Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

extreme, a movement towards the one at the expense of the other,
is antithetical to any yearning for a progressive society and
culture. Whether it is the pursuit of Certainty that culminated
between the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the birth
of what became known as “Current-Traditional Rhetoric” or the
pursuit of Uncertainty that defined the some of the theories of
“post-modern” literary critics and composition scholars in the
late twentieth century - which, in some ways, would eventually
bring me to this endeavor in a very personal way – neither is
helpful to those who would work towards that progress because
they both help nothing but the profusion of the status quo.
Again, the same old thing all over again. However, this
dialectic is a necessity that is, unfortunately, none too easy
to realize, as my experiences teaching freshman writing at the
University of Delaware exhibited.
The difficulty arises from the fact that you have to
always remain conscious of that dialectic. You always have to
be aware of how it is working. Because it would seem that,
unconsciously, humans have an almost “natural” tendency towards
Certainty, as John Dewey had explained in The Quest for
Certainty, that dialectic has to be deliberately and willfully
manipulated. To me, that dialectic is almost like a marriage:
once you allow yourself to believe that it can flourish on its
own and leave it to proceed forth as it pleases, you’ve taken it
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