Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

of them, I was enlightened. I was provoked. I was challenged.
I was inspired. I was liberated. My experience with such
Uncertainty-rooted Post-Modern philosophy would seem to find a
parallel, and interpretation, with Spellmeyer’s description of
his own introduction to what he simply calls “theory,” an event
that he declares “had given me the means to change nearly
everything about what I did and who I was” (“After Theory” 895).
Of this, he writes:
[B]ut theory in my life has had far-reaching
consequences. I acted on the insights theory offered
me, and my actions touched the lives of many
thousands of high school graduates whose experience
at the university might have been more damaging than
it turned out to be. For an entire generation in
English studies, I believe, the encounter with theory
followed a course like the one I have just retraced,
an odyssey from silence, boredom, and paralysis to a
sense of purpose and "empowerment," as we used to
say. (896)
And for Spellmeyer, this “odyssey” left him stirred by a very
definite purpose as a teacher.
He explains:
I recognized more clearly than I ever had before that
teaching any subject was a self-defeating act unless
all of those involved could find the means to enlarge
their particular lifeworlds - worlds that were full
and real in different ways but equally full and real.
(896)
Like Spellmeyer, Covino believes that it is writing and the
teaching of writing that can serve those same ends. It is, in
particular, writing that rises from out of a “critical theory”-
influenced perspective that exists as “fundamentally a theory of
discourse that devalues certainty and closure while it
celebrates the generative power of the imagination” (128). For
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