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celebrity, which only furthered, and further complicated, the
allure of this Post-Modern literary and rhetorical theory:
As the tool of a self-styled critical avant-garde,
theory landed Yale High Church deconstructionists in
a special section of Time magazine, while the
founders of cultural studies, sporting silk Armani
jackets, made fashion statements for the sputtering
New York press. Trivial as these events might seem,
they tell us something essential about theory and the
movements that have followed it. For the first time
since the quiz-show days of Charles van Doren,
scholars who might have started their careers with
books on Donne's debt to Plotinus or Trollope's
comedy of manners saw the chance for something like
celebrity by turning to the signifying practices of
Bugs Bunny or 2 Live Crew. (897)
Those scholars who brought a Post-Modern perspective from out of
the circumscribed domain of literature and rhetoric and unto the
wider world of mainstream American consciousness, because of
their ushering in of a rebellious cultural vanguard, existed as,
again, academic rock stars. And who wouldn’t want to join their
“band”?
But let me say this: I neither mean to detract from those
Post-Modern critics and theorists whom I named, as well as those
whom I did not, nor do I mean to devalue their contributions to
the field of composition and rhetoric, whether they are actually
from “Writing” or not. Very much to the contrary. My own
perspective upon writing – my pedagogy, my philosophy of
composition – is utterly informed by them. Very well, I would
not be here, writing about, wrestling with, Uncertainty, yet
again, if it were not for them. I learned immensely not simply
about writing and about thinking but also about living. Because
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