacy autobiographies demonstrate takes

place between the writers’ own desires "to attain a certain state of happiness" and

their subsequent subjugation to academic discourse.

The interplay of the technologies of self and power is circular and thus

difficult to describe in writing; however, their reliance on each other can be described

through two of their interrelated functions. First, humans participate in maintaining

the power of discourse over us by believing in the concepts and strategies necessary

to that power’s existence. Second, by acknowledging and supporting that power, we

subjugate ourselves to it. Our complicity in our own subjugation results from the

desire created in us by the will to knowledge a discourse produces. Yet we help

create this will to knowledge by granting the discourse power and perpetuating it.

Thus, we have come full circle. That which dominates us gets its ability to dominate

from us. In an attempt to draw the lines of this circle more clearly, I wish to discuss

the relationship between these functions and then demonstrate how the literacy

autobiographies express how these technologies operate with academic discourse. 206 Maintaining the Power of Discourse

Although discursive formations are not created by humans, we do participate in their perpetuation and existence as well as the power they embody. How we do so is perhaps best illustrated through an example.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes a change in the technology of power surrounding punishment. In his discussion of the enslavement of humans within a discourse that links crime-punishment as a single thought, Foucault describes the changing nature of punishment-from the body to the mind-as a change in the discourse’s strategic deployment of power. In this new technology, power was no longer exerted over human bodies in torture. The spectacle of punishment moved to a disciplined institutional punishment that achieved its power through ideas. The mind became "a surface of inscription for power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas . . . was much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture and execution"{Discipline 102). This submission of bodies through ideas controls that which torture by monarchs could not-the soul. New modes of punishment emerged simultaneously with the concept of a non-corporeal soul, a soul which was not under the province of God, as in Christian theology, but of ideas. Such a soul embodies the idea of fundamental human rights, or an aspect of ourselves that cannot be limited by governmental control.

The paradox, however, is that this "soul" is constructed by the very ideas within discourse that made its existence possible. The same discourse that manifests itself in a formation of punishment also produces the idea of certain rights that can be 207 violated and deserve punishment. These rights, or ideas—the "soul"—are further that which can be imprisoned. As Foucault puts it, "the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy," but at the same time, "the soul is the prison of the body"

(Discipline 30). Thus, when the body is imprisoned, so is the "soul." The fundamental right of freedom is thus transgressed, allowing us to see imprisonment as punishment.

Yet the technology of power over the body is not limited to the discourse of punishment. On the contrary, it is upheld by the concept of the "soul" produced within other formations as well. It is found in the language of educators, psychologists, lawyers, and so on. The concept of the soul, then, does not account only for the discourse of punishment. Instead, it is "one of its [the discourse’s] tools"

(Discipline 30). Humans, of course, also benefit from the concept of the soul; thus, they do not generally question its reality. Yet, the very concept that seemingly embodies freedom can be used to exercise power over us. Foucault describes this interplay between freedom and domination as a necessary element of any power relationship:

Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. . . Consequently there is no face to face confrontation of power and freedom which is mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical domination). ("The Subject" 221) 208 More simply put, discursive formations not only repress humans but produce concepts that allow humans freedom. As a result, we do not question the concept; instead, we are eager to support it because it provides benefits to our existence. But, by supporting the concept, we also support the discourses that produce it, allowing them to also use the concept as a tool of domination.

The discourse on punishment should not, therefore, be seen as the creation of the government or penal institution to oppress those not in power. Instead, everyone within the culture participates in upholding the discourse, and thus its strategic use of power. Foucault likens the complicity of those subjected to a body politic rather than a state apparatus. The body politic operates as "a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge" (Discipline 28).

Although we uphold and perpetuate the very discourses that inscribe us, we do not create these discourses by reaching a consensus as a body politic. "The phenomenon of the social body," Foucault explains, "is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals" ("Body"

55). Even though we take part in maintaining discursive formations, the formations themselves still define the way we think about punishment and law, for instance.

Why, then, does it seem as if we want to participate in perpetuating this power? How do we freely subjugate ourselves in this way? Unfortunately, Foucault does not expand upon where our seeming choice comes from, but my reading of his work 209 implies that discourse also creates this freedom. "Freedom" might seem like an odd term here given the way I have described discourse as constructing our identities (see

Chapter 3). Yet this freedom is precisely that which allows us to exercise a

technology of the self. As Francois Ewald points out, discursive power depends on

subjects who believe themselves to be individuals with the power of choice. Thus,

the discourse also produces not only the belief in but also the ability to make choices.

It is only by allowing such freedom to exist, as we saw above, that discourses can

exercise power.

Thus, discourses rely on us to make choices that support their power. Far

from being "free" or "intentional," however, these choices are circumscribed by

discursive formations which produce wills to knowledge or truth that delineate the

routes these choices can take. Again, to flesh out the circle, it is important to note

that we also support the discourses that circumscribe our choices.

The Will to Knowledge or Truth

Discourses incite humans to turn themselves into subjects by producing a will

to gain the power they can impart. As I explained in Chapter 3, academic discourse’s

power relies on its ability to control the production of valued knowledge in our

society. The status of such knowledge allows the discourse to produce a concomitant

will or desire to gain that knowledge in humans. Because the order of discourse

creates knowledge, our desire to be knowledgeable is inspired through the discourse.

It is through this knowledge, and the will to gain it, that academic discourse can

employ the technology of power outlined in the previous chapter. 2 1 0

Connecting this will to knowledge with the discussion above, however, allows us to see that this will does not work simply as an imposition upon human subjects by discourse. While discourse produces the belief and ability to think and act freely,

Foucault also tells us that "the way people act or react is linked to a way of thinking, and of course thinking is related to tradition" ("Truth, Power" 14). Although

Foucault never chose school or the academy as a topic of his genealogies,* I believe his work can be interpreted in such a way that it illuminates much about the way academic discourse achieves its power over (student) subjects. As Jana Sawicki has noted, Foucault’s entire project could be described as writing histories that show how traditional, emancipatory theories have been blind to their own dominating tendencies

(97). The traditional liberatory rhetoric surrounding education in the U.S. (see

Chapter 1) almost begs for an analysis that uncovers how academic discourse’s liberation is also a form of domination. Academic discourse’s ability to dominate and oppress, I argue, achieves its force primarily from that "liberatory" tradition supported through its institution.

"Tradition" in the U.S. tells students that the way to knowledge is through school. Schooling, including language education, is seen as the route to success in realms beyond school, especially economic success. If students want "good paying" jobs, a self-satisfying career, or even to be capable thinkers, they are led to believe that school is the only acceptable route to these ends. Academic discourse’s will to

‘ The only exception to this statement is, of course, "The Discourse on Language," but this short piece does not receive the in-depth treatment other topics do and does not attempt the same type of genealogical analysis. 211 knowledge, then, translates into a human desire which encourages us to "choose" to pursue success through the route prescribed by the discourse-that is, its institution.

As such, the institution becomes that which embodies academic discourse’s will to knowledge. Foucault explains this connection between a discourse’s will to knowledge and the institution by asserting that such a will is orchestrated through the formation’s institutional embodiment. The will to knowledge relies on the institution’s "support and distribution." ("The Discourse on Language" 219).

As Foucault asserts, the institution, in this case school or the academy, organizes the power relations of its discourse with that of other discursive formations.

As such, the institution is seen as the venue by which students can gain the knowledge that other societal discourses (i.e. economics, government, religion, etc.) deem important and necessary. The will to knowledge, then, is not simply the students’ desire to gain the type of knowledge academic discourse produces, although for some students it might be. In its links to other discursive formations, academic discourse creates a will to knowledge because it is the only way to achieve success in these other discursive realms. By believing in academic discourse’s will to knowledge, the students also support academic discourse’s power over them. Desiring to gain the knowledge the discourse can give them perpetuates the status of academic discourse in

much the same way as believing in the soul allows the penal institution to exercise power. The students—as well as educators-support the power of academic discourse over us by maintaining that school is the means to success and knowledge. Such 2 1 2 participation in perpetuating that which can dominate us is one of the intersections between a technology of power and one of the self.

The other way these two technologies support each other revolves around the effect of believing in the will to knowledge. We choose to desire this knowledge, both through our freedom of choice and the discourse’s construction of a will to that desire. Further, this desire, or will to knowledge, is that which leads us to interiorize an exterior discourse in such a way that it becomes part of us. As Deleuze puts it, we come to double the outside, to take in the "non-self that becomes us.

Participating in the will to knowledge, then, is part of the way "a human being tum(s) him- or herself into a subject." Thus, we have again come full circle. We support the power of a discourse, helping it to create a will to knowledge, and then we subjugate ourselves to it by believing that the discourse is the route to power and happiness.

While Foucault’s terminology is helpful in elucidating how academic discourse might willingly be interiorized by its subjects, he has no ostensible interest in how this move to interiorization might manifest itself in the lived experience of actual subjects’ lives. For a clearer picture of how (student) subjects participate in their own subjugation to academic discourse, we must turn again to the literacy autobiographies to seehow a technology of the self is executed.

The Will to Knowledge and the Literacy Autobiographies

As we have seen, the literacy autobiographies express frustration about the distant, exterior, and inaccessible nature of academic discourse. The autobiographies. 2 1 3 however, also demonstrate what lies at the base of such a frustration. Frustration emerges because of the discourse’s power to impart success in realms culturally determined to grant an individual power: the political and economic realms of adult civic life. The writers are frustrated because they feel such power is being withheld from them; thus, they seek to return to an identified relationship with the discourse in order to access this power. The chief characteristic of their desire is the willingness to learn the language of the academy. In this way, the writers demonstrate their intuitions about academic discourse’s will to knowledge. The writers place the ability to access the power academic discourse can give them in its knowledge about language. Further, when their texts begin to comment on this desire to acquire power, the writers suggest that academic discourse must first exert its power over the self before they can receive the discourse’s rewards. In other words, before they can attempt to control its language, a change must occur in their construction of self. The texts, then, also demonstrate the movement to interiorization and comment on how it is linked to the will to knowledge. In sum, the autobiographies inextricably link the power of discourse to shape the self with the cultural status embodied in the discourse.

The Desire to Acquire Power. Or The Will to Knowledge

While the graduate students express their ability to use schooled language in powerful ways, they also recognize that this facility helps them achieve power through the ability of academic discourse to label them as powerful. The desire for power is closely linked to the status identification with academic discourse grants one in realms 214 beyond the academy. This link is articulated most clearly in the graduate students’ texts, since they have already experienced many of the rewards this status can embody.

Holly, for example, describes her ostracized status within social circles because of what she labels her "geek" status, a result of her success in academics.

She does not, however, ever remembering wanting to give up this position because she wanted the approval of authority (defined as her mother, her teachers, and so on).

Holly’s acceptance of ostracism reflects a desire for power gained through the approval of authority. In contrast, Janet attributes her status within social circles to her literacy. Her ability to write won her the respect of her classmates and a place on senior committee. Her classmates assumed her writing ability would hold them in good stead because Janet "would be able to generate reports to our principal that would be so clever they would help us squeeze our way around some of the rules and regulations about planning events." In both cases. Holly and Janet’s labels as literate allowed them to win the approval of others and to move up in their estimation-that is, to achieve a valued status. Janet also comments on how her schooled literacy was the primary factor in her receiving a desirable position at a large insurance company after she graduated from college. She further attributes her subsequent promotions, and there were many, to the status she achieves by being perceived as knowledgeable about school language.

The way schooled language ability can lead to a valued position in society,

however, is probably nowhere more evident than in the references to academics as 215 competition made by half the male graduate students. Rich extends the ability to

"win" in school to success in the business world by describing the winners of reading competitions as "toting a great big pile of books to add to theiralready massive resumes" (emphasis mine). Both John and Rich refer to their schooling as a career throughout their texts. Mark, upon his return to college after failing out his first semester, decided almost immediately to pursue a graduate degree because he wanted the power that the professors he held in "awe" had: "I realized that I wanted to command such power over books, ideas, and students."

The basic writers also seem to intuit the relationship between their "resumes" and success with academic discourse; however, the status given through success with the discourse is something that they, like Mark, want to achieve because of the power it will grant them. The power embodied in this status, then, is a promise of the future rather than a "fact" of the present as in the graduate student narratives. As opposed to the few (7) basic writers who currently see their schooled language as a signifier of power in realms other than school, 22 out of 24 texts comment on the ability to use schooled language as a way of gaining power and achieving respect and status within society. As Spiro puts it, "being able to read and write are two very important things in life. You can’t be active in society without them." The inability to use schooled language in effective ways, then, could keep the writers from being active in and functional members of society. Schooled language, however, will help them attain the status they desire because schooled literacy, as Dan acknowledges, creates "language bosses," a position he would like to find himself in one day. 216

Inherent in Dan’s terminology of "boss" is an image of the power schooled literacy

will give him, both over people and within an economic system. Similarly, Diane

realizes that she does not yet use "proper English," but she appreciates the

"corrections" made by her teachers in high school because she knew she had to

"speak proper English if I expected to successful."

The texts usually express how schooled language can impart a certain status

within society overtly, but the references are not always so clear. Swati’s text, for

example, implies this link through her use of imagery. She begins her text with a

description of waiting for her mother to pick her up from school in their new Lexus.

As she looks for her mother, "anxiously waiting to see the luxurious family car," she

is prompted to enter into a flashback of her arrival in the U.S. and her history with

schooled literacy. It is the overt symbol of status and power-the Lexus-that is

inextricably tied to her concern for this literacy.

The desire for the power granted through academic discourse is not surprising

. considering the value our society puts on facility with schooled language, and the

students’ articulation of it might also be tied to the context in which these texts were

written—that is, a college writing class. The pervasiveness of these comments,

particularly the unanimity in the basic writers’ texts, could then simply be read as an

attempt to stroke their teachers’ egos: "What you’re trying to teach us is the most

important thing in the world." However, the degree to which the students intuit what

will be required to gain this facility is less likely to be a result of "writing what the

teacher wants to hear." Most intriguing are the implicit connections the texts make 217 between gaining the power granted by academic discourse and the re-formulation of consciousness the writers seem to unconsciously see as necessary to gain this power.

The texts imply that the students, on some level, accept this re-formulation of self because of the power such a change will grant them. Put in more theoretical terms, the texts link academic discourse’s will to knowledge with a seemingly necessary interiorization of at least part- of the discourse. Such a re-formulation of self, then, can be seen as the interiorization of yet another subjectivity, or an expansion of the subjectivity already constructed through academic discourse. The texts speak to the need for interiorization primarily in terms of control. Seeking to control the discourse’s language results in their giving control over the construction of their subjectivity to academic discourse.

The Interiorization of Academic Discourse. Or Exercising a Technology of the Self

Gaining the status and power they desire is complicated for the basic writers by the fact that they do not yet feel in control of the language they need to achieve this status and power. For example, Dominic expresses great frustration with the

"great works" of literature, lamenting that "no matter how hard I worked at English I could never be any good at it." "Being good at English" is closely linked to achieving control over a discourse with which he does not feel identified.

Diane also expresses this need for discursive control when she explains that her weakness in writing is making her point clear. This need to "make a point" recurs at three points in her narrative, and she returns to it in response to her instructor’s question of what the class members would change about this particular 218 essay if they had the chance to revise it. In fact, her teacher’s comments on her literacy autobiography also reflect this need; the comments focus solely on a lack of purpose. A writer making a point, or achieving a purpose, implies the ability to organize and present her thoughts about the world in such a way that her audience understands it. Thus, the organization of perception needs to mirror Diane’s audience’s perception—her teacher’s. Diane’s emphasis on not being able to make a point implies that she cannot yet organize her perceptions in the ways academic discourse would have her do (the discourse’s perspective being represented by the teacher). Diane, however, desires this control over schooled language so that she can make a point, implying that she’s willing to change her perspective to achieve this.

Ben’s text presents perhaps the clearest example of how academic discourse seeks to change a student’s way of seeing the world. Ben makes this connection through an anecdote that, at first glance, seems strange and out of place in a literacy narrative. Ben describes being sent to the principal’s office in an early primary grade because he failed to color the trees in a picture according to the directions of the teacher. After an assessment by the school nurse, the principal discovers that Ben could not do the assignment because he was color blind. Although color blindness seems to have no relation to literacy, Ben’s text conflates the two: "The reason I feel this had such an impact on my literacy is because that teacher yelled at me for something I had no control over. " The conflation of the anecdote and literacy is telling. Ben’s text ties literacy to something that seemingly had nothing to do with reading and writing; instead, it focuses on control and the frustration of not being able 219 to understand and perceive the world in the way his teacher did. Control over perception becomes almost a definition of schooled literacy in the connection Ben makes between academic discourse and perception.

Almost all of the basic writers comment that attaining societal status will require some sort of change in them and their relationship to discourse. Given the way the texts link achieving control with academic discourse to control over perception, we can infer that what they depict only as an ambiguous change is, in fact, an interiorization of academic discourse. "Change" is then a shift in the way they perceive the world, a shift representative of the discourse’s worldview. As we saw in Chapter 3, becoming a "speaking subject" in a discourse-identifying with it so as to access its agency—results in interiorizing the discourse in such a way that the subject constitutes at least part of his experience through its worldview. The discourse’s way of seeing reality and experience becomes the subject’s own.

The writers in this study, particularly the basic writers, realize that the discourse that will give them the power and status they desire also has the power to act upon them, to change or shape their "selves" to it. They are willing to make such a "change," however, because of their belief that academic discourse’s knowledge will lead to success in society. As such, they willingly submit to such a change, and hence, exercise a technology of the self.

Cassandra’s text is the least forceful about the need for a change in her relationship to discourse. The text merely implies this change in its shifting terminology. In the beginning of her text, Cassandra describes herself as "Cassandra, 220 the great essay writer." At the end of the text, she becomes "Cassandra, the hard­ working essay writer," implying that there is still work to be done on her ways of using language before she can return to her "great essay writer" status, a status that has given her many rewards in the past through her identified relationship with academic discourse. She does, however, imply that re-gaining this status will involve allowing the discourse to gain control over her. Whenever Cassandra writes about losing control with academic discourse, moments cast as negative experiences, personal pronouns disappear from the nominative position in her sentences. When

Cassandra writes about her positive experiences with schooled language, her text presents sentences such as: "I was a good writer," or "I was praised by all my teachers as being an excellent writer." In contrast, when the text comments on problems with schooled writing, the discourse, not the self, takes the subject position:

"My experience with writing had its ups and downs," or "My essay writing seem to defaulter." The discourse, then, achieves control over her until she can again achieve identification with it; until the "I" changes in such a way that it can again be equated with the discourse.

Joe’s text is more explicit about giving up control over his language to discourse. Joe, another basic writer, mentions that college has taught him to be "less manipulative" with his writing. "College has totally changed the way I perceive my writing style," his text reports. "Now I feel more lax on areas where I would like to stress a point. . . College has taught me to take life as it is and there is more to life than trying to control other people’s lives." The need to give up control, to be "less 221 manipulative" and realize that he cannot be in control of these changes over himself and his writing, imply that "taking life as it is" might be equated with "taking discourse as it is" and letting it gain control over him, at least during his time in college.

Not all the texts submerge the nature of the change in inadvertent connections, however. Latisha’s text, for example, explicitly states that change is necessary in order to gain power: "To make myself successful, a drastic change of giving direct attention towards what I’m trying to present is needed" (my emphasis). Zeeva’s text begins to suggest what this change might entail. Zeeva writes that "I might not be such a great writer at this point but I know that I enjoy writing and hopefully will improve." One sentence later, however, she writes that "being able to read and write can expand the minds of the most narrow-minded people. " In the reference to Zeeva as a writer not fully able to control and use academic discourse’s language, her text implicitly links Zeeva with the "narrow-minded people" whose minds will be expanded through the ability to read and write, implying that it is her thinking and ways of seeing the world that will be changed as well as her reading and writing practices.

Lori’s text is even more overt about the nature of the change acquiring power with academic discourse necessitates. Lori, a basic writer, introduces her literacy autobiography by talking about the power that words can impart. Later in her text, she provides us with a picture of what attaining this power might require. Lori tells the reader that she hates writing because of the need for control through conscious 222 manipulation. She writes that it is too much work "to take personal observation and reference points and compact them into concept symbols that can be read intelligently.

It basically is a lot of mental gymnastics." Such a notion of gymnastics implies that discourse requires a certain type of control over personal ideas in order for those ideas, or the writer’s intention, to be expressed in a way that will be "understood."

Achieving this control is depicted as an act of shifting the ideas in ways that contort them beyond what is considered their more natural state, just as the body in gymnastics moves and jumps in ways that seem almost to defy our physical limitations. In her image of contortion, Lori implies the changes that will be needed in the nature of expression, and indeed the self’s entire relationship to academic discourse, in order for such control to begin to be more natural.

Tim, another basic writer, provides one of the most encompassing articulations of this change. His text demonstrates how the self must become subsumed by discourse in order to gain the status imparted by academic discourse. Tim writes that he feels as if he suffered a "loss of English" in the transition from high school to college, yet despite the fact that he "still hates" English, he knows that he has "to have it to make it in the real world." The only way for him to "have it" again is to attempt to change his now powerless position within the discourse. He writes that "I

know I must utilize the language that I am a part of iil want to be successful in the

workforce" (my emphasis), and becoming "a functional part of society" in this way will require him to make a "complete. . . transition." By alluding to Tim as "part of" a discourse, rather than a user of this discourse, his text begins to suggest the primacy 223 that academic discourse has over the self when a subject seeks to gain control of it.

Such control over the subject is what will lead to interiorizing the discourse’s perspective. Yet Tim implies that he is willing to submit to this discursive control in order to be "successful in the workforce."

Rich, a graduate student, also makes the connection between power and his willingness to "take in" academic discourse, or let it re-formulate at least part of his construction of self, in order to access this power:

You have to talk the language in order to get yourself heard. And I remember knowing, quite early on, shy as I was, that I did indeed want to be heard. What I’ve known all along is that speaking is power: .people who forge a voice that I can listen to have power to move me, a power that I love to experience. Their power empowers me. If I can forge for myself a like voice, if I can become a participant in whatever conversation happens to be in progress, I can enact power, and maybe, empower others with my words and my voice. . . , The words I can speaJc come from all these voices, and they are me, and also they seem to have an odd life of their own, speaking from a voice that seems to come from outside of human ken. (my emphasis)

Here, Rich acknowledges that the voices he wants are something that "seem to come from outside of human ken," thus something over which he has little control. Yet, he wants to take in words he realizes aren’t his own so he "can forge for myself a like voice," or exercise a technology of the self. Rich is willing to "take in" an exterior discourse, and thus become a subject of it, so he can then "enact [the] power" he feels the discourse’s other subjects already wield.

In all these images, the autobiographies demonstrate how the writers exercise a technology of self: (1) The (student) writers acquiesce to academic discourse’s will to knowledge by desiring the power they believe it has in other societal realms. And,

(2) they willingly submit to its subjugation by accepting that a change in self will be 224 necessary to gain this power. By linking the desire to acquire power with a necessary change in self, the autobiographies speak to a future interiorization of academic

discourse much like the one they expressed as already taking place in their past

interactions with academic discourse. In sum, the writers assume that interiorization

of academic discourse is a pre-requisite to attaining its power. ^

Whether the signifying power of schooled language actually has the power the

students’ impart to it is a moot point in this context. While "intellectual language"

wields little power in most contexts in our society, it does have significant power with

the students’ immediate context of the academy, and thus, the autobiographies imply,

becomes part of the inescapable reality by which they must live in order to succeed in

this context. Further, as the graduate student texts demonstrate, the ability of this

language to signify success is less important than the certification success with it

grants the writer/speaker. This certification and the perspective gained through it-an

attitude toward hierarchy, an acceptance of unquestionable rules for language use, an

^ I should point out that two of the basic writers’ autobiographies did not focus on schooled language or academic discourse at all. However, Dave and Nick’s texts also point to interiorization as a requirement to accessing a discourse’s power; they simply do not make academic discourse the topic of this discussion. For example, Dave begins his text by stating that "I learned and adjusted to all my verbal skills by listening to others" (emphasis mine). Significantly, the "others" that he listened to in order to adjust his language were all people in power like his parents and "other significant adults. " He listens intently in any "situation or society" so that he can hold a conversation "without being power struck." In this image of being "power struck," the text implies that listening and adjusting are ways of gaining power; his conversants can’t exert power over him because he’s already become a part of their language through his adjustment. His language, then, shifts from context to context, but significantly, he places the change in language not in himself but in a linguistic realm that he has adapted to by taking it in; the linguistic realm exists in total exteriority to Dave as a language user until this adjustment takes place. 225 orientation to time and work, and so on-is what incites the students to grant such influence to their current context. While the immediate context of school has perhaps the greatest effect on the students’ articulation of the power of schooled language, the autobiographies also suggest that although this language may not gain them power in other contexts, the perspective indicated by the institution’s certification will.

The Will to Knowledge and the Institution: The Attempt to Unify the Subject

Assuming that interiorization is a necessary pre-requisite to a re-identified relationship with academic discourse, however, does not necessarily mean that such an interiorization will be totalizing. In other words, the discussion above demonstrates only that at least part of a student’s self will be made up of a subjectivity in academic discourse. The autobiographies, though, not only express that a change in their present formulation of self will be necessary to gain academic discourse’s power; they also include the erasure of other subjectivities as part of this change. By seeking to erase the subjectivities forged in other cultural discourses as an aspect of the writers’ re-identification, academic discourse attempts to become the

only discourse the writers interiorize, thus unifying the self only within its discursive

realm. Such an attempt at unification could have devastating results on a students’

ability to continue seeing through other cultural perspectives, and thus must be

investigated further.

Although Foucault has little interest in the effects of discourse on the self (and

thus its unification), his work does help to illuminate how such a unification might

occur. His discussion of the will to knowledge suggests that a discursive formation 226 may have the power to incite subjects to see only through its particular worldview. In

"The Discourse on Language," Foucault explains the way in which the will to knowledge of a particular discursive formation can influence a subject to begin constituting all his experience through this formation by referring to such an inscription in seventeenth-century England:

Going back a little in time, to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. . . a will to knowledge emerged which imposed upon the knowing subject—in some ways taking precedence over all experience-a certain position, a certain viewpoint, and a certain function (look rather than read, verify rather than comment) (218).

This "will to knowledge" further "tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse" (219). This power of constraint can become such that the discourse creates a unified subjectivity for its speaking subjects, seeking to confine all their discursive relationships within a single discursive formation.

If we connect interiorization with Foucault’s description of the will to knowledge, we see how the selfs fragmentation can be threatened in the way the literacy autobiographies suggest academic discourse threatens their multiple subjectivities. Discursive formations, through their construction of the will to knowledge, can seek to form a unified subject whereby the interior and exterior mirror, rather than double, each other. In other words, the power embodied within a discursive formation can seek to form a unified subjectivity within its formation in such a way that its "will to knowledge takes precedence over all experience"

("Discourse" 218). 227

Such a description of discourse’s influence, however, implies that subjugation happens equally with all students and all competing discourses. What Foucault’s work ignores, however, is that the effect of a culturally-sanctioned discourse, such as academic discourse, is not an equal one with all its subjects. Foucault implies that

modes of subjugation don’t discriminate and are equal for everyone (see Sawicki, 49); however, the literacy autobiographies contradict this assumption. The literacy autobiographies demonstrate how the cultural status of the competing discourses that constitute the self are more threatened by the power of academic discourse than are other more culturally "acceptable" discourses. In fact, academic discourse’s attempt to unify its subjects is a drama that is played out most forcibly on its subjects whose multiple selves are forged in discourses that seem most different from the dominant ones. While all the students, as we saw in the previous section, are equally subject to the power of academic discourse, the possible effects on the more marginalized

students are more severe.

Almost all the autobiographies point to how the academy can become a site of

contestation among discourses. The writers in the previous section, no matter their

race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, report the significant influence academic

discourse can have over the (student) writers’ construction of self. As a result,

almost all the autobiographies demonstrate how the will to knowledge achieves its

power through its links to other dominant cultural discourses that delineate the means

of achieving power in the economic and civic realms of adult life. By believing

academic discourse’s knowledge to be the route to success in these other realms, the 228 students submit themselves to academic discourse, interiorizing it in such a way that its perspective on the world becomes an inextricable part of their own way of seeing.

What the erasure of other cultural subjectivities adds to this picture is the extent of the power over the (student) writers that the institution’s will to knowledge has gained through its status and links to dominant discourses. It is only the more marginalized students—the female, non-white, working-class, and gay and lesbian students—who feel that they must give up other cultural discourses in order to achieve this success. The cultural validation academic discourse has received through its institution’s connection to dominant discourse appears to be at the crux of such an unequal subjugation by academic discourse. The status of the academic institution apparently makes its will to knowledge so strong that its (student) subjects willingly participate in the erasure of cultural discourses that might threaten academic discourse’s perspective and exclusive claim to knowledge.

The dominant discourses in American society (i.e., government, economics, etc.) as well as their "mouthpieces" (i.e., the media, law, etc.) support academic discourse’s will to knowledge in much the same way academic discourse supports theirs. The government, through its laws, requires mandatory schooling. It further regulates access to post-secondary education by controlling much of the funding

necessary to attend and by providing much of the financial support for the institutions

themselves through grants and the creation of land-grant institutions funded by the

states. Private institutions receive the majority of their funding from corporations and

private individuals successful in the economic realm. The institution’s link to 229 dominant discourses further manifests itself in almost a "cult" of certification, whereby the institution’s validation of knowledge becomes the pre-requisite to attaining desirable positions within economic institutions (i.e., corporations, small businesses, etc.) or political ones. These connections, of course, are what lead many educational theorists, such as Freire and Giroux, to see the school’s function as a reproduction of dominant ideology. But, the relationship between education and the

State is much more complicated than a simple re-production of dominant ideology that benefits only the industrial complex. It is also the means to success and power, to freedom from the poverty and powerlessness that also supports these discourses.

After all, freedom and power must go hand-in-hand for any power relationship to result.

What these connections between the institution and dominant culture do create, however, is a will to knowledge that is so pervasive it is practically inescapable.

Particularly when immersed in its context, the students are encouraged to see the institution’s will to knowledge as all-consuming. In their relatively powerless

position, it would not be surprising if the will to knowledge of academic discourse

could be perceived or internalized by the students in such a way that it appears to be

totalizing. Only this knowledge "counts" in this context; thus, other ways of claiming

knowledge could seem superfluous. By deciding to attend college in order to attain

success, they have already agreed to participate in seeing the world through the

institution’s perspective, a perspective which mirrors that of the discourse it supports.

Through its links to dominant discourses, the institution marginalizes that which the 230 dominant culture has marginalized, thus playing its role of training for citizenship.

Within its realm, cultural discourses not viewed as possessing power in the dominant realm—particularly those of race, class, and gender-are seen as undesirable, and further, as a threat to what academic discourse embodies because these discourses do not reflect the dominant perspective. As a result, they must be erased in order for the students to achieve the identification with academic discourse they seek.

Less marginalized students may not feel these effects as strongly because the

"selves" forged in other contexts are so similar to the dominant discourses of the U.S. that such a move toward unification in academic discourse does not make itself felt.

Since the multiple discourses of U.S. society also define the power relationships among these discourses and their subjects, subjectivities in line with the execution of academic discourse’s power are less threatened simply because they already mirror academic discourse’s perspective. As such, unification may not be a discernible process, but a fait accompli. The more mainstream students are still changed as they move into new enunciative modalities of academic discourse, but there is only a sense of re-definition that is not accompanied by the same sense of a loss of self described by the more marginalized students. This alliance with dominant discourses does not mean these students are any more "free" in relation to their inscription in academic discourse. Rather, they do not perceive its threat to other aspects of their self as clearly as do the more marginalized students. Quite simply, the sense of discontinuity between the self and academic discourse may not be as strong as it is with the more marginalized students. 231 Further, even contradictory discourses, such as those of various religions, seem to provide a space of resistance to academic discourse’s unification because they are valued in a way discourses related to race, gender, class, and sexual orientation are not. Religious discourses are culturally-sanctioned and given power through an institutional embodiment. Although these religious discourses do not wield power within the academic context, culturally the separation of church and state allows the duality of self constructed by religious and academic discourse to co-exist without the overpowering threat of erasure imposes on non-recognized and culturally-marginalized discourses.

As a result of the unequal power dynamic among the discourses of U.S. culture, the autobiographies portray the erasure of subjectivities forged in marginalized cultural discourses as yet another requirement for the writer’s re­ identification with academic discourse. This requirement, however, has apparently not emerged for the first time. As we saw in the previous chapter, identification with academic discourse has also impinged upon the writers’ access to other languages in the past. The continuing themes of erasure and infringement point to academic discourse’s attempt to unify the subject only within its discursive realm. In the examples below, the texts further demonstrate how this move toward unification is accomplished: through the exercising of a technology of the self that results from a desire for the success the writers believe academic discourse will bring them. How that technology participates in the erasure of other cultural subjectivities points to how much influence academic discourse’s will to knowledge has on its subjects. 232

The Wi 'l to Knowledge and the Erasure o/Other Cultural Subjectivities

The discussions of other cultural discourses appear most often in texts written by female, working-class, or African-American students. Not surprisingly, these students seem best able to discern how their gender, socio-economic class, or race has allied part of their "selves" with perspectives and ways of speaking and writing that emerge from their difference. The autobiographies represent the need to "give up" these other discourses by commenting on how the discourses’ languages appear antithetical to academic discourse and how that opposition implies that they must learn a new way of speaking and writing. They demonstrate how academic discourse seeks to marginalize that which does not reflect its language and perspective. Such a change in their relationship to their cultural discourses, then, goes beyond the need to learn a new code (i.e., language) to become part of academic discourse. More often, the texts comment on how academic discourse requires a change in the formulation of self, or subjectivity, connected to these other discourses. Rather than seeing identification with academic discourse as a need to code-switch in school contexts, the writers imply that becoming identified with academic discourse requires a change to the discourse’s perspective and worldview that attempts to subsume more marginalized ways of seeing.

Such a change in perspective can be accomplished because of the desire the discourse creates in students to gain the power it can give them in other realms. The writers seek to learn this knowledge—the language of the academy—and thus give academic discourse the power to change their perspective. By seeking to gain the 233 power of academic discourse-by seeking to control its linguistic manifestations—the writers tacitly agree to allow the discourse to exert this change. They demonstrate their participation in this change by believing that their other languages and the communities in which they are used do not possess the power that they seek. In other words, they correctly intuit that these other languages and communities are not those of dominant culture; thus, they allow academic discourse to put the subjectivities forged in these other discourses under erasure.

The way in which academic literacy appears almost antithetical to other literacies or discourses can be seen fairly clearly in Cathy’s text. Cathy, a graduate student, compares her own literacy and home background with that of basic writers, remarking that "I suspect that being read to frequently was not an experience many

[basic writers] share with me. On the other hand, having parents or at least one parent who works long hours in a factory may not be so atypical. But even my ‘blue collar’ ties are rather weak. Education is highly valued in my family." Through her

text’s link between "weak blue collar ties" and the significance of education, Cathy

implies that "blue collar ties" are somehow a threat to schooled literacy education and

what it embodies. Her own success, the text implies, is a result of how those ties

were subverted because her family encouraged reading and valued education.

Diane, a basic writer, more directly links her family’s background to her

problems achieving an identified relationship with academic discourse. Like Cathy,

her discussion implies that a working-class background embodies a perspective that

threatens academic discourse, and as a result, it must be erased. However, Diane 234 discusses this erasure only in terms of the surface features of her language. A white woman of European descent, Diane ties her lack of facility with schooled language to her parents* educational backgrounds, and by implication, to their socio-economic class. She relates that she is "still struggling with the proper usage of words" and blames this struggle on not learning "correct" and "proper" language at home: "My parents lack of education lead to my inability to practice correct grammatical skills."

In order to gain this "proper" and "correct" language, Diane is willing to grant control over her language to others. In fact, she is grateful to those who correct her.

In the following passage, she seeks out a teacher who embarrassed her by pointing out

her incorrect usage in a math class in order to ask her about what "the right way to

say different words were":

I remember being embarrassed during a high school math class. I was saying something and I used the phrase ‘real bad.’ My math teacher stopped and stared at me, she then asked me to repeat my sentence. I used the same phrase again. She asked me if I knew what was wrong in my sentence. Obviously I didn’t. . . . Following that incident, I became very self conscious of the words that I would use. I wanted to speak correctly so I had to accept my problem and start learning the proper way to speak. 7 knew I had to speak proper English if I expected to be successful. I would ask her if what I said was incorrect or not because I was ready to learn the right way to use words, (my emphasis)

Despite her embarrassment, Diane desires such correction because she wanted "to be

successful." Diane’s text demonstrates how academic discourse’s will to knowledge

has constructed her desire. She believes both that schooled language is the route to

success and that her working-class language is what is threatening that success.

Through academic discourse’s links to other dominant discourses (i.e., economics),

Diane acquiesces to its will to knowledge; in fact, she supports it through her belief 235 that it is the route to success. This will to knowledge causes her to see her current linguistic code as inadequate and thus that which must be erased, an erasure which includes the subjectivity that it speaks.

In its discussion of giving up her linguistic code, Diane’s text only infers how the subjectivity forged with the language’s discourse must also be given up. Others are more overt about this connection between language use and subjectivity. Joe, for example, closes his text by commenting upon the modifications in his thinking he has already experienced in college. The text ends with the line: "Change is a good thing, now we have to do our good thing and change too." Joe’s text also implies how it is the self that must change in order to adjust to the discourse, and further demonstrates the nature of the change that this discourse requires:

Everywhere I go there is a need for different writing styles. Achieving those writing styles is a very complex process. Writing styles change from grade school to high school and even again in college.I being the only member of my family to go to college have to accommodate for all of these drastic changes, (my emphasis)

It is his working-class roots that Joe puts in apposition to "I" in this excerpt. Like

Cathy and Diane, Joe seems to intuit that his working-class perspective is somehow undesirable in academic discourse. As a result, it is this "I," or subjectivity, that must shift or "accommodate" to academic discourse. As Joe puts it, "achieving these writing styles is a very complex process," a process which involves a change in his current ways of seeing the world. Joe implies that his accommodation to academic discourse will require cutting his ties with his working-class roots and thus the subjectivity forged in that culture. 236 In an interesting move, Aretha, another basic writer, also indicates that identifying with academic discourse will require her to change her relationship to her

"home" language, but she is unwilling to cut her ties with this community in order to accomplish this. Like most of the basic writers, Aretha comments on how academic discourse seeks to affect her relationship to other cultural discourses by changing her attitude toward its language. Aretha, an African-American woman, has learned through school to avoid anything that sounds like "bad grammar," especially the language of her friends and family. Rather than give up her ties to this community, however, she seeks to change their language as well as her own. Aretha reports that she constantly "corrects" the language of those around her, particularly family members. In this way, she seeks to change her family’s relationship to another cultural discourse as well as her own. She tries to prevent her desire to access the power she intuits in schooled language from distancing her from friends and family.

LaVonne’s text provides one of the clearest examples of why the students believe other ways of using language must be given up. In her text, it becomes clear how the writers’ other languages are seen as impinging upon control with schooled language, are, in fact, antithetical to the power that language can exert. It is for this reason that they feel they must change their language use, implying that the other discourse’s influence must be erased, since it is this subjectivity that allows them to use its language and see through its perspective. LaVonne, an African-American woman, obliquely ties her inability to achieve control in academic discourse to her home discourse. She comments that her biggest problem with writing in school is 237 with structure—because she writes the way she talks. She further tries to "watch" her speech because she has been corrected so many times for her use of dialect.

LaVonne mentions that she is working on both her structure and language, but comments further that when she is trying to make a point, "I’m liabel to say anything."

Although LaVonne’s text does not connect her ways of speaking with her background or home discourse, it is obvious that her more "natural" way of using language is what is causing problems for her entry into the power of academic discourse. It is at the precise point when she wants to exercise intention and wield the power of this discourse—making a point—that she loses control of the discourse because other ways of using language intervene. In the text’s remarks on "working on structure" and "watching language," we see LaVonne’s unconscious willingness to forfeit these ways of using language if she is to attain the culturally sanctioned power academic discourse can give her to exercise her intentions.

Vicki, a graduate student, does not tie her discussion of the erasure of a cultural subjectivity to the devaluing of its language; instead, she links her willingness to give up control to the discourse to the way academic discourse seeks to devalue cultural ties. Vicki explains that "by the time I was nineteen I was angry about a lot of things. I felt certain that if only I hadn’t grown up in Ohio, if only my father wasn’t a car salesman, if only I had come from a different set of circumstances, I might have been part of some ivy league that would help me skate through my life. It seemed to me that my education had been deficient in some way." For Vicki, the 238 frustration of not possessing the discourse gained through a privileged education is directly linked to her family’s circumstances. She ties her inability to identify fully with academic discourse, and thus her lack of status and power, to her working-class roots. Her image of "skating through life" invokes the power such a discourse can grant, but at the age of 19, her "education" in discourse has not yet subverted these ties to Ohio, car salesmen, and her family’s circumstances as Cathy’s did.

She reports later, however, that her frustration at her lack of status led to giving up these ties and looking to only those in power—male teachers-for direction.

The way in which submitting herself to the power of male teachers led to giving control over herself and her language to academic discourse is best demonstrated through a poem she wrote at the time. In this poem, "Spiderman’s Line," Vicki indicates how academic discourse, through the authority of her male professors, sought to control all aspects of her identity. The poem is dedicated to a professor whom she allowed to tell her what to read and write for a long time. She introduces the poem by commenting that it is meant to show "how much power over language I thought he had":

Spiderman’s Line

He’s spinning sentences like thread She can’t help it they go straight to her head It’s too late, to turn back. She’s tangled up and both her wings are cracked He’ll wrap her round and round With all the words that kiss her mind She might struggle But she’s caught up in the Spiderman’s line. 239 Vicki’s desire to acquire the "power over language" she felt her teacher possessed traps her within the discourse. The discourse erases or, at the very least, submerges any sense of other subjectivities such that its perspective can "go straight to her head," or be interiorized without interference.

This idea that the power within discourse is best accessed when control is given up to it, when otlier uses of language and subjectivities do not interfere with its influence, comes out most poignantly in Carole’s text. Carole, a graduate student who now sees herself as successful with academic discourse, makes intriguing connections between her history with schooled literacy and her narrative of personal pain. Carole, an incest survivor, explains that one way she survived such abuse was to "erase" the self that was receiving the abuse, to the point that she felt no sense of

self at all except one that was "dependent" and "fearful." Intriguingly, it is this

"erased" self that her text ties to her success in school at this time. In the persona of

her young self, Carole writes that she remembers producing text only once, and this

text is a story written only because her mother asked her to write it. "Otherwise,"

Carole writes, "I have no inclination to write or to draw. I think I am too dependent,

too fearful: I listen and I read, I take things in; I let nothing out." A self that only

"takes things in," however, seems to be the self desired by school. Carole’s text

reports in the same paragraph that her third grade teacher describes Carole on her

report card as "so cooperative," and "an avid silent reader who can lose herself

completely in the printed page." Her teacher’s remarks and subsequent grades hint

that "losing herself in academic discourse might be precisely what made Carole such 240 a successful student. Further, Carole admits that she does not "write or draw," she does not herself produce language, so there is no other use of language to interfere

with her immersion within the discourse of school. By erasing herself so completely,

Carole is only dispersed within the discourse rather than positioned in a way that allows her access to any of its power. In other words, by erasing any sense of other

subjectivities, she has granted academic discourse ultimate control.

Of course, Carole’s relationship with academic discourse is complicated by the effects of her abuse, yet 1 find it telling (and almost frightening) that the self

constructed in order to survive incest in this case parallels a self that is successful at becoming part of academic discourse. It is just this type of ultimate control,

however, that academic discourse seems to seek in all these examples. By seeking to erase any subjectivities that might interfere with its ability to control the students’ perspective, academic discourse attempts to unify its subjects within its discursive realm. Only such a unification would allow the discourse to reproduce itself and its perspective on the subject in such a way that the subject interiorizes its worldview without any interference from cultural discourses that might oppose its portrayal of dominant discourses.

Not all the writers, however, participate as willingly in this attempt to erase

other subjectivities as others. While these writers still, support academic discourse’s

will to knowledge by believing it to be the route to power, they also attempt to resist

the totalizing effects the discourse seeks. Yet, even their resistance speaks to the

strength academic discourse’s will to knowledge exerts over them. 241

For example, Todd, a working-class basic writing student, tries to resist the way academic discourse attempts to cut his ties to other cultural communities. He describes the results of his reading and writing in school as a process of "going through life collecting different forms of literacy knowledge from people I felt had something to offer. I felt that this knowledge allowed me to communicate in different communities than I had before." Significantly, the people he "felt had something to offer" were primarily his teachers or authors of schooled texts, and the new communities were those of school and business. Todd, however, wants to resist having these new communicative abilities distance him from his others discourses that are less valued. Even in his resistance, however, he implies how hard maintaining these relationships is:

Even though this [communicating in different communities] was true I felt that I should communicate only with these new communities. I have since come to realize that no matter how high I build my knowledge tower it cannot stand without a strong base. This base is what I get from the communities that I started in. This my literacy base, is something I work to stay in touch with. In order to stay in touch I sometimes will talk as I used to and not as I do now. The comment was once made to me that I shouldn’t talk below my level of learning. I replied that if I alienated someone I would cut off my opportunity to learn from them, (my emphasis)

Despite how much Todd works "to stay in touch with [his] literacy base," the graduate student texts suggest that maintaining this relationship may be impossible as

Todd becomes further identified with academic discourse. Margaret, for example, has similarly attempted to maintain relationships with other discourses. In particular, her feminist activism has made her aware of a subjectivity constructed in a gendered discourse, one that she aligns closely with maintaining the importance of emotions in 242 the public sphere. She comments, however, that as she becomes more identified with academic discourse, she has trouble maintaining the emotional connections to reading and writing she enjoyed when she was younger and less aligned with the discourse:

I wonder if the further my story gets immersed in an academic context, the less I am able to tell stories of my emotional connections to reading and writing. As I’ve progressed through my years of literacy. I’ve felt a tension— the tension to ‘write my age,’ to let go of the child-language I love, and write like a "twenty-two year old" (academic-at title that doesn’t fit, why?)- whatever that means.

Margaret is still able to sense that the "academic title" doesn’t quite fit yet, but in this excerpt, she seems to fear that it soon will. It seems as if academic discourse is gradually erasing the gendered subjectivity that allows her to feel emotional connections to reading and writing, seeking to erase that which might resist its perspective.

The clearest example of the strength of academic discourse’s will to knowledge comes in Tanya’s text, which provides more detail about how academic discourse’s will to knowledge comes to be interiorized than that of any other writer and thus deserves to be examined closely.

Tanya and the Will to Knowledge

Tanya, an African-American graduate student with a farming background, expresses her desire to achieve control with academic discourse throughout her text.

Academic discourse’s will to knowledge is especially strong for her because of her career choice (i.e. to be a professor of English). Becoming identified with the discourse, then, is seemingly the only route to success since she wants to remain within the institution. Tanya’s text also comments on how this will to knowledge, 243 one in which she is complicit, seems to require the erasure of the subjectivity forged in her home discourse. For Tanya, however, the gradual erasure of this subjectivity was a long, painful process.

Tanya links her success in school to her new ability to "control and order" time, an ability she recognizes as an assimilation to the institution:

Prior to starting work on my master’s degree, I never carried a datebook, was never on time, and did everything in a chaotic way. When I knew I had to be more organized, I seemed to have went overboard. Now my entire life is ordered including having my socks sorted by color in the drawer. This is probably another facet of me that has assimilated to cope with the career choice I have made, (my emphasis)

Her text also describes how her "assimilation" goes much deeper than merely a

changed relationship to time. An orientation to time is just one of the elements of the

subjectivity she forged in her home discourse that academic discourse is seeking to

change.

Tanya’s way of dealing with her apprehension about the way academic

discourse might attempt to change her relationship to her African-American culture,

through the erasure of that subjectivity, was to construct two separate personas for

herself: Tanya and Elizabeth. Tanya is the name she reserves for the self forged

within her home discourse. Her text describes Tanya as follows:

Although I mentioned it before, I probably should explain further about Elizabeth and Tanya. Tanya is the dreamer. Her fantasy is to marry a rich man someday, have a bunch of children, write novels and end up on Arsenio Hall. She [Tanya] only did well in school to be popular, she starved to remain small and cute enough to attract a rich man.. . . In many ways Tanya was a little girl who grew into a soft feminine woman. She needed protection and nurturing in romantic relationships and friendships. Because she lacked self­ esteem, she needed constant reassurance that she was smart, cute and popular. 244

When this persona would no longer allowed her to fulfill her dreams, Elizabeth emerged, (my emphasis)

By linking the Tanya persona with the desires of her younger self, Tanya highlights why she aligns this persona with her home discourse. Yet it is also the self forged in her home discourse, the Tanya persona, that lacks control. "Tanya is chaos and is very happy," she told me in an interview. Just as the earlier examples linked a lack of control with the subjectivities academic discourse seeks to erase, this chaotic persona is seen as impinging upon control with academic discourse. As a result, the

Tanya persona is inadequate to pursuing Tanya’s new dream of a successful career in academia. Thus, Elizabeth emerged. Elizabeth does not take over the Tanya persona, however. Instead, Elizabeth was constructed in an attempt to erase the influence of Tanya’s home discourse without requiring her to give it up.

It is Elizabeth who is "academic. She’s the one who writes the papers"

(interview). It is Elizabeth who "went back to the University of Kentucky to clean up

the mess Tanya had made of her grades" (text). And finally, it is Elizabeth who

organized Tanya’s chaos: "Elizabeth came to the forefront more and more and more,

order and control. And it came out in ways to cope with graduate schools and be

successful" (interview). Elizabeth is depicted almost as Tanya’s other: she is the

subjectivity constructed to access the power of academic discourse because, as Tanya

tells us, Elizabeth’s characteristics were constructed to "cope with graduate schools

and be successful." In this way, Tanya has tried to have "the both of best worlds."

She has attempted to interiorize academic discourse in such a way that it only affects

the Elizabeth persona. Although she participates in a technology of the self by 245 presuming that academic discourse’s will to knowledge does circumscribe the route to

her success in the institution, she tries to prevent this will from subsuming her

African-American subjectivity. Constructing two personas speaks to Tanya’s intuition

that academic discourse seeks to unify her within its discursive realm because of her

participation in supporting its power. Despite Tanya’s attempt at resisting this

unification, she becomes less sure of its success as she becomes more involved in her

Ph.D. program

Although Elizabeth emerged because of Tanya’s need not to assimilate totally,

to not "be viewed as an oreo," it is the Elizabeth persona who is gradually gaining control of Tanya’s consciousness, reformulating her self to the contours of academic

discourse. Giving Elizabeth—the subjectivity constructed in academic discourse—the

control necessary to be successful in school has finally resulted in the partial erasure

of Tanya, the subjectivity forged in another cultural discourse. Tanya writes that:

"In many ways, Elizabeth has emerged so successfully, that Tanya rarely has control

in public anymore." Elizabeth was constructed as separate from Tanya so that Tanya

could feel that she could "go back," but in her interview, Tanya told me that she

"really doubts" she can:

Donna: In that same place [in the text] you use the terms ‘assimilate’ and ‘cope.’ Which one do you think you’ve done?

Tanya: I guess I see the assimilation, my assimilation. I’d like to see my assimilation as the thing I’ve only done to cope with the choices I’ve made. Now I don’t know if that’s my way of trying to not be a sell out. Or not be viewed as an oreo. Because if I keep telling myself I am only assimilating as a coping mechanism I guess that implies I can go back. Now whether I can or not, I doubt it. I really doubt it. 246 Even though Tanya wished only to access the power of academic discourse for certain purposes—those that Elizabeth would deal with—Tanya’s desire to acquire such power also granted that discourse control over her, resulting, at least partially, in erasing the subjectivity forged in her home discourse that Tanya tried to maintain.

Graduate Student Reflections on a Lost Subjectivity

While Tanya is still unsure whether academic discourse has managed to erase her connections with another cultural discourse, other graduate students have little doubt this has happened to them. The graduate students reflect upon how just such a change in perspective, like the one Tanya fears, has occurred because of their past identification with academic discourse. While the texts above present the erasure of other cultural subjectivities as an ongoing process, these writers’ lament over losing these perspectives implies that the subjectivities forged in these discourses have been successfully erased. In other words, these texts demonstrate that academic discourse not only seeks to erase other cultural subjectivities, but that it can also be successful in this attempt.

Mary’s text speaks to an ongoing erasure of a gendered subjectivity, but in her text, this subjectivity has already disappeared. She is left only with an amorphous sense of loss:

Could I complain that I’ve been so thoroughly assimilated into a logical, linear way of thinking that it seems impossible for me to write the beautiful, lyrical, circling poetry/prose of Irigaray, Cixous, and even many other students in this class? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to complain that because I have had so many of the advantages usually reserved for white males, I have lost touch with some other part of myself? 247 Mary writes an interestingly formatted text. In the main portion of the text she chronicles her literacy experiences; however, she breaks up this narration with an italicized intertext. The intertext itself works almost as another document because its sentences comment on each other, not on the text it breaks up, yet it is also presented to be read simultaneously with the more conventional narration. Three italicized lines appear on each page of text, portioning the main narrative into thirds. It is in the intertext that Mary comments on her loss of a gendered subjectivity, yet it breaks up a discussion about the power schooled language has given her politically to forge her environmental campaign. Here, Mary expresses the tension evident in all the texts discussed in this section: the tension between wanting a language of power and having to give up other languages in order to achieve it.

Barbara, another graduate student, provides perhaps the most fully articulated discussion of how academic discourse erases the ability to continue seeing from

"other" perspectives. Barbara couches her personal example in a discussion of composition theory. In particular, she uses her personal experience as a student from a working-class background to disagree with theorists who assume students can mediate between "conflicting languages and intentions":

In my personal experience, any type of consciousness about one’s self leads to a new way of perceiving one’s self, and one can’t simply revert back to an old language because the new perceptions still remain. When a person discovers a new way of speaking, a new way of expressing ideas, it is difficult for that person to use old languages simply to fit in with the old discourse community. This consciousness imprints itself on the way that one relates to others. It’s not just a matter of language, of making oneself understood literally. It’s a matter of being able to feel a connection with the other person, of being on the same level of understanding, sharing the same assumptions that is lost. 248 As I began to think about college (it wasn’t assumed necessarily that I would be attending one), I had dreams about getting to study subjects, getting to delve deeper into areas I had always been interested in. My family viewed college in a different perspective. They saw college as a place to study a career, not knowledge in general.. . The language that I had acquired through years of books was useless in attempting to explain how I viewed college. While I understood their perspective, they were unable to understand mine; language had changed the way I viewed die world and while I could still use the language of my family, my relationship with my family was still altered, (my emphasis)

In this section, Barbara provides one of the most concrete examples of how the erasure of another subjectivity can manifest itself, but she also indicates how code­ switching is not the problem. Many of the students, particularly the African-

American students, report being continually able to "talk the talk," to use the surface features of another community’s language. The problem, however, is in being able to

"walk the walk," to continue acting and thinking in a way that is in accordance with the community’s perspective.

Like all the writers discussed in this section, Barbara attributes her change in and subsequent loss of a cultural perspective to her participation in academic discourse’s will to knowledge. Academic discourse may get its power to create such a strong will from its institutional position, but it cannot attempt its unification without the students’ participation in this will to knowledge. Given the pervasiveness of this will and the institution’s status in other realms, however, the students seemingly have no choice but to accept the discourse’s will to knowledge as their own desire. Academic discourse may not be as monolithic as the literacy autobiographies present it here, for we know that resistance occurs at the local level of our classrooms every day. On the more global level, however, the autobiographies imply that these 249 localized resistances do not counteract the effect of academic discourse’s will to knowledge. As a result, the will to knowledge achieves the strength to "exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse," the strength to attempt the erasure of subjectivities formed in more marginalized cultural discourses

(Foucault, "Discourse" 219). The results of this pressure, as Mary and Barbara point out, can be quite severe.

Implications for Composition Theory and Pedagogy

The way in which academic discourse seeks to erase other cultural subjectivities obviously has significant consequences for attempts to define a multicultural writing pedagogy. In particular, the links between composition and the academic institution bear witness to our participation in academic discourse’s quest to be interiorized by its (student) subjects in such a way that it constitutes their entire self. The field of composition developed alongside the institution in the U.S., particularly along with state-funded and land grant institutions. As a result, much of composition’s pedagogy has historically supported the liberatory and egalitarian agenda through which the institution builds academic discourse’s will to knowledge

(see Chapter 1). By presuming that accommodation to academic discourse was a means of social empowerment, writing pedagogy has supported this will to knowledge and further, through its evaluation of language practices, helped to exert academic discourse’s power to create subjects.

Indeed, composition classes may be one of the primary means of inciting such a subjectivation (i.e., the interiorization of an academic subjectivity). If Susan Miller 250 is correct, the act of writing always calls for the writer to construct a unified persona that is in accordance with the discourse being written. The continual construction of

such a persona in schooled writing, then, could be seen as part of the production-

mechanism by which technologies of power and self work. By constructing assignments and evaluating them, composition teachers circumscribe the parameters for such a persona, one that is in accordance with the university’s discourse they are hoping to teach. By seeking to achieve good grades (the route to economic success), the students willingly try to construct such a persona, ultimately interiorizing it.

Such an interiorization in itself is not necessarily a danger to a multicultural pedagogy or its goals. After all, academic discourse can be a route to social success; thus, denying the institution’s value within other discourses of power would serve neither our students nor ourselves. The purpose of schooling, particularly rhetorical education, has always been and continues to be preparation for participation in the economic and political realms of adult civic life. No matter what pedagogy we advocate, the connection to such preparation will continue to be part of academic discourse’s function as long as the institution exists. The teaching of writing, then, would seem always to lead to the interiorization of a subjectivity that reflects its perspective. The interiorization of an academic subjectivity that makes up one element of a fragmented self, then, is a necessary part of education and need not pose a danger to other cultural perspectives and values. The problem for multicultural pedagogies, however, is how this subjectivity seeks to subsume all others, attempting to unify the fragmented self into a single discourse. 251 If the information in these 45 literacy autobiographies can be generalized to other students, maintaining multiple subjectivities is extremely difficult, if not impossible, particularly if any of these subjectivities are forged in cultural discourses marginalized by the discourses of power. Basically, the literacy autobiographies tell us that we must take the good with the bad. The benefits of interiorizing academic discourse’s perspective are inseparable from the ways the discourse attempts to erase other cultural subjectivities. It is just these cultural perspectives and values, however, that a multicultural pedagogy seeks to value and maintain. In sum, academic discourse’s attempt to unify its subjects poses a seemingly insurmountable threat to the goals of a multicultural pedagogy. While many writing teachers may accept the interiorization of academic discourse as the goal of discourse education, a multicultural teacher cannot accept that unification of the (student) subject must accompany this interiorization. For multicultural pedagogy, an academic subjectivity is not enough in itself; education in academic discourse must also allow for other cultural "selves" to voice their perspective.

Despite the field’s desire to articulate a multicultural pedagogy, most of its attempts are inadequate to resisting the unification of the (student) subject that threaten these pedagogies. As we saw in Chapter 1, the majority of composition theory fails to account for academic discourse’s ability to erase other cultural subjectivities because of its reliance on theories of the agent and partial agent. By presuming the agent to be in control of the discourse she employs, much of current composition theory is inadequate to the purposes of a multicultural pedagogy. In 252 particular, pedagogies based on social construction allow the (student) writer to move easily among different discourses. The students’ participation in academic discourse only adds to their linguistic repertoire, leaving the student’s construction of self in other discourses unaffected (e.g., discourse community theorists, Neel, Crowley). As

a result, social constructionist pedagogies need not ever address the unified

subjectivity academic discourse attempts to create. Even theories that try to

acknowledge how language and its agency are embodied within academic discourse

maintain that such a discourse need not create subjects. Instead, (student) writers

maintain, at least in part, the ability to stand free from its influence (e.g. Bizzell’s

articulation of discourse community theory; Bartholomae).

In its reliance on the student as an agent or partial agent (i.e., a free-standing

self apart from academic discourse’s influence), most of composition theory not only

fails to provide a means by which the (student) subject can resist academic discourse’s

unification of her; it also demonstrates these theories’ participation in this unification.

By perpetuating a belief in the individual and the freedom of intentional choice, these

theories help academic discourse produce the belief in freedom of choice necessary

for it to exercise its power. Power relationships can only appear where freedom is

presumed. Karlis Racevskis interprets this relationship between freedom and power

perhaps most clearly:

A subject is that which is amenable to the effects of power: it is the handle by which power takes a hold of/on individual human beings. For power to be effective, humans have to be subjected in the name of their being-that is, there has to be a ‘being’ serving as an alibi if the process of subjection is to be effective. Being, in turn, is but an effect of discourse that naturalizes the situation of individuals in the universe, in history, or in collective destiny (23). 253 If we continue in Racevskis’ terms, composition theorists—in their position as speaking subjects and authorities of academic discourse-help the discourse produce the "alibi" of an autonomous agent, an alibi necessary to the process of subjectivation.

Perhaps the most interesting twist can be seen in the appropriations of critical pedagogy by compositionists.^ Composition’s application of critical pedagogy attempts to highlight how other discourses of power seek to dominate the (student) subject and reproduce their ideologies on her; however, the pedagogy never turns this lens on its own discourse. By implicitly juxtaposing its discourse to other discourses that only dominate, critical pedagogy in composition depicts academic discourse as the ultimate discourse of freedom. As a result, it perpetuates and supports the discourse’s ability to exercise its will to knowledge perhaps even more extensively than those pedagogies that depict the (student) writer as the sole producer of discourse (e.g. expressivist and cognitivist pedagogies).

Thus, despite their attempts to acknowledge the relationship between discourse, language, and culture, these pedagogies and theories continue to support that which allows the technologies of power and self to operate: a belief in freedom of choice and individuation, and academic discourse’s will to knowledge. What such participation and support demonstrates, then, is not only the pedagogies’ inability to meet the needs of a multicultural education but also their tacit betrayal of its goals.

’ The phrasing "composition’s application of critical pedagogy" is very deliberate. Theorists in education, particularly Henry Giroux, have begun to call for a critical pedagogy that examines the domination of school as closely as it does other discourses of power. Critical pedagogy, as it has been articulated in composition, however, has not yet made this move. 254

In other words, what John Schilb has called composition’s "squeamishness about worldly matters of power" is only serving to perpetuate the powerlessness of our students to resist a complete acculturation (i.e., unification) into academic discourse.

Given this tacit participation in academic discourse’s unification of the

(student) subject, are we then left with no alternative but to assume that any multicultural pedagogy is doomed? The few compositionists attempting to articulate such a pedagogy based on a theory of the subject do not think so, and obviously neither do I. What these theorists and the autobiographies suggest, however, is that we must look elsewhere for the basis of a multicultural pedagogy. Instead of localizing the power to resist academic discourse’s domination in a free-standing agent, we need to look more closely at how resistance can take place within discourse. Like the compositionists working with a theory of the subject (e.g.,

Trimbur, Clifford, Bizzell), the autobiographies imply that such resistance might be mounted through the very subjectivities academic discourse seeks to erase. It is this possibility of resistance and its promise for a multicultural pedagogy that I attempt to highlight in the next chapter. CHAPTER V

PLAYING THE GAME OF TRUTH: TOWARD A MULTICULTURAL PEDAGOGY OF RESISTANCE

This unhappy, inwardly disrupted consciousness, since its essential contradictory nature is for it a single consciousness, must for ever have present in the one consciousness the other also.

-G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenoloev of Spirit.

I don’t feel like I am one of them. I want to feel like one of them. . . I like reading books. But all the books are the same. I wish I could find other books. I read more books. I don’t want the prince to marry the princess. It’s not fair. I ask my mother why the prince always had to marry the princess. My mother says so they can live happily ever after.

—Mahesh, a graduate student’s literacy autobiography

The discussion of the literacy autobiographies in Chapter 4 illuminates how problematic interiorizing academic discourse can be. Academic discourse can, of course, be the route to power and success within society; thus, even as a teacher searching for a multicultural pedagogy, I don’t want to discount it or prevent my students from access to it. The problem seems to be how students come to believe that the discourse’s perspective is more valuable than any other. By granting the discourse so much power in other realms, the students seem to think that the only way to take care of their "selves" is to become successful by gaining the discourse’s perspective. Yet this desire for success in itself is not the problem for a multicultural

255 256 pedagogy. In fact, such a desire is a vital element to any educational enterprise and, as such, should be encouraged by any writing pedagogy that seeks to prepare its students for their civic and economic lives in U.S. culture.

Part of the way the discourse builds this desire, however, is by constructing a concomitant belief in the autonomous individual who chooses this route. It is the belief in this autonomous self that allows the discourse to attempt its unification of the

(student) subject. Because the students believe in this autonomous, unified self, they can see no other option but to make themselves over in accordance with the image of that self inscribed in academic discourse. Herein lies the problem. This belief in a unified self convinces students that other ways of using language (tied to other subjectivities) must be erased in order for them to achieve their goals. The technology of the self illustrated in Chapter 4, then, relies upon a belief in such unification in order to incite students to turn themselves into subjects. In fact, encouraging a belief in autonomy seems to be a central strategy in academic discourse’s technology of subject-production.

As a result, in this chapter, I suggest that a successful multicultural pedagogy should attempt to deconstruct this idea of the unified self. I do not suggest that students give up their desire to acquire the power of academic discourse; instead, I believe pedagogy should help them realize that this desire is not inextricable from a belief in a unified self. In sum, I argue that deconstructing such an autonomous, free­ standing self is the first step to resisting the unification academic discourse seeks to 257 perform. Only by maintaining and recognizing the fragmented self can pedagogy then try to create a space for multiple voices and perspectives within academic discourse.

Not surprisingly, the students whose literacy autobiographies I have analyzed are already able to sense such a fragmented self. Rather than celebrating this fragmentation, however, the autobiographies demonstrate how their desire for the power of academic discourse seems antithetical to this fragmentation. As a result, their ability to sense multiple selves results in frustration rather than freedom, in limitation rather than resistance.

Fragmentation and the Literacy Autobiographies

As I will discuss in more detail below, recognizing such fragmentation can be a frustrating revelation for students, so why attempt to encourage it in pedagogy?

This question became a central one when I discussed the information in the previous chapters in a recent presentation. A member of the audience, a well-known scholar in rhetoric and composition, stood up and asked: "But if what you say is true, and our students really want the power academic discourse can give them, why should we try to subvert this process? Why would we not want such a unification to happen?”

There were many responses I might have given to this question. I might have discussed how erasing other cultural perspectives hurts the academy’s goal of pursuing knowledge. Losing these perspectives could mean losing valuable insights into today’s problems that academic discourse’s perspective has not been able to solve. I might have mentioned that pursuing a pedagogy resulting in unification would only perpetuate dominant attitudes and prevent us from moving toward a 258 multicultural society that values difference—my not-so-hidden political agenda.

Unfortunately, I said none of these things. Instead, I simply responded that pedagogies encouraging an unproblematic identification with academic discourse were

"painful for the students." Only after months of reflection have I come to realize why this response seemed such an obvious answer at the time.

In the 45 literacy autobiographies, it becomes obvious that the students already sense, on some level, that there is a difference-an alterity—between their sense of themselves and academic discourse. In an interview, Joe, a basic writer from a working-class background describes this sense of fragmentation fairly clearly:

Donna: Do you feel like the way that you write—like when you write your school stuff—that it’s part of who you are, or does it, like when you look at a piece of paper after you’ve written it, does it feel like it’s you on the paper? Or does it feel like something else?

Joe: It doesn’t feel like me. It feels like something that I’ve made up. It’s part of me but it isn’t me.

Donna: Okay. Can you say more about that?

Joe: It’s like how, this probably isn’t even comparable but, like how a female has a baby. The baby isn’t her; it’s a part of her. And [schooled] writing is just a part of me.

Joe’s acknowledgement of this "partial" subjectivity in academic discourse leads to interesting implications when connected to the rest of his text. Joe was one of the basic writers mentioned in the previous chapter who discussed having to make "a drastic change" in himself in order to succeed with academic discourse. It seems this

"partiality" is not enough; instead, Joe links his working-class perspective to his perceived need for a change. In fact, it’s the partial nature of his identification that 259 he sees as the problem. Rather than accepting his sense of his own alterity, Joe seeks to erase it so that he can achieve a unified relationship with academic discourse.

Because there is no acknowledgement in school that such fragmentation is

"normal,” or even desirable, its recognition has frustrating consequences for many of the (student) writers. In the epigraph, Mahesh quite poignantly describes the alterity he feels between his sense of himself as a gay male and the schooled texts he has been reading. The frustration between this gay self (subjectivity) and the self that likes books (his academic subjectivity) results in continual confusion. His mother’s reply, however, indicates how this frustration emerges out of the perceived need for a unified self: the princess always marries the prince "so they can live happily ever after." Believing that such a unification is the route to "happiness ever after" can only be a source of pain for Mahesh because he knows he’ll never identify with these valued texts in that way. Instead, he seeks to live with his "unhappy consciousness," as Hegel puts it in the other epigraph. Yet he wants to change this type of split consciousness; in his autobiography, Mahesh reports that he’s spent most of his life searching for a text that will reflect his identification with a homosexual subjectivity.

The sense of alterity in Mahesh’s text is apparent throughout the autobiographies. Particularly in their discussions of how academic discourse restricts and tries to erase other uses of language, we can see how the students recognize that they do not have a single self that identifies completely with academic discourse.

Yet, because they believe that such a unified self should exist, they feel as if they’re forced to choose between other subjectivities and an academic one. They believe 260 their problems with academic discourse are some sort of personal failure resulting from their backgrounds; thus, they feel they must change that part of themselves in order to attain success. To not erase these other discourses’ influence would only do damage to themselves because it will prevent them from getting the power and status necessary to live a good life. As Chapter 4 demonstrated, for many students the desire to acquire this power translates into a willingness to erase the other cultural discourses’ influence that seemingly prevents them from reaching this status. Yet even this willingness results in some sort of pain because it demonstrates the students’ belief that their problems with academic discourse reflect some sort of personal inadequacy that must be rectified. When the students sense a fragmented self, they portray it as a problem to be resolved. Chapter 4 illustrated how the alterity between academic and another cultural discourse is seen as a problem to be erased; however, even writers who do not align another subjectivity with a racial or gendered discourse also view this fragmentation as problematic.

For example, Tom, a basic writer, writes that he has always felt he had almost two different selves because of his learning disability. Before his disability was diagnosed, Tom relied on visual learning, primarily diagrams and videos. He comes to see his ability to "think" as something different from his ability to read and write.

Despite his own argument that school should value "thinking" more than reading and writing, he sees his problems with schooled language as a personal inadequacy rather than a perspective different from the one he gained through an alternative learning strategy. In his interview, Tom’s only definition of literacy was illiteracy, illustrating 261 the overwhelming sense of inadequacy his lack of total identification with academic discourse has given him:

Donna: This is like a free association question. When you think of literacy as a word or a term what do you think of? What thoughts do you associate with that?

Tom: Illiteracy. That’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Donna: Why?

Tom: Just literacy/illiteracy. I don’t know. Whenever people say that I say, "Oh, you’re illiterate?" That’s that. But, uhmmm literacy, I think that Vm not, I can’t read that well and thinking about myself, I can’t write and read that well so I always need help with that. It’s not a very good thought.

Tom, like the other basic writers, feels he does need to "write and read that well" in order to gain his goals. However, his feelings of inadequacy, generated by not perceiving himself in a unified relationship with academic discourse, lead to great frustration. His other way of "thinking," gained through his alternative learning style, constantly butts up against his desire to be a successful schooled reader and writer. As a result, he describes his relationship to schooled writing-that which he feels he has to learn to control—as "total evil. The death of darkness" (interview).

His ability to sense his alterity with academic discourse makes Tom believe that schooled writing is evil, but an evil he must deal with.

Perhaps the clearest example of how sensing fragmentation leads to feelings of inadequacy comes from one of the graduate students. In the beginning of her autobiography, Janet quickly summarizes her early experiences with schooled reading and writing because "it was just always easy" (interview). She indicates her almost complete identiOcation with academic discourse very strongly. When I asked her 2 6 2 about a section in her text that discussed how easily she related to the "norms" of schooled and business writing, she replied: "because. . . I was always sort of successful I didn’t have to worry about it. I just figured that I was it." The ambiguity of "it" implies that she was the norms or the discourse-that is, her definition of self mirrored or doubled academic discourse. This seamless attitude toward her relationship with academic discourse, however, disappears when she starts graduate school. For the first time, she consciously perceives her self as not unified within the discourse. Her problems mastering the professional language of English studies almost wipes away her whole sense of identity. She writes that "my identity as a competent reader and writer was in question." When she talks more about this sentence in her interview, she indicates that the loss of this identity left her feeling almost as if she had none:

Donna: You talked about the identity of the reader and writer being in question. Why was it your identity that was in question?

Janet: Because for so long I had been just, you know people had labeled me as literate. I accepted that, I never questioned it. It never occurred to me to think anything different. And then all of a sudden it was like, "Wait a minute. I’m supposed to be a good student. And all of a sudden I’m having trouble?" I mean, i was really wrapped up in being like a pretty, in being labeled bright or articulate or whatever, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t.

Donna: Why do you think that this one sort of encounter with it sort of negated with you all those years of success? I mean, why didn’t you just say like, "Well there must be something about this that is hard because I know I am smart?"

Janet: Probably because I didn’t know that I was smart. I knew that other people thought I was smart. And I mean, once other people stopped telling me that, if you don’t know it for yourself then it’s gone. And I think that’s what happened. I mean I had just accepted the labels that other people put on 2 6 3

me and I was real [tape unclear] about it. And then once they stopped telling me that; ic was all gone. There was nothing left.

What Janet is left with is only a sense of fragmentation that is unrecognizable as an identity. In her text, Janet describes how significant her seeming loss of facility with schooled language was:

Although I realize that not being able to write a seminar paper on a couple of D.H. Lawrence’s short stories is a pretty insignificant problem compared to the daily struggles of people who cannot decipher street signs, bus schedules, or job applications,nty whole self-image was wrapped up in being the second- grader who had the longest caterpillar for reading the most books and the ‘young woman with excellent verbal skills’ that Liberty Mutual Insurance had hired. My self-confidence was obliterated.

In her interview, she connects this obliteration with feeling fragmented:

Donna: Why ‘obliterated’? It seems like such a strong word.

Janet: I felt pretty obliterated. I mean I felt like I was just in pieces. It was horrible. It was probably the worst two years of my life. Well maybe not, but I literally felt like I was in pieces.

Unlike the writers in Chapter 4, Janet seems to have no sense of how these

"pieces" might identify with another part of her self. Instead, she focuses only on becoming re-identified with academic discourse because it is the only part of her self she seems to value.* Like most of the upper-to-middle class, white graduate students-

-especially the males-Janet seems to have never questioned her ability to be a

* * I should note that Janet may have a sense of other subjectivities that she chooses not to write about because of the schooled context in which the autobiography was written. From her text, however, no other sense is present. Instead, for the period of her M.A. degree, the reader gets a feeling that Janet perceives herself almost as a fragmented, blank slate. This failure to mention other "selves" might be significant, however. Janet may believe she cannot acknowledge another sense of identity in schooled writing, a testament in itself to the unification academic discourse seems to warrant. 264 speaking subject within academic discourse. Her relationship is almost seamless up until the point she begins her M.A. degree. As such, she seems to have submerged any other identity she has. Other identifications still exist, as her momentary sense of fragmentation demonstrates, but they seem to exist under erasure (i.e. present only unconsciously). Unlike the more marginal students, the white, middle-to-upper class students in this sample, like Janet, rarely have another discursive subjectivity surface strongly enough to question this autonomy. These subjectivities are easier to submerge or put under erasure because they are not continually surfacing in everyday experiences as racial, or class- and sexual orientation-related subjectivities do.^

For Janet, her past ability to identify with academic discourse without interference seems to have created a belief in her autonomy that is so accepted other subjectivities are not a part of her conscious identity. The discursively-created reality of autonomy not only allows but also prevents her from recognizing multiple selves or identities. In her two-hour long interview and seven-paged, single-spaced autobiography, she only once mentions a perspective she thinks she’s gained from being female. Significantly, this brief reference occurs when she is discussing why she believed her problems as a graduate student were due to a personal inadequacy.

^ Janet’s sex, however, brings up an intriguing problem in this explanation. For her, and many other middle-to-upper class, white, female graduate students, a female- gendered subjectivity surfaces very rarely unless some event takes place that makes the marginality of this subjectivity impossible to ignore (e.g., sexual abuse or harassment, incest, etc.) Although it is difficult to support this supposition, I believe these students can submerge a female subjectivity because their privileged position encourages and allows them to adopt a male-gendered subjectivity. 265

Janet describes how her sense of fragmentation led to a sense of personal inadequacy similar to that of the basic writers. "I began to question everything I did

. . .1 was sure I wasn’t reading texts closely enough, I wasn’t spending enough time in the library looking up the right kinds of secondary sources, and I wasn’t speaking up enough in classes” (text). Her feelings of inadequacy result from feeling as if she is not unified in academic discourse. Her entire text comments on how Janet always believed that her success was guaranteed if she followed the dictates of school. When

I asked her why she was so sure her trouble in graduate school was her fault, she replied "because I’m a good girl" (her only reference to gender). Part of being a

"good girl" is assuming that problems with schooled language are problems with her self; thus, she must change that self in order to be "good" again. Janet’s feelings of obliteration demonstrate how devastating believing unification in academic discourse is necessary can be, particularly if that feeling of unification is not achieved.

Janet, of course, is not alone in the feelings of frustration perceiving her own fragmentation brings about. Like the writers in the previous chapter, she senses that this fragmentation, or multiple subjectivity, keeps her from pursuing an identity closely aligned with academic discourse. Her belief that she must be a unified subject in academic discourse in order to be "good," or successful, leads her to see any multiplicity as an inadequacy. For Janet, however, returning to an identified relationship with the discourse ameliorates these feelings of frustration and pain.

Because of her privileged background, her sense of alterity is not very strong and thus does not interfere with her re-identification. 266 Other writers, particularly those from marginalized races, classes, or sexual orientations, are more aware of where this multiplicity originates; thus, they cannot submerge their sense of fragmentation as easily. Despite the fact that these writers, as we saw in chapter 4, willingly accede to the belief that such a unification is necessary, their compliance also results in pain. They become frustrated at the separation they begin to feel from another cultural identification; however, they also feel they have little choice about this separation if they are to pursue their own success. Some of the writers, like Aretha, attempt to change the perspective of those from this culture along with theirs. Others only report feeling strange and frustrated with the break they begin to sense between their perspective and that of another culture.

For example, Charlie, a basic writer with a working-class background, expresses the tension between this frustration and the desire to be identified with academic discourse fairly clearly in his interview. Charlie, the son of a Greek immigrant, has a strong sense of being at least two people simultaneously, one of which is strongly identified with academic discourse:

Donna: Do you feel like the way that you write is part of who you are?

Charlie: Yeah. In some sense. The way I am around society in general and around in classes I write that way, but the way I write when I’m me personally is not the same. Like I use a different writing style. Like right now when I’m talking to you, I wouldn’t use this, the way I am, I would be the way I am if I was around my friends because I just like to present myself in a different way. But when I write, I like to present myself for the person I want to be present to the people, not to maybe my friends. Because I think in a way everyone acts different when they’re around their close friends than around society. So when I write I present the second person in me, the business man. 267 Despite Charlie’s strong sense that he can be two different people and that his writing can reflect either self depending on the persona required at the time, he also senses that his academic or "business" subjectivity might eventually become his identity:

Donna: Do you think if you keep writing or presenting yourself in a way that the audience wants to see you, will that eventually get to the point where that’s your new self? Will that influence who you are?

Charlie: Exactly. I think that going through life every day you get things that happen that influence you and you see things that influence you to make you change. And when you act one way and act another way, it all comes back into a general mold, and then, in turn, I think that’s what maturing is all about.

Later in his interview, Charlie links maturity with becoming successful and

reports that part of gaining that success indicative of maturity includes achieving

control over schooled reading and writing. Further, like the other basic writers,

Charlie’s text ties his lack of facility with schooled language to his parents’ lack of

education. As a result, Charlie actively seeks to erase this language in his writing

and speaking. Because Charlie believes that he must erase the influence of another

subjectivity to be successful, his intuition that his academic subjectivity might change

him seems to be correct. Even with his sense of two selves, his discussion of how he

now feels within his home culture demonstrates how his belief that he must identify

with academic discourse to be successful is starting to limit his ability to see through

another perspective. Despite his compliance with such a unification, its effects are

disturbing for him.

Donna: Do you think being in college this past year has changed the way that you feel when you’re home with your friends and family? 2 6 8

Charlie: Oh yeah. When I would go home at Christmas and Thanksgiving, my friends and myself, to start with, we’re not the same anymore. . . We still have a friendship, but it’s just not the same as before because I’ve changed a lot from being here. And with the fam ily-I haven’t really come from a really highly educated family—so when I go home not, I try not to. but it comes out, I express my views in a way that’s, like it’s: ’what are you saying? We don’t understand what you mean. ’ But I try to keep a more liberal, open mind with the family, but I can tell I act different around them now.

Donna: Okay. How does that make you feel?

Charlie: Kind of weird. At first, well at first I thought, ‘Hey! I’m Mr. Hotshot,’ you know coming back from college. You know, now I’m finding it harder to relate to my parents because like before we could always like ‘yeah we feel the same way,’ now when we get down to the nitty gritty we got total differences. And I don’t really like that.

In this discussion, Charlie begins to sense a loss of perspective that the graduate students in Chapter 4 also report. For Charlie, this loss seems to be in process, while the graduate students lament losing something amorphous they can no longer define.

Charlie’s belief that he must feel unified within academic discourse to be successful is beginning to undercut his sense of himself as two different people. Losing his ability to sense his own fragmentation—what he describes as a necessary result of maturity— results in frustration over a loss of cultural perspective.

While Charlie’s text demonstrates that he willingly acquiesces to such a unification by erasing his other cultural perspectives, other students, like Tanya, don’t express such a willingness.’ Instead, they seem to be pulled between wanting success and wanting to maintain an identification with another cultural discourse. Simply

’ See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Tanya’s move toward unification in academic discourse. 2 6 9 choosing the latter does not seem a viable option because it seems self-destructive/

If they choose to be successful in the dominant realm, academic discourse seems to be the only option. Thus, they try to resist cutting ties to other discourses, but because of their belief in a unified self, they subvert their own resistance.

For example, Denzel, an African-American, basic writing student, seems very aware of the alterity between his two senses of himself. Denzel’s recognition of a subjectivity related to his race is very strong. He recognizes that the language of this cultural discourse identifies him with others of his culture. In his interview, he explains the importance of such an identification:

Donna: That sentence that you wrote there. T’m not saying that a person has to have certain language skills to talk to black people but it would be beneficial for a black person to have some.’ What does that mean?

Denzel: Oh. Like if a black person, if I was talking to a black person it would be beneficial for him to have those certain language skills. Like in conversation with me and my friends. If another guy came up and wanted to converse he’d stand there like what is he saying, like what do you mean, what are you talking about? He might be more down with us, more cool with us if he, you know, could relate to those things. That’s what I meant. Basically like if he, you know, if he didn’t know what any of that stuff meant. You know like I have, I have a black friend that when I first met him he didn’t have a lot of, and you know, I was his friend, you know, that didn’t bother me but we went around like my other friends it was like, "Where’s you friend from man? He sounds different. Does he hang around whities all the time or something?" And they’d say that all the time you know then if he hangs around me more and we hang around my friends he’d just pick up. Like me and him be talking, and I’d say something, and he’d be like, "What’s that mean?"

* Although I have no data to support this assumption, recent statistics on minority retention in schools would seem to indicate that some students do choose to reject education rather than give up their cultural ties. As one of my returning drop-outs in Boston put it, "I quit because school was just trying to make me white, and I didn’t want to be white." 270 Despite how much Denzel values his culturally-identified language, he also recognizes that this language, and its accompanying subjectivity, is not and cannot be his only one. Unlike the white, upper-to-middle class students like Janet who can believe in the authenticity of a single voice, Denzel is forced to recognize his multiplicity because of his culture’s marginality. Denzel continues in his interview to explain why he must maintain two languages while others do not:

Donna: In that same sentence you said that white people don’t have to have these language skills. Is there a certain type of language skill that everybody should have though? Would you think there is a certain way of talking that everybody needs to know?

Denzel: I don’t know what you can call it, but like the language of getting life, really I mean, I know 7 can’t go to use my black slang, you know the way I talk to my friends, to succeed in life. You know what I mean? So I mean and that ofiier language is. . . why even know it? I guess you could say that is their language in a way, it’s English you know. That’s their language so they don’t need to know my language to get through it.

Donna: But you need to know theirs?

Denzel: Right.

Donna: Okay. Does that seem fair?

Denzel: No. But I mean, we have to, I mean the minorities over here, I mean, if we want to get through it we got to. You know what I mean? It’s hard.

Donna: Do you know if there’re any white people that don’t know how to talk the language that counts either?

Denzel: That don’t know that? Not really. I mean not unless they talk my language all the time, and I doubt that. No, not really.

Denzel’s awareness of at least a dual subjectivity emerges out of his desire to succeed with "the language of getting life" and to maintain his close alliance with a 271 marginalized culture. Denzel’s discussion of past school experiences, however, implies that his recognition of his own duality is not a state he can maintain.

Denzel’s literacy autobiography centers around his experiences moving from a private, Catholic elementary school to a public one. Denzel describes St. Elizabeth’s as an almost totally white school. As a result of his time there, his language came to signify a brand of literacy associated with school. Denzel is happy to have left St.

Elizabeth’s because he feels his experiences there threatened his cultural identification:

Even though I like St. [Elizabeth’s] I felt that I left there at the right time, because while there I didn’t have many black friends, and I think that’s what I needed, or I would have turned out an ‘Oreo’. An ‘Oreo’ is a black person that has been around so many white people that he starts to forget what he really is. When he is around black people he doesn’t feel right because he doesn’t know how to act or he doesn’t have the ‘Language Communicating Skills’ to talk to them.

Denzel also relates how he had trouble identifying with the other African-American students at first because of his identification with schooled knowledge. At the public school, Denzel was immediately labeled as "smart" by his teachers, a label which caused him problems. As he explains, "some of the black students didn’t think I would be cool, because of the school I had previously come from." In his interview, he discusses how not only the school but also his association with schooled language was at the root of his problems with the other black students:

Donna: Did you have trouble because you didn’t really know the language but getting singled out as being smart, did that make it even harder?

Denzel: Yeah, that made it harder.

Donna: Why? What did the kids say to you? 272 Denzel: Just because I did good they feel that they’re not good enough to be around me or you’re too good for him oryou’re really a lot different so they don’t really want to be bothered with you.

Donna: Did you feel different?

Denzel: Kind of.

Donna: How did you feel?

Denzel: I didn’t want to be like that, I just wanted to be like everybody else.

As Denzel begins to feel more closely allied with his "language communicating skills" that made him more "like everybody else," he also starts to do worse in school:

"When I left [the public school two years later] that’s when I found out I’m not a writer or a reader. I found this out when I saw my English grades" (text).

Denzel’s discussion of his experience changing languages implies that he felt he needed to make a choice between one subjectivity and another. Although Denzel never discusses his belief that he can be identified with only one discursive subjectivity, the way he depicts his identification as a forced choice suggests that he believes he must define himself in terms of one discourse or the other. His awareness of a dual self does not seem to be a reality he feels he can maintain. His recognition that schooled language is the language of power, however, implies that there are consequences to choosing his racially-identified subjectivity. In fact, by attending college, Denzel seems to have made his choice. Although he obviously would prefer not to make such a choice, his desire to be successful makes it for him. Believing that he must forge an authentic voice in academic discourse, however, has significant 273 consequences. In his interview, Denzel reports feeling more closely identified with academic discourse again as a result of his post-secondary education:

Donna: When you write something for school, do you feel like it’s part of who you are?

Denzel: Yeah. Before I’d say . . . it wasn’t Denzel. Then when I started taking that class [basic writing], it was Denzel.

Denzel’s belief that he must choose between languages and subjectivities is obviously one of the things a multicultural pedagogy seeks to work against. Such a choice should not be a consequence, real or perceived, of pursuing an education.

Hopefully, however, we can also learn from stories like Denzel’s. The autobiographies need not only provide a critique of current pedagogical practice; they can also help define the route pedagogy must take. As Jana SawicJd points out, the hope of critiques of power is to free up possibilities for new forms to take shape, and the autobiographies can help us prescribe that route.

Implications for Pedagogy

In the autobiographies, recognizing fragmentation is depicted as a problem to be resolved because it restricts the students’ access to power and success. The students, however, do not come to view multiple selves as undesirable on their own.

As Chapter 4 discussed, academic discourse orchestrates this denial of fragmentation by perpetuating a belief in the autonomous self (what Racevskis calls the "alibi of being", and Ewald calls "individuation"). By believing that language emerges from an autonomous self, the students are encouraged to see their language as expressing 274 an authentic voice. The authenticity of this voice can only become a seeming reality if the self feels aligned with a single discursive subjectivity.

Despite their belief in this authentic voice and their desire to become successful through it, many of the students, particularly the more marginalized ones, are frustrated by its consequences. For those who have not yet constructed this voice, their only explanation can be a devastating feeling of personal inadequacy, an inadequacy that encourages them to change their perception of self by erasing other cultural identities. Those who do achieve it, or are beginning to like Charlie, are left with equally frustrating feelings of betrayal or loss. Their success estranges them from other cultural perspectives, resulting in changed relationships with people and cultures with which they do not want to lose their identification. Not choosing to pursue this route to success through identification with academic discourse, however, is not really an option. As Tanya and Denzel’s autobiographies illustrate, such a choice is self-destructive no matter how much they want to avoid losing their cultural identity.

The middle- to upper-middle class, white students seem to be the only ones not deeply disturbed by the results of denying fragmentation. I believe, however, that if we are to move toward a pedagogy that values difference, allowing such a denial to continue may be even more dangerous for these students. By assuming that everyone can forge such an authentic voice, they not only erase a difference that might exist

(e.g. Janet’s gendered subjectivity) but also presume that their assumption of privilege is available to everyone. In sum, their seemingly seamless relationship with academic 275 discourse helps them perpetuate a belief in a unified self that speaks with an authentic voice. Further, they are less likely to recognize power relationships at work because of their security with their own autonomy. As a result, their perspective blinds them to a power that also works on them.

The belief in the autonomous self, then, seems to serve no one’s needs and results only in frustration, pain, and a denial of power relationships that also exert themselves on the privileged students. After all, discourse does not delineate humans into the dominators and the dominated; instead, it exerts power over all its subjects.

The belief in autonomy further poses a significant threat to those of us attempting to teach a multicultural pedagogy. Yet such a pedagogy cannot ignore how strongly this belief in autonomy has permeated all aspects of our culture, and hence, our students’ lives. In fact, its very centrality to the workings of power should suggest how much current power relationships rely upon its perpetuation. Academic discourse and other discourses of power would not be constituted in such a way that they seek to erase any sense of fragmentation were it not essential to exerting their power.

Nevertheless, the importance of the autonomous self also suggests how resistance to this power might be mounted. Rather than seeking to empower students through helping them believe in their power over language, I believe resisting academic discourse’s attempt at unitication must take place on the discourse’s terms. We have seen how attempting to stand outside academic discourse has only aided the discourse’s attempt to erase difference. Instead of continuing to pursue this route, 276 then, I suggest that we try to articulate a pedagogy that resists academic discourse from within itself and uses its own construction of autonomy against it.

Resistance from Within Discourse

The great misconception about theories of the subject, such as the one I’m advocating, is that discourse works as some sort of fixed monolith exercising its power to create an immutable domination. As subjects of these discourses, we presumably become locked within a postmodern prison from which we can effect no change. Articulating a multicultural pedagogy based on a theory of the subject, then, seems to be an impossible task. Such a stable, totalitarian concq>t of power relationships, however, is actually the antithesis of Foucault’s notion of power.

Rather than being fixed, power relationships are multiple and complex, constantly changing. "It seems to me," Foucault explains, "that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them" (History 92). Moreover, because the instability of power relationships depends upon its own confrontation, discourse is depicted as embodying that which can undermine or change it. Foucault states this characteristic quite strongly:

"Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power"(History 95).

To put it more simply, each discursive formation creates its own spaces of

resistance. Since power is never a monolith, any strategic use of power by discourse 277 must also allow for its own destruction within that same strategy. Such resistance is not an escape from discourse; instead, it inverts a discursive strategy in order to change it. This inversion is essential. Foucault believes that the way in which a discourse can be resisted is circumscribed by the discourse much like our "freedom of choice" is delineated discursively. Resistance can only take the form of the same strategy which allows it to dominate. As such, resistance is really the uncovering of the "other," the absence or the restricted, that the discourse already embodied.

Although Foucault’s work is disinterested in the active production of such resistance, I believe we can find a model for a multicultural pedagogy in his concept.

Rather than looking outside discourse for an avenue of resistance, Foucault implies that resistance is best mounted using the tools academic discourse already provides.

We can only hope to resist the unification academic discourse seeks to perform by inverting the very strategies it uses to accomplish this unification. In an intriguing oppositional move, Foucault’s theory suggests that resisting such unification can only be accomplished by inverting the speciAcs of the technology that produces subjects, like the ones described in the previous chapters. I suggest, then, that a multicultural pedagogy begin with these strategies of power. Specifically, I believe the freedom allowed in order for a technology of the self to work also provides the space from which to resist the technology of power’s move toward creating a uniAed subject. In particular, the strategy used to accomplish this uniAcation—the belief in a uniAed self that speaks with an authentic voice-provides the route such resistance should take. In other words, by seeking to maintain that which the discourse attempts to erase. 278 pedagogy can make a space of resistance whereby students employ the "other" of a specific discursive strategy-a self that recognizes its imbrication in discourse-in order to undermine that which would dominate them. Such resistance is not accomplished by an autonomous agent; instead, it inverts the very strategy present within academic discourse in order to change it.^

The Game of Truth as a Practice of Freedom

In the second volume of the history of sexuality— Use of Pleasure--

Foucault describes how the technology of the self was inextricably linked to a certain care for the self in Classical Greece.® Rather than being coupled with the will to knowledge, the technology of the self was connected to a certain aesthetic or ethic.

This aesthetic refers to the how individuals constituted themselves as moral subjects.

Such an aesthetic results from a certain relationship to the mode of subjection (i.e., the technology of power). Individuals transformed themselves into acceptable subjects according to certain expectations about morality. They accomplished such a transformation in order to be considered a "good citizen" by others and themselves.

As a result, this particular technology of the self, whereby individuals turned

® Before I begin describing how pedagogy might accomplish such an inversion, I should note that Foucault, as Edward Said points out, was more interested in showing what discourses were all about—that is, how "rules became epistemological enforcers" of how people lived and spoke—than in how these rules could be changed (10). As such, my discussion extrapolates from Foucault’s work in order to articulate a resistance pedagogy.

® In the third volume. The Care of the Self, Foucault continues this historical discussion of how the care for the self manifested itself in Roman and early Christian times. 279 themselves into acceptable subjects, was related to a certain care for the self, an attempt to formulate oneself in such a way that one could see oneself as "good."

Rather than following rules outlined by moral institutions (e.g. the Church in

Christian times), such "goodness" is accomplished only through an individual’s actions upon himself. It was, Foucault tells us, a deliberate practice of liberty: "in order to behave properly, in order to practice freedom properly, it was necessary to care for self, both in order to know one’s self. . . and to improve one’s self, to surpass one’s self, to master the appetites that risk engulfing you" (Foucault, "Ethic"

5). Thus, in Classical Greece, the routes the technology of the self should take were only implied through the similar goal of being "good" and presenting a good ethos to others. As Deleuze points out, the great novelty of the Greeks emerges in how "the exercises that enabled one to govern oneselfbecome detached both from power as a relations between forces, and from knowledge as a stratified form, or ‘code’ of virtue" (1(X)).

Although the moral aesthetic by which one cares for oneself has remained linked to institutions and "rules" of conduct since Christian times, I believe Foucault’s discussion of the Greek ethic of care has interesting implications for modern times.

In particular, his discussion leads to intriguing observations about how technologies of the self might interact with academic discourse in the late twentieth-century context of

U.S. education. As Foucault explains in a late interview, how an individual accedes to a certain mode of being and transforms herself in order to attain this mode of being is still linked to a care for the self. The goal of this care, however, has shifted. 280 Rather than seeking to attain freedom through transforming oneself into a moral subject, the individual believes the route to freedom is through transforming herself into a knowing subject. We care for ourselves through our care for truth ("Ethics"

14-15).

Although Foucault makes little of this observation, the literacy autobiographies imply that this care for truth is central. As such, it may be the key to a productive resistance. Part of academic discourse’s truth is the reality of an individual’s ability to exercise free choice. Our belief in this truth then leads to our desire to gain knowledge and power through pursuing the education defined by the academic institution. What is so essential here is not how academic discourse creates its will to knowledge but how human subjects accede to that will. We do so according to a care for the self that is inextricable from our belief in individual liberty. We pursue knowledge as a free choice, assuming that such knowledge will only enhance our ability to care for ourselves. The primary goal of that care, as we saw in the previous chapter, is to become successful citizens with the power to follow our desires.

These links between care for the self and liberty imply not only how academic discourse’s will to knowledge operates but also how we might resist that will through pedagogy. If (student) subjects care for themselves through a technology of self in order to enhance their individual freedom, a pedagogy which demonstrates how discourse belies this freedom could disrupt the execution of this technology. In other words, a pedagogy which highlights how discourse seeks to shape an individual’s 281 thinking would transgress the (student) subjects’ belief that the institution’s knowledge equals freedom. In sum, a multicultural pedagogy would attempt to expose part of

the "game of truth" wherein academic discourse gets its ability to incite subjects to

seek its knowledge. Such an exposure would focus on the possibilities for truth that

academic discourse leaves out: the ways of knowing and perspectives forged in other

discourses and their relation to a fragmented self.

What I am suggesting is a pedagogy that takes its own discourse as a topic of

inquiry, focusing on discursive relationships as the class content. Only through

examining how academic discourse limits liberty and attempts to restrict other

"truths" or ways of seeing the world can a multicultural pedagogy become a site of

resistance. It is on the very conditions that academic discourse employs to unify

(student) subjects within its discourse that a resistance pedagogy must be grounded to

be effective. Since it is through a will to knowledge and a belief in a unified,

autonomous self that academic discourse exercises its power, a resistance pedagogy

must attempt to look at this knowledge and autonomy in another way. In this way,

resistance is mounted within the rules of the game of truth that the discourse has

constituted for itself.

Because the obligation to truth manifests itself in the self’s desire to act upon

itself to become a knowing subject, Foucault explains that resistance to this

domination within the discourses of knowledge must also be played on the field of

truth:

It is indeed in this field of obligation to truth that we sometimes can avoid in one way or another the effects of a domination, linked to structures of truth or 282

to institutions charged with truth. . . . We escape[d] then a domination of truth, not by playing a game that was a complete stranger to the game of truth, but in playing it otherwise or in playing another game, another set, other trumps in the game of truth. . . we could only do this [change the rules of the discourse] by playing a certain game of truth, showing what were the effects, showing that there were other rational possibilities, teaching people what they ignore about their own situation, on their conditions of work, on their exploitation ("Ethics" 15, my emphasis).’

As the literacy autobiographies demonstrate, what (student) subjects seem to "ignore about their own situation" is their own sense of alterity with discourse resulting from their fragmentation. The "truth" of academic discourse silences this "other truth" about fragmentation. A resistant pedagogy, then, must work to show what "other rational possibilities exist." These "rational possibilities" include discursively- constructed subjectivities that define our thinking and perception, and an academic subjectivity that seeks to devalue alternative truths.

What I suggest, then, is that a pedagogy which takes discursive relationships as its class content and organizes itself around deconstructing these particular truths.

Specifically, such a pedagogy would first attempt to do two things: 1) demonstrate how perception is constructed through language, undermining the belief in autonomy and its accompanying authentic voice, and 2) critically examine schooled language for

’ Foucault illustrates this resistance by discussing how the ecology movement functions in relation to the discourse on science. By juxtaposing another language of truth, that of nature’s equilibrium, the ecology movement resists science’s claim to knowledge by playing within the same rules it sets out. Both science and the ecology movement claim a "truth" about the physical world. Since science encourages subjects to see through its perspective by claiming knowledge of the natural world, the ecology movement can only accomplish its resistance by putting forth an alternative truth on the same subject. A multicultural writing pedagogy of resistance would similarly juxtapose truths by presenting another truth about how language works. 283 what knowledge and perspectives it leaves out as a way of subverting the belief that academic discourse is the only route to knowledge. The latter component would not seek to invalidate academic discourse’s claim to valued knowledge; instead, it would expose how its knowledge is aligned with only certain ways of seeing reality.

Exposing the nature of discursive relationships in this way, I hope, will create the space of resistance I am seeking.

Such a pedagogy would work to magnify the gap between academic discourse and the self, or our identity. As Karlis Racevskis points out, it is this gap that current discursive formations try to submerge:

As the individual reconstructs and reflects upon an imaginary identity [encouraged by discourse], he/she cultivates an illusion of conscious control that only serves to occlude the aleatory and contingent nature of this imaginary essence. Thus, in a sense, identity is our metaphysical refuge, it is the gap between our history and History, between our self-conscious and purposeful use of language and the Logos that makes our speech possible. We reside in this gap by covering it up with an explanatory system that reconciles our self- image wi our being, a system that has also the virtue of placing other humans within the context of a fundamental nature, a teleological design, or a scientific paradigm (21).

If pedagogy can manage to expose the gap of identity for what it is, by making such explanatory systems overt, the "aleatory and contingent nature" of the self also becomes a "truth." Fragmentation can be seen as a reality rather than only that which must be submerged in order to speak with an authentic voice. The contradictory feelings of multiple selves need not exist under erasure. The self can be recognized as the locus of conflict, and such conflict creates resistance to the unified self academic discourse seeks to perpetuate. 284

A multicultural pedagogy, however, cannot stop here. Discovering a space of resistance does not in itself help to change the way a discourse works. As such, the final component of such a pedagogy would attempt to change the discourse by bringing in that which it silences (i.e., the "other rational possibilities). The pedagogy would try to present avenues through which the students can speak the other perspectives the discourse tries to erase. In sum, the pedagogy would not present academic discourse as if it were of little value in U.S. culture. Instead, it would seek to change the discourse through specific strategies of resistance on the local level.

These strategies can only be employed, however, if the students themselves first believe that their desire to be successful does not have to rely on a belief in an autonomous self that controls the construction of its voice. Without this component, such a pedagogy would merely be a return to current-traditional rhetoric that asks students to employ different styles or "voices" in different contexts and for different audiences, maintaining the decision-making power in a writer unaffected by these voices. Encouraging students to switch languages in this way will not make them immune to the power of academic discourse. No matter how much we validate alternative styles, students still know there the "real" power lies, and thus make

themselves susceptible to academic discourse’s will to knowledge by which they

create themselves as subjects. Unless we also expose the danger that blindly pursuing

a certain language or knowledge has for the construction of thinking and of self, we

merely leave students in the same position as before; vulnerable to the unifying force

of academic discourse. 285 Behind this pedagogy, of course, is my theoretical assumption that examining our own culture and writing about its influence on us makes us partially aware of our inscription, and thus, allows us to resist that inscription. Or, as Foucault describes his own writing about culture, the anticipated purpose of this pedagogy is to "free thought from what it thinks silently and to allow it to think otherwise"—to whatever extent that is possible (qtd. in Racevskis 22). Such "freeing of thought" will not liberate (student) subjects from discursive inscription; rather, it will allow them to understand how discursive force relations affect them. Hopefully, an awareness of these relations will not result in students exercising their freedom of choice by rejecting academic discourse entirely. Instead, my goal is the implementation of another care for the self, one that seeks to make other subjectivities acceptable while still pursuing the power that comes with being a speaking subject in academic discourse.*

* I should note that the pedagogy I am proposing shares much with that of other composition theorists working with neo-Marxist or poststructuralist theory, such as Bizzell ("Marxist Ideas"), Clifford ("The Subject"), and Spellmeyer ("Foucault"). Although Bizzell does not advocate a pedagogy that takes the authentic self or school as its objects of study, she does recommend a course that would similarly uses cultural criticism to examine power relationships. Spellmeyer is more interested in how the position of the subject allows her to play the game of truth "otherwise," locating that ability and his pedagogy in the tension between Inclination and Institution in which the subject resides. While my pedagogy attempts to play on the same tension, it focuses more overtly on a fragmented self as the source of diis tension (rather than an "exterior" self) and deliberately tries to subvert academic discourse’s will to knowledge. While Spellmeyer defines Inclination as a desire for self-expression, my pedagogy problematizes this concept of Inclination by addressing how academic discourse’s will to knowledge constructs that desire. Finally, Clifford’s theoretical argument most closely mirrors my own, yet his pedagogy is not fully spelled out. As a result, the pedagogy outlined in the following pages keeps the spirit of Clifford’s argument but attempts to go beyond Clifford’s suggestion to encourage a "self-consciousness" in students about their 286 The Construction o f Discursive Perception

Although my theoretical stance allows me to abstract a pedagogy, my teacherly self will not allow me to stop here. Even as I wrote the discussion above, a small voice inside of me kept insisting that theoretical implications alone are inadequate:

"What about concrete pedagogical suggestions? How does this theory help anyone know what to do with their class on Monday morning?" This voice, I know, emerges from my frustration (and that I’ve heard others express) about the tendency of compositionists who use theory only to critique, ending their discussions with only a

scant "implications for pedagogy" paragraph. In this section, I try to resist this

tendency by presenting my own syllabi and assignments as one attempt to employ the

type of pedagogy I’m advocating.® I present this description not as a guide but rather

as an illustration.

In this course, I attempt to put forth an "alternative story" to the one most of

my students have learned throughout their education and experience in American

culture. As a class, we critically examine many cultural myths (e.g., the individual,

the "melting pot," etc.) thorough the lens of rhetorical theory. My syllabus describes

the course as an investigation "into the role language has in defining our culture and

the perspectives and ways of thinking we derive from that culture, " Specifically, the

course attempts to disrupt the belief in an autonomous, unified self through two

discursively-created subjectivity.

® To review the entire syllabus for this course, which I have taught twice, see Appendix G. 287 related units that encompass approximately 65 % of a ten-week quarter. The first unit focuses on the issue of language and reality in order to explore how language influences thought and perception. The second examines U.S. education in general, and language education in particular. Although I obviously have an agenda in this course, I try not to make the perspective investigated in the course into a new foundationalism. As a class, we constantly discuss the ways the students believe language works and acknowledge such interpretations as viable options. At different points throughout the quarter, the students reflect in writing on their own theory of language, keeping a running journal about how this theory changes or remains the same throughout the course. Further, to circumvent my authority as a presenter of

"the truth," the class is organized around student response through individual reading responses and small group discussions.

In the first unit, the class reads, discusses, and responds to several essays in rhetorical theory. We begin with James Berlin’s overview of modern composition theory in order to provide some general terms for different ways of looking at language. We then examine some of these theories in particular, beginning with early, modem rhetorical theorists such as I. A. Richards, Richard Weaver, and

Kenneth Burke. Through his discussion of interanimation, Richards provides a fairly accessible way for the student to begin considering a connection between language and thought. Weaver’s discussion of god, devil, and charismatic terms helps students see a link between the words we use to think about things and the culture from which the words emerge. The students readily accept the idea that certain words have a 288 forcible persuasive power within certain cultural contexts, especially after we examine

Pat Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention according to

Weaver’s theory.

Once the class has begun thinking about the links among language, thought, and culture on a micro-level, the course attempts to show how these connections can begin to define an entire perspective on certain realties. Kenneth Burke’s essay on terministic screens works very well at this point. In fact, phrases such as "what’s your screen?" or "I think my screen doesn’t allow me to look at this the way you do" are used by the students throughout the rest of the course. Usually, after reading and discussing Burke, however, most of the students still see their "terministic screen" as resulting from their individual way of looking at the world. As such, the next move the class makes is to examine how screens can be defined by cultural context rather than individual experience. We use the concept of terministic screens to interrogate how pervasive certain beliefs about women and the reality of individual choice are in

U.S. culture. Such an interrogation examines not only how the language and specific terms we use about these concepts "select reality" but also what they allow us to deflect, or not see, because of our use of certain terms and belief in the reality they reflect. During this part of the course, we also look at the media to examine what screens we accept without knowing it from our immersion in music, television, movies, advertising, and so on. As a class, we critique music videos, t.v. advertisements, and newspaper reports, trying to see what screens they encourage us to accept as reality. The paper assignment for this unit asks the students to do a 289 similar analysis on their own. The assignment sheet I give to the students is included verbatim below:

Paper #1: Constructing a Way of Seeing

We’ve spent a lot of time in class discussing how the rhetoric of presentation and the language of our culture might persuade us to see and/or construct reality in a certain way. Such a construction does not have to be individual but can also be influenced by the culture that we are a part of and the ways that certain mediums choose to present reality. For this assignment, we’ll try to take this theoretical issue and examine how some of the discourse we encounter everyday tries to influence the way that we think about certain groups or issues. For this assignment, then, you will need to choose a "site" to study how language is presented.

Choosing a Context:

Choose a place where the rhetoric being used is seen and/or listened to by a large portion of the population. Below are many examples of such "sites." Please see me if you choose another one.

TV news coverage (national or local) on a single issue or the organization and presentation of the news women’s magazines TV advertising TV sitcoms a particular newspaper, say The Lantern newspaper cartoons TV cartoons jokes told by family and friends a particular genre of films, say action films "cop" shows on TV advertising of a specific organization, say ROTC or OSU recruitment materials a specific genre of music, say rap

Once you’ve chosen a context or medium, collect several examples of it. That is, watch several TV shows, collect pamphlets, watch the news for certain number of days. Make sure you watch, read, or examine enough material so that you are well versed in it. Try to keep careful notes or else it will be difficult to write the paper later. 290 Analyzing the Context:

While collecting the examples, especially if they’re visual, take notes on the ways in which they use cultural commonplaces. Are there certain maxims that go unexamined, for example? Do they use certain god or devil terms? What is being presented as "good" and what as "evil"? What themes seem to keep recurring? Remember to look at the visual rhetoric as well as the spoken rhetoric. How are people dressed? How do the advertisements picture people in relationship to what they’re selling? Also pay attention to the selection of details (i.e., the terministic screen). What details do news reporters choose to tell? V^at don’t they talk about? What clips are you shown on the news? Why this one? What does it emphasize? What roles are characters chosen to play? (e.g., why are the Cosbys a lawyer and a doctor; why is Roseanne a waitress) How do these roles relate to the things they say and our perception of them?

Your goal in the analysis is to examine all aspects of the context: the language used, the selection of details and facts, and the visual presentation. Use these analyses to create an argument about how your chosen "site" is encouraging us to see things in certain ways. What assumptions are we meant to take as "truth" when we watch, listen, or read your chosen medium? How does this lead to what we are encouraged to see as the "norm" in American culture?

Writing Up the Results:

In your paper, make an argument for what "truths" your "site" is encouraging us to see by explaining your analysis of the examples you collected. Basically, you are trying to describe the way a certain context might create a "terministic screen" that they want the viewers, readers, or listeners to see through. To make such an analysis, you will probably need to focus on one aspect of culture addressed in your site. For example, the show "Roseanne" may give you interesting things to say about the way we assume working class families live and act, or about gender roles in a marriage, or the way we perceive single women (the sister), and so on. You will need to decide as you watch which topic you find the most interesting and look for that in the other shows you analyzed. For example, if you decide to focus on socioeconomic class, you can then talk about how class is presented in other sitcoms, such as "The Cosby Show," "Roc," "Cheers," "The Golden Girls," etc. You might even find that few other shows focus on working class people. This in itself will give you something to talk about because you can consider why this is so. Why might TV shows present mostly a certain class of people? 291 There are many other options for this type of assignment. For example, with one class I turned the critical lens away from media and asked the students to examine a piece of folklore—jokes, jump-rope rhymes, other children’s games, tales, graffiti, ghost stories, stories of ways to celebrate holidays, etc.—in order to see what cultural assumptions these reflect. In this unit, the site of investigation is less important than the purpose of it. In this paper assignment, I hope to get students to become active interpreters of their own experience and realize how their immersion within the language of their culture may circumscribe how they view the world around them.

At this point, many of the students begin to accept that the media and government try to define our thinking through language and images; however, they still believe an individual human agent working behind the scenes decides how this persuasion will be executed. The last text we look at in this unit, then, tries to demonstrate how even seemingly innocuous phrases and images define a cultural way of seeing the world. For many students, the examples Lakoff and Johnson provide in

Metaphors We Live By begin to show how language itself, without the decision of a human agent, can influence the way they think. For example, while discussing

Metaphors We Live By in small groups, one group of students developed their own metaphor for how language defines culture. This group likened the many cultures of the world to a house, with each room representing a different culture. Language, in this metaphor, works like the windows in each room; it limits what part of the outside world we can see, thus defining what we think of as reality. However, as the group pointed out, we’re all seeing out different windows. As a result, the group’s question 292 to the rest of the class revolved around issues of difference: "Can we," as they put it,

"ever learn to see out of someone else’s window, or are we always going to not understand other cultures because we think our window is the only one there is?"

Not surprisingly, issues of difference emerge throughout this unit as the students come to believe that language deflects attention away from other realities, preventing us from seeking other explanations for experience (e.g., how the focus on individual autonomy helps us view the homeless as people who simply did not try hard enough to be successful).

The second unit—"Language as structuring reality in education "-seeks to build on the students’ recognition of how ways of using language influence thinking and perception. In this unit, we begin by brainstorming on what the purpose of education is. Almost to a one, the students provide definitions that see education as the route to individual success and a way to help them understand the way the world really works.

We begin, then, by asking what the purpose of education is, looking at how Isocrates,

Cicero, Quintilian, and E.D. Hirsch define the purpose of education. The students usually unproblematically accept that education is training for participation in society.

As we look more closely at Hirsch, however, especially at his lists, the students begin to see how this goal marginalizes different types of knowledge. One particular class organized itself into a debate about Hirsch at the students’ request. As the two sides argued about what type of knowledge should be considered important and if there was any such thing as "universal" knowledge, one African-American student finally stood up and said: "Come on. Haven’t you even noticed that all the non-white students in 293 the class are on this side of the room? Doesn’t that tell you something about whose knowledge is included in this list?" By the end of a two-hour long discussion, only two white, male students remained on the side of the room that had been arguing for

Hirsch.

The class also looks at how education may be training a workforce that serves its own needs, and at personal narratives, like Richard Rodriguez’, of how education can give one a certain perspective on the world that may or may not be in contradiction to the different cultural perspectives present in the U.S. After examining an alternative story about the goal of education, the course turns its attention to language education and difference. We discuss Bizzell, Heath, Lofty and others as a way of investigating whether schooled language education is attempting to make students see the world only in a way that is amenable to dominant culture.

During this unit, the students turn their critical lenses inward in the paper assignment.

While in the first unit, the students applied our discussions to external manifestations of language, in this unit, they examine their own language education to see how their education may have forced them to view the world through a screen that reflected dominant values:

Paper #2: Literacy Education and Culture

In this assignment, you will be turning your critical lens inward to examine how your education in reading and writing over the years may or may not have acculturated you into a certain cultural way of writing and thinldng. To do this, the paper requires two tasks that are outlined below. Despite the way I’ve separated the explanation of these tasks, however, they should not be seen as two separate sections of the paper. The best papers will integrate the analysis with the narrative. 294 Part 1: Narrative: Think about your experiences learning to read and write as far back as you can remember. When do you first remember reading? Writing? What about reading in writing in school (elementary, secondary, and college) stick out the most for you? What do you think you learned from these experiences? How did certain reading and writing experiences make you feel? Were there times when you were not successful in school literacy tasks? Describe these. Why do you think these difficulties arose? What type of reading and writing did you do outside of school? Did these experiences seem (or still seem) different than those you participate in at school? How so?

Try to be as specific and detailed in this part of the paper as your memory allows. Attaining this type of detail will obviously mean you can’t recount everything you remember, so you may want to choose certain experiences that seem significant to you for some reason. Try to include both in and out-of- school experiences, however. This will help you write the analysis section.

Part 2: Analysis: In this section, reflect upon your own experiences in terms of the topics generated in our readings for this unit. You may focus on whatever issue seems to fit your experiences the best. For example, you might concentrate on the idea of discourse communities. Did the community of school literacy seem different in any ways from the community of home literacy? How so? Did the two compliment each other or did you feel a tension between the two at times? Or, you might want to concentrate on the idea of education as acculturation. Do you feel that your literacy experiences were geared toward a certain idea about culture? How did your literacy education prepare you to be a "good citizen" in U.S. culture? Was your literacy education "empowering" or does it feel as if it has restricted you in any way?

Whatever perspective you choose to concentrate on, try to incorporate the terminology and issues of at least some of our readings in your analysis of your own literacy education.

Through this assignment and the first one, the students are asked to adopt a perspective that does not view their experiences through the lens of an autonomous

self. The goal of the first two units, then, is to examine language and the students’

interactions with it from another perspective, one that assumes discourse and education may be forming the perspective of the students. Although we never use

such terminology, the students begin to see how discourse creates them as subjects. 295 I’d be lying if I said all the students come to see this perspective as a new "truth;" however, the power of this syllabus for me is that it, at the very least, presents an alternative to the truth the students have been taking as reality for many years.

Students begin to see how their thinking and perspective have been constructed through cultural and institutional discourses rather than through their individual autonomy. The frequent discussions about how these discourses marginalize other perspectives and knowledge also start to introduce the concept of a fragmented self because many of the students, particularly the female, working-class, and non-white

students, begin to recognize that they identify with some of these marginalized perspectives.

The irony of this syllabus is that both these assignments also require the type

of thesis, analysis, and support characteristic of most school writing. And, of course,

I evaluate the papers according to these criteria. Rather than hide how this course

also attempts to teach a certain way of thinking that is similar to the one we are

analyzing, the students and I discuss this irony openly. Throughout the course, then,

we attempt to "read" our own classroom through written responses and discussion,

just as we are reading other sites.

The Results of Deconstructing Autonomy

Perhaps the most interesting facet of presenting an actual course is that it

allows me to discuss not only what was done in the class but also what effect it had

on the students. When I talk about this course with other teachers, their main

concern is that encouraging students to see themselves as constructed by discourse 296 will lead to a feeling of powerlessness. Recognizing that you may not be in control of your ideas can, in fact, be a deeply disturbing experience, and it has been for many of my students. Their discomfort with the idea that they may be subjects rather than agents with language emerges in many different ways: overt resistance, anger, and frustration.

Throughout this course, a few students, almost always men, refuse to accept or even consider that language has any influence on their thinking. In their response papers, they present stories of the alternative reality of the individual as truth. For example, one of my students in the fall, Greg, consistently recounted the history of

Horatio-Alger-type figures (e.g. Andrew Carnegie, Michael Jordan, and even Rocky

Balboa) to prove that an individual can be whatever he decides. Steve, a student in the winter, invoked the bible in most of his oral and written responses to show that the individual has control over his own destiny. Other students resist because they do not want to see themselves implicated in the power relationships we discuss.

Particularly when we consider how the language of school and power is frequently male-identified, male students, even those who had previously acknowledged how language restricts other perspectives, return to a view that language only communicates thought and thus could not be male. This resistance, however, plays a very productive role in class. It incites other students to ask why these mai want to resist seeing their gender or race as a position of privilege. Class members also try to argue that these men’s opinions merely prove exactly what we are talking about because of their unquestioning acceptance of the individual. 297 While I could view the recalcitrance of my male students as a positive force in the class, it was more difficult for me to see how the frustration and anger expressed by many students could be productive. Many class sessions would end with the students complaining through comments like "my brain hurts," "this class makes me think too hard," or "I get so frustrated because I don’t know what’s real anymore."

While I Arst took such comments as a validation of the success of the course, I quickly realized these comments also indicated how deeply the course disturbed a certain sense of self the students needed to act in the world. The course had generated a real discomfort that was difficult to deal with. For some students, particularly the more marginalized ones, this discomfort did become empowering, but only after a period of anger at a world they felt was pre-disposed to silence them.

The way in which recognizing how discourse constructs a way of thinking can be empowering is best illustrated through an example. After reading Jean Anyon’s article, "The Hidden Curriculum of Work," and writing her paper on literacy education and culture, one of my students came to realize the basis for her frustrations in college. Jane, a sophomore, analyzed her own education in terms of

Anyon’s study which argues that the way information is presented in schools frequently mirrors the socio-economic class of the area in which the school is located.

In her study, Anyon found that students in working-class areas, for example, were taught and evaluated primarily on how well they followed directions and arrived at the correct answer through the prescribed route, while students in upper-class areas were encouraged to create their own ways to solve problems. Based on these observations. 298 Anyon argues that schooling prepares students to fill prescribed roles as workers within society. As Jane reviewed her own education according to Anyon’s observations, she came to believe that her small, rural school system had presented information in ways that would only allow her to fulfill working-class types of positions. She was never asked to problem-solve, criticize, or create her own procedures for approaching a topic. In her paper, Jane explains that her college experience had been an exercise in frustration because she never understood why she couldn’t comprehend what teachers were asking her to do. She would work hard, do all the reading, complete all the assignments, but somehow her responses were always inadequate even though she had correctly summarized the work or followed the instructor’s directions as best she could.

In the early drafts of her paper, Jane’s conclusion was one of hopelessness.

Because she had not been trained as other students were to think in ways that were amenable to college assignments, Jane felt she was doomed to fail in college. As we discussed her drafts and she reflected further on her present situation, however, Jane’s conclusion changed. She began to feel empowered by her realization that her schooling had defined how she thought. Before Jane had accepted her poor grades in college as a personal inadequacy; somehow she simply wasn’t as smart as the other students in her classes. After this assignment, she concluded that she lacked the appropriate acculturation in schooled norms. Rather than assuming this lack meant inevitable failure, Jane began to seek out help from her teachers, asking them to explain the assumptions that frequently go hidden in many school assignments. When 299 I ran into Jane on campus last quarter, she told me that she has continued to seek any help available for courses whether it be conferences, tutoring, etc. Before she had analyzed the effects of her past schooling, she was unable to do this because she felt she would be admitting her own inadequacy. Becoming aware of how her thinking had been constituted by academic discourse now gave her hope that such a constitution could be changed.

Recognizing their lack of autonomy in itself, however, was not an empowering experience for many of my students. Because their belief in autonomy was not replaced by another concept that would allow them to feel as if they had power, some students felt only frustration. One student, for example, constantly complained in her response papers and in conference with me about how powerless this course made her feel. She liked the way she could understand better how oppression and marginalization worked, but she was frustrated because her recognition of these problems made her want to change them. However, she had little faith in her ability to execute change because she had come to believe she was controlled by something beyond her reach. Another student majoring in education felt the course was forcing her to re-evaluate her career choice. In conference, she told me she wanted to be a teacher to help inner-city students escape the cycle of poverty, but now die wondered if teaching did more harm than good. The comments of one of my African-American students are perhaps the most disturbing example of how this course led to a feeling of disempowerment. Terry’s literacy autobiography presented example after example of how she had received poor grades whenever she had tried to invoke what she now 300 realized was a different perspective, one that emerged from a cultural way of thinking. Seeing how educational discourse was pre-disposed to silence and marginalize her perspective led her to feel she was stuck between a rock and a hard place. More than before, Terry felt she had to make a choice between earning a degree in order to gain power and submerging her identification with a marginalized culture.

These students’ reactions demonstrate how painful deconstructing the belief in autonomy can be. Even replacing the belief in autonomy with a concq>t of the fragmented self did not help students like Terry feel any less marginalized within the institution. I had hoped my third unit would dissipate these feelings of frustration, but it did not. In the third unit, the class examined how cultural discourses can emerge in perspectives different from those of the dominant culture we explored in the first two units. We read selections on marginalized cultural discourses, in particular African-American discourse, women’s ways of writing and speaking, and

Native American ways of viewing reality. While such reading and discussion encouraged the students to understand that their definition of themselves was fi’equently made up of many different fragments, it also led to intense discussions about power relationships and how these other "selves" were marginalized and

silenced. My course, at the time, did not try to make a space from which this

marginalization could be resisted within the institution, leaving some of my students with only an awareness of fragmentation and no productive use of that fragmentation. 301

I do believe, however, that such frustration about and awareness of a fragmented self can be used productively in pedagogy. In fact, the results of this lack in my own syllabus point to how much such a component is needed. Rather than

merely creating a site of resistance in academic discourse by disrupting the grounds on which its technology operates, a multicultural pedagogy also needs to suggest ways the discourse might be changed. In sum, it should encourage students to eazct certain

strategies of resistance that might change the discourse itself.

Making a Space for the Other in Academic Discourse

Discussing the speciAcs of such resistance, I admit, is one of the most difficult parts of my suggestions for pedagogy because it seems both (at once) to include

endless possibilities and a currently unimaginable form of discourse. What I suggest

is that we not try to imagine the forms this could take but instead encourage it and see

what happens. Rather than prescribing the route to change academic discourse, a

multicultural pedagogy can only demonstrate that resistance is possible. The specific

forms of resistance will be multiple. A multicultural pedagogy, then, is simply the jumping of point for resistances whose form and content it cannot predict.

Encouraging students to find ways that their other subjectivities can speak

within academic discourse could begin with an exploration of what these subjectivities

might entail. Basically, pedagogy can help students ask the question: "What is this

other in me?" For many of my students, this question started to be answered in their

literacy autobiographies. Writing, as Susan Miller has theorized, seems to give

students the distance through which they can explore their own identities. Because 302 they are required to select a persona which may not reflect their various subjectivities, analyzing their own writing about self provides a distance from which to sense the gap between the self on the page and their seemingly unified identity. As Foucault puts it, we write "to be other than what we are" (qtd. in Racevskis 22). By exploring how their educations had sought to form them and define their thinking in certain ways, my students frequently discovered a sense of themselves that they had submerged or rarely articulated because of its restriction within academic discourse.

Admittedly, this discovery was a disempowering experience for some, but it was a liberating revelation for others.

Through writing her literacy autobiography, one of my Asian-American students discovered how she had used her success in school to deflect her attention from how her Japanese heritage is marginalized within that realm. In her paper, she reports coming to realize how she had sought the validation of school throughout most her life at the expense of not valuing her heritage. Always an active participant in class, the nature of her comments changed after this assignment. She began to speak from another subjectivity that she now realized had a significantly different perspective from her more usual, schooled responses in class. In the last three weeks of the quarter, she frequently prefaced a comment with "as an Asian-American, I think. . something she had never done in the first seven weeks. Mary, one of the graduate students in this study, seems to have come to a similar conclusion in her literacy autobiography. In the intertext of her main narrative, Mary reflects on how she may be using her unification in academic discourse to prevent her from 303 recognizing her difference. Unlike my student, such a realization results only in a question that goes unanswered:

What would happen if I were brave enough to reveal how many times, late at night, I wonder if I am using this goal of intellect, individuality, and prestige that I have worked for—this ‘life of the mind,’ this academia, even this noble calling of teaching—to escape from taking control of the happiness and fulfillment of my own life? What if I admitted I am escaping in exactly the same way that I used all the wonderful fantastic stories of my childhood to escape from the fear/realization that I just didn’t fit in with tiie rest of the children in my school?

In my course, recognizing other subjectivities did not happen only for the female, non-white, or working class students but sometimes for the white men as well. While writing his literacy autobiography, one of my male students discovered that most of what he called his "real learning" had taken place in out-of-school contexts. His immersion in a rural culture had given him a sense that knowledge could not exist in a de-contextualized space like school. Instead, up until his last few years of high school he had always been frustrated by schooled knowledge because it did not speak to the practical realities around which his life centered. This awareness caused him to realize that he still valued practical knowledge but had chosoi his major—business management-according to the schooled norms he had internalized. In conference, he told me he was changing his major to construction engineering as a way of integrating these two senses of himself, both of which he wanted to value.

For other students, recognizing other subjectivities occurred through reading about other discourses. Many of my female students saw themselves reflected in

Elizabeth Flynn’s discussion of gendered writing and Deborah Tannen’s examples of female communication in You Just Don’t Understand. In what I still remember as the 304 best class I was ever involved in, one of my African-American students and a friend

she had invited to class proceeded to explain Gates’ The Sigmfyin(g) Monkey to the

rest of the class by using examples hrom their everyday conversation with friends. As

Eva put it at the end of class, "I thought this was just the way black people talked

with each other. I never realized how it was also a way of breaking down the power

of white people’s speech by giving it a new meaning.

Although I obviously see these classes as successful, I unfortunately provided

no productive outlet for the sense of multiple selves my pedagogy encouraged. I wish

I could have encouraged Eva to use her new discovery of her ability to be a trickster

in schooled writing. Her realization that she could use a form of rhetoric to turn

another in on itself was very powerful, but it remained for Eva a marginalized form

of discourse in school. What I realize now is that two essential components should

have been added to this unit: 1) experimentation with writing from other

subjectivities, and 2) discussion and practice on how these subjectivities might enter

academic discourse.

The first suggestion could easily be implemented in the classroom by asking

students to explore a subjectivity they don’t usually speak from in academic discourse,

such as Eva’s capacity for irony and subterfuge with language. In other words, this

experimental writing would ask students to write in the voice they feel is restricted

from a school context. Such restricted voices will already have become recognizable

*“ This quote is only an approximation since, unfortunately, I did not record her comments at the time. 305 through the discussions about academic discourse and the readings on other cultural perspectives and their languages. Assignments could come in the form of modeling: try to write like Cixous or another non-linear author." Others could be more open- ended, asking students to re-write a fairly conventional paper according to another perspective that values a different type of knowledge. Some of my studrats had begun such experimentation on their own when we read authors like Tannoi. A few of my female students wrote response papers in which they tried to argue why the communication style Tannen had called feminine was actually more conducive to learning. Their arguments, however, invoked only personal knowledge and emotional reactions as their proof and were written in a form that asked the reader to find the meaning. In other words, there was no thesis or overt voice providing the interpretation of information; instead, as one student noted at the bottom of her paper, she wanted me to decide what I thought her stories argued.

Such experimentation with writing "otherwise" would help students access

subjectivities they may have submerged. Although in the last unit my course focuses

on gendered and racial discourses, similar experimental writing could be encouraged

hrom other perspectives: class, sexual orientation, and so on. There are many

avenues investigating the perspective of other subjectivities could take. Each student

could respond to a similar set of information from a certain situated position. How

" At the most recent CCCC, Susan Jarratt discussed assigning just such modeling assignments in an upper-division composition course. Jarratt reported that the students both enjoyed and seemed to get a heightened awareness of themselves as women through such writing. (She applied such experimentation only to a gendered subjectivity.) 306 would a working-class community interpret and/or express the same body of information? A woman? Students could research the perspectives of other discourses with which they identify part of their identity. If a student comes from a working- class community, for example, she could do a mini-ethnography of how people in that community present arguments, examining how what counts as proof may reflect a different perspective from an academic one. Part of the investigation could include trying then to write from the perspective she discovers.

Whatever form such assignments take, they should be geared toward exploring how these other perspectives manifest themselves in language. In sum, the students are asked to conduct investigations into multiple subjectivities similar to those they are reading in class. It gives them a chance to experiment with other voices they might find are just as authentic as their schooled voice. Authenticity, then, becomes aligned with multiplicity, with a fragmented self, rather than an autonomous one. This connection of other languages, or "voices," to the self is what distinguishes this pedagogy from one that asks students to experiment with different purposes and voices. In the latter pedagogy, students become more aware of the differaice of the others to whom they address their writing but are not asked to reflect on how these languages speak their own difference. Rather than only looking outward for the effects of their language, the students also look inward for the past and present effects of discourse on their selves. In sum, such a pedagogy seeks to examine discourses and the students’ imbrication in the same rather than only experiment with its manifestations and effects on others. 307 The central reason for exploring these subjectivities, however, is not simply to become more aware of them but to then investigate how these perspectives might be used in academic discourse. This investigation is the key element of a resistance pedagogy that seeks to change academic discourse rather than only critique it. As

Foucault defines resistance, a discourse creates its own resistance through what it silences. Bringing in the silenced, voicing the "other," is the only way to execute a change in a discursive formation. No matter what route such resistances talœ, the end-product, I hope, will allow more than one subjectivity to speak within a text. As

Pat Sullivan notes, recent work on collaborative writing has argued for collaborative writing assignments that allow more than one perspective to interact in a single text.

What I am advocating is a similar heterogeneous text; however, in this pedagogy, such multiple perspectives could emerge as easily from a single-authored text as much as from a multiple-authored one.

It is just such a movement that many feminists are attempting to make in other realms. Feminist scholars and theorists trying to write "otherwise" provide useful models for how a multicultural writing pedagogy might encourage a productive resistance within the institution. In particular. Luce Irigaray’s project seems very similar to the type of productive resistance I’m advocating. Irigaray defines her project as a "jamming [of] the theoretical machinery itself, [of] suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and meaning that are excessively univocal"

(78). Her proposed strategy for this jamming is to turn the space, "lack, deficiency, .

. .imitation, and negative image of the subject," that has been seen as the feminine 308 into a concomitant presence within patriarchal discourse. In simple terms, Irigaray argues that the only way to propose alternative models of truth is to bring them into the discourse that tries to silence them. What I have been referring to as using the perspective of multiple subjectivities to resist the seemingly universal claim to knowledge of an academic perspective, Irigaray limits to a specific gendered subjectivity that pushes at the boundaries of a phallologocentiic discourse.

Irigaray’s value for a multicultural pedagogy lies in her suggestions about how to use one subjectivity to resist another. Her strategy for interrupting a patriarchal discourse that silences the feminine is found in her concept of speaking (as) woman and mimicry. Speaking (as) woman within a phallologocentiic discourse (i.e., the

Economy of the Same) involves discovering how a certain discourse in a certain moment positions her as Other; that is, locating the place of her exploitation by discourse. Yet merely realizing this exploitation will not in itself prevent her from being reduced by it. To prevent such a reduction, Irigaray proposes that a woman

deliberately assume the role inscribed for her in order to "convert a form of

subordination into an affirmation, and thus begin to subvert it. . .it means to resubmit

herself. . .to ideas about herself that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as

to make ‘visible’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain

invisible" (76). This playful repetition is what Irigaray calls mimicry. It is a

strategy that exploits the very position created for women and displays it in such an

absurd light that it cannot be ignored. To reduce this idea to its simplest terms. 309 Irigaray proposes that the only way to make a space for the feminine, for the Other, is to force that Other to be recognized.

Irigaray’s strategy can be a powerful one for a multicultural pedagogy. As writing teachers, we can suggest that students critically examine the manifestations of academic discourse they encounter for what they could be silencing. A model for such a critique can come within our classrooms, through an examination of academic discourse in general (as in my unit on education) or by looking at specific assignments or texts. (Of course, such a local analysis would mean that our own assignments would be subject to such a critique.) A pedagogy based on this strategy would examine texts of academic discourse not only to see how they are constructed and what they say, but to see what, how, and what ways of writing are being silenced.

Students would be encouraged to "play" with language, to mimic this silenced voice in their responses to these texts.

This mimicry need not be earth-shattering. Instead, it tries to demonstrate how a certain type of knowledge or a certain way of thinking is being marginalized by including it. Let me provide an example. Last year, one of the tutors in the Writing

Center I was directing approached me with a problem. The tutor was working with a junior. Nursing major, whom I’ll call Susan, who was writing about treating cancer

patients. Susan is a returning student who spent the last ten years as an LPN in a

cancer treatment center. Susan wanted to rely on her personal experi«ice to support

her advocation of a certain nursing approach with cancer patients but was told by her

instructor that such an argument was unacceptable. One of the goals of the 310 assignment was to find documented sources for her recommendations. The student was unwilling to acquiesce and let citations speak for her, but she also could not risk failing an assignment in the course. Together, the tutor and I helped this student reach a compromise that I would like to call a form of mimicry. Susan wrote the paper based on her personal experience, but at appropriate points, she included references as "see alsos" in parentheses. In this way, she met her instructor’s requirement while mimicking the use of sources in such a way that requiring them as the only viable claim to knowledge seemed ludicrous.

Suggesting such particular forms of resistance, such as mimicry, demonstrates to students how recognizing their multiple subjectivities can be empowering. Being more aware of how a discourse tries to silence other perspectives can also be a route to changing that discourse. By showing how it might be possible to turn a certain aspect of academic discourse to their advantage despite its attempt to silence another perspective, I believe we help students find productive outlets for other perspectives.

Such strategies use the sense of fragmentation that pedagogy can bring about to effect change, thus counteracting the feelings of powerlessness with which some of my

students were left.

These strategies may take many forms, not all of which mirror Irigarian

mimicry. My experience suggests, however, that my students will come up with

many more ways for this resistance to manifest itself than I ever could. For example,

one of my students from a previous quarter told me how she turned a history research

paper into a critique of selected knowledge. After reading Lakota Woman in my class 311 and discussing how terministic screens deflect attention from other realities, she wrote a paper indicting her history class for not discussing the American Indian Movement in its discussion of civil rights in the 60s and 70s. Rather than only criticizing the lack, her paper became an investigation into the cultural reasons history may have been written to leave out AIM. Although her paper did not emerge from a different subjectivity, her experience suggests another way resistance might be enacted.

Becoming aware of a perspective situated in another cultural subjectivity could give students a way to argue for another way of seeing the world. They could choose to argue why one perspective leads to a more valuable reading of a certain object of study. Or, they could juxtapose two different interpretations in the same paper.

The literacy autobiographies in this study provide intriguing examples of how some of the writers have attempted to enact such resistance by using one subjectivity to present a perspective that is silenced within academic discourse. For example,

Stephanie, unlike most of the writers in the study, is unable to submerge her awareness of fragmentation. She cannot believe in a single authentic voice because personal experiences have forced her to become aware of the inevitable presence of a gendered subjectivity that interferes with her academic one. Stephanie’s experience with sexual abuse and rape in a long-term relationship not only makes her painfully aware of a gendered subjectivity; these experiences also give her a sense of what has been silenced in academic feminism’s discourse of victimization: the complicity of the "victim." Although she realizes that discussing "what women gain from their own oppression" (interview) goes against anything she has seen in feminist discourse, she 312

can no longer silence this story or her sense of a gendered subjectivity that is defined partially by it. As a result, she chooses to write a text that tries to speak this silence.

When I asked why she apologizes to the reader throughout her text in her interview,

she revealed the difficult choice she thought she had to make:

I felt like I may well be transgressing. But I couldn’t tell any other story really, because I tried to just talk about it, and it all came out sounding really fake and disgusting, and I was lying and saying things I didn’t mean, and I would try to explain to myself why what I had just said was contradicting something I had said two pages before, and I finally decided it was just because what I was trying to talk about was just, couldn’t be talked about in the academic voice I usually write papers in.

Rather than submerge the voice that would speak something that is

marginalized within accepted feminist discourse, Stephanie chooses to write her

literacy autobiography (a piece of academic writing) from another subjectivity’s

perspective. In order to speak from this subjectivity, she makes an interesting move

in her text. She titles her literacy autobiography: "My Face, Your Face. Selected

Diary Entries of an Illiterate." In her interview, Stephanie explains her choice of the

term "illiterate":

Donna: Why do you describe yourself as an illiterate?

Stephanie: Because I was . . .trying to talk in the language of the academic. At least that was how I perceived the assignment. Basically the first draft was a thinly veiled list of reasons why I couldn’t do the assignment. That’s not quite how I couched it. And I called myself illiterate (pause). No, literate. I called myself literate in that draft. And then I decided that for this draft probably the most productive thing would be to just stop being thickly veiled about it. Call myself illiterate and try to explain why I’m illiterate and go from there. I was finding that it was more productive to talk about the ways in which I have trouble dealing with language and language in general. With the language of, the language of the academy, which is completely without sexuality. And the language of most of the people that I try to talk to which is also certainly without this very, I guess we can call dark and/or deviant 313 sexuality, and in order to describe it, I had to talk from the position of an illiterate I found. Because trying to talk about the problems I was having from the position of someone who really was supposed to be able to talk the discourse was completely unproductive because I found myself unable to say a lot of things.

In her text, Stephanie uses her invocation of illiteracy as a way of magnifying the gap between a self that understands academic feminism and a self that cannot speak within that feminist language. Her text tries to discuss why she feels her interpretation of her sexual experience is difficult to talk about in academic feminism: how the language of this discourse silences her and makes her feel she must translate her experience so that it becomes something different. The story she chooses to tell of her literacy, then, is a story about a certain fragmented relationship to a language that can’t speak her experience. A small selection of her autobiography illustrates well the tension she tries to make explicit:

I want to effect a translation, to become literate. The biggest problem I have when I finally do get around to translating is my inability to explain my own role in this messy relationship—my own attitude towards my complicity, for example. . . In the privileged language I’m trying to learn and then translate into, complicity also isn’t usually discussed, it’s also wrapped in silence, but it’s dismissed. It’s assumed not to exist, usually, and when it is discussed, it’s treated as if it were a disease that must be cured. The gap, especialfy the gap between the two silences, is almost impossible to talk across (my emphasis).

Stephanie’s assumption of "illiteracy" here, then, serves as a way to explain the literacy she does possess from another subjectivity; that is, the language that allows her to speak from this other perspective. She uses her alternative "literacy" to put forth another "truth" not recognized as such by academic discourse. In doing so,

Stephanie attempts to magnify the gap between her two subjectivities. As she

explains it, "I was asking her (the instructor) to read between the lines and do a 314 reading of it. Try to fill in the gaps herself" (interview). Stephanie attempts to make a space from which her experience can be validated in academic discourse by deliberately transgressing the boundaries she knows it sets up. As she puts it, "I guess essentially in this text I’m trying to teach a feminist audience—because I consider [the instructor] a feminist-a feminist audience how to treat a victim, specifically a rape victim and/or an S&M victim" (interview). Stephanie is allowed to exercise such an overt resistance, however, because of the space her instructor created in the class. She reports that the course, a seminar on difference in composition,

made her feel that academic discourse could be resisted in this way. In particular,

she relates feeling safe with her instructor and knowing that the instructor would not

discount what she had to say simply because it transgressed the boundaries of

academic discourse.

Although our students may not find a space outside our own classrooms where

such an overt resistance like Stephanie’s can be enacted, her text demonstrates how

powerful executing such a resistance can be. She not only pushes at the boundaries of

academic discourse, but she also finds a space within the institution to have her

fragmentation recognized. For Stephanie, the experience of writing this text has

changed her relationship to language. She reports that she now looks "at language in

really abstract terms" and tries "to think about" it. Her analysis centers on "where

the problems are, where it’s missing. Where I’m missing it and where it’s missing

me, then things can come out of that" (interview). Quite simply, it is the hope that

"things can come out of that" that makes a pedagogy which seeks to make a space for 315 the silenced so attractive for the goals of a multicultural education. My own hope for

a pedagogy that explores fragmentation is that my students will leave with the ability

Stephanie seems to have gained: the ability to critique a discourse that would silence

them so that they can speak from that silence if they choose to. Encouraging students to recognize how they are constructed by language need not be a disempowering or painful experience; instead, it leaves us open to new possibilities within academic discourse.

Perhaps the best way to end a discussion that seeks to celebrate fragmentation is with the example with which I began: Mahesh’s autobiography. Mahesh’s autobiography describes how painful realizing his difference from accepted discourses was, particularly academic discourse, because his sense of a gay self was never validated in any of these realms. He has no language with which to speak his difference: "The older I get, the quieter I become. I recoil into my self. I know I am different, but I don’t know how to articulate the difference. . . I become a loner"

(my emphasis). Throughout his text, Mahesh consistently represents "myseir as two

separate words, indicating his awareness of the alterity between his identity and the

multiplicity that defines this supposedly unified self. Finding an external validation

for his marginalized self, however, has astounding consequences for Mahesh: "My

silence is killing me. Insanity that would have burst and devoured me had I not

stumbled upon Thom Gunn/Jimmy Sommerville/David Hockney. . .1 savor their

words/pictures. My flesh tingles. Cliches but I am eighteen. I feel relieved. I feel

sane.” 316 Receiving a validation for his sense of alterity and seeing a reflection of his self in texts allows Mahesh to begin achieving control over that which is trying to oppress him. In particular, he discusses using a Gates-like subversion of language through which he re-interprets a term of oppression by defining it within an alternative discourse. The term "faggot" existed for Mahesh as something which he could not use to name himself because it was inaccurate: "I cannot call myself faggot.

I am not a faggot. I am my self, I am not my self. I deny my self." Rather than accept the alterity between the term and his self, Mahesh accepts the term but not the definition. His text suggests that by using the term within his cultural experience, it becomes something different, much like Gates describes AMcan-American riietoric as changing the accepted signification of a signifier:

I say faggot silently. I mouth the word. Endlessly. It is difficult to say. Whenever my friends said faggot, I would scream don’t use that word. My ears hurt. My heart aches. I stand in front of the mirror. I try to shout. . . the word. My voice chokes. I laugh. Then suddenly I am saying faggot and laughing, laughing, and faggot faggot faggot. I am calling my self. I am naming me. There is faggot and there is me. I am a faggot. There is strength in that word, and there is strength in me. There is beauty in that word, and there is beauty in what I am. I feel emboldened. I am empowered. I am me. (my emphasis)

Mahesh’s comment that receiving validation for his own sense of fragmentation made him "feel sane" is perhaps the best argument for a pedagogy that seeks to make students aware of the sources and consequences of their differaice.

Mahesh was able to turn a dominant discourse in upon itself by re-defining a part of its language through another subjectivity’s perspective and lived experience. That he was able to accomplish such resistance on is his own is remarkable, yet most of the 317 autobiographies I discuss here tell us that resistance rarely comes on its own. Instead, if we hope to encourage it in the institution, pedagogical practice must change.

Conclusion: The Promise o f Pedagogy

The hope for a multicultural pedagogy lies in making a space within the institution through which difference can be validated. Such validation, however, cannot come only through reading multicultural texts or giving lip service to other perspectives as many "multicultural" pedagogies currently do. Instead, a multicultural pedagogy must also deal with the complexity of discursively-constructed identity.

Without this component, academic discourse will continue to exercise its will to knowledge, a will that all too often totalizes its (student) subjects.

In fact, in a recent classroom ethnography, Amy Goodbum and Beth Ina demonstrate how multicultural pedagogies frequently fail precisely because of the students’ belief in a unified, autonomous self. In a collaborative assignment in Ina’s class, she asked students to use "personal stories" to talk about gender issues. The assignment asked the students to analyze how the differences in their stories emerge from the way "socially determined differences influence and construct the ways they can relate to each other and to society" (7). The collaborative writing group

Goodbum and Ina discuss, however, never engaged in this analysis because of the students’ belief that "personal writing functions as an unmediated expression of self"

(8). In sum, Goodbum and Ina assert that the students subverted Ina’s multicultural goals for the assignment because of their perception that language emerges from an authentic self. Even in its use of collaboration and explicit consideration of gender 318 issues, Ina’s pedagogy did not result in creating a space for difference to be expressed. By defining writing "as an extension and expression of an essential

‘self," the students perceived any analysis of difference as "a violation of someone else’s identity" (12-13).

Although Goodbum and Ina’s discussion centers on "personal" writing, their

observations point to the necessity of subverting academic discourse’s construction of

a belief in the individual. Without deconstructing the specifics of the technology by

which academic discourse’s power is exerted, even the best intentioned multicultural

pedagogies seem doomed to failure. On the other hand, creating a venue through

which (student) subjects can recognize what is silenced by academic discourse’s claim

to knowledge seems to offer one powerful way to subvert the strength of the

discourse’s will to knowledge because it plays the game of truth on the discourse’s

terms.

This aspect of resistance-its need to start with the specifics of academic

discourse’s technology—is what frequently goes unrecognized even by compositionists

calling for a pedagogy based on multiple subjectivities. Recommending a pedagogy

that gives students agency by recognizing their multiple subjectivities is not enough

(e.g., Clifford; Trimbur, "Postmodern"). Students are not prepared to recognize

these subjectivities or to see why speaking from them would serve a useful purpose.

Without discussing how multiple subjectivities can subvert a power that seeks to

oppress them, students will only continue to pursue a route that seemingly guarantees

their success. Resistance, thus, must be presented as better or equal to the "care for 319 self academic discourse seems to represent. What the autobiographies and my own students’ experiences point to is not only the pervasiveness of the belief in autonomy but also how implicit is the power it gives to academic discourse. Unless pedagogy addresses this autonomy head on and teaches students to think "otherwise," our goal of letting difference speak and be valued in the academy will be undermined by academic discourse’s will to knowledge.

There is significant power in learning to think "otherwise." As one of my students puts it in his student evaluation, "after this course, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think about language in the same way. This course totally changed my thinking." Although I cannot know how this student acted upon his "changed thinking," Stephanie and Mahesh’s experiences suggest that such "thinking otherwise" could create a powerful site of resistance. A key element to enacting resistance is the recognition of multiplicity within the same institution that seeks to erase or submerge

feelings of difference. As we saw with Tanya, attempting to maintain a fragmented

self—illustrated nowhere more clearly than in Tanya’s dual personas of Tanya and

Elizabeth-may not in itself provide the ability to resist unification in academic

discourse. If the subject still believes that she is in control of the discourses she

speaks, her belief in autonomy subverts her own attempt at resistance.

Tanya tried to resist her belief in an autonomous self by creating two

autonomous selves. Yet assuming both selves would be allowed to speak whenever

she chose to invoke one or the other results in the partial submergence of the Tanya

persona. As Tanya puts it in her interview, "Tanya rarely has control in public 320 anymore." It is the institutional realm where the Tanya persona loses her ability to speak precisely because the institution recognizes neither the ability to speak from multiple subjectivities nor the reality of a fragmented self. Acknowledging Tanya’s fragmentation could have prevented Elizabeth from gaining control in the discursive realm Tanya has chosen for her career. In fact, Tanya, a scholar in composition herself, recently told me that her immersion in discourse theory has made her recognize how academic discourse encourages her to de-value other perspectives and sources of knowledge. As she put it in a recent conference paper:

Before I discovered that I had been socially-programmed through an ideology and epistemology which excluded me, I felt my emotional nature which is part of my gender and race was something to be ashamed of. My occasional need to vent anger or frustration at the top of my lungs was viewed as a lack of control, and my inability to remember names, dates, important historical battles, chemistry formulas, and lines of poetry was viewed as a lack of intelligence. However, now I have gained personal, social, and academic power through my understanding of my exclusion, my silence, and my difference.

Before this realization, Tanya had told me that she rarely discussed how she attempted to maintain two personas because "people would think I was crazy"

(interview). At the very least, a pedagogy that acknowledges fragmentation would let students like Tanya, Mahesh, and Stephanie feel sane. I hope it would also help students like Charlie and Denzel feel less tom about pursuing higher education. At the most, although this may be presuming too much, the pedagogy would provide a site of resistance that might very well help re-constitute academic discourse in such a way that different perspectives, ways of knowing, and alternative "truths" are not only valued but also seen as viable—and valuable-sources of knowledge. The effect 321 of valuing alternative knowledge is impossible to foresee, but if we believe in multiculturalism, we must also assume that such a change is invaluable and quite possibly a pre-requisite to the "new world order" we keep hearing so much about.

If we are to attain these goals, however, our search for a multicultural pedagogy cannot stop with the suggestions I’ve put forth. The very nature of resistance suggests that it must be continuous. Seeking to resist the power of discourse must be a life’s work because resistance only remains radical for a brief moment. Completely radical change, whereby one escapes the power of discourse, is impossible in a discursively-constituted world. There is never a complete departure from power and the discourses that embody it. Instead, because the sites of resistance exist within discourse, they are thus subject to its power as well. What was once resistance quickly becomes reified into a slightly altered power dynamic. That which was once "other" to the discourse becomes encompassed by it so that the discourse can control its manifestation. In other words, the discourse co-opts resistance, changing the technology of its power so that such resistance no longer threatens its execution.

Perhaps the clearest example of this co-option is feminist criticism in English studies. The power of feminist readings to resist academic discourse by making the previously silenced overt is quickly co-opted as a new type of knowledge. Feminist readings become "normal" within the discourse, allowing academic discourse to claim province over the way such knowledge is expressed. As a result, many academic feminists continue to voice another perspective, although they do so in terms already 322 laid out by the discourse. Feminism becomes just another hermeneutic method among many. Rather than deconstructing other hermeneutic methods which silence the feminine, feminism is rendered neutral by becoming a viable option alongside that which it would critique. What was once a seemingly radical resistance, such as

Gilbert and Gubar’s groundbreaking Madwoman in the Attic, becomes part of the history of knowledge controlled by a discourse that now claims province over it.

Academic discourse relies on its exclusive claim to knowledge in order to exercise its power. As a result, when other forms of knowledge become attractive to enough people, the discourse changes to include them. In this way, its will to knowledge can include the "other" and not be disrupted. Further, the change executed within the discourse is only enough to prevent the destruction of its power to incite humans to its knowledge.

Despite the inevitability of such a neutralization by the discourse, the history of feminism in the academy also speaks to the promise of resistance. The discourse does change in order to bring in the silenced. Its power never ceases, but the forms that power takes can be altered. Such alterations, of course, become new forms of power, but the reality of such co-option should not lead to despair. Instead, resistance must be an on-going process, defined by continual discomfort with whatever "truth" seems evident at a specific moment. Feminists in the academy seem to have realized the inevitability of constant critique as they seek to resist in multiple ways. The new radical—the personal prose of Jane Thompkins, the circular writing of

Cixous—will most likely develop into yet another codification of knowledge, but my 323 hope is that this codification will lead feminists in a new direction, looking for yet other spaces through which to mount our resistance.

It is just this on-going resistance that I hope can be encouraged by multicultural pedagogies. No one pedagogy will ever remain the route to resistance and change. Instead, pedagogies and resistances must be multiple and context-bound.

As one form of resistance becomes co-opted into the discourse, we need to re-evaluate our position and return to critique, constantly searching to define the multiple ways in which discourse seeks to control its subjects. For teachers, particularly teachers of discourse, our goal should be to examine academic discourse for its effect on

(student) subjects. We will never be able to define the totality of academic discourse

nor all the strategies it embodies to produce knowledge and human subjects; however,

we can seek to define that which our position at different points in time allows us to

see. As scholars, we have a commitment to producing knowledge, and this

production includes trying to uncover what forms of knowledge our commitment to

the institution allows us to ignore. As teachers, we have an equal commitment to

helping our students engage in the same process. It is this sense of critique,

articulate, resist, then critique, articulate, resist again that I believe leads Foucault to

characterize himself primarily as a teacher. In a late interview, Foucault eschews the

claim to knowledge others give him: "I am not a writer, a philosopher, a great figure

of intellectual life: I am a teacher" ("Truth, Power, SelP 9).

Our role as teachers, if we seek to value difference, then, means accepting the

contradiction inherent in our own positions. As a teacher, I am inevitably an 324 authoritative voice of "truth" at the same time I try to resist believing in any singular idea of truth. Becoming too comfortable with established knowledge only undercuts

our commitment to producing knowledge. Similarly, believing too much in the

effectiveness and goals of our pedagogies prevents us hrom examining how those

pedagogies may not be serving our students. We must exist in a moment of

commitment to some reality in order to act productively in the world, but we must

also realize that such a momentary affirmation will only, and inevitably, be transitory.

In sum, being a teacher, for me, is being a reader of my culture, including the

institutional one, and learning to live with the paradox of my situation.

In short, the only constant in the search for a multicultural pedagogy is

struggle. The only truly multicultural pedagogy, then, is one that not only allows for

critique within the classroom but also keeps effecting itself to critique. CHAPTER VI

AFTERWORD

This dissertation—at least according to the conventions of the institution—has already concluded, yet the questions it raises demand something more of its writer: something more self-reflective and explorative. I began this dissertation by admitting that it seeks to explain my own history as well as that of my students, but in the process of writing it, I seem to have erased my "self* from the pages of this text.

Instead, the self that speaks this dissertation appears to be singular: a voice which emerges only from my academic subjectivity. Any sense of my own literacy autobiography seems to have been lost. This afterword, then, is my attempt to explain how the investigation discussed in the previous pages has helped me understand my own history.

Realizing that a belief in the unified self is at the root of academic discourse’s ability to put other cultural perspectives under erasure has led me to understand why I find it so difficult to escape the academic subjectivity that speaks this dissertation.

Making a space for other voices—letting myself speak from other subjectivities-is very difficult for me in an academic text because my academic voice is the only one that seems to feel "authentic" anymore. My own belief in a unified self has let me, with the help of twenty-five years writing and speaking in school, successfully ignore

325 326 any other subjectivities, particularly those related to class and gender that seem to have no place within the institution. There is little doubt in my mind that I have interiorized academic discourse’s perspective so fully that my ability to sense the alterity between my self and this subjectivity has been subverted. Never having other

"selves" validated in an academic context has forced me to suppress other perspectives whenever they surface. Similarly, being rewarded for the self that speaks through an academic subjectivity has only reinforced the effectiveness and value of this suppression.

However, like Mary and Barbara, whose autobiographies express frustration over losing the ability to access a gendered or working-class subjectivity, I too have had to pay a price for my success in the academy. "Suppression" implies that these perspectives are active yet silenced. My continual immersion in academic discourse has forced these subjectivities, instead, to exist under erasure, making themselves present only in their absence—and the loss I feel as a result of that absence.

I have learned over the years what cannot and should not be spoken within academic discourse and, as a result, have attained success within the institution. I can still recall the times when my working-class perspective was devalued. I remember how the students and professor reacted in a composition seminar when I attempted to present another cultural perspective on illiteracy. I tried to discuss why illiteracy was not as disempowering as our readings made it sound by discussing a close Aunily friend’s productive role in society-despite his illiteracy. I further recall the professor in an American literature class who authoritatively declared that "there is no working- 327 class in the U.S. that wants to identify itself as such like there is in Great Britain."

His reaction when I tried to speak from my own working-class experience was to move on as if I had not spoken, teaching me perhaps most clearly the value of silencing this perspective. My lived experiences in another cultural scene were not considered a valuable source of knowledge in these contexts. (But I shouldn’t be telling you all this. It’s too confessional, too anecdotal. Shouldn’t I be forging some wonderful, logical argument about the need for a multicultural pedagogy?)

So, I stopped talking about my experiences. I actually began to think that they should be interpreted differently. Illiteracy was a social problem to be eradicated.

The U.S. had no social classes. I was crazy to think that we did. As friends pointed out, I was living proof of the American dream; I was not working in a factory or as a housewife with hordes of children. (Although in a recent phone conversation with my father, he told me he thought I’d be "happier” in the latter situation. Perhaps I would be.) I had moved out of the working class, living proof that others could too.

But I didn’t want to move out of the working class. I still thought there were things about it that made more sense than this new "reality" did. I knew academic literacy wasn’t necessary for successful participation in society. I knew too many people maldng contributions who were "un"educated. I also knew that "book" knowledge was not the only knowledge that counted. My father, I still believe(d), is one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met, even though he doesn’t have the degrees to certify that intelligence that society expects. But then I didn’t know how to say this anymore at that time. Didn’t think it mattered, so I forgot it. 328 I now knew what counted. My arguments became grounded in texts. I began to think that "ideas" only counted if they were sanctioned by the institution.

Abstraction was better than the concrete. The way to make a difference in the world was through the quality of my ideas, not the efficacy of my actions.

About two years ago, I was ready to quit graduate school again and talked with one of my professors about it. I was becoming increasingly frustrated with this

"life of the mind," feeling that if I truly wanted to make a change in education, I should return to teaching in an inner-city school system where I could see immediate results with real students. His response was to ask me a question. He told me that if

I could answer "yes" to his question, then I belonged in the academy. He asked if I thought ideas mattered. Since my response was "yes, ideas matter," I remained in my Ph.D. program. That I, a child of working-class parents, could answer "yes" is a testament in itself to how much I had changed.

But my answer was/is also "no," although I couldn’t, at the time, make any

sense of the part of me that wanted to say "no." I still had/have a problem-a result

of my working-class subjectivity making itself present-with valuing "work" (ideas)

that doesn’t produce anything tangible. Since I couldn’t validate this answer—after

all, another part of me believes intellectual work is real, if not tangible-I didn’t

believe it was a "real" answer.

What the literacy autobiographies and the theory they’ve helped me articulate

have taught me, however, is that "real" answers can come from many places. Being

unable to validate them within the rules of academic discourse only makes them more 329 powerful. What was previously a source of discomfort and frustration—and led to submerging "other" perspectives—can be a source of power. Throughout my schooling I believed that these perspectives were at the root of my inadequacies as a student. I now hope that I can learn to voice these perspectives as a source of critique.

There are some perspectives lost forever, however, because we, as a country, participated in their erasure. The part of me that is my Iroquois heritage can only be a void. Never having been told I was part Iroquois until adulthood and never having been exposed to that part of my heritage makes this part of my self only an absence that laments something she never had and can never have because of the desecration of the Six Nations.

Despite these irretrievable absences, I want to gain the power—the power that

Stephanie, Tanya, and Mahesh seem to have-not only of being aware of my other subjectivities but also speaking them in academic discourse in a way that can change the discourse. The others in me no longer want to be silent.

Enacting such resistance, however, is difficult for me. I have been identified with academic discourse for perhaps too long. As a result, whenever I approach schooled writing, my academic self begins to speak in what seems to be a natural voice. I easily suppress any other perspectives that question this voice’s authority because I have been rewarded for doing so for so long that any other way of writing or speaking in the academy seems almost an impossibility. Yet this suppression makes me angry. Trying to talk about what beliefs I’ve gained through another 330 cultural subjectivity, even what little I’ve been able to do here, has been incredibly difficult. It took over ten drafts, and innumerable cups of coffee and packs of cigarettes. Not only do I feel it’s inappropriate to talk about such personal experiences in an institutional document, I wasn’t sure I had anything to say.

Perhaps were I exposed to a pedagogy that valued these other perspectives, my current attempts to voice them would not be so difficult. Despite the struggle ahead, however, I need to keep trying. I can no longer rest easy with the loss I feel. I can no longer keep submerging the sense that I am two, three, four people at once. What doing this research has given me is the conviction that I do not have to submerge these feelings in order to continue to be successful in the academy. I am beginning to see that it is possible, as Irigaray puts it, to inscribe heterogeneity.

It is this conviction I want to give to my students, for we can no longer afford not to give them such a conviction. I wish I had known this when a student in Boston told me that what my writing class was trying to do was make him white. I didn’t know what that meant, didn’t know that he was trying to speak his fragmentation.

Now I do. Despite its academic nature, then, this entire text is an attempt to tell that student that it’s okay to feel pulled between knowing he needs to be in school and believing that school will somehow change him. It’s not only okay to feel that conflict, but also to feel that there’s something he can do about it. This student needed to know-as I too need(ed) to know-that academic literacy does not have to force a choice between cultures. 331

I wish I could have told him that learning a new way of speaking and writing did not have to become a betrayal of his identity. Unfortunately, unless we find a way to change the way academic discourse works, that wouldn’t have been and isn’t true. But students like this one, or like I was/am, can’t wait any longer for a change. APPENDIX A

LETTER TO BASIC WRITING TEACHERS

332 333

February 11, 1992

To: English 100 & 101 Teachers

From: Donna LeCourt

RE: Literacy Autobiographies

As some of you may already know, I am working on a dissertation that uses the literacy autobiographies of basic writers and graduate students as its primary data source. I know many of you have moved to literacy "biographies" recently, but I’d like to ask those of you still assigning autobiographies, or who have done so in the past and saved them, for your help.

I am trying to collect approximately 30 of these texts by basic writers (ideally from two classes total) and would like to know if I can talk to your class about using their texts and/or get the names of people whose texts you still have to ask their permission to use them. If you are using literacy autobiographies now or have done so, could you please drop me a note or call me at The Writing Center or at home so we can discuss the details?

The participation of your students is totally voluntary and their anonymity will be protected throughout die research. The only other commitment, besides their text, that I will ask for is the willingness to let me interview them once during Spring quarter. (Not everyone will be interviewed, though. Probably only 5-8 from the original 30.)

I know all of you are very busy so I appreciate your taking the time to consider this. I’d also appreciate it if you could let me know if you can help as soon as possible because I’d like to collect all the texts by the end of this quarter.

Thanks in advance for your help! APPENDIX B

PERMISSION SLIP FOR PARTICIPATTON

3 3 4 335

I, ______(print name), give Donna LeCourt permission to use my literacy autobiography written fo r ______(course title and number) at [university name] as part of her dissertation research. I understand that she may follow up on her analysis of the autobiography (and drafts) with a series of interviews.

In either case, I understand that Donna will use a pseudonym and fictional names for any place, event, etc. that may identify me when referring to my writing and/or interview responses. I also understand that her research might also be used in the more public forums of professional conferences and publications and that my interview and/or text will be quoted either partially or in its entirety in any publication.

(please sign here)

(date)

Thanks in advance for your participation! APPENDIX C

LIST OF STUDENTS BY GENDER AND ETHNICITY

336 337

Basic Writing Students

Pseudonym Course # Gender Ethnicity

Aretha (100) Female African-American

Ben (101) Male White^

Bruce (101) Male White

Cassandra (101) Female African-American

Charlie (100) Male White

Dan (101) Male White

Dave (101) Male White

Diane (101) Female White

Denzel (101) Male African-American

Dominic (100) Male Italian-American (3rd gen.)

Joe (101) Male White

Judy (101) Female White

Julie (101) Female White

Latisha (100) Female African-American

LaVonne (100) Female African-American

Lori (100) Female White

Matt (100) Male White

NeU (100) Male White

* *"White" is used here as a generic category for people of European descent who do not designate their ethnicity beyond their race. 338 Nick (101) Male White

Spiro (100) Male Giedc-American (2nd gen.)

Swati (100) Female Indian-American (1st gen.)

Tim (100) Male White

Tom (100) Male White

Todd (101) Male White

Zeeva (100) Female Isradi-American (2nd gen.)

English Graduate Students^

Pseudonym Course # Gender Ethnicity Sexual SoçiQççQPOpiç Orientation Class

Barbara (800) Female White Heterosexual Working

Carole (700) Female White Heterosexual Middle

Cathy (800) Female White Heterosexual Working

Cindy (700) Female White Heterosexual Middle

Stephanie (700) Female White Bi-Sexual Working

Holly (700) Female White Heterosexual Middle

Janet (800) Female White Heterosexual Middle

John (700) Male White Heterosexual Upper-Middle

Kim (700) Female White Heterosexual Middle

Mahesh (700) Male Indian Homosexual Upper

^ Information on the sexual orientation and socioeconomic class of the basic students is unavailable. The designation of a heterosexual orientation may includ who are not "out" yet. The socioeconomic class categories were devised 339 National

Margaret (700) Female White Homosexual Upper-Middle

Mark (800) Male White Homosexual Middle

Mary (700) Female White Heterosexual Middle

Patty (700) Female White Heterosexual Upper-Middle

Rich (700) Male White Heterosexual Upper

Sarah (800) Female White Heterosexual Upper-Middle

Sheila (800) Female White Heterosexual Middle

Stanley (700) Male White Heterosexual Working

Tanya (700) Female African- Heterosexual Working American

Tricia (700) Female White Heterosexual Middle

Vicki (700) Female White Heterosexual Working APPENDIX D

COURSE SYLLABI

3 4 0 341

English 700: Issues of Difference and the Politics of Rhetoric/Composition

Autumn 1991 T,R 9-11

Course Description

This seminar seeks to build on one I offered in the Fall of 1989 on Gender and Writing, a seminar that examined how gender affects the ways in which we read and write as well as the ways we teach reading and writing. The two years following this seminar have produced one of the most bitter debates in recent academic history, one focused on what should (and should not) be taught in Freshman Composition classes and on a larger question of how the University can and should recognize and respond to difference, including the difference represented by gender. Eng 700 will begin by examining the terms of this debate and key articles associated with it. We will then look in more detail at three areas in which difference is at issue in the politics of reading and writing; namely gender, race, and class.

Texts

Susan Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson, eds. Gender in the Classroom. Mike Rose. Lives on the Boundary. Henry Louis Gates. The Signifying Monkev. Richard Bullock and John Trimbur, eds. The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary Course Packet of articles.

Requirements

A Literacy Autobiography One or two group presentations Two summary responses A final project

Course Schedule

Th 9/26 Introduction to the Course

T 10/1 Burke, "Terministic Screens"; Lunsford, "Rhetoric and Composition." Herzberg, "Composition and the Politics of Literacy" fPWD. Literacy Autobiography begun. 342 Th 10/3 "Opening Academia Without Closing It"; "The Real Aim"; "Why Can’t Colleges"; "Politics and Pedagogy"; "E306"; "E306: Chronicle of a Smear Campaign"; "Reworked Writing Course Adopted Quietly at Texas." Group Presentations assigned and scheduled.

T 10/8 Showalter, "The Rise of Gender"; Gabriel and Smithson, Gender in the Classroom.

Th 10/10 Gabriel and Smithson, Gender in the Classroom. Summary/Response #1 due.

T 10/15 Flynn, "Composing ‘Composing as a Woman’"; Flynn, "Composition Studies from a Feminist Perspective" fPWD: Belenl^, "A Conversation with Mary Belenky" (with responses)

Th 10/17 Rakow, "Woman and the Telephone"; Holbrook, "Women’s Work"; Miller, "The Feminization of Composition" (PWD.

T 10/22 Jarratt, "The Case for Conflict"; hooks, "Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy" ; Minh-ha, "Difference." Summary/Response #2 due.

Th 10/24 Seidler, "introduction: Masculinity, Language, and Sexuality"; Catano, "The Rhetoric of Masculinity." Statement regarding final project due.

T 10/29 Kennard, "Ourself behind Ourself"; Bums, "Preface"; Cohen "Are We (Not) What We Are Becoming?"

Th 10/31 Gates. The Signifyinfg) Monkey. Draft of Literacy Autobiography Due.

T 11/5 Gates, The Sienifyin(g) Monkey.

Th 11/7 Hughes, "Theme for English B"; "Indian Rootlessness"; "Blacks Look to Basics"; "Hispanics in Despair"; "The Culture Question"; "World Views"; "Reliance on Multiple-Choice Tests"; Farr and Daniels "The Problem of Writing" and "Language Variation."

T 11/12 Rose. Lives on the Boundary. Literacy Autobiography Due.

Th 11/14 Rose, Lives on the Boundary: Zebroski, "The English Department and SocM Class."

T 11/19 Robinson, "The Politics of Literacy"; Trimbur, "Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis" fPWD: Holzman, "Observations on Literacy" (PWD. 343 Th 11/21 Freire, "The Adult Literacy Process"; Shor, "Educating the Educators"; Fiore and Elasser, "Strangers No More"; Villanueva, "Considerations of American Freireistas" (PWD.

T 11/26 Tompkins, "Pedagogy of the Distressed" (with responses);Brodkey, "On the Subjects of Class and Gender"; Belanoff, "The Generalized Other and Me."

Th 11/28 Thanksgiving. No class.

T 12/3 Bullock, "Autonomy and Community in the Evaluation of Writing" (PWD: Schwegler, "The Politics of Reading Student Papers" (PWD: Wall and Coles, "Reading Basic Writing" (PWD. Final Project Due.

Th 12/5 Last day of class.

English 800: Summer. 1990

Our course is, in the university bulletin, entitled the "Teaching of Remedial College Composition." I prefer to think of it, however, as the "Theory and Practice of Basic Writing," and yet even that title is inaccurate because of what it omits, for example, the history of basic writing (which we will plunge into immediately). Since we will deviate from the investigation our titles suggest, we will, as I see it, undertake several processes of definition this quarter: our course itself (its title, substance, and activities), undergraduate basic writing courses, and basic writers themselves. (Soon, too, we will discuss the implications of the names we choose and use in entitling our courses and identifying our students.)

READING

I have prepared a syllabus of readings for the quarter and have slated some class activities, so let me give you an overview. We will, I anticipate, reshape things as we go along. I see our reading as divided into five areas: history and definitions; the intellectual development of basic writer; pedagogy and students’ writing; error; and if we get to it, assessment. These reflect to some extent my interests but also represent some of the primary issues addressed in the scholarship on basic writing. I expect that each of you will carve out an area of interest to pursue in a final project for the course (a written paper and a class presentation). I have planned for die informal writing you do throughout the quarter to lead into the final project. 344

WRITING

Since I believe that writing is a tool for learning, I want you to write regularly about what you read for class. First, I want you to keep a reading log in which you respond to at least one of the articles (or a section of the book) that is assigned each day. (This will amount to twenty reading logs.) These responses will form the basis for each day’s discussion. In this log, I expect a variety of writing: your first response to a piece (confusion, agreement, anger, boredom, piqued interest, etc.); summaries; discussion with yourself, with your reading group, with the class about a point of continuing interest; position statements; and so forth. (I do not mean that each entry must include all of these; rather that you will have a variety of entries.) I will collect these periodically, but by the end of July, I would like some of the entries probably three) to be revised into more formal position statements that you will submit for a grade. The statements should be shor (one page) and may synthesize your responses to several articles as well as class discussions. I would also like you to keep in a journal your on-going thoughts on two matters: 1) a record of your recollections of pat and current experiences that have had an effect on your reading and writing and 2) a developing record of what you know about basic writers and the theory and practice surrounding them in America’ colleges and universities. (One entry per week on each topic is sufficient.) I expect the first record to be useful for us as we try to develop a theory of reading and writing for students whose experiences may or may not have been like our own. The second should become very quickly a record of what you know and what else you would like to know about basic writing. If it does, it will lead you to formulate a questions (or several) to explore for the final project. The final paper will be an extended investigation (ten to twenty pages) of an issue related to basic writing, it may be a theoretical question, a question of practice, a question that requires classroom observation to answer, or something else. YOu will show me what’s possible through our developing discussions in class and in writing.

SPEAKING

Once we get started, I would like groups or individual to be responsible for class discussions each day. We can decide whether we want to have formal presentations, interactive dialogues, or something else that I cannot think of right now. I would also like each of you to make an oral report on your final project.

CLASS SCHEDULE

Our class meetings will be compressed into eight weeks instead of spanning the usual ten. As a result, we will meet on four (possibly five) Fridays, and the class will not met between August 13-24 (the last two weeks of the quarter). Final rqx>rts and oral presentations will be due during finals week (August 27-31), when we may meet for a long session during the evening. (You should plan to settle on a topic by very early in 345 August so that we can use the first two weeks of the month to confer about your projects, look at rough drafts, etc.)

READINGS

Kinkos packet

Errors and Expectations. Shaughnessy

Lives on the Boundary. Rose

Facts. Artifacts. Counterfacts. Bartholomae and Petrosky

A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers. Enos, ed.

When a Writer Can’t Write. Rose, ed. (optional)

English 800 Summer, 1990 Readings

Thursday, 6/21

Nineteenth Century History of Composition Instruction Kitzhaber Contemporary (almost) Stories of Basic Writing Programs Bruffee, Roskelly

Friday, 6/22

Historical Perspectives on Literacy Kaestle, Resnick and Resnick

Tuesday, 6/26 History Continued: Toward a Definition of Basic writing/Basic Writers Armstrong and Fontaine; Rose, "Language of Exclusion"; Troyka, "Literacy and Legacies"

English 800: Summer. 1991

In this course, "Theory and Practice of Basic Writing," I will ask you to acquaint yourselves witfi some of the scholarship and research on basic writing as well as with what I think are sound pedagogical methods of writing instruction. While this course is the prerequisite for a graduate teaching appointment in the [basic writing program], the purpose of the course extends beyond preparing teachers for [the university’s] basic 346 writing program. Additionally, the purpose is to lay the foundation for future research in basic writing, should you choose to pursue such projects. The topics we’ll focus on in our reading, writing, and class activities are these:

History of composition and the place of basic writing in that history. Literacy, Collaborative learning/individual writing processes Basic writers and their texts, Reading and writing, and Theoretical and general views on basic writing pedagogy and research.

Throughout the course, we will continually try to understand who basic writers are, what characterizes their writing, and what the classification, "basic writing,” designates. While teaching needs may seem to motivate such questions (e.g. who will I see in my basic writing courses, what can I expect these students to do?), I hope we will create a broader perspective by questioning the cultural and political and institutional forces that influence the designation of some students "basic," "developmental," or "remedial" writers. My hope is that you will each have some familiarity with the field of composition. If you do not, you should quickly read the Bedford history of composition, try to acquaint yourself with composition studies over the last twenty years, and expect to feel a little lost as you delve into a discourse of terms, scholars, and such that are new. The pace of our course will be intense since we are condensing ten weeks’ worth of work into eight. If what I have outlined is an unworkable schedule, please let your final projects to be completed by August 9, but I am open to alternatives—as long as I have seen at least a proposal or a draft of the projects by then.

TEXTS

Bartholomae and Petrosky, Facts. Artifacts, and Counterfacts Enos, A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers Farr and Daniels, Language Diversity and Writing Instruction Rose, Lives on the Boundary Kinko’s packet

ASSIGNMENTS

My plans now are for you to complete the following assignments for class, in addition to the readings:

Literacy Autobiography (Drafts and Final Version) Occasional, In-Class Group Activities Two, Shor, Written Analyses of Class Activities (either or both of which may be collaboratively written) Guidance of Class Discussion 347 (Meet with Me in Advance with your plans) Final Project, Choice of Two Options: 1) Collection of Class Writing, Anthologized and Including Editorial Comment, or 2) Annotated Bibliography of Works on Basic Writing (Due August 9, tent.)

W EEK l: June 24-28

Monday: Introductions Review Syllabus Discuss Class Goals and Structures Group Research on the Field of Basic Writing In-Class Activity

Wednesday: Read for Today: Reagan, "Putting Theory into Practice. . ." (in packet) In-class Activities on Active Learning and Literacy

Friday: Read for Today: "Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing" (closed reserve); Lunsford, "Politics and Practices. . ." (in Sourcebook^ In-class Activity

WEEK 2: July 1-5

Mon: Read for Today: Resnick and Resnick, "The Nature of Literacy" (packet); Farr and Daniels, Chapters 1 & 2 ("The Problems of Writing in American Education" and "Language Variation and Literacy") Discuss Resnicks and Farr and Daniels In-class Activity

Wed: Read for Today: 101 syllabus First Draft of Literacy Autobiography Due in Class In-class Activities

Fri: Read for Today: Trimbur, "Collaborative Learning. . . " (Packet); Smit, "Some Difficulties with Collaborative Learning" (packet); Schneider, "Collaborative Learning. . ." (packet) Discuss Articles In-class Activities 348

WEEKS: July 8-12

Mon: Read for Today: Rose, Lives on the Boundary Discuss Rose and Synthesize with Previous Class Readings and Discussions

Wed: Second Draft of Literacy Autobiography Due in Class Group Activities (Collaborative/Individual Reports Due Friday)

Fri: View Video (Mike Rose) Write Collaborative Report on the Video in Class. Expand Reports from Wednesday; Hand in Today.

WEEK 4: July 15-19

Mon: Composing Individually DUE TODAY: Final Draft of Literacy Autobiography Read for Today: Perl, "A Look at Basic Writers. . ." (Packet); Sommers, "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" fSourcebookl: Optional: Perl, "The Composing Process of Unskilled College Writers" (Sourcebook) Retrospective Look at Composing Processes Discuss Perl and Sommers

Wed: Read for Today: Perl, "The Process of Creative Discovery. . ." (packet); Shaughnessy, "Syntax" (closed reserve); Student Writing (Roberta) Group Activity Analyzing Revision

Fri: Read for Today: Coles, "Empowering Revision" (FAC) Continue Group Activity; Report on Revision Analysis

WEEK 5: July 22-26

Mon: Read for Today: Lees, "Proofreading as Reading, Error as Embarrassments" (Sourcebook): Hull, "Acts of Wonderment: Fixing Mistakes and Correcting Errors" (FAQ

Wed: Read for Today: Salvatori, "Reading and Writing a Text: Correlations Between Reading 349 and Writing Patterns," (Sourœbook): Salvatori, "The Dialogic Nature of Basic Reading and Writing" (FAQ; Ede, "On Writing Reading and Reading Writing" (packet)

Fri: Read for Today: Greenberg, "Research on Basic Writers: Theoretical and Methodological Issues," (Sourcebook) Group Activity on Research Projects in Basic Writing Use Group-Generated Material to begin Final Project

WEEK 6; July 29 - August 2

Mon: Read for Today: Barholomae and Petrosky, FAC. Chapter 1 "Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: A Basic Reading and Writing Course for the College Curriculum;" English 99/100 Syllabus Activity on Student Writing? Proposal for Final Project Due

Wed: Read for Today: Bartholomae, "Inventing the University," (packet); Wall, "Writing, Reading and Authority: A Case Study," (FAC): Brodkey, "On the Subjects of Class and Gender. . ." (packet); Rouse, "Scenes from the Writing Workshop[" (packet)

WEEK 7; August 5-9

CATCH-UP, As Necessary FINAL PROJECTS DUE

English 101 - Smith

Texts: The Heart o f a Woman by Maya Angelou

Kinko’s Packet

A Writer’s Reference by Diane Hacker (optional)

Materials: Two DS, DD (double-sided, double-density) diskettes; A double-pocket folder in which you can turn in al your work at the end of the quarter

English courses have a reputation for focusing on grammar or great works of literature. This is a course that would like to challenge that assumption. Have you ever thought about the language of your daily life? What about the language that batters our 350 sense every day, from the sports page to testimonials to rap music? This course aims to explore the power and force of the written and spoken communication we encounter each day. Perhaps there is more to these forms than meets the eye. Do you speak differently with one group of people than yo do with another group? Do you use :code words" in your community that an outsider might not understand? Even in a culture like ours that speaks one language, there are many "languages" that operate. Most of us are part of many "discourse communities" as they are called, and in this course we will investigate the nature of language and community by doing an intense amount of reading and writing and by sharing our work with each other. All of the work we do this quarter will help you develop the kind of independent, critical thinking that is crucial to the kind of reading and writing that will be useful to you in your future college career and outside of the academic community.

Writing Assignments: To complete this course, you will write four major essays. Each of these essays will be taken through multiple drafts and you will receive feedback from your classmates and your teacher as you work. All final drafts must be typed (use 1" margins all around), and each essay should be three to six pages in length.

Reading Assignments/Journals: Each reading assignment will lead to an informal writing assignment that will allow you to express your opinions about readings in a candid and honest manner. After every reading, you are expected to write a response that is about one-and-a-half to two pages in length (either typed or handwritten). Your responses should allow you to form a tentative opinion about reading assignments before class begins; in this way, the responses will help you participate in class discussion. In addition, you will find that as the term progresses, it will get easier and easier for you to quickly express yourself in writing, which is a skill you will continue to develop and rely upon throughout your college experience. The responses are due on the day that we discuss a reading and will be collected at the end of class. Responses written during class defeat the purpose of the response and inhibit you from participating in class discussion and will not be accepted.

I suggest that you write your response soon after reading the assignment because the reading will then be fresh in your mind. You can respond to the subject matter of the reading assignment by agreeing or disagreeing with a point the writer makes; you can raise questions concerning the subject matter, and you can even take a shot at answering your own questions. Feel free to respond to any issue that touches or disturbs you on a personal level, for these will by your most powerful responses. The more sophisticated responses will draw connections between your reading assignments and/or class discussions. Drawing connections between your reading assignments in your responses will also allow you to use your responses as a source for your final paper.

These response will not be graded with a letter grade; they will instead receive a numerical score from one to five. I will base the scores solely on the content of your responses, not on grammatical concerns. What I want to see in your responses is an 351 active engagement with the issues raised in the readings. Sometimes, I will ask you to write journals in class or on topics other than the readings.

Throughout the quarter, please turn in your work in a folder with your name on it. Also, please hang on to any papers that I return to you because you must turn in all your work at the end of the quarter to receive credit for the course. (You may pick up your folders during Spring Quarter.)

Writing Groups: In this class, you will become a member of a writing group which will meet with an upperclass tutor once a week in the Writing Center in [address] for independent discussions of writing projects. You will also work with this group frequently in class, and you will need to meet with your group members occasionally on your own outside of class. You will receive two additional credit hours for this activity.

Presentation: During week six of the quarter, groups will give a short presentation on something that shows a connection between literacy and lives. I would like to see people bring in non-traditional texts (song-lyrics, memos from an ofRce, pamphlets, excerpts from speeches, etc.) and show the inner-workings of such a document, (more on this later)

Attendance: Because so much of this class depends upon all of us working together, your regular attendance is required. In the case of a true emergency where an absence is unavoidable, call me immediately. If you choose to miss more than three classes, I will send a note to your advisor. If you miss more than six classes, you may receive and "F" for the course. Please talk to me before it’s too late if you begin to accumulate absences. I want to make this class a place where you are challenged to think and work hard, but I also want to create an atmosphere where you fee safe, relaxed, and welcome. However, please note that I will be more relaxed and welcoming if you are on time for class every day. If you are repeatedly late for class, you may be counted as absent.

Computers: This section of 101 is a computer section, which means you will be asked to learn and use the Macintosh wordprocessing system. While we won’t use the computers daily, you are expected to become familiar with them as quickly as possible and to use them for all the writing you hand in for this course, unless otiierwise specified.

Grading Scale:

Writing Assignment 1 10% Writing Assignment 2 15% Writing Assignment 3 15% Writing Assignment 4 20% Class Participation 352 (presentation, group work, etc.) 15% Journals 15% Midterm 5% Final Exam 5% 100%

Submitting Papers:

All papers must be turned in on time, in class, on the days that they are due. I do not accept late papers or late assignments unless you speak to me the day before it’s due and provide what I consider a reasonable explanation. If you are not in class on the day an assignaient is due or is being worked on, and "F" will be recorded for that day.

Plagiarism:

Plagiarism, stealing ideas and/or the words of another person and representing them as your own, is not permitted at [this university] and is considered a serious offense. Although I encourage you to read and share your writing assignments with others, the work you submit is finally your own (or your group’s if you are writing collaboratively). Penalties for plagiarism range from failing the course to being dismissed from the university, after appearing before the University Committee on Academic Misconduct. Do not take the risk! While you are at [this university], it is a good idea to do your work in advance and discuss with your instructor any difficulties yo have in understanding what might constitute plagiarism.

Grievances

If you have a complaint about any aspect of this class, please discuss the problem with me first so that I can be aware of the problem and try to solve it. If you need to, though, you may see the Director or Assistant Director of the [Basic Writing Program].

Day-by-Day Syllabus

(for the period up to and including the date the final draft of the literacy autobiography was due)

January 6 In Class: Introductions and Diagnostic Essay

Focused Freewriting: Describe the earliest experience with writing that you remember well enough to write about. Remember, writing does not include only essays that you were assigned in school—think about times when you may have written notes, letters, lists, etc. After you’ve described the experience in great detail reflect upon it a bit: Is your memory of it positive, negative, or neutral? What exactly is it about the experience that makes it a good or bad memory? 353 For Wednesday: Read "Twenty-five Ways to Start Writing" by Donald Murray and write at least one page of text in response to the following questions:

— What are some characteristics of the writing process you currently use for most school papers?

— Do any of Murray’s ideas seem helpful to you? Why?

— What are some ways in which you think writing with a computer rather than with a pen, pencil, or typewriter could change your writing process?

January 8 DUE: Response to Murray questions

In Class: More Introductions Discuss Murray Begin thinking about what articles/chapters you want to select for the day(s) you lead class discussion

For Friday: Complete Guided Tour of Macintosh

January 10 In Class: Computer Workshop

January 13 DUE: Reading Journal on the "Cocktail Waitress" and "Notes from the Country Club"

In Class: Work in groups on articles. Analyze and discuss the articles from one of the following perspectives:

—Can you distinguish between information in the articles that the authors learned directly from their "informants" and information they learned from experiencing particular situations? do the authors use words to describe the groups of people they are writing about? Are there times when the authors use the "insiders" words?

-Take a close look at how the articles are written. How do the authors take their information and put it into text? How are the pieces organized? Do they sound very objective, subjective, neutral? How would you compar^contrast the ways these articles are written?

-Think about your own experiences as a customer or perhaps as an employee in a bar/restaurant. Does the author’s portrayal of Brady’s Bar seem credible to you? What convinces you of its credibility or makes it seem unrealistic? Can you think of any connections between 354

the way the people associated with the bar function as a group and another group of any sort that you are familiar with?

Each group is responsible for leading the class in a discussion of some aspect of the article.

for Wednesday: (1) Read the prompt for Essay 1 an list at least three groups you might want to write about in you essay, and (2) read Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman (pp. 1 -104) and write a response journal.

January 15 DUE: Response journal toThe Heart of a Woman and ideas for essay 1.

In-class: Sign up for days to lead class discussion-guidelines for leading discussion will be distributed.

Discuss connections between Essay 1 and The Heart o f a Woman, raise questions about Lakoff, discuss the roles of language in a community or group.

Do some Boundary Mapping; that is, brainstorm a visual representation of words, values, behavior that fence in an insider’s turf.

Share maps with class.

Writing Groups will be assigned.

For Friday: Draft of Essay 1 with copies for group members and teacher.

January 17 DUE: Draft of Essay 1 with copies for group members and teacher.

In Class: View Writing Group Videotape. Peer Responding.

For Friday: (1) Write a Writing Group Analysis-Take 20 minutes or so to write about your writing group session. Reflecting on what happened, why, and what you might have done differently (or might do differently next time) can help mate your group as effective as possible. From your point of view, describe in some detail what happened in the group session. What kinds of roles did each person in the group play? (Try to go beyond just labeling the roles; describe what people did in those roles). What could you do differently to make the group function better next time you meet? What might you do to give and get more effective oral and written responses?, (2) read The Heart o f a Woman (pp. 104 - 211) and write a response journal, and (3) write a second draft of Essay 1.

January 20 No Class—Martin Luther King Day!!! 355 January 22 DUE: (1) In your writing groups, take turns reading your essays aloud to the group. After a person reads his or her essay, die other group members should talæ turns offering reactions and responses before the next paper is read. (2) In your groups, come up with at least three questions or comments about the reading from Angelou that you did for today. (3) As a class discuss readings from Angelou, trying to make explicit connections between what Angelou has to say and the writing you are doing for this class.

For Friday: (1) Read Lakoff s "Language Bosses" and (2) Write a self-analysis of changes you made from the first to the second draft of Essay 1. In this analysis, answer the following questions:

— What were the most signif cant kinds of changes you made and what prompted them? — What is it that you want your readers to take away from reading this essay? What do you want them to know or feel? — Does your essay have something that you would call a thesis statement at this point? If so, what is it? Are you satisfied with it? — Which paragraph of your essay do you believe works the best? Why is it successful? Which paragraph is least successful? What might be done to improve it? — Are there specific questions you have aobut any aspects of your essay, including punctuation or sentence structure, that you would like to have answered? If so, what are they?

January 24 DUE: Response journal and self-analysis of draft #2 of Essay 1.

In Class: Discuss assignment for Essay 2 Brainstorm possible questions to ask yourself about your literacy experiences Writing Workshop/Conferences

For Monday: Finish reading The Heart o f a Woman and write a response journal.

January 27 DUE: Final Draft of Essay 1.

In Class: Read final drafts of Essay One and fill out evaluation/response forms Watch videotape of Ophrah Winfrey interviewing Maya Angelou 356 For Friday: Read Mellix’s "From Outside, In"

January 31 DUE: Reading journal for "From Outside, In"

In Class: Discuss Mellix, talk about midterm, question distributed. Writing Workshop/Conferences

For Monday: (1) Take Midterm Exam

February 3 In Class: Midterm Exam

For Wednesday: Draft one of Essay 2 (literacy autobiography)

February 5 DUE: First Draft of Essay 2 (bring copies for you writing group and your teacher)

In Class: Peer response

For Friday: Read Ede and Lunsford "Why Write . . . Together?" and write a response journal.

February 7 Due: Response journal to "Why Write. . . Together?"

In Class: Discuss drafts of essay 2 (Volunteers read their drafts aloud) Talk about collaborative writing Writing Workshop, if time permits

For Monday: Draft 2 of Essay 2 (literacy autobiography)

February 10 Due: Second Draft of Essay 2

In Class: Peer Responding to second draft of essay 2 Begin forming plans for you group’s collaborative letter to future 101 students

For Wednesday: (1) Final Draft of Essay 2 is due, and (2) reread "Notes from a Country Club" (no response journal this time!)

February 12 Due: Final Draft of Essay 2

In Class: Read final drafts and fill out evaluation/response forms Workshop to continue drafting collaborative letter to future 101 students 357 Language Awareness Presentation Assignment introduced. In groups, discuss "Notes from a Country Club" as a sample text that might serve as a basis for you Language Awareness Presentation—groups share findings with the class to begin a discussion.

For Friday: (1) Final Draft of you group’s letter to future 101 students, (2) q>end 30 minutes writing in your journal aobut your group’s dynantics, and (3) bring in a text your group could anadyze for its class presentation

English 100 - Jones

This quarter we will continue our examination of adolescence through both reading and writing. However, our readings will be more abstract, and our discussions will be student-led rather than teacher-led. All of you will be required to assume an active role in class activities. We will still be using a writing workshop model, and you will still be working in assigned groups. Attendance is imperative if you are to stay current with your assignments.

Required Texts:

Knowles, John, A Separate Peace Sheehy, Gail, Passages Mead, Margaret, Coming of Age in Samoa Non-Spiral bound paper Pocket folder

Grading:

Autobiography paper 35% Case Study paper 20% Midterm 10% Final Exam 15% Journals 10% Class Participation 10%

Week 1 Preview of the quarter Discussion of first paper due Introduction to A Separate Peace Read the first half of the novel for next week

Week 2 Group work on autobiographies Student-led discussions on A Separate Peace 358 First Drafts of autobiographies due next week Read second half of A Separate Peace for next week

Week 3 Student-led discussion of A Separate Peace Group sharing of first drafts of autobiographies Introduction to Passages Read first fourth of Passages for next week Second draft of autobiography due next week

Week 4 Group work on autobiography drafts Student-led discussions of Passages Read second fourth of Passages for next week

Week 5 Midterm Group work on autobiographies Student-led discussion of Passages Read third fourth of Passages for next week Final Draft of autobiographies due next week

Week 6 Autobiographies due on Monday Corrected Autobiographies due on Wednesday Student-led discussion of Passages Read last fourth of Passages for next week

W eek? Final Discussion of Passages Preparation for case studies paper Discussion of class book Introduction of Coming of Age in Samoa

W eeks Work on first draft of the case study paper Student-led discussion of Coming of Age in Samoa Read second half of Coming of Age in Samoa for next week

Week 9 Group work on second draft of case study paper Student-led discussion of Coming of Age in Samoa 359

Week 10 Case Study papers due on Monday Corrected papers due on Wednesday Discussion of final exam topic Course evaluation

Week 11 Final Exam APPENDIX E

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

3 6 0 361

General Information Questions for Basic Writers

1. Do you feel comfortable with writing papers for college? Why or why not?

2. Does college writing feel different than other school writing (e.g. high school)? How?

3. When you’re at home with your family are the ways you talk different than with other people or in school? How?

4. How do you tell a story with your friends? with your family? Would the way you tell it be different in class discussion or if you wrote it in a paper? How?

5. Has being in college for a year changed the way you feel when talking to your family or friends? How? Is there something you feel is difficult to communicate that might not have been a year ago, for example?

6.How would you describe your relationship to reading and writing?

7. Do you feel like the way you write is part of who you are? Explain, (or is it something different, doesn’t seem like you on paper?)

8. What thoughts do you associate with literacy? with writing?

General Information Questions for Graduate Students

1. Why did you choose to pursue an advanced degree in English? What is it about the study of English that drew you to it?

2. What is your definition of literacy? How do you apply that to yourself?

3. How would you describe your relationship to language?

4. Do you like to write? Describe how writing makes you feel.

5. When you write does it feel like you on the page or someone else? Does this change with the type of writing you’re doing?

6. Do you ever feel there are times when you want to express something but that there are no words for it? Describe such an instance.

7. What is the language of your home background like? Describe a) how’d they’d tell a story? b) conduct an argument? 362

8. Do you feel as if your literacy education has changed your relationship to your home language at all? In what ways,or why not?

9. Describe a time when you felt totally in sync with a text (your own or someone else’s).

10. Describe a time when you felt distanced by a text (your own or someone else’s).

Background Questions for Basic Writers

1. Age

2. Rank in School

3. Race/Ethnicity

4. Generation

5. What do your parents do?

6. Level of Education of parent(s)/guardian and siblings

7. Where’d you grow up? Do you still live there now?

8. How would you describe your neighborhood? What was its racial and class make-up?

9. How would you describe your high school? grammar school?

10. Why’d you come to [this university] instead of someplace else?

Background Questions for Graduate Students

1. Age

2. Racial/Ethnic background

3. Where’d you grow up? Do you still live there now?

4. How would you describe your neighborhood? What was its racial and class make-up?

5. How would you describe your high school? grammar school?

6. What socio-economic class would you describe yourself as being in? your parents/family? 3 6 3

7. Parents’ and siblings’ occupation/educational background

8. How many people in your extended family have B.A.s? Advanced degrees?

9. Where are you in your program?

10. Are there any factors in your background that you see as essential to your current relationship with literacy/language?

11. How would you describe academic discourse (i.e., what is it?) APPENDIX F

THEMES DISCUSSED IN CHAPTERS 3 - 5

3 6 4 365

Themes Discussed in Chapter 3

THEME % OF TOTAL General Overview

Writers Moving In and Out of Power with Language^

BW- Todd, Diane, Denzel, Cassandra, Dave, Dan 92% Spiro, Charlie, Latisha, Zeeva, Dominic, Matt Joe, Swati, Tim, Ben, Judy, Tom, Aretha, LaVonne, Julie, Lori, Bruce

EGS- Tricia, Mary, Mark, Sheila, Margaret, Patty, 90% Cathy, Barbara, Janet, Vicki, Stephanie, Carole, Holly, Mahesh, Neil, Tanya, Sarah, Kim, Cindy

Identification

Ability to use schooled language to exercise intentions (besides receiving good grades) (RWJ:^ 28% Charlie, Swati, Todd, Diane, Denzel, Dan, Joe

Ability to use schooled language to exercise intentions (EGS): 100% Tricia, Mary, Mark, Sheila, Margaret, Patty, Cathy, Barbara, Janet, Yield, Stephanie, Carole, Holly, Rich, Mahesh, Stanley, Tanya, Sarah, Kim, Cindy, John

^All the writers in the sample are included in this theme but three white males: Neil, a basic writer; and Rich and John, two English graduate students.

^BW = Basic Writing Student; EGS = English Graduate Student 366 Division

Distance

Schooled Language as Distanced (BW): 56% Charlie, Tim, Swati, Tom, Aretha, LaVonne, Todd, Bruce, Denzel, Cassandra, Dan, Latisha, Dominic, Joe

Schooled Language as Exterior to Self (BW): 76% Dave, Spiro, Swati, Tim, Aretha, Todd, Diane, Nick, Dan, Joe, Judy, Latisha, Dominic, Swati, LaVonne, Denzel, Cassandra, Ben, Julie

Graduate School Discourse as Distanced and Exterior (EGSl: 57% Sheila, Mark, Patty, Janet, Barbara, Stanley, Kim, Cindy, Tricia, Sarah, Vicki

Inaccessibility

Schooled Language as "Totally" Inacessible (BWl: 44% Tom, Aretha, Latisha, Dominic, Tim, LaVonne, Lori, Bruce, Diane, Cassandra, Ben

Graduate School Language as Inaccessible ŒGS): 66% Sheila, Janet, Mark, Patty, Barbara, Stanley, Kim, Cindy, Tricia, Sarah, Vicki, Stephanie, Mary, Sarah

Restriction

Academic Discourse as Restricting "Other" Reading Practices (BW): 60% Latisha, Charlie, Neil, Swati, Tim, Zeeva, Judy, Diane, Tom, Aretha, LaVonne, Bruce, Denzel, Dan, Joe

Liked to Read, but Resented Written Reports (BW>: 40% Charlie, Spiro, Latisha, Neil, Tim, Zeeva, LaVonne, Todd, Diane, Matt 367

Reading Texts Unaccepted bv School as Illicit Behavior (EGS^: 43% Mary, Mark, Cathy, Barbara, Holly, Mahesh, John, Margaret, Sheila

Influence

Power of Discoure to Shape Self (General):

BW- Charlie, Spiro, Swati, Tom, LaVonne, Bruce, 72% Denzel, Tim, Judy, Latisha, Dominic, Zeeva, Dan, Diane, Dave, Nick, Joe, Ben

EGS- Margaret, Sheila, Barbara, Janet, Carole, 57% Holly, Tanya, Rich, Mahesh, Kim, Tricia, Vicki

Power of Texts to Shape Self:

BW- Latisha, Charlie, Neil, Swati, Tim, Zeeva, 72% Judy, Diane, Tom, Aretha, LaVonne, Bruce, Denzel, Dan, Joe, Spiro, Matt, Lori

EGS- Tricia, Mary, Mark, Sheila, Margaret, 100% Patty, Cathy, Barbara, Janet, Vicld, Stephanie, Carole, Holly, Rich, Mahesh, Stanley, Tanya, Sarah, Kim, Cindy, John

Themes Discussed in Chapter 4

Images of the Status and Power Academic Discourse Can Grant (Overt References'):

BW- Charlie, Spiro, Swati, Tim, Zeeva, Aretha, 72% Todd, Diane, Denzel, Cassandra, Neil, Dan, Joe, Tom, Lori, Dave, Ben, Julie

EGS- John, Stanley, Mahesh, Cathy, Mark, Janet, 71 % Vicki, Carole, Tanya, Rich, Tricia, Sarah, Margaret, Mary, Kim 368

Wanting to Achieve Control and Power with Academic Discourse;.

BW- Dominic, Latisha, Matt, Swati, Tim, Tom, 72% LaVonne, Lori, Bruce, Diane, Denzel, Cassandra, Judy, Dave, Nick, Joe, Ben, Julie

EGS- Mark, Mary, Stephanie, Janet, Vicki, 70% Carole, Holly, Tanya, Rich, Mahesh, Stanley, Kim, Tricia, Margaret, Cindy

The Need for a Changed Relationship With Academic Discourse (i.e. a change in self, including cutting ties to "other" discourses):

BW- Todd, Diane, Denzel, Cassandra, Dave, 84% Charlie, Latisha, Zeeva, Dominic, Joe, Swati, Tim, Ben, Judy, Tom, Aretha, LaVonne, Julie, Lori, Swati

EGS- Margaret, Mark, Stephanie, Janet, Rich, 81% Mahesh, Vicki, Kim, Cathy, Tricia, Sheila, Carole, Holly, Barbara, Tanya, Mary, Cindy

Cutting Ties to "Other" Discourses Necessary for Identification with Academic Discourse:

BW- Diane, Joe, Aretha, LaVonne, Todd, 50% Denzel, Cassandra, Zeeva, Latisha, Sprio, Tom, Charlie

EGS- Holly, Barbara, Kim, Cathy, Cindy, 57% Margaret, Mahesh, Tanya, Vicki, Carole, Mary, Stephanie

Themes Discussed in Chapter 5

Awareness of Fragmentation:

BW- Dominic, Latisha, Matt, Swati, Tim 79% Tom, LaVonne, Lori, Bruce, Diane, Denzel, Cassandra, Judy, Dave, Nick, Joe, Ben, Julie, Charlie 369 EGS- Mahesh, Janet, Tanya, Stephanie, 62% Mary, Margaret, Carole, Vicki, Kim, Tricia, Mark, Barbara, Stanley APPENDIX G

AN ATTEMPT AT A PEDAGOGY OF RESISTANCE

370 371

Course Description

English — is an intermediate composition course that extends and refines skills in expository writing, critical reading, and critical thinking by having students analyze, discuss, and write about major topics pertaining to social diversity in the United States. The course requires that students draft and revise essays that demand a sophisticated application of expository skills. This section focuses upon rhetoric as a way of looking at American culture. In particular, we will investigate the question of what role language has in defining our culture and the perspectives and ways of thinking we derive from culture. The selected readings on rhetoric and American culture are meant to stimulate the students’ own writing and facilitate an awareness of the interplay among purpose, audience, content, structure, and style.

Required Texts

1) Golden, Bergquist, and Coleman. The Rhetoric o f Western Thought 2) Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 3) Course packet

Assignments

Response Papers: A response paper entails just what the name implies: a thoughtful response to a reading. These responses may be on one essay assigned for the day, on all the essays, or some combination thereof. Topics for response papers are varied; they might include working out on paper what the essay means in your own words, questioning the readings, formulating questions the essays bring up for you and describing how you arrived at that question, comparing or contrasting essays or the assigned readings to earlier readings or class discussions, critiquing the readings, relating a personal or new event that adds to or calls into question the texts, and so on. The only requirement for these responses is that they take the essay(s) one step further-into an interpretation, issue, question, critique, etc. Some of the readings are difficult and challenging, and may be difficult to understand initially; use these papers as one way of figuring out their complex topics.

Try not to exceed one single-spaced typed page per response. The essays will be used to generate class discussion and will be collected on the day they are assigned for comments. I will not grade the responses until week 10. On the last day of class, a portfolio of response papers will be due. For this portfolio, you must include all six responses to receive full credit, but select three out of the six that you decide are your best work. These three will form the majority of your grade, with improvement over all six papers taken into consideration as well. You may revise the responses before they are graded, but it is not required. Although only three responses will be graded, the portfolio must be complete; the grade for the portfolio will be reduced a full letter 372 grade for each missing response paper. Response papers are due on the day assigned; you may not include a response paper in the portfolio that was never turned in earlier in the quarter.

Unit 1: Perspectives on Language and Reality: How Does Language Influence the Way We Think?

Week 1

T Introductions; group information; defining some terms: the communication triangle and the rhetorical situation

R Berlin, "An Overview" (packetV. LA. Richards (RTW 235-258); formation of groups

Week 2

T Burke, "Terministic Screens" (packet): Weaver, "Ultimate Terms" (packetl: Aristotle, "Maxims" (packet!: In-class analysis of Buchanan speech at Republican convention; Intro to Paper #1; Response Paper #1 due

R Okabe, Roichi, "Cultural Assumptions of East and West Japan and the United States" (RTW. 546-556); Bellah, et al. "The Paradox of Individualism" (packet!

Week 3

T Spender, "Constructing Women’s Silence" (packet!: OSU Writing Center, "Non­ sexist Use of Language" (packet!: Response Paper#2 due

R Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (pp. 1-72); Draft of Paper #1 Due

Week 4

T Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (rest of book); Response Paper #3 due

Language as Structuring Realitv in Education

R Educating the Good Citizen: Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian (RTW. 53-72); Our Concepts of Education and "Educated Writing;" Intro to Paper #2; Final Draft of Paper #1 Due 373

W eeks

T Farrell, Thomas "Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory" (RTW 608- 623); selections from E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy (packet): Response Paper #4 due

R Colombo, Cullen, Lisle, "Learning Power: The Myth of Education and Empowerment" (packet): Jean Anyon, selection fromSocial Class and the Hidden Curriculum o f Work (packet): Richard Rodriquez, "The Achievement of Desire" (packet)

Week 6

T Thomas Kochman, "Classroom Modalities" (packet): Patricia Bizzell, "What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College" (packet): Shirley Brice Heath "The Functions and Uses of Literacy" (packet)

R John Lofty, "Time to Write: Resistance to Literacy in a Maine Fishing Community" (packet): Draft of Paper #2 due for Peer Response

Unit 3 - Issues of Power: Race and Gender with Language Use

Week 7: Power and Language

T "Emerging European Perspectives on Rhetoric: Foucault" (RTW 439-445); Michel Foucault "Method" from The History o f Sexuality: Volume (packet):I Intro to Paper #3; Response Paper #5 due

R Bizzell and Herzberg, "Women’s Ways of Using Language" (packet): group time for topics for paper #3; Final Draft of Paper #2 due

Week 8: Gender cont’d

T Deborah Tannen, "Asymmetries: Women and Men Talking at Cross-Puiposes" (packet): Elizabeth Flynn, "Composing as a Woman" (packet): Simone de Beauvoir, "Woman as Other" (packet): group time for project; Response Paper # 6 due 374

R Henry Louis Gates Jr., selection fromThe Signifying Monkey and the Language o f Signijyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning with an introduction by Bizzell and Herzberg (packet): group time for project

Week 9: Race

T Group conference; progress reports due

R Crow Dog, selections fromLakota Woman (packet)

Week 10

T Portfolio of Response Papers Due;Workshop for Group Papers

R Summing Up and Catching Up; Course Evaluations

Finals Week: Paper #3 and oral report on paper #3 due during scheduled finals time WORKS CITED

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