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Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

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students, students under the tutelage of those “successors” of<br />

Post-Modernity and the schools of theory and criticism that it<br />

gave rise to who, very well out of their zealous belief in the<br />

justness of their perspectives and philosophies, put forth<br />

Uncertainty as an undeniable and unremitting “Truth.” It is<br />

upon the heads and the shoulders of those students that this<br />

weight of the certainty of that Post-Modern Uncertainty<br />

inevitably falls.<br />

How do I try to explain that unfortunate irony: Certainty<br />

promoted in the guise of Uncertainty? Perhaps two distinctions<br />

have to be made. First, like Spellmeyer, it is not Uncertainty<br />

itself about which my suspicions have become raised but its<br />

“successors”: those who would bring it to their classrooms and<br />

the students sitting, and writing, in them. Second, is this<br />

reversal of perspective indeed the case, widespread yet<br />

unheeded, like Hairston and Spellmeyer would seem to suggest in<br />

their essays or is it simply a possibility, something that can<br />

happen if that something like that “dialogue” or “dialectic”<br />

that C. H. Knoblauch seems to hold as utterly critical is not<br />

consciously and deliberately provoked? I lean towards the<br />

latter here, in particular because I have not undertaken some<br />

exhaustive study of writing classes that are constructed upon a<br />

perspective of “reality” and “truth” rooted in Uncertainty and a<br />

philosophy of education and writing flowing from it. With this<br />

112

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