High Theory, the Teaching of Writing, and the Crisis of the University A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Lucia Pawlowski IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR PHILOSOPHY Dr. Geoffrey Sirc July 2012 i Post-structuralism, a theory of signs for written texts, would seem an obvious resource for a field like Composition Studies that has “writing” at its center. Yet the post- structuralist turn in Composition Studies is hamstrung by the deep division between camps in the field that are committed to political critique on the one hand or to textual critique on the other. In this polarization, too often post-structuralism is posited as mere ludic play, while serious political critique is considered the domain of other bodies of research, such as social-epistemic rhetoric. Political critique is especially important at this historical juncture for academia, where the neoliberalization of the university means a less just university. While social-epistemic rhetoric is necessary to a political critique, social-epistemic rhetoric is insufficient because it lacks a micropolitical critique—one that works at the level of specific institutions (in this case, the university). The exemplary case of social-epistemic work that is necessarily political but insufficiently micropoiltical is David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” In this essay, he argues that composition teachers must teach first-year writing students the conventions of academic discourse as one would teach the social conventions of any culture in order to acculturate the newcomers. This project posits queer theory as a micropolitical post-structuralism: a theory that can co-articulate post-structuralism and social-epistemic rhetoric, while paying attention to the kind of institution into which students are expected to be acculturated (academia). Queer theory, with its critique of heternormativity, has obvious political implications. At the same time, with its post-humanist notion of the subject and of semiotics, queer theory is post-structuralist. This dissertation proposes that composition teachers use the concept of “drag” in queer theory to “teach academic discourse in drag,” which means to teach academic discourse as a kind of identity—like gender—that students “perform” without identifying with or subscribing to the institution—neoliberalized academia—from which its emanates. I propose a “rhetoric of drag” for post-structuralist composition teachers who are critical of the neoliberal university. This professional rhetoric consolidates the diverse attempts in social-epistemic rhetoric to teach academic discourse while critiquing academia for its neoliberalization. But the metaphor of drag does more than consolidate existing statements in Composition Studies: the metaphor of “drag” politicizes the process of acculturation in a way that “inventing” does not. The metaphor of “drag” draws attention to how the discourse of any oppressive institution--be it heteronormativity or academia— is exclusionary, oppressive, and compels a creative, parodic response. By teaching academic discourse in drag, college writing teachers give students the opportunity to reconcile the need to learn the discursive conventions of academia even while resisting the institution of academia. The act of disidentification that “drag” offers has special purchase for marginalized students—first-generation students, students of color, and working-class students—who already have a resistant or oppositional relationship to academia. Teaching academic discourse in drag acknowledges this oppositional stance, a ii stance that we can expect to become more prevalent the “non-traditional” student becomes the norm in our writing classrooms. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………….……..…...1 Chapter 1: The Rhetoric of Theory-Talk in Composition Studies………….…………....35 Chapter 2: Necessary but Insufficient: Post-structuralism and Social-Epistemic Rhetoric…………………………..…………...62 Chapter 3: Teaching Academic Discourse in Drag: A Proposal………………....……..120 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….…….….165 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………….……..180 Introduction 1 Introduction I. The Seminar Room and the Writing Classroom II. Why Theory? Why Composition Studies? Parsing Composition Studies/Literary Studies Parsing undergraduate/graduate education Parsing Composition Studies/first-year writing III. What is “theory” in this study? IV. Which Theory? V. What is “post-structuralism” in this study? VI. What is “academia” and “the public” in this study? VII. Outline of the Chapters Chapter 1: The Rhetoric of Theory-Talk in Composition Studies Chapter 2: Necessary but Insufficient: Post-structuralism and Social- Epistemic Rhetoric Chapter 3: Teaching Academic Discourse in Drag: A Proposal I. The Seminar Room and the Writing Classroom The problematic of this study originated in the distance I found between my first-year writing classroom (where I teach writing) and the seminar room (where I took many of my graduate theory courses). In the seminar room, I learned the current theories of my field, which are all post-humanist in one sense or another: whether we learned about structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, or postcolonialism, the Enlightenment subject was getting it from all sides in that seminar Introduction 2 room. Formerly orienting concepts like “text,” “subject,” “language,” “consciousness,” and “ego” were questioned, reconstructed, and sometimes dismantled. I rejoiced in the edgy newness that theory offered, and felt liberated at not having to pretend that absolutes existed, language merely communicates, subjects are self-knowing, the self is rational, context doesn’t matter, and truth isn’t contingent. But then down the hall I went to teach my first-year writing course, and found that, in my teaching, Enlightenment humanism was alive and well. I came to see that in my first-year writing classroom, I taught the “modernist text,” as Lester Faigley calls it in his 1992 Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. In his book, Faigley pits “modernist” against “postmodernist” writing pedagogy, where the “modernist” text is one that enshrines a “stable, coherent self,” transcendental Reason, mastery of language as a transparent instrument of communication.1 As I look back now, the subtle message of my curriculum at the time was indeed to learn to write with authority and purpose so as to cultivate discursive mastery. On first glance, the reasons for this chasm might seem obvious, and not worthy of further inquiry. “Composition Studies and literary studies are two different disciplines,” one might say, “therefore, of course each has its own theory.” One might also say, “We should expect a disjunct here, as in one case, the students are freshman, and in the other, they’re graduate students. And we don’t need graduate-level tools like theory to teach a lower-division undergraduate courses like first-year writing.” I will address each of these possible explanations for the chasm, plus several more, later in this chapter. For now, I 1 Lester Faigley, Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. University of Pittsburgh, 1992. 7-8. Introduction 3 will address the most compelling reason that I felt, despite these initial explanations, that it was indeed mysterious why this chasm existed—that is, why there shouldn’t be a more well-worn path from the post-humanist theory seminar to the post-humanist writing classroom. The reason the chasm remained interesting (surprising, problematic, and capable of reversal) to me is because I assumed that any field with writing as its center would naturally be engaged with the most current and serious theorizations available about writing, and one such theorization is, as I will argue, post-structuralism. Post- structuralism deeply threatens the Enlightenment subject--which makes post- structuralism theoretically current to anyone teaching writing now; it also offers the deepest and most comprehensive theorization about writing--which makes it an obvious keystone for writing teachers. For these reasons, I expected to find a great deal of interest in (through the research, at conferences, and in conversation with other writing teachers) and perhaps even well-developed articulations of the post-structuralist writing classroom. As it turns out, however, there is at least as much unexamined modernist pedagogy in the writing classroom as there are experiments in post-structuralist writing pedagogy. The question therefore threads through “Where is post-structrualism in Composition Studies?” and “How would we teach a post-structuralist first-year writing class?” to arrive at “What can we learn about larger, more highly charged, controversial binaries—namely, academia/public; theory/praxis—from this inquiry into how we might use post-structuralism to teach first-year writing?” In the next section, I will explain why this leap from the second question, which is still confined to academia, to the third one, which extends beyond the borders of academia. Introduction 4 II. Why Theory? Why Composition Studies? In this study I delve into two concentric circles of questions. The inner circle has to do with theory in Composition Studies, and the outer circle has to do with how different configurations of this relationship (the relationship between theory and Composition Studies) can shape or differently pressure