Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

turned outward, towards society and those who live all around
them in the world, the students asking themselves that same
question again and again.
Very simply, if the students realize perplexity and
relativism over aspects of the “self,” perhaps they will realize
that such a thing can be found elsewhere – beyond the “self.”
The content of the course is rooted in my teaching philosophy’s
dialectical roots, a dialectic I have tried to foster –
successfully or not – between “expressivism” and “critical
literacy” and I contend that the conflicting and contrary
definitions of “self” that are experienced by students
throughout the course’s different units are those which, in many
ways, are similar to the conflicting and contrary perspectives
of the “self” upon which each of these theoretical schools would
seek to converge. What is an utter necessity, though, is that
dialectic: one perspective of the reality or “truth” of the
“self,” as Elbow wrote of his “cooking,” again, “being seen
through the lens of another, being dragged through the guts of
another, being reoriented in terms of the other, being mapped
onto the other.” Again, what is an utter necessity is that
“mutual deformation.” The depth of “self” then, and the writing
done from that “self,” is dependent upon the extremity of the
dialectic between those contrary definitions of “self.”
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