To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
teacher's task is to "elevat[e] them to the
role of co-inquirers." This is all so bad that
it is hard to know where to begin. It is, of
course, we who will question our authority,
and most students will learn that in
Professor X's class they should pretend to
question his authority, for one can imagine
what would occur if a student asked
Professor X not to speak so much, or not at
all, since he had talked enough for the
entire term. And the suggested "negotiation"
is a farce. What power does a student
have to negotiate? Absolutely none.
Students can, at best, appeal to a higher
authority. Finally, few students are in any
sense "co-inquirers," and it is nonsense to
claim that they are. Almost the entire radical
program, as portrayed in this volume, is
a cruel, destructive deception. The better
students might see through it, but many
will be very hurt and confused when they
discover that this effort to liberate and
empower them is nonsense. It was somewhat
less nonsensical when it was the students
themselves in the 1960s who were the
rebels, but the idea of the professor-rebel
instructing students in the illegitmacy of
his or her authority is contradictory, in bad
faith and subversive of anything we might
justifiably call education.One writer seems
to have an inkling that something is wrong
with all this: "Such an interrogation of the
work students do in the class can certainly
be encouraged by instructors without
overtly indoctrinating students within a
leftist agenda, for students must be allowed
the option of aligning themselves with the
dominant discourse." How charmingly liberal!
And it goes without saying that "the
leftist agenda" and "the dominant discourse"
are the obvious and only alternatives,
as if the dominant discourse in many
universities weren't left-liberal, and that
what has most often been excluded, since
the sixties, is anything to the right.
More problematically silly are ideas about
the curriculum. One writer says that "Texts
should be chosen in terms of the theories
and social and historical relations they may
be made to illustrate," and this choice leads
to a preference for "the straightforward,
resonant prose" of Harriet Wilson's Our
Nig over James's "more intricate and highly
wrought" What Maisie Knew, because "the
racist brutality faced by the black indentured
servant who serves as Wilson's heroine
is more important for our culture—and
thus more deserving our of consideration—than
the middle-class sexual and
marital merry-go-round that oppresses
Maisie." The belief in the moral superiority
of English teachers who share the writers'
political beliefs is taken for granted in this
volume: "I myself insist in addition that to
counter the official master narrative with
more liberatory ones is an act that empowers."
But is it our business to liberate and
empower? I think that learning to read
complex works and write about them is
inherently liberating, but then so is learning
anything.
But enough of this sad volume. John
McGowan's Postmodernism and Its Critics is
happily very different. McGowan's book
has two parts. In the first he shows how
incoherent postmodernist theory is in its
social theory, and in the second he offers a
theory of "positive freedom" in opposition
to the negative freedom (freedom from) of
traditional liberalism and, in his interpretation,
the postmodernists.
McGowan's premises are sound. He takes
postmodernism as a response of the
humanist intellectual class to its diminished
role within our cultural life, rather
than as a condition of society generally.
Science and popular culture dominate, serious
reading of classic texts declines, and the
status of the humanities diminishes. This is
the postmodernist crisis seen in proper
perspective.
McGowan also believes that postmodernism
is another gasp of romanticism,
perhaps its last. The romantic dream was
136