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must be made. Furthermore, because of its “dialectical” nature,
it is a mutual “conditioning and reshaping,” each bearing
witness to the other. Like the turning of the sun wheel: one
without the other is unwhole and, very well, unwholesome.
Elbow:
This mutual “reshaping” brings to me those words of Peter
Good learning is not a matter of finding a happy
medium where both parties are transformed as little
as possible. Rather both parties must be maximally
transformed – in a sense deformed. There is violence
in learning. We cannot learn something without
eating it, yet we cannot really learn it either
without being chewed up. (148)
This “mutual deformation” of Elbow’s, as it were, is of the same
essence as Knoblauch’s dialogue, as well as its “dialogue” with
commitment. It is also metaphor of what is at the heart of
Elbow’s philosophy of “cooking,” which he explains simply as,
again, “the interaction of contrasting or conflicting material”
(40). Further painting his portrait of it, he writes:
[C]ooking consists of the process of one piece of
material (or one process) being transformed by
interacting with another: one piece of material
being seen through the lens of another, being dragged
through the guts of another, being reoriented or
reorganized in terms of the other, being mapped onto
the other. (40-1)
Simply put, “cooking” is dialectic and, for Elbow, this
“cooking” is an utter necessity to those who would be not only
writers and teachers of writing but, perhaps much more so,
thinkers unlike that which they have been before. In Embracing
Contraries, he testifies that there are various types of
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