Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

And of that textbook-publishing reality of composition and
rhetoric, Hairston continues:
As Kuhn repeatedly points out, the standard texts in
any discipline constitute a major block to a paradigm
shift because they represent accepted authority.
Many, though certainly not all, of the standard
textbooks in rhetoric and composition […] have been
product-centered books […]. […] And textbooks
change slowly. Publishers want to keep what sells,
and they tend to direct the appeals of their books to
what they believe the average composition teacher
wants, not to what those in the vanguard of the
profession would like to have. (80)
What Hairston tried to paint a portrait of was an unfortunate
situation (circa 1982 but perhaps true at other times for
teachers of writing, those before as well as those after)
wherein the conditions of possibility were defined by book
publishers and book-publishing dollars. And those conditions of
possibility established, and was established through, a simple,
straightforward correlation: “static and unexamined”
composition and rhetoric textbooks promoting “static and
unexamined” methods of teaching promoting “static and
unexamined” philosophies of writing and the teaching of writing
promoting a “static and unexamined” paradigm, a basic
perspective of reality, that promoted - very well worshipped -
the “Static” and the “Unexamined.” Again: Certainty.
However, all of this said, I would return to Hairston’s
pronouncement of that “paradigm shift,” the existence of which
she rests upon the “insecurity and instability” of that socalled
“traditional paradigm” of hers, Current-Traditional
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