Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

his book Embracing Contraries, he explains not simply the origin
of his present work but the origin of his pedagogy:
A hunger for coherence; yet a hunger also to be true
to the natural incoherence of experience. This
dilemma has led me […] to work things out in terms of
contraries: to gravitate toward oppositions and even
to exaggerate differences – while also tending to
notice how both sides of the opposition must somehow
be right. My instinct has thus made me seek ways to
avoid the limitations of the single point of view.
(x, emphasis mine)
With this as the motivation and the guiding principal not simply
for his book but for his philosophy of writing and the teaching
of writing as a whole, the essays that comprise Embracing
Contraries all deal with those titular “contraries,” the
“opposite extremes” and “polar opposition[s]” experienced with
thinking and writing and teaching, and the question of how to
work with them separately and together. Somewhat early in the
book, he offers a very simple piece of advice: “keep yourself
from being caught in the middle” (48-9). Following this caveat,
Elbow, in the chapter “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching
Process,” offers up the notion of “middling.” When discussing
the “contradictory” positions teachers can take with their
students, he writes:
[W]e can take a merely judicious, compromise position
toward our students only if we are willing to settle
for being sort of committed to students and sort of
committed to subject matter and society. This
middling or fair stance, in fact, is characteristic
of many teachers who lack investment in teaching or
who have lost it. Most invested teachers, on the
other hand, tend to be a bit more passionate about
supporting students or else passionate about serving
and protecting the subject matter they love – and
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