Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

Roland Barthes, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Spivak,
Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Hélène Cixous. These are but a few of
the theorists and critics to whom Covino’s appraisal could
apply, in no particular order and with no reference to their
particular movement or school.
About the response to their work as well as the work of
unnamed others, I can attest. Their names are spoken with an
utter respect that borders on ecclesiastical reverence. The
reading of their books are used to separate the knowledgeable
from the ignorant, the devout from the poseur. Their
perspectives on language, writing, literature, politics,
economics, history, culture, existence, and reality are taken as
a gospel of sorts, the revelation of some universal “Truth” –
or, at least, a very, very good facsimile of it. In Maxine
Hairston’s “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing,”
published by College Composition and Communication almost ten
years after she had declared that “paradigm shift” in its pages,
she explains the “response” to those influential explorers of
the Post-Modern, those advocates of Uncertainty:
Partly out of genuine interest, I’m sure but also out
of a need to belong to and be approved by the power
structure, [compositionists] immerse themselves in
currently fashionable critical theories, read the
authors that are chic – Foucault, Bakhtin, Giroux,
Eagleton, and Cixous, for example – then look for
ways those theorists can be incorporated into their
own specialty, teaching writing. (184)
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