Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository 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) 96
Although Hairston is writing about composition theorists’ emulation of literary critics because they are “psychologically tied to the English departments that are their bases” (184) and is writing in order to critique – somewhat defensively and somewhat harshly – the co-opting of writing classrooms by “radical politics” and the “cultural left” that she sees as being the end result of this emulation of “post-structuralism and deconstruction theory, […] the works of Foucault, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, and Stanley Fish, and […] feminist theory” (185), I believe Hairston’s account can help to explain the almost fervent regard for such Post-Modern theory and criticism among beginning students in graduate composition and rhetoric programs, at least those that I knew and at least the one that I was. Along with that “need to belong […] and be approved” is the sheer attraction to the unconventional and the unorthodox that such work can represent and the thrilling, almost heady experience an immersion in those pages and the conversation therein can inaugurate. There is a subverting of the standard and the status quo and, as I wrote before, such an unveiling of all that is Uncertain can be freeing indeed. And according to Kurt Spellmeyer in “After Theory: From Textuality to Attunement with the World,” this flirtation with that Post- Modern fringe would come to also afford a sense of pseudo- 97
- Page 53 and 54: not a denigration of Christianity,
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- Page 73 and 74: This power of modern Western scienc
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- Page 77 and 78: the masters of nature ... Instead o
- Page 79 and 80: and, during this time, “assimilat
- Page 81 and 82: as in specific political, ideologic
- Page 83 and 84: Darkness. For Said, it was in the p
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- Page 87 and 88: III. Before I continue any further,
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- Page 99 and 100: falling away to such a “shift”
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- Page 109 and 110: All experiences, even the scientifi
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- Page 147 and 148: are, as LuMing Mao explains in his
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Although Hairston is writing about composition theorists’<br />
emulation of literary critics because they are “psychologically<br />
tied to the English departments that are their bases” (184) and<br />
is writing in order to critique – somewhat defensively and<br />
somewhat harshly – the co-opting of writing classrooms by<br />
“radical politics” and the “cultural left” that she sees as<br />
being the end result of this emulation of “post-structuralism<br />
and deconstruction theory, […] the works of Foucault, Raymond<br />
Williams, Terry Eagleton, and Stanley Fish, and […] feminist<br />
theory” (185), I believe Hairston’s account can help to explain<br />
the almost fervent regard for such Post-Modern theory and<br />
criticism among beginning students in graduate composition and<br />
rhetoric programs, at least those that I knew and at least the<br />
one that I was. Along with that “need to belong […] and be<br />
approved” is the sheer attraction to the unconventional and the<br />
unorthodox that such work can represent and the thrilling,<br />
almost heady experience an immersion in those pages and the<br />
conversation therein can inaugurate. There is a subverting of<br />
the standard and the status quo and, as I wrote before, such an<br />
unveiling of all that is Uncertain can be freeing indeed. And<br />
according to Kurt Spellmeyer in “After Theory: From Textuality<br />
to Attunement with the World,” this flirtation with that Post-<br />
Modern fringe would come to also afford a sense of pseudo-<br />
97