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COMPUTERS, COMPOSITION, AND RHETORIC:
RETHINKIN G THE SUBJECT IN THE DIGITAL WRITING ENVIRONMENT

By

Paula Rosinski

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT

COMPUTERS, COMPOSITION, AND RHETORIC:
RETHINKIN G THE SUBJECT IN THE DIGITAL WRITING ENVIRONMENT

By

Paula Rosinski

This dissertation conducts a rhetorical study of contemporary computer-
composition scholarship, handbooks, and lore and argues that while the ﬁeld promises to
make students better writers, it still often takes students themselves as the subject of the
writing course and represents them as in need of social empowerment or moral salvation
through the rhetorics of fear, loathing, and promise. This study analyzes the ways in
which current scholarship unevenly deploys the rhetoric of loathing student inadequacy,
the rhetoric of fear over what may happen to students as a result of their deﬁciencies or
their inability to survive in this increasingly complicated world, and the rhetoric of
promise that computer technologies can help give students the vision ﬁnally to see the
various types of oppressive economic, social, political, or educational forces that blind
and control them. Furthermore, when otherwise valuable scholarship focuses on the
student subject and draws upon narratives of social turmoil or postmodern crisis, its
conclusions oﬁen become diluted into something more along the lines of a moral
salvation tract and contribute little to the research on using Internet technologies to
improve student writing or enhance writing instruction.

The introduction explores the ideological underpinnings of the ﬁeld’s problematic
focus on the student subject and lays the theoretical groundwork for an alternative

antifoundational rhetorical approach to computer-composition. Chapter 1 reviews the

history of U.S. writing instruction and suggests that computer-composition’s tendency to
frame students as intellectually inferior or in need of social guidance is indebted to earlier
models of composition theory and pedagogy. Chapter 2 explains how the ﬁeld’s pervasive
deployment of the rhetoric of the student subject can thrust students and scholars alike into
a type of purgatory where modernist ways of knowing and writing conﬂict with liberatory
narratives of newer technologies. Chapter 3 identiﬁes the primary types of fear and “evil
others” from which students must be redeemed, ranging from the degenerative forces of
popular culture, to homogenizing capitalism, to the infective nature of computer
technologies and cyberculture. Chapter 4 analyzes the promises that are oﬁen evoked in
the scholarship, including claims that using newer Internet technologies can help students
gain social or political empowerment, achieve a type of vulgar Marxist correct sight, or
conquer new and potentially dangerous cyberfrontiers. The conclusion argues that it is
important for scholars to understand better how these perspectives may create demeaning
images of the student subject and suggests directions for future research.

By being mindful of the rhetorics we employ and the representations of students
that we construct in our scholarship, the ﬁeld can avoid debilitating visions of the student
subject and move toward focusing more on student writing, on ways newer technologies
can enhance wn'ting instruction (i.e., encourage collaboration, facilitate peer-response,
emphasize the value of visual literacy, information architecture, and web usability for
producing user-centered texts), and provide students with more opportunities to produce
context-speciﬁc and audience-appropriate traditional, online, and digital texts. This study
also suggests that the ﬁeld could beneﬁt by developing alternative scholarly genres that
take writing itself and the pedagogical activities enhanced by newer Internet technologies

as the subject of research and debate.

C0pyright by
PAULA ROSINSKI
2002

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have contributed their time, patience, casual conversations and
intellectual assistance to the completion of this project. I want to thank each of my
committee members for their assistance. I thank Dean Rehberger for introducing me to
the ﬁeld of computers and writing, challenging me to question my assumptions about
teaching in computer-mediated environments, and giving me the opportunity to work at
Matrix, an experience that has greatly affected the trajectory of my academic and
intellectual pursuits. I thank Diane Brunner and Marilyn Wilson for igniting my interest
in education, and I thank Kathleen Geissler and Sharon Thomas for our many discussions
about composition, rhetoric, and teaching writing at MSU. I also want to thank Mike, my

parents Elizabeth and Tom, and my sister Lauren, for their support and encouragement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter 1

The History of the Subject 31

Chapter 2

Purgatory: The Impossibility of Writing My Dissertation 63

Chapter 3

The Rhetorics of Fear and Loathing 99

Chapter 4

The Rhetorics of Promise and Fertility 126
Conclusion

Reevaluating How We Create Perspectives in our Field:

A Call for Vigilant Rhetorics 159

Bibliography 1 89

vi

Introduction

By divorcing the subject from prevailing notions of the individual, either the
freely choosing individual of capitalism or the interpellated individual of
Althusserian Marxism, postmodern theory understands subjectivity as
heterogeneous and constantly in ﬂux. The present frustration of those who have
followed the course of theory I have just sketched . . . is where to locate agency in
a postmodern subjectivity.
—— Lester Faigley Fragments of Rationality (1992)
The dispersal of the subject in electronic communications technologies suggests
that we need new ways of talking about subjectivity and raises the issue of what
metaphor of the subject might be most useful for articulating a postmodern ethics.
—— Lester Faigley Fragments of Rationality (1992)
I argue that the rejection of the individual-versus-community dichotomy for
conceiving the subject and the recognition of heterogeneity and unassimilated

otherness establish ethics as the central concern for postmodern subjectivity.

— Lester Faigley Fragments of Rationality (1992)

Lester Faigley’s call for a new postmodern theorization of the subject1 of
composition rings with excitement and potential. While I agree with his admirable call to
action, with his enticing call for retheorization, I disagree with his hasty solution. For no
sooner does Faigley tempt us with this rallying cry to alter the way we think, write, and
theorize in the ﬁeld of composition, to alter how we go about doing what we do in our
ﬁeld, or why we do what we do, than he retracts the possibility dangling in front of us
and returns instead to a disappointingly traditional answer. The problem is that the turn
F aigley makes is to the student—and not writing———as the “natural” subject of a course in

composition. This declaration, this disappointingly vapid solution to an otherwise

titillating question, merely perpetuates what masquerades as a reﬂex-like automatic
assumption on the part of practitioners and scholars in the ﬁeld: that it is right and
appropriate for ethics—for the students’ beliefs, attitudes, and feelings—to be the subject
of any writing course. This solution is problematic to the ﬁeld of composition because it
contributes to the hegemony of the deployment of the rhetoric of the subject and diverts
attention away from teaching rhetoric and encouraging students to participate in
rhetorical production.
The primary problem with Faigley’s answer is that it amounts to a return of the
liberal humanist subject as the site of authenticity and ethics. He concludes that
[b]ringing ethics into rhetoric is not a matter of collapsing spectacular diversity
into universal truth. Neither is ethics only a matter of a radical questioning of
what aspires to be regarded as truth. Lyotard insists that ethics is also the
obligation of rhetoric. It is accepting the responsibility for judgment. It is a
pausing to reﬂect on the limits of understanding. It is respect for diversity and
unassimilated otherness. It is ﬁnding the spaces to listen. (239)
While F aigley’s reference to Lyotard provides him with a convenient way to think
through the matter of teaching rhetoric within a postmodern pedagogy, it waylays his
argument and dilutes his conclusion. In the end, the claim that an ethical rhetoric
empowers students actually achieves the reverse. The incessant focus on morality and
reﬂection and understanding and listening prevents students from getting to the point of
production, to the act of writing, and hence makes it even more unlikely that they will
achieve power in the form of rhetorical expertise. It leads to the continual deferment of

writing and production on the part of students. At the same time it leads to the

reconstruction of the responsible, reﬂective subject.

Throughout chapters 1-7, F aigley strategically resists the traditional rhetoric of
the student as the subject of composition. Yet in the last chapter, which is even titled
“The Ethical Subject,” he seems compelled to disseminate this rhetoric once again.
Faigley latches onto Lyotard’s notion of the diﬁerend because he sees it as an answer to
the problem of the student subject in composition and provides a convenient way to
realign composition’s focus on ethics. In The Diﬂcrend, Lyotard describes his concept of
“regime of phrases,” where phrases are the basic unit of discourse and the act of linking
phrases becomes central. Lyotard explains that

A phrase comes along. What will be its fate, to what end will it be subordinated,

within what genre of discourse will it take it place? No phrase is the ﬁrst. This

does not only mean that others precede it, but also that the modes of linking
implied in the preceding phrases—possible modes of linking therefore—are ready
to take the phrase into account and to inscribe it in the pursuit of certain stakes, to

actualize themselves by means of it. (136)

Yet because postmodernism has no absolute outside foundational point of reference or
truth, phrases can be linked in different ways in different genres, leading to possible
conﬂict. Linking phrases can therefore give rise to a dijfkrend, to a conﬂict between
genres:

The differend is the unstable state and instance of language wherein something

that must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be . . . What is at stake in a

certain literature, in a philosophy, or perhaps even in a certain politics, is to bear

witness to differences by ﬁnding idioms for them. (The Diﬂkrend l3)

Faigley reforrnulates Lyotard’s linking of phrases and the primacy of the “unstable”
differend to mean that before the act of composing or production can take place, great
thought, ethical deliberation, and attention must be paid to what linkages should be made
between phrases. Although Lyotard is concerned all along with notions of justice,
Faigley twists his concepts into a return of the ethical student subject in composition: “In
a postmodern theory of rhetoric, there is no legitimate preexisting discourse of values for
rhetoric to convey. Ethics becomes a matter of recognizing the responsibility of linking
phrases” (237). In other words, the writing subject becomes entrusted with the ethical
task of making responsible linkages between phrases, and in turn the practice of linking
phrases becomes inextricably associated with morality.

Faigley senses that he may be stretching Lyotard’s meaning and justiﬁes his
revisions: “Even if Lyotard in the end still does not offer more than a call for justice, The
Diﬂerend remains important for composition theory because it points to a missing ethics
throughout the activities of composing, for all are involved in linkage” (239). Faigley is
thus clear to argue the following:

Lyotard would not have writers look to an external theory of ethics but would

encourage them to consider the implications of their linkages. (23 8)

To detect differends requires a momentary delay of those linkages and a

questioning of their ethical implications. (239)

[Ethics] is a pausing to reﬂect on the limits of understanding. (239)

[Ethics] is respect for diversity and unassimilated otherness. (239)

[Ethics] is ﬁnding the spaces to listen. (239)

Here then Faigley has composition asking students to consider the ethical implications of

their linkages, delaying those linkages, pausing and reﬂecting, respecting and listening.
He does not have composition asking students to write. In the end, then, Faigley
recreates the traditional student of composition: individualistic, objective, sensitive and
tolerant, she is the perfect image of the bourgeois capitalist subject who willingly submits
to the rational social order and consensually polices herself as well.

Scholars working in the ﬁeld of computer-composition have more recently
suggested that a turn to computer or Internet technologies can remove the emphasis on
the student as subject and instead refocus our attention on writing and rhetoric as the
subject of composition. That is, technologies as mundane as composing on the computer
or as sophisticated and sexy as online communications in M003 and MUDs can provide
us with a different way to enact Faigley’s call for a retheorization of the subject of
composition. The student as subject is freed in cyberspace, we are promised, freed to
multiply and shift, free to disperse and disappear. Therefore, writing itself can move into
a position of priority and become the subject of composition. However, the hegemonic
pull to regard the student as the primary subject of a writing course often appears to be
too strong a force for computer-composition scholars to resist.

This dissertation conducts a rhetorical study of contemporary computer-
composition scholarship, lore, and handbooks and argues that while this subdiscipline
promises to make students better writers, it is still heavily indebted to traditional
composition and disciplinary technologies that take the student as the subject of the
course. This debt, which is repaid over and over again in contemporary computer-
composition scholarship, most commonly manifests itself in an unacknowledged yet

apparently uncontrollable desire to make students the subject of the course and discipline

their thoughts, beliefs, and morals, thereby retin'ning them to reify that ghost of Western
capitalism, the modernist individual humanist subject. As it currently stands, the ﬁeld of
computer-composition remains too focused on the student as subject, which makes it too
easy for scholars to revert seamlessly back to ﬁctive stories of student redemption or, in
the newest tracts of computer-composition, technological determinism. The danger of
making students themselves the subject of any writing course is that it can quickly and
yet decisively frame them as in-need of some type of discipline or personal, political,
social or cultural empowerment. Therefore, current theories of composition and writing
instruction that deploy this rhetoric of the subject can be debilitating and may not be the
most effective way to help student improve their writing.2

The analysis chapters of this dissertation examine these rhetorics in order to make
their deployment in the ﬁeld obvious again. Because they use commonly accepted and
even expected tropes, we often draw upon them and disseminate them without question.
Even Faigley, who issued a plea for a new postmodern theorization of the subject in
Fragments of Rationality, was compelled in the end to draw upon the traditional rhetoric
of the subject and fashion students into ethical bourgeois individuals. Yet this
dissertation argues, along with Crowley, that such representations of students are
contradictory and dangerous: “[i]f I am right that students’ subjectivities are the material
of contemporary writing instruction, their (and our) location in these spaces utterly
compromises the liberal depiction of students as free and self-sovereign individuals”
(Crowley Composition in the University 221). The rhetoric of the subject becomes
particularly problematic in computer-composition because the rhetoric deployed in the

ﬁeld is often more exaggerated and hyperreal as it strives to make claims about the

promise of new technologies. It is important, then, that we come to understand better
how we create perspectives in our ﬁelds and the problems that arise from these
perspectives. In doing so, we can work to avoid debilitating visions of the student subject
and move toward focusing more on student writing and rhetoric as the subject of writing
courses.

One recent and popular trend in the effort to re-imagine writing instruction has
focused on post-process theories. The theme threaded throughout each of the essays in
Thomas Kent’s Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm: Post-Process Theory (1999) is
that the heyday of process pedagogy is over. While the essays fail to reach a consensus
about how best to move beyond rigid approaches to process pedagogy, that process
pedagogy has been solidiﬁed into ineffective rules is generally agreed upon by each of
the contributors. Kent very usefully summarizes that “Most post-process theorists hold
three assumptions about the act of writing: (1) writing is public; (2) writing is
interpretive; and (3) writing is situated” (1). Because post-process theorists believe that
writing is a public act, always interpretive, and always situated, then it cannot be
“reduced to a generalizable process” (5). And Kent, along with many of the contributors,
places extra emphasis on the situated nature of writing:

[t]his claim is a commonplace idea nowadays; no one denies that writers are

situated—that writers must have something to communicate in order to

communicate—and this idea is accepted by process theorists just as much as by
post-process theorists. However, most post-process theorists represented in this
book want to make more out of this claim; they want to ride it a bit harder than do

most process theorists. (3)

While the contributors to Kent’s volume agree that process pedagogy has been frozen
into unproductive rules, their solutions to this problem vary and oﬁen turn to promises of
empowerment and democratic liberation. For example, Clifford and Ervin conclude “By
rethinking the guiding idioms of our discipline, sociopolitically alert rhetors might be
better poised to resist domination and exploitation” (197); and Barbara Couture argues
that writing is best taught as subjective expression bent towards “discovering who we
are,” and that “[w]e become better at this, better at being subjective agents among other
agents—better persons among other persons—through relating to others with caring
attitudes” (47). As these selections from Kent’s collection indicate, it seems that
composition scholarship which concerns itself to any extent with the nature of the student
subject cannot resist the pull to represent that subject as lacking and in some way in need
of improvement.

Although post-process theories of writing instruction seem to offer a way to avoid
the rhetoric of the student as subject, they tend to revert precisely to this same type of
debilitating rhetoric. A more fruitful alternative is found in scholarship that is grounded
in antifoundational theories of rhetoric. While aspects of antifoundationalism can be
found in classical texts, this study is informed by the contemporary theory made popular
by Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Terry Eagleton and discussed in Michael Bernard-
Donals and Richard R. Glej zer’s Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language,
Culture, and Pedagogy (1998). Fish’s deﬁnition of the term antifoundationalism is “that
matters [of fact, truth, correctness, validity, and clarity] are intelligible and debatable only
within the precincts of the contexts and situations or paradigms or communities that give

them their local and changeable shape” (Fish 344, quoted in Bernard-Donals and Glejzer

1). And an antifoundational world regards language “not as a transparent medium but as
a construction that itself was the result of a combination of material and discursive
forces” (1). Combining the idea that all knowledge is situationally produced with the
concept of language as a mixture of material and discursive forces, an antifoundational
approach to rhetoric is therefore concerned with how language works in different
situations. If we accept an antifoundational understanding of the world as discursively
organized, then the scholarship and teaching of writing in general, and computer-
enhanced writing instruction in particular, should take a rhetorical and situational
approach to writing instruction.

In 1979, Richard Rorty introduced the theory of antifoundationalism to American
audiences with the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He argued that,
for hundreds of years, philosophy had been asking epistemological questions which
muddled the relationship between “world” and “truth.” Bernard-Donals and Glezjer
explain that for Rorty, “[i]t is impossible . . . to be able to say anything about a world ‘out
there,’ separate from the sentences we use to describe it, and so it is equally impossible to
say anything about truth, since truth is always relative to a scheme which is itself an
artiﬁcial construct” (2). Rorty calls for a “world without mirrors,” where epistemology is
replaced by hermeneutics, “an expression of hope that the cultural space leﬂ by the
demise of epistemology will not be ﬁlled—that our culture should become one in which
the demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer felt” (Rory Philosophy 315,
quoted in Bernard-Donals and Glejzer 3). Epistemology is the study of how the mind
makes meaning; it presumes the mind is a stable unit, that there are ahistorical

dimensions to the way people learn and think, and it establishes laws of how the brain

creates knowledge. In contrast, hermeneutics is the study of how meaning-making is
grounded in speciﬁc historical contexts and discursive practices of the times. A
hermeneutical approach is therefore grounded on the premise that “[p]eople change their
minds—and descriptions of the world can be said to progress—not when they are
convinced that one set of statements more closely approximates a state of affairs
unmediated by language, but when the equation can be restated in terms recognizable
enough by both interlocutors . . . ” (3). In a sense, then, one could argue that the same
debate between epistemology and hermeneutics has been replayed over and over again in
composition, only with different terms.

According to Bemard-Donals and Glejzer, compositionists are attracted to an
antifoundational approach to rhetoric because it provides a reason to relinquish the search
for objectivity yet still provides a mechanism for communication, improvement, and
progress:

it gives up the difﬁcult (if not impossible) task of ﬁnding objective criteria with

which to adjudicate truth claims without giving up on a notion of progress and

emancipation. Truth, in other words, becomes a set of practices in a world of
descriptions rather than an object of discovery, and at a stroke the threat of chaos
resulting from a world without foundations is dispelled in favor of a more humane
world in which order is available though contingent, and in which understanding
is reached through debate and something that looks like communication . . . If
knowledge is formed by language (not the other way around), and if language is

constructed socially out of contexts, situations, and communities, then what is

needed for antifoundationalism is a methodology that understands language as

10

constructed, contingent, and constitutive of social orders. (3)

In an antifoundational world, truth is not “an object of discovery,” but rather something
negotiated and contingent and perhaps only momentarily agreed upon through the use of
language, debate, and communication. This is of primary importance in a ﬁeld like
composition, which in certain manifestations have become inextricably associated with
current-traditionalism and its obsession with objectivity. By presenting “truth” as
something that is arrived at in communities through debate, antifoundationalism appeases
composition’s anxiety over the chaos that is introduced when foundational principles are
undermined. In an antifoundational world, then, rhetoric is the means for negotiating and
controlling this debate, it is the means for containing this threat of chaos. As Bernard-
Donals and Glej zer emphasize, “[w]hat is important to note in this understanding of
rhetoric is that it takes as axiomatic language’s capability to exert power in observable
(and reproducible) ways, that as a form of praxis it can produce real social change, and
that rhetorical analysis can yield information about language’s power and its relation to
the material world from which, in part, it derives that power” (4). The practice of
rhetoric in an antifoundational world, then, is contingent upon the belief that language, as
“constructed, contingent, and constitutive of social orders,” can produce real material and
social change in the world.

While many compositionists claim to be antifoundationalists, their scholarship is
often based upon foundational concepts of humanism or returns to reify current-
traditional ideas. While current-traditionalism is humanistic, there is no such thing as a
“pure” form of current-traditionalism; rather, it functions more as a label that is applied to

composition scholarship and pedagogy which relies upon the belief that truth resides

ll

outside of language. As Crowley indicates, this [such scholarship and pedagogy] is
problematic because: (1) humanism privileges reading over writing, (2) humanistic
composition practices are more concerned with asking students to analyze already-
completed texts, as opposed to asking students to produce texts, (3) humanism enforces a
narrow type of humanist subjectivity, and (4) humanism has more in common with
metaphysics (the study of reality without observable evidence to back it up) than it has
with rhetoric (Composition in the University 13-14). While James Berlin’s later work in
social-epistemic rhetoric is often regarded as antifoundational, the fact that his work
draws upon the metaphysical concept that the world can be divided into those who are
immersed in ideology and those who are beyond its grasp indicate that his work is still
dependent upon foundational concepts. Consider Berlin’s argument that “[t]he liberated
consciousness of our students is the only educational objective worth considering . . . . To
succeed at anything else is no success at all” (“Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing
Class” 492). John Trimbur makes a similar gesture in “Consensus and Difference in
Collaborative Learning” when he suggests that “the point of collaborative learning is not
simply to demystify the authority of knowledge by revealing its social character but to
transform the productive apparatus, to change the social character of production” (612).
The problem here is that Trimbur, similar to Berlin, draws upon the foundationalist
concept that teachers are outside ideology while students are immersed in it; that teachers
know what students should be arguing before they even begin to produce texts and
without considering the social or historical context. Dasenbrock further critiques
Trimbur’s approach because “[it] presents itself as freeing the student’s self-expression.

Demystiﬁcation, transformation, and change—these are the signs in this view of a

12

‘liberated consciousness,’ self-evidently so since any student preferring things as they are
must still be mystiﬁed by ideology, unlike us” (8).

Several key compositionists have also reworked antifoundational approaches to
writing instruction in attempts to foreground the role of rhetoric in discursive practices.
In “Beyond Antifoundationalism to Rhetorical Authority,” Patricia Bizzell argues that a
hard-line antifoundational approach does not carve out space for agency or authority, and
instead posits a theory of positionality. This theory of positionality both acknowledges
the “shaping power of current cultural interpretations” and the power of rhetorical
practice to transform negative cultural interpretations. Bizzell proposes that teaching the
rhetorical process should be informed by a theory of positionality, which means that
instructors need to “to aver provocatively that we intend to make our students better
people, that we believe education should develop civic virtue” (384). Teachers should
therefore make their ideological goals explicit to students: “I am suggesting that we must
be equally forthright in avowing the ideologies that motivate our teaching and research”
(385). In arguing for a perspective of positionality, Bizzell aligns herself with Richard
Lanharn’s claim that the ancient world believed education served the common civic
community and with Eagleton’s claim that rhetorical analysis can transform students into
better people. According to Bizzell, Eagleton’s ﬁrst concern is making students into
better people: “Eagleton says that he wants the rhetorical analysis of textual power to
‘ [make] you a better person’ (207), and he insists that ‘better’ must be understood to
encompass civic as well as personal morality. . . [he] argues that we should ﬁrst ask how
to make our students better people, and then decide what to teach and how to teach it on

the basis of what best answers the initial questions” (384-385). But in the ﬁnal analysis,

13

Bizzell’s theory of positionality is suspect not only because it builds upon the humanist
concepts of individual subjectivity and metaphysical truth, but also because it focuses
more on already-produced texts as opposed to texts currently being produced or texts that
will be produced in the future.

Being careful to avoid the humanistic principles that mar some attempts at
antifoundational rhetoric in the US, this study argues that an antifoundational rhetorical
approach to computer-composition should teach students how to create and situate texts
(and not their true humanist selves) within speciﬁc historical and social contexts; it
eschews the analysis of preexisting texts in favor of producing texts; and it focuses on
rhetoric, as opposed to humanist metaphysics and its interest in “determining how a given
text either questions or upholds a supposedly permanent or quasipermanent set of human
values” (Crowley Composition in the University 14). Computer-composition scholarship
that is informed by an antifoundational rhetorical approach uses Internet technologies to
help students understand how language functions in different situations and to help
students gain experience producing situationally appropriate and persuasive arguments.
It is essential that Internet technologies do not become imbricated with foundational or
humanistic values, because this leads to epistemological claims that the technologies
themselves are imbued with objectivity and can somehow bring students to truth or some
type of correct insight.

Over the past thirty years, a variety of other contemporary approaches to writing
instruction have also claimed to embrace ideas about the socially constructed and
contextually-bound nature of meaning-making. However, as Chapter 1 “The History of

the Subject” will show, these approaches oﬁen return to foundational ways of thinking

14

about meaning-making and writing and so in the end return to a routine of standardizing
the student subject once again. One reason why this may happen is because the notion of
subjectivity is like the last strong-hold of modernism, and while compostionists may
embrace poststructuralist or social constructionist ideas about language as a social
construct that both affects and is affected by materiality, they seem loath to relinquish the
power attributed to them with the promise that writing instructors can morally redeem
students by helping them to become better writers.

This study draws upon several scholarly deﬁnitions of the term rhetoric. I rely on
Aristotle’s deﬁnition of rhetoric as “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the
available means of persuasion” (0n Rhetoric 36). I co-opt Terry Eagleton’s claim that
the term rhetoric “today means both the theory of effective discourse and the practice of
it” (Eagleton 87). And from Sharon Crowley I employ the concept that modern rhetoric
instructors, like the ancients, should “[teach] their students how to analyze the contexts
for which they composed and how to adapt their composing processes to ﬁt those
contexts as closely as possible. They never assumed that a given discursive situation
could be adequately met by the employment of generic formulas” (Ancient Rhetorics for
Contemporary Students xiv). This study also differentiates between the terms writing
and rhetoric insofar as the former takes a cognitive approach to language use and teaches
composing as a series of steps or rules to be followed, while the later takes a situational
approach to language and teaches composing as a process of determining the best means
of persuasion for a particular context. I align myself therefore with Bernard-Donals and
Glej zer’s argument that what is important about an antifoundational approach to rhetoric

is that it takes for granted the ability of language to get things done and make changes in

15

the world: “this understanding of rhetoric . . . takes as axiomatic language’s capability to
exert power in observable (and reproducible) ways, that as a form of praxis it can produce
real social change, and that rhetorical analysis can yield information about language’s
power and its relation to the material world from which, in part, it derives that power”
(4). The sum result of the above appropriations means that this study uses the term
rhetoric to refer to the study of language, how it functions in different situations, and its
ability to create real change in the world. In this scheme rhetoric teachers study “the
theory of effective discourse” and guide students in their “practice of it” so that students
can determine the available means of persuasion in different contexts and adjust their
writing processes and arguments accordingly.

While composition technology promises to liberate passive students by shifting
them into more active, rhetorical, and historical spaces, it is also fraught with
contradictions capable of deﬁning and framing students in rather traditional ways.
Although the popular discourses surrounding computer-mediated communications and
online writing environments perpetuate our desires for technology to reconstitute students
as active rhetoricians, they also obscure our awareness of how the rhetoric of the student
as subject may hijack computer-composition scholarship into controlling students instead.
This is not to say that there is a complete lack of effective research and scholarship in
computer—composition geared toward helping students become more effective writers.
Rather, what makes the rhetoric of the student as subject so dangerous is that it emerges
and undercuts otherwise valuable scholarship; when computer-compositionists pick up
bits and pieces of this rhetoric, it veers otherwise effective scholarship into the realm of

disciplinary-technique. Computer-composition is unevenly dispersed with the rhetoric of

16

loathing for student incompetence, the rhetoric of fear over what may happen to students
as a result of their inadequacy, and the rhetoric of promise that computer technology can
help students overcome their naivete or give them the vision ﬁnally to see the different
types of oppressive discourses and the various economic, social, political, or educational
forces which blind and control them. The problem is not that scholars completely fail to
talk about how to teach writing in computer-mediated environments, but rather that these
discussions get overlaid with the rhetorics of fear, loathing, and promise, which in turn
limit student opportunity to gain rhetorical expertise. Instead of focusing on how to
discipline students’ thoughts, beliefs, or moral attitudes, this study argues that the ﬁeld
should focus on how to use Internet technologies to help students discipline their rhetoric.
This study explores the problematics of focusing on student subjectivity in computer-
composition and offers an alternative which takes the focus off of the subject altogether
and redirects it toward antifoundational ideas of rhetoric.

The fact that I do not develop my own theory or rhetoric of the student as subject
is essential to the validity and value of my argument. One of the more important
implications of this study is that we do not need a rhetoric of the student, that we should
wean ourselves from our reliance on such rhetoric, because it is debilitating to scholars
and damaging to students. To come up with a theory or a new rhetoric of the student as
subject puts both compositionists and students back into the same conundrum I critique in
this study. When an instructor views his or her students as the subject of the writing
course, he or she must suddenly become an expert on class, race, sexuality, and gender
issues. When instructors design a course around the theme of gender and sexuality, race

relations, or class conﬂict, they often deliberately make the student’s own gender,

17

sexuality, race, or class the focus of the course. In such courses students are often asked
to read a novel or shorter piece of literature on the given topic and then asked to give
personal responses to questions like “How do you feel about this particular issue? Have
you ever experienced a similar situation?” or, in a variation which gives a nod to
contextual and historical pressures, “How is racism today similar/different to racism in
the 19th century?”

An alternative approach might entail designing a course around studying and
producing the language, the rhetorics, and the contexts in which these rhetorical moves
function, that give life to the themes of gender and sexuality, race relations, or class
conﬂict. In such a course students might still be asked to read a novel or shorter piece of
literature, but then they would be asked to study the types of words it uses, the language
or rhetorical patterns employed to produce particular affects or to invoke particular
thoughts or emotions in the reader. But the class would not stop there: students could
also be asked to produce these patterns of language as well, with any number of
variations on the assignment. There is a subtle but nonetheless important distinction
between these two types of courses, a distinction that makes all the difference; it makes
the difference between whether students are asked to explore the inner depths of their
psyches in order to ﬁgure out their beliefs or feelings about their gender or race—asking
students to make a self transformation—or whether students are asked to identify and
critique how language works to activate these rhetorics, how rhetorics of gender or race
function in different contexts, such as in magazines, television sitcoms, or online
shopping sites, and then practice manipulating this language and these rhetorical patterns

themselves.

18

When composition instructors take the perspective that students themselves are an
appropriate topic for a writing course, it demands that the instructor relinquish his or her
role as a writing teacher and instead become a social scientist, a cultural historian, a
psychologist, and even a social worker. Instructors are entrusted with the momentous
task of diagnosing the problems with an entire classroom full of students’ subjectivities,
and then they are expected to help students ﬁx their problems by either looking inward or
outward for a remedy. It is in this respect that computer-composition tends to frame the
instructor as an ideologically-neutral and powerful hero who can guide students away
from intellectual darkness and towards social, political, or personal enlightenment. If an
instructor takes an expressionist approach, students are guided to look inward in order to
locate their true voices or beliefs. If an instructor takes more of a social epistemic or
social constructionist approach, students are guided to look outward toward social and
cultural contexts and discourse practices in order to escape social conditioning. Reed
Dasenbrock argues that social constructionism in the end authorizes a very traditional and
narrow type of humanist individuality and places the instructor on an ideologically-
neutral pedestal:

Given this objective, not only does social constructionism collapse back into

something not very different from Emersonian celebrations of the minority of

self-deﬁning individuals, social constructionist pedagogy becomes little more
than a more sophisticated version of subjectivism, with a slightly stronger
emphasis on what is wrong with those people over there who are socially

conditioned, and a slightly weaker emphasis on how we are not. (6)

While the problematics of social constructionism will be examined in more detail in

19

Chapter 1 of this study, what I want to emphasize here is Dasenbrock’s critique that in a
social constructionist framework, the instructor is still framed as outside of social
conditioning. This paves the way yet again for the instructor, as the benevolent and
unfettered hero, to lead the students out of their ignorant state of existence. As
Dasenbrock so succinctly argues, the various approaches in composition which have
emerged over time all still ultimately create a dichotomy between those immersed in
ideology and those who are not: even with social constructionism, “we ﬁnd here the
same dichotomy, no matter how disguised, between the many whose selves are
constituted by others and the few who are self-constituting and free” (5 -6). As a result,
“this vision of the world as divided into the elect and the conditioned allows no way to
value or to explain in anything other than negative terms what we share with the rest of
society or inherit from cultural traditions. It also, to put it bluntly, allows no way to value
our students unless they agree with us, unless they share our (critical) views on society”
(6).

Whichever the approach, the promise that instructors can lead students to greater
understanding, fulﬁllment, or freedom is often infused with desire on the part of
instructors to remake students into mirror-images of themselves, taking on their values,
beliefs, and morals, not unlike the way some self-proclaimed antifoundationalist
compositionists claim it is their responsibility to make students aware of their own (the
instructor’s) ideological orientations. James J. Sosnoski betrays a similar desire to act as
the masculine hero who can function as a model for students as he extracts them from
their painful oppression: “Though we are not accustomed to thinking of ourselves as

healers, we do help reduce pain. Of course, we cannot reduce every pain conceivable,

20

but we can help with those pains having to do with discourse, that is, with rhetoric——
namely, the frustration of not making sense, humiliation, insult, shame, and so on” (217).
Besides the fact that it should be obvious that compositionists have neither the education
nor the training required for such psychoanalytic delving into students’ psyches, such
procedures are far beyond the realm of the compositionist’s supposed task—teaching
writing and helping student gain rhetorical competency.

As for students, treating them as the subject of writing courses is nothing less than
crippling; it tells them that they cannot write anything until they ﬁgure out who they
really are and what they really believe, it tells them that the act of production and
manipulating text must be postponed until they ﬁgure out all the connections of a given
situation, solve the contradictions, and ascertain the truth. This deprives students of
playfully practicing and experimenting with rhetorical possibilities. Students arrive in
writing classes naively expecting to learn how to write, but instead discover that they
must turn inward or outward (depending on their instructor’s ideological orientation) to
ﬁnd themselves, their true voice, their true beliefs, or more commonly in the newer
computer-mediated environments, their multiple cyber-selves. While many students
unfortunately become what the instructor had in mind for them all along—most often
mini-versions of themselves—there is perhaps nothing else that could be done to paralyze
so completely potential writers and deprive them of the opportunity to gain rhetorical
ﬂexibility. The end result of deploying the rhetoric of the student as subject in our
scholarship, and by extension, in our classrooms, is that students clearly get the message
that until they achieve a type of critical consciousness, they cannot write. Besides failing

our appointed task of helping students to become more effective writers, such scampering

21

about in students’ psyches is especially dangerous because it occurs at a time in their
lives when they are attempting adjust to a new academic environment
While some of the moves in the rhetoric of fear and loathing and the rhetoric of
promise ﬁilﬁll common expectations of academic scholarship (i.e., ﬁnd a gap and ﬁll it
in), other moves seem peculiar to computer-composition. As with all ideological acts,
these rhetorics do not enjoy a completely hegemonic position within the ﬁeld. Rather,
the discipline takes up the rhetoric of fear and loathing and the rhetoric of promise in bits
and pieces and in sometimes overlapping or even contradictory ways; in other words,
they are unevenly and inconsistently deployed throughout the ﬁeld’s scholarship, lore,
and textbooks and handbooks. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the interwoven
nature and the trajectory of these rhetorics as corresponding roughly with this series of
maneuvers and constructions:
(1) Fear that we are entering a postmodern epoch and/or that the world has become
more complex and conﬂict-ridden. There are several “evil others” which make this
world more dangerous:
a. popular culture / postmodern crisis
b. a generic “oppressive ideology”
c. capitalism
(1. computer technology and discourses of technology
(2) A declaration of loathing over inadequate or failing students. Student lack can be
constructed in a variety of ways, such as:

a. through an inability to decode the signs of cyberculture or
postmodernity

b. through a failure to contain threats of cyber-contamination

22

e.

through images of students as developmental, childish, or unable to
think for themselves

through the negative example that students have to become mirror
images of their instructors in order to survive in a technologically-

enhanced environment

through images of students as prey to larger cultural forces

(3) An appeal to the rhetoric of promise—an explanation of how technology can

empower students, get them “to see” some truth, get them to see the “evil other” for

what it really is, or get them to resist some type of ideological domination. These

rhetorics of promise may take a variety of forms, such as:

a.

the promise of social, political, or personal empowerment, which is
often accompanied with appeals to liberatory or critical pedagogy

the promise of achieving correct vision or correct sight, which is often
accompanied with appeals to vulgar Marxism

the promise of liberatory technology to help students conquer the new
empty cyberfrontier

(4) An appeal to the rhetoric of fertility, which functions as a way for teacher-

scholars to evade the new type of ideological discipline being forced onto the

subject.

I'CSOUI'CCS.

Because various devices in the rhetorics of fear and loathing and the rhetorics of promise
and fertility overlap, merge, and are used together in various combinations, I made

deliberate decisions about which rhetorical devices to highlight and study in which

I do not argue that the computer-composition scholarship which incorporates the

rhetorics of fear and loathing and the rhetorics of promise and fertility fail completely to

contribute valuable knowledge to the ﬁeld. Rather, I am interested in showing how these

23

rhetorics—which emerge often, even if in uneven ways—displace attention away from
helping students gain rhetorical experience in favor of disciplining students themselves as
the subject of the writing course. And in these formulations, the student as the subject of
the writing course is always already treated as duped by larger forces, blinded to the true
nature of reality, and in need of salvation, standardization, or discipline. These
formulations correspond with Susan Miller’s argument in Textual Carnivals that the
development of the ﬁ'eshman writing course in 1874 “established [composition] in its
carnivalesque aspect to regulate writing that accomplished domestic exchanges among
American citizens by placing it under the bourgeois gaze of an institution” (80). As a
result of these inauspicious and ambivalent motivations, “[c]omposition students,
composition teaching, and ways of organizing both have since then deﬁned the space of a
seemingly inconsequential sideshow” (79-80). I extend Miller’s argument to
contemporary computer-composition scholarship and argue that this sub-discipline tends
to frame online writing environments and Internet technologies as the newest ringside
attractions, the newest bread-and-circuses that represent and treat students as clownish
dupes and deny them the opportunity to gain rhetorical expertise and power.

The reasons why computer-composition continues to show traces of disciplining
students—in spite of the liberatory claims to the contrary—are of course overdetermined.
Just like any other cultural formation, the discipline of computer-composition is affected
by multiple and contradictory social and political inﬂuences, and in this case they
converge to contribute to the view that students are deﬁcient subjects in need of some
direction and guidance. This study therefore analyzes the contemporary cultural

conjuncture in which technology and the rhetoric of liberation are combined, where it is

24

often assumed that the computer-mediated subject in composition will automatically be
freed from the humanist Enlightenment bonds of coherent rationality and the Romantic
limitations of self-expression. Although the liberatory rhetoric surrounding computer-
mediated communication perpetuates our hopes and desires for technology to reconstitute
the student subject as an active rhetorician, it also obfuscates our awareness of how such
technologies may colonize the student into passivity as well. In other words, computer-
composition often becomes a site of colonization where teachers ﬁrst represent students
as lacking failures and then remake or refashion them into a likeness of their own more
successful images.

One reason the ﬁeld of computer-composition shows strains of disciplining
students is because it is still very much entrenched in post-Freirian approaches to critical
pedagogy. Ellen Cushman recognizes this ongoing inﬂuence in her critique that
institutional language and “key critical pedagogues” assume inappropriately that certain
populations labor under the burden of false consciousness. This debilitating assumption
continues to be made by researchers in the United States when they update Freire’s model
and yet still engage “the assertion that oppressed people are naively conscious” (271).
This study does not seek to completely undermine the work of compositionists working
in the vein of critical pedagogy. On the contrary, it seeks to open up discussions on this
potentially limiting aspect and bring a new perspective to the theory and practices of
critical pedagogy.3 In turn, the beneﬁts of bringing such discussions to the forefront
include developing more effective ways to use computer-enhanced and lntemet
technologies in the writing classroom.

This study also suggests that another possible reason why computer-composition

25

tends to standardize students and treat them as unknowing dupes is because—as Michel
Foucault has shown in Discipline and Punish (1975)——the humanist self is at the center of
Western identity and functions not only as a way to control people, but as a way to get
people consensually to police themselves as well. Foucault’s work has greatly
contributed to by now well-known stories that certain classroom practices and procedures
(such as grading, the physical layout of classrooms, and even process approaches to
writing) act as disciplinary measures that call students into occupying a narrow type of
rationalist subjectivity (Clifford; Dasenbrock). Foucauldian critiques of these practices
point out that such classroom activities, assignments, and regimental approaches to
writing instruction tend to do more for maintaining classroom order than for teaching
rhetoric. Allucquere Rosanne Stone points out that Foucault’s theoretical developments
are appropriately applied to contemporary research on computing technologies and
subjectivity:
[Foucault] discusses the epistemological and social moves by means of which
certain people were excluded from normal social intercourse. The result of these
moves is the discursive space that simultaneously organizes and calls into being
the rational social order. Later, in The Birth of the Prison, Foucault describes a
method of dividing and organizing physical space so as to make the inhabitants of
that space available for observation; this process is accomplished in ways that
presage the gradual transformation of the citizen into streams of information, a
process that Haraway identiﬁes as part of the production of the cyborg. (42)
Foucault’s argument that physical spaces have historically been organized in such a way

as to increase optimal panoptical observation, thereby bringing about optimal social

26

control, could also be applied to the ways computer-compositionists organize space and
time, or discuss organizing space and time, in computer labs. It is possible to
hypothesize, then, that a more insidious type of social control may occur during “the
production of the cyborg” when student identity and writing is increasingly associated
with “streams of information” and lntemet technologies.

The idea that social control also occurs in the discursive space of cyberspace
corresponds with Stone’s work that desire is at play in all technological innovations, in as
much as they are also ideological formations (The War of Desire and Technology at the
Close of the Mechanical Age). Relying on Stone’s premise that human desire is
imbricated in all technological change, I suggest that, when computer-composition
scholarship represents students as failures, it reveals a desire on the part of scholars/
instructors to control students, refashion them into the more socially adept image of
themselves, and accumulate institutional power. By claiming the power to deﬁne the
nature of student subjectivity, computer-compositionists are invested with substantial
institutional power (Miller Textual Carnivals; Berlin Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures;
Crowley Composition in the University; Dasenbrock). If conceptions of selﬂrood are
central to social power dynamics, and if to some extent they are discursively constructed
in composition classrooms, then it is understandable how classrooms become sites of
struggle. The question of who controls or orchestrates these struggles is indeed important
because is also gets at the question of who is in a position of authority and power in the
classroom. In this light, the act of representing students as passive and perpetuating
related myths about the technological revolution serves multiple ideological purposes. It

provides a rhetorical framework for the development of a hierarchy where knowledgeable

27

teachers reign over submissive students. This hierarchy “functions to reassure”
composition teachers that they occupy a place of authority in the new technological
academy and economy, because their guidance is essential to student success. Hence this
hierarchy may ultimately function to reassure administrators that English or writing
departments are preparing students adequately for the new technological ﬁxture of
electronic communication. And as Sharon Crowley explains, “the discourse of needs
interpellates composition teachers as subjects who implement the regulatory desires of
the academy and the culture at large” (Composition in the University 257). In this sense,
then, the representation of student need and anxiety could also be read as a displaced

marker of teacher need and anxiety.

Chapter 1, “The History of the Subject,” reviews the disciplinary treatment of the
student as the subject of writing courses throughout the history of US. writing
instruction. This chapter therefore lays the foundation for my argument that computer-
composition’s tendency to treat the student as the subject of the course is indebted to
much earlier and more traditional models of composition pedagogy and theory. Chapter
2, “Purgatory: The Impossibility of Writing My Dissertation,” explains—through the lens
of my own struggles as a graduate student and scholar—the problems caused by the
ﬁeld’s pervasive deployment of the rhetoric of the student as subject. The dissemination
of this rhetoric cripples students and thwarts scholars, which reinforces my argument that

this rhetoric needs to be made obvious again and problematized in our scholarship.

28

The bulk of analysis of contemporary computer-composition scholarship, lore,
and textbooks occurs in chapter 3, “The Rhetorics of Fear and Loathing,” and chapter 4,
“The Rhetorics of Promise and Fertility.” In each of these chapters I outline the
movement of these rhetorics in contemporary scholarship and analyze how they function
to make the student, and his or her ethics, salvation, or empowerment, the subject of
writing instruction. The former chapter surveys the primary types of fear and “evil
others” that computer-composition scholarship evokes rhetorically. It is important to
identify these fears and evil forces because they create the sense of postmodern crisis
from which students must be saved. The latter chapter reviews the different types of
promises computer-composition makes; these promises range from automatic
technological determinism to more subtle forms of academic, social, or personal
salvation. The ultimate goal of the various promises is the same, however: to use
computer technologies in order to improve students morally or intellectually and to
rescue them from their inability to survive in this more postmodern and complicated
world.

The conclusion, “Reevaluating How We Create Perspectives in our Field: A Call
for Vigilant Rhetorics,” argues that it is important for computer-composition scholars to
understand better how certain perspectives and rhetorics may create demeaning visions of
the student subject. By being cautious about the rhetorics we deploy, the ﬁeld can move
away from the perspective that lntemet technologies can redeem failing students from
their own inadequacies or from an ever more dangerous and postmodern world and
instead turn toward the perspective that these technologies can be integrated in ways that

will assist students in gaining rhetorical knowledge. The conclusion recommends that

29

scholars in the ﬁeld consider alternative ways to write computer-composition scholarship,
ways that will focus on the types of writing and pedagogical activities supported and
enhanced by newer lntemet technologies (i.e., encourage collaboration, facilitate peer-
response, emphasize the value of visual literacy, information architecture, and web
usability for producing user-centered texts). To these ends, this chapter closes with a
discussion of some ways that newer lntemet technologies can be integrated into the
writing classroom in order to provide students with additional practice producing
situationally appropriate and context-speciﬁc traditional, online, and digital texts. In
order to avoid technological determinism, this chapter carefully notes that a computer-
assisted writing course in and of itself does not automatically use newer technologies in
these more productive ways; rather, it is the uses to which the technologies are put in
particular courses that amount to a turn in computer-composition away from the student

as the subject of the course to writing as the subject of the course.

 

1 Chapter 2 will discuss the complications and contradictions that arise with the use of the
term “subject” in composition scholarship. At this point, therefore, I only want to note
that debates over student subjectivity can range from viewing the subject as autonomous
and completely knowable versus the subject as completely constituted by language.
These debates most often return to a conception of the modernist humanistic subject who
can come to know him/herself by turning inwards.

2 The panel chaired by Susan Miller, “Walking Down Theory Street: Reconsidering the
Role of Theory in Composition Studies” at the 2002 Conference on College Composition
and Communication included several participants who made similar arguments about the
failure of composition studies to assist students in learning to write more effectively.

3 The effects of computer-composition’s reliance on Frierian-informed types of liberatory
pedagogy are explored in more detail in Chapter 3.

3O

Chapter 1
The History of the Subject

To keep as closely as possible to this strait and narrow path is the plain duty of
each of us. No one who knows how to frame a sentence with tongue or with pen
but can do something in the right direction. Even the child who says “as I do”
instead of “you was,” “shall 1?” instead of “will I?” serves the mother-tongue. So
does the young woman who never says “My partner was awful nice,” or “I love
caramels”; the young man whose talk never smells of stable, billiard-room, or
mid-night oil . . . Those who have great talents and unusual opportunities as
speakers or as writers can do much for the good cause: but every man, woman,
and child can do something; for every word tells for good or for evil on him who
utters it and on at least one other person. (xiv)

— A. S. Hill Our English (1888)

You enter this course with the hope of becoming a better writer. To write well,
however, is not merely a matter of learning a few tricks or skills. It is not a matter
of memorizing rules. To write well you must think straight. And to learn to think
straight is the aim of your education. (1)

— Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brook Modern Rhetoric with
Readings (1949)

[fjor the essential purpose of this course goes far beyond the mere technicalities of
grammar and rhetoric. Ultimately, this course engages your deepest needs and
interests, your thinking, your feelings, your relationships with other people. These
last assertions will not seem too sweeping when you realize that language is an
indispensable instrument in the functioning of the human mind and personality. (2)

— Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brook Modern Rhetoric (1961)

As these opening quotes indicate, the desire to make students the subject of the
writing course in order to lead them down a path of moral or intellectual improvement
can be detected as easily in textbooks from the late nineteenth century as in textbooks

from the twentieth century. Students are entreated to stay on the “strait and narrow path”

31

so that their “talk never smells of stable, billiard-room, or mid-night oil,” they are assured
that in order to “write well [they] must think straight,” and then promised that their
writing course will go beyond simple grammar and rhetoric and instead engage their
“deepest needs and interests, [their] thinking, [their] feelings, [their] relationships with
other people.” Taking its one from the concern over student redemption revealed in these
quotes, this chapter reviews how the rhetoric of the student as the subject of the writing
course has been disseminated throughout the ﬁeld since its ﬁrst manifestation at Harvard
in 1874 (Berlin Rhetoric and Reality 20). I ﬁrst examine histories written by James
Berlin, Susan Miller, and Sharon Crowley and show how they argue that early on, the
ﬁeld was designed to discipline students into particular ways of thinking, ostensibly in an
effort to bring them up to par with their intellectually and socially superior peers. I then
examine the work of later compositionists and show that subsequent forms of writing
instruction starting in the 197OS—such as expressivism, process pedagogy, academic
discourse, critical or liberatory pedagogy approaches, and social constructionist and social
epistemic rhetoric—while supposedly designed to free the student from being the
disciplined subject of writing instruction, often tacitly reinforced such rhetorical
positioning of the student. This chapter therefore lays the groundwork for this study’s
larger argument that computer-composition’s tendency to discipline the student as the
subject of writing courses—to rhetorically frame and treat students as child-like,
intellectually inferior, and in-need of moral or intellectual guidance——is very much
indebted to earlier forms of writing instruction.

As a composition and rhetoric graduate student you quickly learn that there are

popular stories about the history of the ﬁeld that you should study and memorize. Most

32

often you hear about this in your composition theory course, and you quickly realize that
one way to become initiated into the ﬁeld is by becoming familiar with these stories. Yet
these stories are just that, only stories.l Not only can we can learn from what they say on
the surface, but we can also learn from how they are put together and what they focus on
or highlight. In this respect, what is also relevant to this current study is how these
histories about the early years of the discipline themselves convey a particular rhetoric of
the subject: an undertow in each of the histories is that the student as subject of the
writing course is squashed, controlled, or disciplined in the name of aesthetics, classism,
or capitalism. It is as if Berlin, Miller, and Crowley assume that writing instruction must,
by default, assert some rhetoric of the student as subject; and it is part of their task to
identify and describe its earlier manifestations. The ﬁrst section of this chapter therefore
highlights how each of these histories reﬂect a strong desire to explain how students were
represented during the early development of the ﬁeld. The second section of this chapter
shows how concern over standardizing the student still manifests itself in contemporary
shifts in the discipline as well. So this chapter performs the essential function of showing
that computer-composition’s preoccupation with taking the student himself or herself as
the “natural” subject of the writing course is actually a continuation of a long-standing

trend in the ﬁeld.

Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality (1987), Miller’s Textual Carnivals (1991), and

Crowley’s Composition in the University (1998) each offer historically grounded and

33

theoretically sophisticated accounts of the development of freshman writing programs.2
Each of these scholars also agrees that the discipline of composition appeared as a
response to uncertain times and uncertain attitudes toward the new types of students—
women, minorities, and the middle- or working-class—entering the university in the late
nineteenth century. And they each argue that the early establishment of the ﬁeld
represents a major shift in the discipline of rhetorical instruction. This shift brieﬂy goes
as follows: up until the early twentieth century, rhetorical training was available to the
typical student who attended college: white, upper-class, and male. As Crowley explains,
“This education was designed for, and limited, to, men—speciﬁcally those men who
qualiﬁed by virtue of family background or training to be called ‘gentlemen’”
(Composition in the University 47). When less-valued groups of students began to enter
higher education (because of changes in the social structure and much later with
assistance from the GI. Bill) institutions stopped teaching them to discipline their
rhetoric and instead started teaching them to discipline their beliefs, values, and morals
(Berlin; Miller; Crowley). Crowley summarizes that “Classical education was challenged
after the Civil War, when demographic changes and new cultural pressures threatened to
put the old colleges out of business. More people, including women, demanded to study
more subjects for other reasons than entering the ministry or teaching” (Composition in
the University 54). In sum, institutions deprived these less socially and culturally valued
students of the opportunity to gain rhetorical expertise. Such an opportunity could have
provided these students with one way get things done in the world and advocate their own
agendas.

But the stories that Berlin, Miller, and Crowley tell about the particular rhetoric of

34

the student as subject, which the early years of composition constructed, are also
somewhat different depending upon their larger arguments. For example, Berlin’s history
emphasizes how different rhetorics teach a particular version of reality to the exclusion of
other versions and therefore also tells the related story of how composition became
imbricated in producing a new managerial class to support the new economy. Miller’s
history tells the story of how composition became situated as the intellectual inferior in
the literature-composition dichotomy, and thereby explains how composition teachers and
students likewise became situated as intellectual inferiors in this same dichotomy.
Crowley’s historical story shows how the development of composition occurred under
circumstances that framed composition students as continually in-need. This story
provides the backbone for her argument calling for the abolition of the Freshman
English/Composition requirement because it does nothing less than label and represent
students as limited and perpetuates class hierarchy and social distinctions (Composition in
the University 241-243).

Berlin’s history about the development of composition operates from the
perspective that the discipline was keenly interested in creating a new type of managerial-
class to help control the ﬂuctuations of the new economy. Responding to the new
scientiﬁc curriculum of the modern American University, the establishment of the ﬁrst
freshman English course at Harvard in 1874 ushered in a focus on current-traditional
rhetoric, the most prominent of objective rhetorics. No longer were universities preparing
only the elite for the church or state, they were now also preparing the upwardly mobile
middle-class for “the new scientiﬁc specialties proven to be proﬁtable in the world of

industry and commerce” (“Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” 480). Hence,

35

Berlin argues that in the later half the nineteenth century, writing courses represented
students as middle class subjects eagerly consenting to scientiﬁc and Enlightenment
principles: “The new middle class of certiﬁed meritocrats had arrived . . . . current-
traditional rhetoric with its positivistic epistemology, its pretensions to scientiﬁc
precision, and its managerial orientation was thoroughly compatible with the mission of
this university” (“Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” 480). Berlin’s story shows
composition reinforcing the new “mission” of the university—that is, subsidizing
capitalistic social and economic structures—by calling students into occupying a rational
modernist Enlightenment subjectivity thoroughly steeped in the scientiﬁc process.
Miller’s history of the emergence of composition is interested in telling a story
about how the discipline, its teachers, and its students became positioned as inferior to
their counterparts in English studies. As a result of the ambivalence about the new kinds
of students entering the university in the late nineteenth century, composition courses
were developed “to test the suitability of a newly admitted group for an education that
was still explicitly a privilege. The test of composition showed propriety and good
manners in regard to the student ‘body,’ the surface of his writing . . . . the original
student of composition was thereby deﬁned . . . as the lower and in some ways the
‘anirnal’ order, in need of scrubbing” (Textual Carnivals 86). Hence the turn to current-
traditionalist writing instruction, which emphasized to an extreme the surface correctness
of writing, at the expense of the quality of the rhetorical argument being made. By
focusing on grammar or spelling errors, usage choices, and syntax issues, the writing
subject was constructed as continually in danger of offending accepted conventions and

as continually “in need of scrubbing.” According to Miller’s interpretation, the fact that

36

these writing courses emphasized superﬁcial correctness means that they represented the
student as an immature beginning writer: “The student is imagined to be (and in
participating in the course is generally required to be) a presexual, preeconomic,
prepolitcal person” (Textual Carnivals 87). She concludes that “composition was
established in its carnivalesque aspect to regulate writing that accomplished domestic
exchanges among American citizens by placing it under the bourgeois gaze of an
institution” (Textual Carnivals 80). In other words, Miller’s own history about the
development of composition itself shows a preoccupation with identifying and describing
the type of student-as-subject early writing courses assumed and called into being.

Crowley takes a decidedly Foucauldian bent as she discusses the historical
emergence of composition. She summarizes that “Freshman English was (and is?) a
‘political technology of individuals,’ a pedagogy designed to create docile subjects who
would not question the discipline’s continued and repeated demonstration of their
insufﬁcient command of their native tongue . . . ” (Composition in the University 77-78).
Creating “docile subjects,” and in turn sacriﬁcing rhetorical education, was acceptable
given that superﬁcial correctness and the use of “proper” English could be used to prove
that these formerly unentitled students now “inhabited an appropriately developing
character” that made them ﬁnally worthy of higher education (Composition in the
University 78).

What is unique about Crowley’s account is that she sees ethical instruction as a
consistently common thread running throughout the entire history of writing instruction.
Before the mid-nineteenth century, ethical training took place alongside rhetorical

training. When classical rhetorical instruction was abandoned aﬁer the mid-nineteenth

37

century, ethical instruction did not disappear, but instead took on new life through the
“guise” of improving students’ aesthetic taste. Crowley explains that
In a new aesthetic guise, ethical instruction was conducted under the pedagogical
heading of taste, at ﬁrst by rhetoric teachers, and later, during the last three
decades of the century, by teachers of English-language literature. In other words,
American colleges did not abandon ethical instruction when they abandoned
rhetorical education; rather, they transferred instruction in the development of
character to the study of English-language literary texts. What they did abandon
was the ethical subjectivity that was maintained and disciplined within classical
rhetorical study: the vir bonus. In his place appeared the genteel man of taste.
(Composition in the University 35-36)
Crowley’s story weaves a tale of historical continuity as she argues that the rhetoric of the
student as the subject of the writing course can be identiﬁed even in classical education:
“the Freshman English requirement retained something of the institutional function that
composition exercises had fulﬁlled in the classical colleges: it remained the site wherein
students’ character could be subjected to the disciplining gaze of the academy, and that is,
presumably, why it continued to be required of all matriculants” (Composition in the
University 58). While ethical instruction remained consistent throughout the history of
writing instruction, Crowley is also careﬁrl to note that something did change at the close
of the nineteenth century: “in other respects freshman English was an entirely new
phenomenon, constituting a radical departure from the pedagogy and rationale of the
composition exercises practiced in the classical colleges . . . ” (Composition in the

University 58). The major difference between ancient and late nineteenth century writing

38

instruction was not that the latter lacked ethical training, but rather that it lacked
rhetorical training. By rejecting the ancient canon of invention and situating it within
individual minds, rhetoric became a handmaiden in the service of science: “When
American rhetoric teachers ﬁnished their revision of rhetorical pedagogy in the late
nineteenth century, the only bits of classical invention that remained were the topics, put
to humble—and literate—service as a means for paragraph development” (Composition
in the University 35). While Crowley’s history does much to question the effectiveness
of what has come to be regarded as the freshman writing requirement, it also reveals her
own desire to determine how students were predominately represented in writing
instruction in the late nineteenth century.

The above review of three inﬂuential histories about the development and
evolution of late nineteenth century writing courses makes at least two points. First, it
describes some of the major social, economic, and cultural forces at play which may have
set a precedent for the ﬁeld’s propensity for representing students as lacking essential
social and cultural capital. And second, it shows how each of these three histories
themselves convey a desire to identify and describe the type of rhetoric of the student as
subject conveyed by writing courses at the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas Berlin,
Miller, and Crowley may have analyzed this historical moment of change in writing
instruction from different perspectives, they each employ an approach which examines
how students—as the subject of the course—were represented, discussed, and treated.

As these three academic histories indicate, the ﬂuctuations in the nineteenth
century economy which signaled a need for a new managerial-class, the emphasis on

positivistic science, and the new types of students entering the university all contributed

39

to shifting the ﬁeld’s focus from rhetorical education to a focus on current-traditional
rhetoric with its formalist rules. This approach to writing instruction prepared students to
assimilate into established social and cultural institutions and to serve as the managerial-
class in the new economy. In other words, students were represented and treated as
autonomous and passive subjects, and they were expected to follow rules under “the
bourgeois gaze of an institution.” These new types of composition students were not
expected to learn about the history of rhetoric or to participate in public forums, but
instead were only expected to prove their worthiness by producing “correct” English and
by showing their willingness to be subservient to the dominant class by valorizing its
aesthetic tastes. What Berlin’s, Miller’s, and Crowley’s histories each argue is that a
current-traditional approach to writing instruction represents students as lacking
individuals who can be reﬁned and interpellated into capitalistic ideologies. Current-
traditional trends can still be seen in composition resources, textbooks, and classrooms
whenever there is a focus on testing, writing analytical essays, and obsessive-like concern
with superﬁcial correctness. In other words, cm'rent-traditional approaches to teaching
composition make the student herself the subject of the writing course and discipline her
into a modernist, rational, and Enlightenment individual. And in their very telling,
Berlin’s, Miller’s, and Crowley’s histories themselves also reveal a type of obsession with
determining how the student-as-subject of the writing course was represented in the late

nineteenth century.

40

Expressivist Rhetoric

Good writing has a voice. Good writing talks to you with a real voice; it has the
recognizable imprint of the author on it. Ken Macrorie calls this quality the
“record of the authentic voice of another person,” and Donald Murray says that
“The writer's voice may be the most signiﬁcant element in distinguishing
memorable writing.” (11 1)

— Dan Kirby and Tom Liner Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for
Teaching Writing (1988)

Good writing is honest writing. Lynn takes a chance with her reader, sharing
something very important to her . . . . My responsibility is to be receptive, to listen
to her voice. And encourage her to use her voice when she writes. (112)
—— Dan Kirby and Tom Liner Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for
Teaching Writing (1988)

Because being aware of their voices in writing is so important to young writers,
we don't believe you should try to move kids away from personal expression too
early in their development as writers. Don't be too anxious to get them through
the “personal stuff” and on to the “serious business of real writing.” (139)
—— Dan Kirby and Tom Liner Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for
Teaching Writing (1988)

Most expressionist theories rely on classroom procedures that encourage the
writer to interact in a dialogue with the members of the class. The purpose is to
get rid of what is untrue to the private vision of the writer, what is, in a word,
inauthentic. (241)

— James Berlin Rhetoric and Reality (1987)

While the 1970s and 1980s experienced a proliferation of pedagogies and
rhetorics aimed at democratizing education and revolutionizing pedagogy, the primary
approaches emerging out of this era still tended to take the student himself or herself as

the subject of the writing course. Expressivist rhetoric, the most popular of subjective

41

rhetorics, became especially prominent in the late sixties and early seventies amid the
efforts to democratize education. This rhetoric is also ﬁrmly grounded in the
Enlightenment liberal humanist assumption that the writing subject is an autonomous
entity with an authentic consciousness that can be ascertained by looking inward for “the
truth.” It assumes a stable subject position, the existence of an authentic and original
voice (and hence identity), and privileges the personal over the social and political voice.
However, this approach narrowly conﬁnes the subject within artiﬁcial boundaries of a
singular authentic personal voice, glosses over the violent power struggles such
conﬁnement demands, and ignores the problematic issue of how the subject writes itself
into discourse within social, political and historical contexts. This rhetoric operates under
the assumption that the subject freely makes choices unencumbered by social, political, or
linguistic interference. Hence, expressivist rhetoric assumes that the autonomous and
free writing subject can locate, or even be identiﬁed through, its “true voice.”3
Because it ignores the social and negotiated nature of language, an expressivist
approach to writing instruction is more concerned with what students have to say rather
than with how they say it. It becomes clear how expressivist rhetoric—in its pursuit to
help students express their thoughts, emotions, and desires—can easily fall into the
pattern of taking the student himself or herself as the very subject of the writing course.
As a result, this approach to writing instruction at times seems obsessed with asking
students to explore their personal and individual feelings and then to express them in their
“true voice.” It is in this sense that expressivist rhetoric has a tendency to discipline

students into becoming better people by holding the “correct” values and beliefs. For

example, in Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for Teaching Writing, Kirby’s and

42

Liner’s explanation about their approach to writing instruction ﬁrmly places them within
an expressionist framework:

(Our approach to writing instruction) helps students to discover and strengthen

their individual voices in their writing . . . . You should watch for opportunities to

say things to your students like—“This is you” —and—“This sounds like you
talking” —as you read their work. Mark their papers to indicate where they sound
real, genuine, like themselves. Use every opportunity in class to point to passages
in their writing that clearly reveal their voice. And have students ask themselves
after they have completed a piece—“Does this sound like me? Can I hear myself
in this paper?” Do whatever you can to create an environment in which students

are aware of, and encouraged to use, authentic voices in their writing. (139)

The very language use and rhetorical patterns employed in this passage convey a sense
that students must be brought to a better of understand of who they really are: teachers
will help student “discover” and “strengthen” their “individual voices,” and teachers are
encouraged to use a type of dialogic questioning that will lead students to their true
selves. In doing so, the teacher is ﬁgured as the arbiter and discoverer of the student’s
true self; it is the teacher who locates the student in the text.

Another important caveat on expressivist rhetoric is that it equates being a good
person with being a good writer, and good writing is assumed to be truthful and honest
writing about one’s own ideas, beliefs, and values. As Reed Dasenbrock so succinctly
states, “At the heart of expressivism is a desire to make the student a better person as well
as writer: either we teach the student to express his or her self that has been repressed or

we encourage the student to develop just such a sense of self” (7-8). While the idea of

43

asking students to pinpoint their “true” feelings is already problematic, expressivist
rhetoric is further complicated by the fact that what is considered “true” and “honest”
usually corresponds with the teacher’s ideas and beliefs.

Antonio Grarnsci’s ideas about critical elaboration and the historical process sheds
some light on why expressivist rhetoric may have taken on such a strong foothold in
composition pedagogy. He explains that the “starting-point of critical elaboration is the
consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself as a product of the historical
process to date which has deposited in you an inﬁnity of traces, without leaving an
inventory” (Prison 324, as quoted in Lott 11). The hegemonic force of capitalistic liberal
humanism has leﬁ “traces” of knowing oneself as an ethical and singular subject which
can authentically write itself into discourse by embarking on an inward journey. And the
idea that students can come to know themselves—with the help and guidance of a
knowledgeable writing instructor—is seductive. Lester F aigley’s discussion about the
“truth producing” function of confession in the West helps develop this idea further. He
explains that

The practice of writing about the self in college composition might be viewed as

part of a much larger technology of confession for the production of truth in

Western societies—witness Foucault’s description of the frequency of confession

in legal, medical, and educational practice as well as in family and love relations

and even in the popular media. Foucault argues that this production of truth is
deeply embedded within relations of power where teachers are receivers of
confessions as part of the institutional exercise of power. (Fragments of

Rationality 23)

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By combining Gramsci’s notion of the hegemonic force of knowing oneself as an ethical
and singular subject with Faigley’s idea that truth is constructed in the West through
confession, we can frame the ideological underpinnings of composition’s expressivist
trend of focusing on the ethical autonomous self which can arrive at the truth by turning
inward and making public confessions in papers, journals, and free-writes.

The ideological notion of the independent individual who is only limited in
success by his or her own shortcomings is imbricated in composition’s expressivist
construction of the freely choosing subject as well. It is in this sense that we can see how
hegemonic forces at play in the ﬁeld of composition can also work towards justifying
existing social, political, and economic relations. For example, Faigley also explains that:

This conception of the free individual is at the foundation of the dominant

American ideology because it promises to empower individuals through their

choice of consumer goods and thus justiﬁes the existing social order. Because the

individual is said to be free to choose her or his “lifestyle,” politics, religion, and
occupation, as well as which brand of soap to use, the poor are alleged to choose
to be poor, or as Ronald Reagan said of the homeless, “They’ve brought it on

themselves.” (Fragments of Rationality 16-17)

By the very nature of capitalism, not everyone can be a capitalist. But the very
ideological notion of the rugged individual who can become empowered through the
consumption of consumer goods serves those in power by mystifying and erasing this
fact. Because if we are all autonomous individuals—and therefore lack a collective
voice—we cannot resist the hegemonic order. The hegemonic pull of this ideology can

also be detected in composition’s expressivist focus on the singular and ethical subject.

45

Just as capitalism pits a powerful few against the unknowing masses, expressivism
frames powerful teachers as the elite few who can lead unknowing students to discover
their true selves. The introduction of process pedagogy—the next major development in
writing instruction after expressivism—can be seen as a kind of corrective to the
extremes of expressivism and as an attempt to bring a more democratic perspective to

writing instruction.

Process Pedagogy

Many people are now trying to become less helpless, both personally and
politically: trying to claim more control over their own lives. One of the ways
people most lack control over their own lives is through lacking control over
words. Especially written words. Words come at you on a piece of paper and you
often feel helpless before them. (vii)

— Peter Elbow Writing Without Teachers (1973)
The students are individuals who must explore the writing process in their own
way, some fast, some slow, whatever it takes for them, within the limits of the
course deadlines, to ﬁnd their own way to their own truth. (6)

— Donald Murray “Teach Writing as a Process not Product” (1972)
The student ﬁnds his own subject. It is not the job of the teacher to legislate the
student’s truth. It is the responsibility of the student to explore his own world
with his own language, to discover his own meaning. The teacher supports but

does not direct this expedition to the student’s own truth. (5)

— Donald Murray “Teach Writing as a Process not Product” (1972)

While the introduction of process pedagogy in 19705 was hailed as a liberating

possibility for democratizing writing instruction and freeing students from the limits of

46

current-traditionalism, a F oucauldian disciplining of the student continued to pervade this
approach as well. With its objectivist distinction between process and product, its idea
that writing can be condensed into a series of identiﬁable and explainable “steps,” and its
idea that teachers can intervene in the student’s writing process in order to improve it,
process pedagogy reproduces the ideological tyranny of the institutionally sanctioned
teacher who knows the “secrets” of writing that empty students must absorb in order to
succeed. Process pedagogy ultimately deﬁnes the writing subject as rational and coherent
because it expects the student to stand outside of and objectively observe his or her
writing process (Crowley Composition in the University 212-213). Murray exempliﬁes
this urge to prioritize the writing process and locate the truth above all else, including the
ideological effectiveness of texts, when he explains that “We have to respect the student,
not for his product, not for the paper we call literature by giving it a grade, but for the
search for truth in which he is engaged” (“Teach Writing as a Process not Product” 5).
Through its often elaborate series of complicated handouts for all phases of writing
(prewriting activities and diagrams, outlines, multiple drafts, peer response, revisions, and
editing), process pedagogy reveals its concern with bringing both the student and her or
his piece of writing to a very speciﬁc and coherent form.

Somewhat paradoxically, process pedagogy is also subjectivist in its ties to self-
expression. Teachers working from this approach want students to become empowered
to write on their own, and a telling sign of self-expressionist and process pedagogies are
their focus on “empowering” or “demystifying” students. This subjectivism also
manifests itself in writing prompts and brainstorming strategies that ask students to turn

inward, interrogate personal feelings and beliefs, and then write about them in an act of

47

purging (Clifford “The Subject in Discourse” 48). With its connection to self-expression,
process pedagogy also ushered in a renewed interest in helping students locate their true
voice and constructing ethical students. The work of major compositionists at this time
—such as Dan Kirby and Tom Liner (1981, 1988), Ken Macrorie, C.H. Knoblauch and
Lil Brannon (1984), Peter Elbow (1973, 1986), and Donald Murray (l972)—highlight
how process pedagogy assumes a stable subject position, the existence of an authentic
and original voice, and hence privileges the personal over the social and political. In
Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin explains that “Elbow’s purpose in (Writing Without
Teachers) is avowedly to empower students, to enable them ‘to become less helpless,
both personally and politically’ (vii). This power, however, is not political in any overt
sense; it is instead conceived in personal terms—getting control over one’s life through
getting control over words” (154). Berlin’s comments help us understand how such a
perspective narrowly conﬁnes the student subject within artiﬁcial boundaries of a singular
authentic personal voice, glosses over the violent power struggles such conﬁnement
demands, and ignores the problematic issue of how the subject situates its texts within
social, political, and historical contexts. In other words, expressivist process pedagogies
aim to empower students to interrogate their minds, follow certain proscribed procedures,
and then perfectly convey their intentions without any linguistic, social, or cultural
interference. This concern with empowering and demystifying students also carried over
into academic discourse approaches to writing instruction, which was one of the next

major trends following process pedagogy.

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Academic Discourse
In the course, and in this book, we are presenting reading and writing as a struggle
within and against the languages of academic life. A classroom performance
represents a moment in which, by speaking or writing, a student must enter a
closed community, with its secrets, codes and rituals. And this is, we argue, an
historical as well as a conceptual drama. The student has to appropriate or be
appropriated by a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were
easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the
academy. And, of course, he is not. (8)

— David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky Facts Artifacts and

Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course
(1986)

The academic discourse approach to teaching writing promised to empower
students by letting them in on the hidden secrets of academia. It is also the approach that
perhaps held the most potential for focusing composition studies more on student writing
and less on students’ sense of self. However, as Bartholomae and Petrosky illustrate in
the above quote, this approach tended to assume that while the student is at risk of
appropriating or being appropriated by academic discourse, he or she is always already
failing at this task. Two of the primary ways this approach tried to bring students up to
par were also fraught with limitations. One approach promised to “’remediate’ students
writing ability,” improving their writing skills so that they could succeed in advanced and
discipline-speciﬁc courses (Crowley Composition in the University 233). A second
approach focuses on teaching students the guidelines of what Crowley refers to as “the
myth of the academic essay,” or “a euphemism for the ﬁve paragraph theme”
(Composition in the University 233). The ﬁrst approach is problematic because, in its

declaration to remediate students, it frames them as lacking and failing subjects. The

49

second approach is problematic because “there is no such thing as ‘the academic essay’”
(Crowley Composition in the University 233). Each discipline has its own preferred
genres, unique vocabulary and ways of using syntax, and its own conventions. Endorsing
the idea of the academic essay also superﬁcially assumes that the rhetorical expectations
are the same over time and in different contexts, and that students can follow a set
checklist in any writing situation (much like process pedagogy had previously advocated).
These two major limitations mean that the academic discourse approach once
again invoked an Enlightenment rational student who must be ﬁlled with knowledge from
“university-certiﬁed” experts by following a series of predetermined steps and producing
academically-sanctioned forms of writing. Many approaches to writing instruction that
take an academic discourse approach fail, in part, to live up to their promised potential
precisely because they tend to take students themselves as the subject of the course and
represent them as passive and in dire need of empowerment in order to participate in
supposedly liberating academic contexts (Bizzell; Bartholomae and Petrosky; Chiseri-
Strater, Herrington-Moran). And such an approach is also problematic because it reduces
writing to empty forms void of meaningful contexts and real audiences. And ﬁnally, in a
related vein, academic discourse is problematic because “[i]t is too vague, self-serving for
teachers, and doesn’t get at politics of location, class, gender, etc.” (Composition in the
University 233). What Crowley so tersely points out here is that academic discourse
approaches to writing, far from helping students become more effective rhetoricians,
instead frame the student as an ahistorical and apolitical entity in need of empowerment
that can be bestowed upon him or her by an all-knowing instructor. Her comment is also

suggestive of the struggles over power, authority, and control that get imbricated in

50

different types of writing instruction, a theme that is returned to throughout this
dissertation. The tendency in academic discourse is to lapse into explanations about how
students need to be empowered so that they are capable of engaging in different academic
discourse communities. However, such scholarship fails to question whether a generic
type of academic discourse or the academic essay even exists.4 The desire to “empower”
students, which is more of a secondary concern in academic discourse approaches to
teaching writing, becomes the focal point in the related pedagogical trend of critical and

liberatory pedagogy.

Critical & Liberatory Pedagogy
[S]ocial practice is studied in the name of freedom for critical consciousness;
democracy and awareness develop through the form of dialogue; dialogue
extemalizes false consciousness, changing students from re-active objects into
society-making subjects; the object-subject switch is a social psychology for
empowerment; power through study creates the conditions for reconstructing
social practice. (98)

— Ira Shor Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1980)

Ira Shor’s Critical Teaching and Everyday Life is not only concerned with
education in general and writing instruction in particular, but it also serves as an
exemplary model of liberatory writing pedagogy and has been widely quoted in
composition scholarship. What is also important about his work is that it did a great deal
to expose Western educators to Paulo Freire’s theories of critical pedagogy for working
with pre-literate peasants in the Third World. While Shor acknowledges that it is

inappropriate to take Freire’s approach out of context and apply it whole cloth to Western

51

students (127), he nevertheless uses Freire’s theories in such a way that he ends up
treating pre-literate peasants and Western students alike, as if they had the same
problems, life-experiences, and material realities. Note how Shor’s language and
political sentiments in the following passage mirror almost identically Freire’s discussion
of pre-literate peasants, adjusted only for an assumed Western affinity for crude mass
culture and technological innovation:
Domination by mass culture, in an advanced society like the US, has left the
population either ftmctionally illiterate or uncritically literate, and politically
undeveloped. The need for conscientization exists, to counter the interferences to
critical thought in daily life. The questions of dialogic pedagogy, cultural
democracy, critical awareness and structural perception are urgently relevant in
this technically advanced culture. The extension of social control through state
institutions like the schools, and the dissemination of commercial culture through
electronic media, make the situation ripe for a humanizing pedagogy. . . . Critical
education can be a compelling force for de-socialization. Both mass culture and
false consciousness are strangely vulnerable to critical classrooms, here in the
center of the First World. (127)
Western students are represented in a similar fashion as Freire’s peasants: they are
“functionally illiterate” and “politically undeveloped.” Just like Brazilian peasants, US.
students live in a society that is “ripe for a humanizing pedagogy.” A technically
advanced mass culture, which is even more insidious because it reproduces itself through
the “dissemination of commercial culture through electronic media,” is identiﬁed as the

culprit responsible for the students’ immersion in false reality. In this scenario, then,

52

mass culture and technological innovation are synonymous with false consciousness,
which opens the door for educators to claim that large proportions of the US. student
population are in need of conscientization. What is important to recognize is that not only
does such a liberatory pedagogy lead to incongruent practices and conclusions, but it also
leads to a situation where it is assumed without question that certain students lack critical
consciousness and hence require empowerment and liberation.

The popularity of critical or liberatory pedagogy in writing instruction in the US.
has contributed to a climate where it is appropriate to take students as the proper subject
of the writing course by introducing several popular concepts which still appear with
relative frequency in composition and computer-composition scholarship. These
concepts include emphasizing the deﬁcient nature of students, the important role of the
teacher in bringing students to critical consciousness, and concern over the degenerative
inﬂuences of popular culture.5 Crowley agrees with this assessment:

[t]he most sympathetic critic of composition instruction must admit, I think, that
the aim of empowering students, however worthy, is so encompassing that it can
never be reached, and so vague that to articulate any usable meaning for it is
nearly impossible. Talk of “mastery” and “control” involves composition teachers
in academic projects whose ethics and politics are insufﬁciently considered
(Malinowitz; Stuckey). In addition, the argument for literacy as empowerment
begs a number of important questions: . . . what sort of empowerment are we
talking about—political? ethical? intellectual? ﬁnancial? And if in fact literacy
does empower people, for whose purposes does it do so? (234)

Not only is the goal of empowerment sufficiently vague that it is just about impossible to

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describe, but Crowley implies that that this elusiveness lends itself to serving instructors
more than it serves students.

Shor seems to have established a type of precedent with the condescending
language he uses when describing students as in-need.‘5 In the following passage, he
carefully balances framing students as inadequate enough to require liberation, but
competent enough to achieve this liberation once they receive the appropriate assistance
from instructors:

Caught in a hostile and disempowering culture they remain remarkable strong and

good-natured. When treated with respect and equality, in class, their hidden

resources open up. Savvy about life’s nitty-gritty demands, they maintain a lively
sense of friendship and comedy. They love good stories, satires, exaggerations,
tall and bawdy tales (a strange mixture of good-humored kidding with aggressive
sexist, racist and self-hating narratives). Side by side with anger and aggression is
their modesty. They don’t act spoiled, as if the world owes them something.

They demonstrate an admirable seriousness, in meaning what they say and saying

what they mean, and honoring commitments once they make them. Intellectually,

they have barely been allowed to test their minds. Yet, they have more brain-

power than they show in class or on the job. (86)

This is an amazingly schizophrenic quote which invokes images of the “peaceful savage”
(i.e., the student) who indulges in the guilty and lowly pleasure of bawdy tales. Trapped
in a life overwhelmed with “nitty-gritty” demands, these students still maintain their
childlike innocence and naivety (they mean what they say and say what they mean and

they honor all of their commitments). The problem here is that because Shor applies

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Freire’s theory in a lock-step manner, he is required to prove that students are in real
danger of being ideologically overpowered, but at the same time he is also required to
show that students are resourceful and capable of breaking out of such domination with
the guidance of an educated teacher. Shor sets up this hierarchy between student and
teacher repeatedly: “Faced with this threat, the designers of an empowering pedagogy
have to study the shape of disempowering forces. As allies to the powerless, liberatory
teachers need a working knowledge of the anti-critical ﬁeld in which a critical pedagogy
evolves . . . . The teacher’s own critical learning preﬁgures the knowledge the class as a
whole will gain” (47). Liberatory pedagogy places the teacher in the position of the all-
knowing sage who can redeem students from their immersion in false-reality. While
teachers know true reality, students are tricked by mass capitalistic culture into believing
in false reality.

One of the more common and popular arguments that the teacher is in a position
to show students the correct way to think can be found in liberatory pedagogy’s concern
over the degenerative inﬂuences of popular or mass culture. Within this scenario, grave
concern over the dangers of mass culture are expressed, a concern which is consistently
considered an unwholesome inﬂuence on impressionable young writing students, as is
explored in more detail in Chapter 3 this dissertation. As quoted above, Shor explains
that “The teacher’s own critical learning preﬁgures the knowledge the class as a whole
will gain” (47). Once the teacher’s primary role in bringing students to critical
consciousness has been established, popular culture and all its attendant ills can set up as
the evil that students must come to recognize and conquer. Shor makes an outlandish

claim for the value of critical pedagogy when he argues that “critical thought and the

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practice of freedom are foundations for exorcising mass culture, purging sexism and
racism, evoking class solidarity, and initiating social reconstruction” (269-270). But the
connection between false consciousness and mass culture are made even more explicit, to
the point that the former is a direct result of the later: “Beneath false consciousness, there
are resources which survive the acidity of mass culture, waiting for a reconstructed life”
(Shor 87). Herein lies an enduring concept still drawn upon in writing scholarship today,
the concept that if students could only come to break out of the stupor in which they are
immersed as a direct result of their complicity with popular culture, then they would
achieve a vulgar type of Marxist true sight.

Shor’s concepts and procedures for bringing about critical literacy, and by
extension other forms of Freirian liberatory pedagogy, continue to be disseminated by
compositionist and computer-compositionists alike: it is as if scholars do not recognize
or think about what these terms or turns of phrases mean anymore, but the major terms
and concepts nevertheless continue to be drawn upon (false consciousness, liberation,
critical consciousness, the dangers of mass culture). Sharon Crowley similarly writes that
later forms of critical pedagogy still condescendingly construct students as passive and
oppressed: “Leftist composition teachers desire that their students be alerted to the
oppressive and debilitating means by which their culture deﬁnes them and their relations;
they desire as well that students be empowered by their awareness of oppression to
change the means by which it is maintained (Berlin and Vivion; Bizzell 1992;
Sullivan/Qually)” (Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays 234-
23 5). This desire on the part of composition instructors to “alert” students to their

oppression and lead them to challenge the material culture and social relationships which

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maintain this oppression carried over into social constructionist and social epistemic

rhetorics as well.

Social Constructionist and Social Epistemic Rhetoric

James Berlin explains that different forms of social constructionist rhetoric have
emerged out of different historical contexts—appearing in the early 20th century in
conjunction with progressive politics, in the 1930s in reaction to the Depression and in an
effort to train students in political discourse, and again in the 19608 and 19705 as a
response to social unrest and race, gender, and class conﬂict. Each strain of social
constructionist rhetoric recognizes “the inﬂuence of social forces in the formation of the
individual” and the role the individual can and should play in participating in democracy
for the good of the larger community (“Composition Studies and Cultural Studies” 398).
Because this rhetoric places a premium on the individual as a ﬁeely acting entity, even
while recognizing the social construction of knowledge, it has the tendency to represent
the student as an individual who can come to really know his or her true self and make
the right decisions outside of social or historical constraints. Berlin also recognizes that
“[w]hile it emphasizes the communal and social constitution of subjectivity, it never
abandons the notion of the individual as ﬁnally a sovereign free agent, capable of
transcending mere material and social conditions” (“Composition Studies and Cultural
Studies” 398). Herein lies the impetus for social contructionist and social epistemic
rhetoric’s turn toward disciplining students: while students are free to make their own
choices as individuals, clearly the right choice is to resist social inequity in all of its forms

and to defend democracy.

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While Berlin does not address this critique of the social constructionist treatment

of the student subject, he does acknowledge that it assumes the existence of rational

discourse:

[w]hile this rhetoric sees the manipulative power of discourse, it continues to
believe that a universal, ahistorical, rational discourse is possible. As a result, it
regards itself as a disinterested and objective arbiter of competing ideological
claims, occupying a neutral space above the fray of conﬂict. In other words, it is
incapable of examining its own ideological commitments, which it mistakes for
accurate reﬂections of eternal truths. It accepts its signifying practices as
indisputably representative of things as they really are. (“Composition Studies

and Cultural Studies” 398)

Because of its belief in “a universal, ahistorical, rational discourse,” social constructionist

rhetoric assumes that it can convey the “truth” to students who, in their sovereign and free

nature, will recognize it as the “truth.” However, this type of circular logic leads to yet

another type of standardization and discipline of the student. This rhetoric does not show

students how to create and situate texts in social contexts, but rather shows students how

to situate themselves as resisters of social conﬂict and defenders of democracy by

deploying such universal and rational discourse. Dasenbrock makes a similar argument

that:

social constructionist pedagogy becomes little more than a more sophisticated
version of subj ectivism, with a slightly stronger emphasis on what is wrong with
those people over there who are socially conditioned, and a slightly weaker

emphasis on how we are not. This is precisely what social constuctionism has

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become in composition, a tool for the critical analysis of the social complacency

of our students. . . Seeing this leads us also to see that the struggle between

individual and social models of the self has been a gigantic exercise in shadow-

boxing. (6)

Berlin argues that much of the work being done in cultural studies composition
pedagogy coincides with social epistemic rhetoric and therefore “considers signifying
practices in relation to the ideological formation of the self within a context of
economics, politics, and power” (“Composition Studies and Cultural Studies” 401).
Social epistemic rhetoric, like social constructionist rhetoric, works from the premise that
the subject is a discursive construct, or “a plethora of discourses—a rich variety of texts
inscribed in the persona of the individual. The subject is thus a construction of the play
of discourses that a culture provides. These discourses interpellate or address us,
providing each of us with directions about our behavior, scripts that have to do with such
categories as race, class, and gender” (“Composition Studies and Cultural Studies” 399).
Yet this acknowledgement that the self is a made up of competing discourses also leads
social epistemic rhetoric to focus on conﬂict, which means that it tends to regard the
writing classroom as a site of intervention “in this process of construction, locating the
conﬂicts in order to make them the center of writing” (“Composition Studies and Cultural
Studies” 402). It is in this sense that social epistemic rhetoric controls and constrains
students, because when students are encouraged to confront conﬂicts and produce
resistant readings, such encouragement and such readings are always already
ideologically loaded from the start (“Composition Studies and Cultural Studies” 401).

Social epistemic rhetoric therefore betrays a tendency to discipline the student, as

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opposed to student texts, as a result of this conﬂict approach.

The problem of representing students as in need of discipline and control once
again becomes clear when we see that social epistemic rhetoric’s focus on confronting
conﬂicts requires that writing classes focus on student thoughts, beliefs, and morals, as
opposed to student texts. This problem is apparent in Composition and Resistance when
the authors claim that writing provides students with a way “‘to make learning a personal
act toward taking greater control’ of their lives, and it must situate this process ‘in and
with social order” (Hurlbert and Bliz 4, quoted in “Composition Studies and Cultural
Studies” 403). The reason for emphasizing conﬂict in the classroom is that it is the
competing discourses which emerge out of this conﬂict that oppress students politically,
economically, or socially. In other words, social epistemic rhetoric focuses on the
student’s sense of subjectivity within these conﬂicts, and not on the student’s use of
language or the student’s understanding of how language functions in particular contexts
to contribute to such conﬂicts. In the ﬁnal analysis, social epistemic rhetoric returns to

taking the student, and not language or rhetoric, as the subject of the writing course.

Since the ﬁrst freshman writing course was designed and taught at Harvard in
1874, the idea that students’ intellectual or moral improvement was an appropriate topic
of the course has been disseminated and often unquestioned in the ﬁeld of composition.
Whether these earliest manifestations of the rhetoric of the student as subject were

concerned with producing a passive managerial class or students who could prove their

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worthiness to serve the dominant class by producing “correct” English, they nevertheless
set a precedent for taking the student himself or herself as the “natural” subject of the
writing course. While a variety of pedagogies and rhetorics were designed in the 19708,
’805, and ’903 in efforts to democratize and revolutionize writing instruction, they were
unable to relinquish their investment in disciplining and standardizing students. This
historical narrative suggests that computer-composition’s contemporary penchant for
disciplining the student as the subject of the writing course—to frame rhetorically and
treat students as intellectually substandard and in need of moral regulation ——is indebted
to earlier forms of writing instruction. In the next chapter, I offer a ﬁrst person narrative
of my student and scholarly experiences as a way to explain how this traditional rhetoric

of the student as subject functions as an undercurrent in computer-composition today.

 

‘ In Textual Carnivals (1991), Susan Miller refers to the popular histories of composition
as stories in order to indicate that they are open to interpretation and debate. She also
argues that telling stories about composition is important because it gives the discipline a
sense of its past, present, and future directions. Furthermore, telling stories about the
ﬁeld is a way to bring previously neglected topics—such as students, teachers, research
and institutional frameworks—into the symbolic realm, “the space traditionally reserved
for more ‘important’ topics” (3).

2 While several other compositionists have contributed important histories of the
discipline—including Robert J. Connors’ Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory,
and Pedagogy (1997) and Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition
(l987)——Berlin’s, Miller’s, and Crowley’s histories are often regarded as among the most
inﬂuential.

3 Similar critiques of expressivism can be found in Reed Dasenbrock’s “The Myths of the
Subjective and of the Subject in Composition Studies” (1993), John Clifford’s “The
Subject in Discourse” (1991), and Sharon Crowley’s Composition in the University
(1998)

4 Crowley suggests that by giving Americans and English Departments the concept of

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academic discourse to latch onto, their anxieties are appeased: “[i]t fosters and supports
the persistent American belief that universal standards of literacy exist, and it legitimizes
and covers over the social and institutional functions of Freshman English” (Composition
in the University 233).

5 Similar critiques of critical or liberatory pedagogy can be found peppered throughout a
variety of other scholarship as well, including Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, Charles
Paine’s The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present (1999), and
Ellen Cushman’s “Critical Literacy and Institutional Language” (1999).

6 The language of liberatory pedagogy appears in other major scholarly works from this
time period, such as Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power (1981) and Paulo Freire and
Donaldo Macedo’s Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (1987).

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Chapter 2
Purgatory: The Impossibility of Writing My Dissertation

We were journeying on through the evening, straining our eyes forward, as far
as we could, against the evening and shining rays;
And 10, little by little, a smoke, dark as night, rolling towards us, nor any room
was there to escape from it. This reft us of sight and the pure air.
— Dante Alighieri The Divine Comeay, Purgatorio, Canto XV
Before we enter into God’s Kingdom, every trace of sin within us must be
eliminated, every imperfection in our soul must be corrected. This is exactly what

takes place in purgatory . . . [purgatory] does not indicate a place but a condition
of life.

— Pope John Paul 11, August 4, 1999

Consenting to Purgatory

I offer my struggles with writing this dissertation as a practical example of how
the dissemination of the rhetoric of the student as the subject of the course subtly
pervades the realms of composition and computer-composition and ensnares those
involved with it; it emerges in the research and scholarship and it populates the minds of
instructors and students alike. In this chapter I therefore write as both a graduate student
and a scholar who was on an unproductive quest to locate the elusive subject. My
unproductive quest was prolonged not only because I actively consented to such
traditional expectations and constraints, but also because the promises of computer-
technology functioned to further strengthen my conviction that the elusive subject could
indeed be identiﬁed and embodied.

As is common among graduate students, the rhetoric of the student as subject told

me that if I read everything, rurninated hard enough on the issues at hand, thought clearly,

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and followed the advice and direction of my committee members—in sum, if I could just
become that perfect graduate student who did everything right and thought right—I
would ﬁnally be able to synthesize every idea, bit of theory, and piece of scholarship I
had ever read into one clear, absolute, without-a-doubt and beyond-reproach thesis
statement, and then I could convey this absolutely correct answer in writing without
interference or confusion to my readers. Yet in this chapter I also explain how this
feeling was intensiﬁed by another important factor that contributed to the conundrum in
which I found myself: there is a new type of desire that comes with working, reading,
writing, and researching with computers; there is a stronger illusion, a more seductive
siren-song that I can, or must, or am expected to arrive at the truth or keep working on
each of the different versions of my chapters simultaneously precisely because the
promises of computer technology permit me to do so. In other words, although
computer-composition may promise otherwise, the deployment of the rhetoric of the
student as subject also pervades this scholarship and affects the scholars and students
working in the ﬁeld. This chapter concludes with a review of how other computer-
compositionists have attempted to negotiate, come to terms with, or resolve this
problematic rhetoric of the student-as-subj ect.

I decided, or rather I was persuaded by my committee, that if I was ever going to
complete my dissertation I had to jettison my own deployment of and investment in this
rhetoric. I myself had to stop disseminating, through my own research, writing, and
intellectual efforts, the rhetoric of individual originality, truth, and comprehensiveness. I
realized that I had been working in a type of purgatory where my very topic of study

wedged me into paralysis—psychological, philosophical, and theoretical paralysis. The

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very act of conducting online or database research, analyzing resources, articulating
positions, and theorizing my conclusions further entrenched me in the futility of writing
this dissertation. I was trying to identify a single point of subjectivity from which to
write about the futility of writing from a single point of subjectivity, and I was trying to
develop an alternative rhetoric of the subject from which to write about the futility of
endorsing any particular rhetoric of the subject. I was caught in a Derridian slippage in
which the signiﬁer could never map the sign. Or in other words I was hunting for the
very thing that I was arguing was impossible to obtain. These realizations showed me that
the central task of my dissertation was to identify and dissect the rhetoric of the student-
as-subj ect as it is threaded unevenly and inconsistently throughout the scholarship, lore,
and cultural artifacts of computer-composition.

Writing this dissertation often felt like I was living in purgatory, and I came to
view my intellectual struggles, writing false starts, and theoretical frustrations as types of
penance. I now realize, however, that this idea that I must pay penance is yet another
manifestation of the deployment of this traditional rhetoric, and the process of writing
this dissertation has shown me the extent to which it can fail students and hinder writing.
The very idea that I can work into my dissertation a chapter entitled “Purgatory”
contributes to my argument as well. I was so completely immersed in this rhetoric that I
played into the idea that I was on an internal quest to improve myself spiritually,
intellectually, and emotionally. If I could just become a better person, a more insightful
reader of theory, a more serious and intellectually astute scholar, then I could once and
for all ﬁgure out my exact argument and the exact outline of my chapters. I could

theorize a concept of the subject that would escape the concept of the subject. It is

65

embarrassing to say and I realize my confessional tone here is problematic, but it is
nonetheless true that my committee meetings oﬁen began with the confession “I’m a
failure as a graduate student; I should know all this already,” and concluded with the
disclosure “If I was smarter this wouldn’t be so difﬁcult.” And again, it may seem
obvious now, but I assure you I was unaware of it at the time, that this attitude shows
how well I accepted, bought into, and then disseminated the rhetoric of the subject. Once
I had experienced enough internal psychological and intellectual hell, once I had
experienced the external and physical struggles of getting up early and staying up late to
write, then I would be a good student, good enough to think clearly, arrive at the correct
answer, and write my dissertation.

A consideration of the distinctions between modernism and postmodernism can
act as a heuristic device for thinking through this particular problem of subjectivity in
composition. While computer-composition entices us with postmodern promises for
computer technology in the writing classroom (meaning is never comprehensive or
stable, originality is impossible), they get peppered with more traditional promises
(meaning can be located and conveyed without interference, originality is possible)
because we are still very much operating from a modern worldview. Yet of course, I do
not mean to imply with this discussion that modernism and postmodernism are two
different and distinct movements or that they are unrelated and independent of each other.
The modern worldview, grounded in Industrialism and its accompanying print culture,
values truth, knowing oneself, individualism, hierarchy, individual creation, and depth.
In other words, the notion that ideas are created in individual minds and then are

unproblematically expressed to the word—what could be referred to as a Platonic

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rhetorical invention—prevails because of its long-held connection with industrial
economy based on individuality (Turnan Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age
92). In contrast, a postmodern worldview, grounded in a post-Industrial information age
and its attendant online/computer culture, values the contingent nature of truth, vertical
organization, collaboration, the impossibility of new or unique ideas, surface, and the
connection of fragments (Turnan Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age 48).
Computer-composition ﬁnds itself in a strange mid-place between these modern and
postmodern worldviews and values, where the ﬁeld is excitedly discussing “new”
theoretical ideas about how reading, writing, meaning-making, texts, and authors (writing
subjects) are foregrounded and conceived of differently in technological environments.
However, the ﬁeld has not yet relinquished its strong and ingrained hold on a modern
worldview and print as the primary way of organizing our lives. So we get a disjunction
when computer-composition attempts to incorporate new technologies and ideas about
online literacy with older models of thinking about students, what writing classes should
accomplish, and best practices for teaching writing. While computer-composition’s
theoretical musings enter the realm of postrnodemity, in the ﬁnal analysis the reassertion
of the traditional rhetoric of the student as subject indicates that this sub-discipline is still
ﬁrmly entrenched in a modern worldview, trying to get students to buy into modern print
culture and its accompanying modemist subjectivity, values of truth, knowing oneself,
individualism, comprehensiveness, and unique creation. There is a general pattern that
each of these different promises follow: writing in computer-mediated environments is
supposed to free authors from the traditional expectations of comprehensiveness,

originality, and authority, yet in the end, technology also paradoxically reinforces these

67

traditional expectations as well.

Although computer-composition scholarship promises to relax certain long held
beliefs about textuality and authorship (Landow; Vitanza; Snyder; F aigley; Stone;
Turkle)—which essentially amount to foregoing our investment in the modern rhetoric of
the student-as-subject—we see that its promises still play into and reinforce this
traditional rhetoric. For example, I was arguing that computer-mediated writing
environments can help improve student writing when computer-mediated writing
environments were greatly increasing the complexity of my own writing and proliferating
my meaning-making. I had played into the latest version of the rhetoric of the traditional
student, and it was tinged with the additional promises of technology: if I could just
fulﬁll the promise of the cyborg and piece together an improved version of my scholar-
self, then and only then would I ﬁnally be able to write my dissertation. I relished the
notion that once I completed this project, I would be a better person, new and improved,
cast in the mold of Haraway’s cyborg, storming the reality studio and obliterating
intellectual and disciplinary boundaries. In sum, what I experienced was a new type of
desire that accompanies reading, writing, and researching in computer-mediated spaces.
A longing that I must, since technology provides me with the opportunity, see everything,
know everything, be everything, and therefore arrive at the truth which is there if only for
my asking. The appearance of this new type of desire that arises when working with
technology means that there are additional questions about teaching writing in computer-
mediated environments that must be asked. And all these questions converge on the issue
of what it takes to help improve student writing in online spaces. It is not a matter of

achieving nirvana, the elusive promise of technology under which I had been laboring—

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knower of all computer-composition research, reader of all theory, explorer of all
databases and portal pages—but rather a matter of focusing writing courses on student

rhetoric.

Traditional Authorial Expectations

A survey of computer-composition scholarship suggests that computer-mediated
writing environments are suppose to free me from adherence to traditional authorial
expectations such as authority and objectivity (Landow; Faigley; Stone; Turkle). Yet I
have been forced to accept that writing in computer environments has, quite simply,
failed to free me from these expectations, or perhaps more precisely, failed to free me
from such self-imposed desires. On the contrary, I felt intensiﬁed pressure and
responsibility to fulﬁll traditional authorial ﬁmctions. Reading, conducting research, and
writing in computer-mediated environments may be offered up as a liberating experience,
but in practice it foregrounds the impossibility of writing a dissertation in synch with the
traditional authorial requirements and expectations.

The traditional student-writing-dissertation subjectivity invokes a very traditional
type of author-function. George Landow tells us that the author in hypertext, and by
extension in computer-mediated environments, is “a decentered (or centerless) network
of codes that, on another level, also serves as a node within another centerless network”
(Hypertext 2.0 91-92). And Allucquere Rosanne Stone tells us that the notion of
individuality and singular subjectivity is dispersed in cyberspace: “The cyborg, the
multiple personality, the technosocial subject, Gibson’s cyberspace cowboy all suggest a

radical rewriting, in the technosocial space . . . of the bounded individual as the standard

69

social unit and validated social actant” (The War of Desire and Technology at the Close
of the Mechanical Age 42). William Gibson’s cyberspace cowboy provides us with a
perfect example of the contradictions inherent in the promises of technology to alter
subject formation or identity. Neuromancer ’s central hero, Case, is damaged physically
and emotionally, and he hungers perpetually to jack into cyberspace so that he can throw
off the limitations of the ﬂesh. The reader is reminded constantly of Case’s disdain for
the ﬂesh given that his name exempliﬁes how his physical matter is merely a container,
or a case, for the meat of his body (“The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his
own ﬂesh” 6). Yet far from being a technosocial space where “the bounded individual
and the standard social unit” are rewritten, cyberspace paradoxically becomes the place
where Case reiﬁes the traditional qualities of individuality, experiences the nostalgic
desire for modernity, and ultimately reafﬁrms the division between mind and body. In
cyberspace he becomes hyper-rational and hyper-real, more real than if he were not
logged into the sim-stim cyberspace deck. When the three-dimensional colored columns
of information emerge out of the consensual hallucination grid and tower over him, Case,
released from his damaged body and psyche, in the clarity of rrrind that can only be
achieved in cyberspace, ﬁnally comprehends the complexity of data and patterns of cause
and effect that have structured his life.

Case is ﬁnally sutured to the truth again in a nostalgic desire for the traditional,
and, in a moment of clarity, he understands the web of interrelated and overdetennined
structures of information and power that control the universe. It is a modernist dream of
Enlightenment, a Transcendental dream of truth: by becoming whole in cyberspace, Case

achieves a type of critical consciousness and understands that his subjectivity is a

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modernist whole and that true reality is linear and completely comprehensible. While
cyberspace promises to release Case from the limits of his physical body and the limits of
modernist ways of knowing, it is in cyberspace that he paradoxically reaffirms the
modernist division between mind and body (consciousnesses can be downloaded and
exist entirely in cyberspace) and it is in cyberspace that he achieves a type of hyper-
rationality. Case’s situation serves as a popular culture example that, in the end, even in
cyberspace, our intense desire to achieve a state of uniqueness, wholeness, and
objectivity, our desire to seamlessly suture ourselves to the ruse of truth, situates us back
ﬁrmly within a modern framework.

Like Case, I too feel the lure of the promises of technology to free me from
traditional modernist authorial constraints. But also like Case, I too feel the contradictory
nostalgic desire to be sutured back to the truth again, to a familiar space of modernist
newness and wholeness, when I am working in online spaces. My desire in part is
produced by my particular position as a graduate student writing a dissertation. From this
position, I am still expected to write from a location of singularity and authority and, in
the end, to produce something unique and new. In addition, I have not been forced, but
rather have eagerly consented to the hegemonic, authoritative, singular, and dry writing
style of academia, as it has served me well in earning high grades in my course work,
being accepted to conferences, and in general creating a space for myself at my university
and among my peers as a type of computer-composition expert.

In sum, I am trying to inhabit the type of subject position I am critiquing. I am
trying to embody a particular notion of subjectivity at the same moment I am pointing out

its contradictions. And the computer—instead of freeing me to work and write from

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multiple perspectives—is only multiplying my problems and anxieties. I invoke the
modernist author function to limit the never-ending proliferation of meanings I confront
and create, and yet part of my dissertation criticizes this same act as well. My project
critiques how the author function—the reassertion of the modernist Enlightenment
subject—truncates, reduces, and limits meaning-making. Yet I still ﬁnd it necessary to
limit the meaning I create with my project; I am not free to allow my meaning-making to
consider multiple paths are contradictory perspectives. While the popularly accepted
story is that the author is the creator and proliferator of meaning, it actually functions in
the reverse of this: we really use the “ideological product”—the idea of an author—to
limit and exclude meaning. The author is therefore the “functional principle by which . . .
one impedes the ﬁee circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition,
decomposition, and recomposition of ﬁction” (Foucault “What is an Author?” 119). I
was trying to do in my dissertation exactly what I argue is limiting; that is, I was using
the author function as “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” (Foucault
“What is an Author?” 118). I was eagerly consenting to the rhetoric of the student as
subject and was accepting the call to interpellate myself into a modernist author, and as
such was “mark(ing) the matter in which (I) fear the proliferation of meaning” (Foucault

“What is an Author?” 119).

Uniqueness, Originality, and Truth
As a scholar, the traditional rhetoric of the student subject told me that there was
one correct answer that I should be able to ﬁnd, and launched me on endless attempts to

reconcile conﬂicting terminology and deﬁnitions and contradictory theories and

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scholarship. I was lulled into believing that writing my dissertation was a matter of truth,
and not a matter of rhetoric. Computer-composition’s offer of stripping meaning-making
of the guise of independence might have freed me from this belief in originality and truth.
As Landow suggests, “by making the borders of the text (now conceived as the individual
lexia) permeable, it (cyberspace and hypertext) removes some of its independence and
uniqueness” (Hypertext 2.0 84). However, this offer proved hollow to me, since my
focus on truth was inextricably linked with my focus on the modernist concept of
originality. In other words, while hypertext may on one level obliterate uniqueness, on
another level the fact that borders continually merge and shift in cyberspace means that
there is perpetual originality: no borders and no stability means that nothing stays the
same, and so hypertext paradoxically re-ignites my desire to locate uniqueness.

An obsession with uniqueness can once again be attributed to an embrace of a
modernist and humanist subjectivity. What I walked right into and could not get out of,
even at a time when I was writing about this very enigma, was the rhetoric of the student
as subject who could create something special and original. I was almost completely
unable to resist the hegemony of the traditional stories I had read so much about and
critiqued: that when we write, we should be able to produce something completely
unique, and if we are reading and thinking and writing correctly, then we should be able
to see some patterns of truth emerge and then convey that truth to our audience without
interference or confusion. Landow suggests that writing in computer-mediated
environments is supposed to free me from this need to create something unique: the fact
that hypertext “enforces the presence of multiple versions potentially undercuts belief in

the possibility of a unique, unitary text” (Hypertext 2.0 84). However, on the contrary,

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the “presence of multiple versions” only complicated and mystiﬁed my modernist
attempts to arrive at a deﬁnitive thesis. I wrote not as if the “belief in the possibility of a
unique, unitary text” had been undercut, but rather as if I was that much more expected to
arrive at a unique and unitary text precisely because I had the freedom, the option, of
working with multiple versions. What I needed to do instead was dislodge my
investment in the rhetoric of the student as subject. By foregoing the goal of locating
uniqueness, originality, and truth, I could then focus my energies on writing and
experimenting with which rhetorical devices and movements would best help make a

strong argument.

Comprehensive Knowledge

Just as hypertext and cyberspace are supposed to free writers from the ruse of
uniqueness, they are also suppose to free them from the ruse of comprehensiveness. The
acts of researching and writing in computer-mediated environments are supposed to help
me become a better researcher and writer, but instead I ﬁnd that it proliferates my
research options, thereby making my tasks more difﬁcult. For example, the traditional
rhetoric of the student as subject says that, in order to be a good student, I should be able
to locate all research, read everything, and become an expert on all topics. While
Landow argues that hypertextuality will obliterate our frustration with print’s tendency to
limit connections and truncate lines of investigations, I found that hypertextuality
achieves the opposite: its forever-multiplying options greatly increases my frustration by
dangling the possibility of comprehensive research in front of me (Hypertext 2.0 97).

One of the earliest promises of technology was to attain the organization and

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connection of all meaning. For example, the Director of Scientiﬁc Research and
Development in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, Vannevar Bush, proposed a
machine that would organize large amounts of scientiﬁc information. His imagined
memex mechanism “would transcend the storage and retrieval limitations of print
technology by allowing users to gain access to and to search huge amounts of information
in order to retrieve and annotate what they considered important” (Snyder Hypertext:
The Electronic Labyrinth 22). Working ﬁom Bush’s concept of a memex machine later
in the 1970s, Ted Nelson developed a similar idea for connecting all human knowledge,
which he referred to as the “docuverse.” Ilana Snyder explains that Nelson conceived of
his “Xanadu” project as “a system in which the whole of recorded discourse—all the
world’s ‘literature,’ deﬁned as ‘an ongoing system of interconnecting documents’
(Nelson, 1992a:2/9)—would be woven into one enormous matrix” (Snyder Hypertext:
The Electronic Labyrinth 24). The goal that Bush and Nelson had hoped to achieve with
their projects— namely for technology to enable the cataloging and connection of all
human information—helps us understand why the aggravation of being unable to connect
everything in a complex web of meaning is usually attributed to the limitations of print
textuality. Landow makes this argument explicit when he explains that “[s]uch
frustrations (with print) derive ﬁ'om repeated recognitions that effective argument
required closing off connections and abandoning lines of investigation that
hypertextuality would have made available” (Hypertext 2.0 97). However, computer-
composition’s promise of comprehensive completeness, never-ending webs of
connection, and multiple perspectives wedged me back into the overwhelming position

that I could, and hence should, achieve comprehensiveness.

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Online databases and lntemet enhanced research capabilities lure me into
believing that I can access every piece of digitized scholarship throughout the world. Far
from being a reassuring situation, thought, it can instead be overwhelming. I detect
similar anxieties in colleagues, like Matthew G. Kirshenbaum, who explains that “It’s a
ﬁrll-time job (and more) not only to keep pace with the inevitable changes in hardware
and software, but also to stay current with the exponentially increasing body of
theoretical and critical literature on everything cyber, virtual, hyper, and digital, and most
importantly of all, to ﬁnd ways in which to implement the technology so as to make a real
difference in my classroom and in my scholarship” (Chronicle of Higher Education, July
25, 1997: B11; quoted in Hawisher and Selfe’s “The Passions that Mark Us” xiv). In
contrast, Landow celebrates this aspect of digitized research and writing because it holds
out the promise of increased efficiency:

The speed with which one can move between passages and points in sets of texts

changes both the way we read and the way we write, just as the high-speed

number-crunching computing changed various scientiﬁc ﬁelds by making
possible investigations that before had required too much time or risk. One
change comes from this ability to move with equal facility to points within a text

and to those outside it. (Hypertext 2.0 82)

The promise of databases, which now make possible “investigations that before had
required too much time or risk,” taunts me into imagining that I can locate every journal
article, book, publication, or listserv discussion, and then read, understand, and
incorporate it all into my project. The promise of interconnectivity and searchable

databases entices me into a dream that I can ﬁnd everything, read everything, understand

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and incorporate everything; it is a dream that all modes of information and scholarship
are “at my ﬁngertips.” However, consider that a search in the MLA Bibliography (1991 -
2002) for the keyword “subjectivity” turned up 2,099 hits and a similar search in the non-
academic search engine Google turned up 171,000 hits. A general search in the
academic-friendly Alta Vista with the term “subjectivity” returned an astronomical 64,842
results, a search with the terms “composition” and “subjectivity” returned a more modest

” ‘6

5,272 results, and an advanced search with the terms “composition, rhetoric,” and
“subjectivity” returned a comparatively reasonable 1,276 results. Hoping that a more
discipline-speciﬁc database might return even more reasonable results, I turned next to
ERIC, a database containing journal articles and reports on education. A search with the
keyword “subjectivity” returned 533 results and a more speciﬁc search with the keywords
“subjectivity” and “composition” returned a decidedly more manageable 64 results. In
each of these cases, many of the returned results were unrelated to my intended topic of
research, and so the time-intensive act of sorting through the results and culling out
useful entries was still necessary. These examples illustrate the expanse of information
that technology vows we have at our ﬁnger-tips, to use for our beneﬁt and to break out of
modemist ways of knowing and writing. Yet how could I possibly accept the
postmodern promise of so much available information without then calling upon
modernist ways of dealing with this astronomical amount of information?

Taking my specialized area of research of computer-composition as an example,
there are several online clearinghouses of scholarship and pedagogy which claim to strive

for comprehensiveness. Two recently introduced sites—Rhetcomp.com and Kairosnews:

A News Site and Online Community for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and

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Pedagogy—promise to provide exhaustive and up-to-date coverage on all topics related
to rhetoric and composition. Rhetcomp.com boasts that it is a portal to relevant sites and
information in the ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition, and it allows one to search based on
a variety of categories, including calls for papers, ﬁelds of study, journals, listserves,
MOOs/OWLs, organizations, people, portals, programs, and terms of research.
Kairosnews describes itself using an analogy of the general store, where people used to
gather daily to share both personal and worldwide news. Charles Lowe, the co-editor of
the site, explains that “[i]n today’s electronic frontier, a similar need exists, an lntemet
nexus for members of the teaching with technology community to share the news.”
News is collected based on the open journalism model used by Internet Technology sites
like Slashdot, so that instead of sending calls for papers or book reviews to individual
listservs, one can behave like a journalist and submit the information at Kairosnews. Far
from simply being a list of news headlines, this site also provides forums and chatrooms
for discussing this information, as well as portal pages to conferences, projects in
progress, calls for paper, and major voices working in the ﬁeld.

Landow makes a liberatory declaration about how the amount of material
available through lntemet technologies is altering the learning experience of students.
Yet he does not acknowledge that this problematic situation may further mire students
into modernist ways of thinking and coping with information:

For students hypertext promises new, increasingly reader-centered encounters

with text. In the ﬁrst place, experiencing a text as part of a network of navigable

relations provides a means of gaining quick and easy access to a far wider range

of background and contextual materials than has ever been possible with

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conventional educational technology. Students in schools with adequate libraries

have always had the materials available, but availability and accessibility are not

the same thing. (Hypertext 2.0 225)
Interconnectivity and searchable technologies make available library databases across the
world: online electronic journals which seem to be proliferating almost every day;
archived listserv discussions from computer-composition practitioners and professionals;
archived syllabi, writing resources and bibliographies; and lists of articles on teaching
with multimedia. While the experience of being unable to read everything is certainly
common among students, it seems that the amount of information, scholarship, and
research made available through the promise of interconnectivity and searchable
databases is almost incapacitating. Again it seems that students are enticed with a
postmodem-type of promise that they now have “a far wider range of background and
contextual materials [available to them] than has ever been possible with conventional
educational technology,” but they may very well have to rely on modernist ways of

organizing this information in order to deal with its volume.

Endless Revision and Fragmentation

Intimately related to the matter of the proliferation of meaning and our hopes for
technology to connect all knowledge is the idea that word processors permit us to edit
and revise our writing endlessly, leaving us with absolutely no excuses for awkward
phrasing, unclear paragraph organization, weak explanations, or my personal favorite,
split inﬁnitives. Jeannette A. Woodward implies that computer technology makes such

textual ﬂaws a thing of the past: “The introduction of the computer into the writing

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process is an exciting development. It can free you from the more tedious aspects of a
formal writing project and allow you to expend your efforts on developing insightful
ideas and expressing them in the most precise and compelling language” (Writing
Research Papers: Investigating Resources in Cyberspace xv). What all these supposed
beneﬁts of writing with word processors sometimes amounts to is the potential of
spiraling writers into a never-ending purgatory of revision and rewriting in their search
for “insightful ideas.” However, taking my experiences writing this dissertation as an
example, if I ever intend to complete it, I must resist the temptation to revise and rework
endlessly in an inexhaustible search for new ideas. In order to complete my project, I
must reject technology’s postmodern lure of ongoing revision and embrace more of a
modernist stance.

Another implication of the temptation of endless revision and endless
development of insightful ideas is that I can juggle multiple versions of my dissertation
chapters. And the different drafts have subtle differences in argument that seem to carry
immense differences in meaning. For example, is my argument about how best to teach
writing in computer-environments, or is it about how best to approach student
subjectivity? One version focused on how computer composition carries echoes of
traditional composition rhetorics and pedagogies which reinscribe modernist student
subjects; a second version focuses on how computer composition continues a much older
trend of disciplining docile student subjects; a third version is organized around rhetorical
moves; and yet a fourth version is organized around different forms of computer-
mediated communication and writing. Of course, graduate students have always worked

with multiple versions and have always been required to select, at some point, what

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appears to be the best option and follow it through to completion. The more important
point that can be derived out of this scenario is that, once again, the popular narrative of
computer technology tempts me with the postmodern idea that I do not have to select one
strict perspective from which to view my topic and that I can work with multiple
versions. A related manifestation of the promise of word processors is that I can
efﬁciently and effectively put everything into categories (primary and secondary sources;
books I think with versus books I think about; arguments; chapters; ideas). Yet this
promise proved misleading, because the very act of categorizing my evidence into ever
more fmely-tuned categories only created meaningless fragments.

Enticed by the promise of hyper-organization and hyper-categorization, what I
had meant to argue is that the rhetorics of fear and loathing and the rhetorics of promise
and fertility are dispersed unevenly over a wide range of cultural manifestations. But in
my zeal to take advantage of the promise of technology to categorize efﬁciently and
effectively my ideas, I often undid my own arguments and sabotaged my own efforts by
the extreme way I was fragmenting my information. I was also attracted to the possibility
of saving, organizing, and accessing all of the fragments of writing I had ever produced
in my graduate program: notes from seminar discussions, old course papers and their
various versions, conference papers, notes taken on sessions attended at conferences,
notes from comprehensive exams, peers’ notes from comprehensive exam reading
groups, comprehensive exams themselves, different drafts of my comprehensive exams,
and even ﬂeeting ideas jotted down on sticky notes. I was encouraged in this attraction
by the cyborg promise of technology that fragments can be put together to create, in the

end, a better whole. The promise that we can now write, or want to write, in fragments is

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best described by Johndan Johnson-Eilola: “Composition theory and pedagogy must
overcome a reliance on the idea of writing as production and look instead at ways for
considering the values inherent in connection between texts and fragments. We can
begin to see some of the cultural tendencies toward connection rather than production in
information systems such as the World Wide Web” (22). This call to focus on the
relationship between textual fragments seems to suggest the downfall of the traditional
essay, thesis statement papers, and research papers, which ask students to brainstorm
“original” ideas and then write their papers from scratch, essentially alone, even when so-
called peer-response sessions are involved. But the contradiction this amounts to is that
postmodern pieces and fragments can be and should be molded into a modern whole, and
in the end the Western educational system still prizes more traditional ways of knowing,
organizing information, and writing. What all these supposed beneﬁts of writing with
word processors sometimes amounts to is the potential of spiraling writers into a never-
ending purgatory of revision, rewriting, and reworking of fragments. However, in the
end, if I am going to complete my dissertation, I have to resist these temptations and
instead select one perspective and one version with which to work: in other words, to
complete my dissertation, I must reject the promises of computer technology and
embrace a modernist stance.

While computer-composition scholarship may tempt us with postmodern
promises that computer technology can alter the traditional rhetoric of the student as
subject and dislocate traditional authorial and textual expectations, it often still gets
tethered with more traditional promises because we are still very much entrenched in a

modern worldview. For example, while writing in computer-mediated environments is

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supposed to free authors from the traditional expectations of comprehensiveness,
originality, or authority, in the end, technology also paradoxically reinforces these
traditional expectations as well. These problematics— which are isolated in the above
analysis and which amount to a return to the construction of the traditional student

subj ect—also plague many of the contemporary theories of the subject in composition.

The rhetoric of the student subject emerging out of composition studies is a
slippery issue that has been approached in a variety of ways. And any attempt to
construct a cohesive review of past scholarly treatment of this issue is complicated by
debates over individuality and community, philosophical meditations on the relationship
between self and subject, as well as obligatory renunciations of the ever-entrenched
Enlightenment division between body and mind. It striking that this scholarship does not
use the exact same terms in the exact same ways, and hence never ends up making the
exact same argument. For example, there are terminology complications, such as what
constitutes the “mind” and the “body,” whether “self” and “subject” refer to the same
concept, and if so do the terms really refer to distinct and identiﬁable entities. There is
debate over whether or not a “self” or a “subject” can really exert “agency,” and then
there is debate over the concept of “agency” itself. There are different perspectives on
how different writing or discourse practices affect student subjectivity. And there are
disagreements over how and in what ways the student subject should be “freed”: the idea

of “freeing” the subject is being used in many different ways and to mean several

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different things. Should the subject be freed to be whatever it wants? To morph into
different identities on the lntemet? Or should it be freed from oppressive social and
economic forces? Or perhaps freed from traditional composition pedagogy?

While practically all composition scholarship in some way or another grapples
with the issue of the student-as-subject—to the extent that any piece of scholarship could
be examined in order to determine how the student is conceived, represented, or treated—
some compositionists have dealt with this issue as their primary concern. As the review
of representative examples discussed below shows, what each of these scholars have in
common is the struggle to reconcile a rhetoric of the subject as totally free and a rhetoric
of the subject as totally socially and/or linguistically constructed. What is important to
note is that each of these compositionists assumes that a rhetoric of the student as subject
must exist; they each work from the assumption that while the current rhetoric may be
insufficient or problematic, another rhetoric must be developed to take its place. The
option that the rhetoric of the student as subject must be muted or removed from our
scholarship and, by extension, our teaching practices is not even considered. Despite
their occasional use of different terminology or their different conclusions in the agency
debate, all of the scholars assume that the subject is being controlled in some way. And
despite the fact that they arrive at different conclusions for how to “free” the student
subject, they each nevertheless reveal their own obsession with the student subject by
prescribing new types of discipline.

Marguerite H. Helmers’s Writing Students: Composition Testimonials and
Representations of Students (1994) criticizes written practitioner lore for relying on the

genre of testimonials because they are replete with tropes highlighting “the stupid,

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beastlike, and childish aspects of college writers” (1). Helmers maintains that these
representations perpetuate unequal power dynamics between student and teacher,
essentially casting students as deviant and lacking others. Such representations “remain
stable enough to suggest that power relationships between students and teachers can be
reversed neither by a change in epistemology (current traditional to expressivist) nor by
an alteration of ethos (authoritarian to student-centered). In the ﬁnal analysis, it would
appear that composition must negotiate its own academic trouble before its discourse may
reﬂect a change in attitude toward students” (149). In other words, composition has
become associated with a feminine powerlessness: “Compositionists are the angels in the
academic house, essential to the academic system, but not its most powerﬁrl resident. In
the story of composition, we repeat our own tropes of lack, confessing that we are
without the patriarchal authority or the cleanliness of intellectual respectability” (148).
Helmers concludes that “practitioners and writers need to envision in new ways the
relationships and underlying assumptions of the ﬁeld to reverse hierarchies and replace
familiar representations” (17). The primary limitation of Helmers’s work is that it is still
concerned primarily with developing alternative ways to represent the student subject and
concludes that feminine representations of struggling students should be regarded as
positive.

Other compositionists—such as David Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky, Lester
Faigley, John Clifford, Reed Way Dasenbrock, James Berlin, and, more recently, a group
of scholars taking a cultural studies perspective—have attempted to complicate the notion
of the subject in their work by appealing to social constructionist or poststructuralist

ideas. Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and

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Method for a Reading and Writing Course (1986) presents a college course based on the
premise that students must learn about how to produce academically speciﬁc textual
performances in order to be successful in college. By arguing that students create
speciﬁc textual performances when they read and write, they confront explicitly the
problem of the authentic and free student subject in composition:
The paradox of imitative originality or of captive self-possession can be resolved
in the image of the reader or writer at work that is present in an artifact, a textual
performance . . . . What we are offering them is not an afﬁrmation of a person,
free and self-created, but an image of a person who is made possible through her
work, work that takes place both within and against the languages that surround
and deﬁne her. Or, as Said argues . . . “To begin to write, therefore, is to work a
set of instruments, to invent a ﬁeld of play for them, to enable performance.” (40)
Their idea of “an artifact, a textual performance” created “both within and against the
languages that surround and deﬁne” a student implies that since multiple textual
performances exist, so do multiple subject positions. Such a proposition can be viewed
as a precursor to much contemporary computer-composition scholarship that hinges on
notions of multiple and shifting subjectivity. While Bartholomae and Petrosky attempt to
complicate the subject with the notion of textual performances, they ultimately reinforce
a traditional singular subject throughout the design and implementation of their course,
with its focus on academic discourse and its failure to consider wider ranges of rhetorical
elements in a wider range of discourse events. Their insistence on dealing only with
academic discourse indicates the extent to which their course aims to interpellate students

into the narrow subjectivity of academia, and provides us with an example of how

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composition tends to recreate students into the mirror image of their instructors as well.
In Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition
(1992), Lester Faigley uses theories of postrnodemity to examine the ﬁeld of composition
since the 19605 in general and the question of the subject in particular. Faigley confronts
the problematics of the subject from a postmodernist stance, and his return to the subject
as a site of morality and authenticity is representative of a great deal of later scholarship
as well:
Postmodern theory decisively rejects the primacy of consciousness and instead
has consciousness originating in language, thus arguing that the subject is an
effect rather than a cause of discourse. Because the subject is the locus of
overlapping and competing discourses, it is a temporary stitching together of a
series of often contradictory subject positions. In other words, what a person
does, thinks, says, and writes cannot be interpreted unambiguously because any
human action does not rise out of a uniﬁed consciousness but rather from a
momentary identity that is always multiple and in some respects incoherent. If
consciousness is not fully present to one’s own self, then it cannot be made
transparent to another. (9)
Faigley represses the sense of the subject as complete and autonomous in chapters 1-7,
and with the aid of postmodern theory constructs the subject as a site of multiple and
contradictory identities. He also useﬁrlly points out that discussions about student
subjectivities are often confusing because two related but different notions of the
“individual” are often conﬂated:

the ﬁrst notion of the individual is the subject of high modernism: a coherent

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consciousness capable of knowing oneself and the world. . . . the world is not less
fragmented and transitory than in descriptions of the postmodern condition, but
the individual is granted the possibility of being able to critique that social
formation from a distanced viewpoint and to discover a potential course of human
emancipation. The second notion of the individual is the postmodern “free”
individual of consumer capitalism: one who can change identities at will because
identities are acquired by what one consumes. (16-17)
While Faigley argues for a postmodern subject who can switch identities freely, he
concludes with an awkward return to the complete and singular subject as the site of
authenticity. In the ﬁnal chapter, “The Ethical Subject” (the title of which is telling in
and of itself), F ai gley withdraws from his postmodem construction of the subject and
returns to the autonomous subject as the site of authentic and good writing. He concludes
that “the rejection of the individual-versus-community dichotomy for conceiving the
subject and the recognition of heterogeneity and unassimilated otherness establish ethics
as the central concern for postmodern subjectivity” (24). Although Faigley claims to
reject the individual-versus-community dichotomy, his simultaneous entrenchment of
ethics as the concern for subjectivity reinscribes the authentic subject/self as the site of
value which will produce good writing if it turns inward. F aigley ﬁnally cannot resist the
hegemonic lure to deploy a rhetoric of the subject, and he returns to the subject as the site
of morality and authentic writing.
Both John Clifford and Reed Way Dasenbrock directly confront composition’s
constant battle between representing the subject as completely free or as completely

socially/linguistically constructed, yet arrive at different, and at least from some

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perspectives, inadequate, conclusions. Clifford’s “The Subject in Discourse” (1991)
criticizes current-traditional and expressivist rhetorical theories which construct singular,
ethical subjects that are expected to turn inward to ﬁnd “the truth,” but ultimately ends up
reinscribing just such a view himself. He explicitly questions the treatment of the subject
in composition classrooms, stressing his concern that instruction often ignores social
contexts and issues of race, class and gender:
The subject position constructed for the student writer in this seemingly pluralist
rhetoric leaves out resistance, excluding radical feminism, Marxism, and other
committed political agendas. Masked as reasonable pragmatism, it seeks to
ignore and therefore disparage dissent, discontinuity, and confrontational
discourse. Our felt experiences, our various subjectivities, and our speciﬁc social
situatedness as readers and writers is obviated under the guise of
disinterestedness, as if race, class, and gender were messy accidents. (44)
While Clifford’s discussion seems to be moving in the direction of arguing for situated
authorship, his ﬁnal concerns are only with acknowledging social and historical contexts
and the overdetennined issues of race, class, and gender so that students can locate their
“true” voices. Hi5 solution to the problem of the rhetoric of the student subject is to
adjust composition pedagogy to ﬁt students’ “natur ” urge to ﬁgure out “who they really
are”:
Students want to become writers not because they have mastered syntax but
because they are convinced they have something to say and, more important,

somebody to say it to . . . they are propelled forward by the quest to clarify their

identities, order their existence, and understand their values and the world’s.

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Instructors can help students become inquisitive writers by avoiding rigid rules,
constant evaluation, and an obsession with socializing students into the
conventions of “normal” academic writing. (46)
Clifford also reinforces the view that the subject in writing is naturally on an internal
search for the truth: “Those who know the pleasures and excitement of discovering and
writing a truth not in concert with institutional norms are difficult to silence or mystify”
(47). He ultimately turns to a liberal humanist view that the truth will be found when the
subject follows its natural urge to turn inwards and express personal feelings.

Just as Clifford seeks a way to redeﬁne the subject, Dasenbrock acknowledges
composition’s constant struggle to move beyond the Western dichotonries of inner/outer
and subject/object and argues that turning to philosophy is one way out of this
conundrum. He argues that while the ﬁeld now seems aware of the complications,
futility, and self-serving potential of concerning ourselves with students’ senses of self, it
still spends a great deal of effort worrying about “their identiﬁcation with or alienation
from society” (8). Dasenbrock further argues that the concept of an autonomous subject
is oversimpliﬁed because “it ignores the networks of socialization in which our choices
are made and by which they are conditioned” (5). While this work usefully identiﬁes
composition’s self-serving potential of disciplining the subject, it is limited in its
primarily theoretical recommendations and its failure to provide direction for ﬁrture
scholarship or practice.

While the work of compositionists taking a cultural studies perspective is
informed by poststructuralist and postmodernist ideas about language and subjectivity,

much of it fails to explicitly interrogate the implications of the various ideological and

90

hegemonic forces at play within the ﬁeld. As a result, such scholarship still tends to talk
in terms of empowering passive students through writing activities designed to “help”
them ﬁnd their “true culture” and hence their “true voices” (Harkin and Schilb 1991;
France 1994; F aigley 1994; Fitts and France 1995). Further, such scholarship also tends
to work from simplistic vulgar Marxist notions of ideology as a “false consciousness”
which can be lifted from students with the help of a knowledgeable writing teacher. For
example, two texts which converge composition and cultural studies—Karen Fitts and
Alan F rance’s Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy (1995) and
France’s Composition as a Cultural Practice (1994)—examine the intersection of these
ﬁelds on a superﬁcial level only. Each of the essays in Left Margins work from the
assumption that teaching writing under the rubric of cultural studies necessarily involves
teaching about culture, and teaching about culture necessarily means teaching about
ideology. Another assumption all of these contributors seem to share is that all writing is
a form of cultural production. In other words, to articulate culture through writing is to
produce culture. Therefore, they all approach writing instruction from the perspective
that the production of writing should not be separated from the contexts and ideologies
that condition and shape it. The writing classroom is viewed as a site where students can
be encouraged to become aware of the cultural conditions in which they are immersed.
Once students become aware of these conditions, they can then develop a more
sophisticated and critical understanding of culture and the role writing plays in
reproducing and resisting cultural formations.

While it may seem like paying attention to the contexts and ideologies that shape

writing and highlighting the effects of writing could be fruitful ways to question the

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rhetoric of the student subject, most of the essays conclude with an awkward return to an
at-risk subject in-need of redemption. Unfortunately, the essays most often conclude that
understanding contexts and ideologies is important only because it will help students gain
critical self-consciousness, which is required before they can engage in political
demystiﬁcation and social change. While these essays useﬁrlly gesture towards how
linguistic struggles constitute the social realm, their major limitation is that they are based
on a mechanistic reading of ideology which condescendingly conceives of students as in
need of redemption from some type social oppression. While the term “hegemony” is
mentioned at a few points, it is merely mentioned and these essays continue to work from
a vulgar Marxist view of ideology a5 “mystiﬁcation.” For example, in “Contested Terms,
Competing Practices: Language Education and Social Change,” Mary Hines studies a
literature class taught by Richard, “a Marxist instructor with strong feminist
commitments” (231). Hines applauds Richard’s pedagogical goal of leading students to
reject “imaginary relations” of capitalism for “the real conditions of existence” (232).
Likewise, Paul Gutj ahr’s “Constructing Art&F acts: The Art of Composition, the Facts of
(Material) Culture” represents students as dupes of popular culture. He explains that
“Like the police ofﬁcers tracking Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, I strive to train my
students in various techniques and strategies which will help them trace, identify, and
ultimately capture the ideas which guide their lives” (70). Just as Hines supported
Richard’s efforts to lead students to the correct way of viewing the “real world,” Gutjahr
is certain his “training” will lead students to ﬁnally understand their lives.

The essay which perhaps comes closest to resisting assumptions of false

consciousness on the part of students is Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s “The Pedagogy of Pleasure

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2: The Me-in-Crisis.” Zavarzadeh criticizes the “pedagogy of pleasure,” which he
argues attempts “to make the student a ‘singular’ well-rounded, ﬂee person” (224). He
calls instead for a “pedagogy of critique,” which would focus on collectivity, knowledge,
critique, and social emancipation. But just as Zavarzadeh condemned the pedagogy of
pleasure for concerning itself with the ﬂeedom of individuals, his pedagogy of critique
concerns itself ultimately with the emancipation of individuals as well. While he rejects
the concept of the free self and instead posits the self as “an imaginary identity produced
by the dominant ideology,” in the end he is preoccupied with ﬂeeing this imaginary
identity. He explains that the pedagogy of critique will make students “aware” of
ideology, it will lead them to recognize “the different ways social relations are organized
in order to act on them,” and its practice will lead students to experience “the pleasure of
emancipation ﬂom established views and of participation in the construction of a new
world ﬂee ﬂom class, gender, and race exploitation” (225). What is also striking about
Hine’s, Gutjahr’s, and Zavarzadeh’s essays are that they each repeatedly show dynamic
teachers using a cultural studies/composition pedagogy to lead indifferent students to
“empowerment” through a conversion to “correct vision.” The teachers redeem students
ﬂom their culturally conditioned passivity and show them how to be active interpreters
and resisters of ideology. Again, this seems to be a result in part of the collection’s
uncritical and mechanistic view of ideology which is uninformed by complicated notions
of hegemony and negotiation.

France’s Composition as a Cultural Practice exhibits a similar tendency to
oversimplify cultural criticism and the concept of ideology. France is concerned with

how reading and writing instruction tends to immerse students in the language of

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commodity production and consumption. Hence, students are unable to question the
status quo, uneven distributions of power, and ideas of privatized conformity based on
commodity satisfaction which are in line with the goals of the managerial class. France
therefore argues that composition, as a cultural practice, can be taught in such a way as to
question all of the previous mentioned social trends, thereby also encouraging students to
question their identity formation in American cultural practices. He calls for instruction
that challenges students with “the venerable practice of rhetoric as the basis for a
liberating and humane education” (xx). In addition to the already popular self-
expressivism and social constructionism, he wants to “clear the ground for a third
rhetorical position ﬂom which writing might become an active means to transform the
existing social inequities of commodity capitalism” (1-2). Here again we see the same
limitations that pervaded the essays in Left Margins: students, who are automatically
“duped” by the false ideology of capitalism, will be taught the “venerable practice of
rhetoric” by all-knowing teachers and therefore will ﬁnally receive the “liberating and
humane education” which will allow them to throw off their yoke of false consciousness.
Rhetoric is offered up as a revered practice—indeed it is offered up as a type of savior-
like transcendental signiﬁed—and the role of complex notions of ideology and hegemony
in the deployment of signifying practices and subject formation is left unanalyzed.
Instead, yet another version of the rhetoric of the student as subject who must in some
way be redeemed ﬂom their intellectual stupor is deployed.

Some scholars have more recently recognized how the rhetoric of the student as
subject has problematically pervaded the history of the discipline. In The Resistant

Writer (1999), Charles Paine studies the nineteenth-century rhetoricians Edward T.

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Charming and A. S. Hill and argues that their approach to writing instruction—which
viewed composition as a countercultural force that could help students resist dangerous
strains of rhetoric, very similar to the way people could resist dangerous viruses—ﬁts a
long standing pattern of rhetoricians attempting to save students ﬂom dangerous types of
popular culture and communications. Like current-traditionalism which ﬂamed the
subject as in need of bourgeois disciplining, Channing’s and Hill’s approach also ﬂamed
the student subject as lacking something—the social rearing, the moral strength, or the
intelligence—required in order to resist the dangerous rhetoric threatening to corrupt his
or her “authentic” voice. Their idea of rhetorical of immunity “saw composition
instruction as countercultural, as helping students ‘resist’ (again, as they might resist a
cold or an infection) cultural domination” (xiv). Paine shows how Charming and Hill
attempted to use rhetorical training to “safeguard students and citizens ﬂom a dangerous
world of discourse, rather than trying to activate them as responsible, contributing
citizens” (ix). Such training makes students themselves, and not their rhetorical acumen,
the subject of the course. The student as subject is represented as passively in need of
protection and safeguarding, rather than as actively participating in his or her own
culture. They viewed composition as a countercultural force which could aid students in
protecting their “authentic” voices ﬂom dominant discourses. Charming and Hill’s move
in the nineteenth century of representing students with “authentic” voices may have
established a precedent for a trend in composition which can be seen in later expressivist
theories of writing instruction. Significantly, this trend of viewing composition as
inoculating students against dangerous rhetoric can still be detected in the ﬁeld today and

can help us understand similar contemporary metaphors about writing in computer-

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mediated environments.

Initially Paine argues that we must question the idea that composition can, or
should, instill a sense of “resistance” or a type of cultural “inoculation” in students. He
claims that the metaphors of resistance and immunity are limiting because they position
students as in danger of being subsumed by dominant culture, and he especially singles
out contemporary cultural studies approaches to teaching composition as being particular
guilty of this. In contrast, he praises composition studies for its unique “capacity for
addressing students as individuals, and for helping them wrestle with the conﬂicts they
bring with them to the classroom.” Although Paine criticizes the health metaphors used
by Charming and Hill, in the end he deploys them in his own argument as well:
“Focusing on this sort of conﬂict may do little to ‘inoculate’ students against dangerous
strains of discourse within their culture, but it can do much, I think, toward bringing them
to a healthful understanding of the complexity and confusion of their culture as well as
the complexity and confusion of their role in that culture” (xiv). While Paine initially
resists arguing that composition studies can protect students ﬂom dangerous cultural
discourses, he does claim that it can lead students to a “healthful understanding” of their
individual culture. However, later in his argument Paine curiously falls into deploying
the very same rhetoric of the student as subject:

While we may think our students have merely conformed to the penetrations of

commodity culture, we have to remember that those cultural beliefs, as far as our

students are concerned, are their beliefs, and that our countercultural intrusions
are the alien ones. To put this in terms of the inoculation/resistance metaphor, for

our students, the beliefs of commodity culture are those of the healthy body, and

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the teacher’s countercultural beliefs are the irnmunogenic or pathogenic ones.
And it seems likely that rather than really changing our students, we may merely
be providing them with immunity to any countercultural arguments they will
encounter after our class, leading, in other words, to the boomerang effect. (1 6)
By employing the same language and terms (“healthy body” and “immunogenic or
pathogenic” beliefs) and ruminating over the same considerations as Charming and Hill in
the late nineteenth century, Paine himself disseminates the rhetoric of the student as
subject in a strikingly similar way. At the exact moment when Paine criticizes
Channing’s and Hill’s rhetoric of immunity, he himself is swayed by the hegemony of
writing about the history or contemporary manifestations of the discipline in the very

same manner and by deploying the very same rhetoric.

This chapter began by offering my struggles with writing this dissertation as a
practical example of how the dissemination of the rhetoric of the student as the subject of
the course is infused throughout composition and computer-composition. Not only does
it emerge in the research and scholarship, but it also inhabits the minds of instructors and
students alike. Although some computer-composition scholarship may promise to alter
certain long held beliefs about textuality and authorship (Landow; Vitanza; Snyder;
Faigley; Stone; Turkle)—which essentially amounts to relinquishing our hold on the
traditional and modern rhetoric of the student as subject—its promises ultimately play

into and reinforce this traditional rhetoric. This contradiction emerges, in part, because

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the various lntemet technologies are employed in such a way so as to reinforce these
traditional expectations as well. So, for example, online databases and lntemet research
engines make available unprecedented amounts of information, which allow Landow to
celebrate that hypertext capabilities now make possible “investigations that before had
required too much time or risk” (Hypertext 2.0 82). But the availability of such an
astronomical amount of information only further mires students into modernist ways of
thinking about and coping with information. The above scholarship review shows that
composition as a ﬁeld likewise grapples with similar contradictions. The next chapter of
this dissertation will focus on a more speciﬁc manifestation of this contradiction and
argue that the rhetorics of fear and loathing emerge in computer-composition to once
again represent students as docile subjects in need of enlightenment in the modernist

sense.

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Chapter 3
The Rhetorics of Fear and Loathing

Disenﬂanchised students, like expert learners, can use such (hypertext) tools to
empower themselves in transforming knowledge to their own ends. (50)

— Michael Joyce Of Two Minds (1995)
Perhaps the primary reason to encourage such (hypertext) writing . . . lies in its
potential for social change and personal empowerment. (70)
— Donna LeCourt and Luann Barnes “Writing Multiplicity: Hypertext and
Feminist Textual Politics” (1999)
Hypertexts of the sort I am developing are excellent chances for textual producers

to explore their internalized oppression. (37)

-— Laura L. Sullivan “Wired Women Writing: Towards a Feminist
Theorization of Hypertext” (1991)

While the above statements could be mistaken as excerpts ﬂom a self-help book,
they have, in fact, been culled ﬂom contemporary computer-composition scholarship.
The primary concern of these writers seems to have curiously little or nothing to do with
helping students become more effective writers; instead, these critics are more troubled
with how students are becoming increasingly passive, vulnerable, and in danger of being
consumed by evil forces in contemporary society. In these statements, scholars position
themselves as the sages who will come to the aid of students, helping them use
technology to break out of their intellectual or moral stupor so that they can acquire a
more correct vision of themselves and their surroundings. Thus, students will be taught

“to empower themselves,” to facilitate “social change,” or “to explore their internalized

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oppression.” These claims betray an urge to improve students morally or to manipulate
them into advocates for social change, with scholars adopting the language of liberatory
pedagogy to suggest that—by using newer computing technologies—students will arrive
at some kind of proper social understanding and only then be capable of surviving in this
more complicated world.

The above excerpts are representative examples of how computer-composition
becomes overlaid with the rhetoric of fear that the world has entered a postmodern era
and subsequently become a more dangerous place for students, and the rhetoric of
loathing the failure of students to comprehend properly and negotiate this more complex
society. For computer-composition, the move online often becomes the contradictory
space of self, where wholeness is promised but priority is still placed on the incongruous
values of ﬂagrnentation and mystiﬁcation. This strange merging of hypertext theory and
composition leads to peculiar conclusions, where inhabiting online spaces leads students
to gain social understanding in cyberspace, wholeness in ﬂagrnentation, critical
consciousness in unconsciousness. Students are promised that if they go online and
create multiple identities or compose disjointed hypertexts, magical transformations will
take place: they will ﬁnally become whole and empowered, understand and break out of
their oppression, and establish contact with their inner essences and their true selves. The
primary problem with this enigmatic promise is that it emphasizes the supposed limited
social understanding of students and focuses on their sense of self; it is concerned with
using newer lntemet technologies in order to discipline student thoughts, morals, and
beliefs, and not with how to integrate technologies into the writing classroom in ways that

will enhance composition pedagogy and increase student opportunities to create

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situationally appropriate and audience speciﬁc texts, thereby assisting students in
becoming more effective writers. The primary problem, then, with computer-
composition’s tendency to draw upon narratives of postmodern crisis and student failure
to negotiate the resulting dangers is that it diverts attention away ﬂom discussing how
newer technologies might be deployed in the service of improving student writing and
writing instruction. This is not to say that cultural critiques of contemporary society are
not valuable; rather, what this study is concerned with is how computer-composition’s
engagement of these critiques often leads the scholarship to create problematic
representations of students as well as sometimes peculiar perspectives about the beneﬁts
of integrating newer technologies in the writing classroom.

This chapter analyzes contemporary computer-composition’s deployment of the
rhetorics of fear and loathing and identiﬁes common rhetorical maneuvers in the way
scholars construct the problem of a more perilous postmodern society and the lacking
student who is laboring under a false vision of the world and its corresponding
ideological systems. If computer-composition is going to study how computers can best
assist students with improving their writing, the discipline would be better served by
focusing on the ways in which newer technologies can enhance writing instruction (i.e.,
enhance collaboration, facilitate peer-response, explore writing in online environments)
and provide students with opportunities to produce context-speciﬁc and audience-
appropriate texts, rather than focusing on declarations of student lack and paradoxical
promise. The rhetorics of fear and loathing have become so commonplace throughout
computer-composition scholarship that it is easy to outline the broader strategies often

employed:

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(1) Fear that we are entering a postmodern epoch and/or that the world has become
more complex and conﬂict-ridden. There are several “evil others” which make this
world more dangerous:

a. popular culture / postmodern crisis

b. a generic “oppressive ideology”

c. capitalism

d. computer technology and discourses of technology
(2) A declaration of loathing over inadequate or failing students. Student lack can be
constructed in a variety of ways, such as:

a. through an inability to decode the signs of cyberculture or
postrnodemity

b. through a failure to contain threats of cyber-contamination

c. through images of students as developmental, childish, or unable to
think for themselves

d. through the negative example that students have to become mirror
images of their instructors in order to survive in a technologically-
enhanced environment

e. through images of students as prey to larger cultural forces

While these categories have been developed for the sake of clariﬁcation, it is important to
remember that these rhetorical acts overlap, merge, and even contradict one another in
their actual deployment. My intention for providing this brief outline is to offer an
overview of how the rhetorics of fear and loathing come together to create powerful
stories in computer-composition.

One of the more common ways the rhetoric of fear gains momentum is by

constructing popular culture as a type of evil other ﬂom which students must be saved.

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By ﬂaming popular culture as degenerative, infective, or something ﬂom which students
must be redeemed by the graces of technology, the rhetoric of fear manages to tap into
long-standing disciplinary anxieties about how students may be tricked into submission.
This rhetoric often follows in the footsteps of earlier manifestations of fear in
composition that popular culture had become too confusing for students to comprehend.
James Berlin exempliﬁes this earlier pattern in Rhetoric, Poetics, and Cultures (1996):
The aim of the course remains the same in all situations: to enable students to
become active, critical agents of their experience rather than passive victims of
cultural codes. The “tactics,” to use Friere's term, are always open to change. The
ﬁnal purpose of the course is to encourage citizens who are actively literate, that
is, critical agents of change who are socially and politically engaged—in this way
realizing some of the highest democratic ideals. (104)
Berlin is concerned that culture has become over bureaucratized and commodiﬁed,
leading to alienated subjects who are “passive victims of cultural codes” and who will
require some type of liberatory pedagogy to become “critical agents of change.” In The
Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (1999), Henry Giroux also
describes a similar sense of crisis over popular culture’s gloriﬁcation of consumption and
reiﬁcation:
A5 commercial culture replaces public culture and as the language of the market
becomes a substitute for the language of democracy, consumerism appears to be
the only kind of citizenship being offered to children. Consumerism, corporatism,
and technological progress become the central principles for constructing who we

are and how we act . . . . The commercial spheres promoting such changes include

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television, radio, cinema, and newspapers. They and other media are engaged in a
cultural pedagogy marked by a struggle over meaning, identity, and desire.
Increasingly large corporations work to connect matters of meaning and desire to

a commercial logic that constricts democratic identity and afﬁrms the growing

political and pedagogical force of culture “as crucial site and weapon of power.”

(24)

For Giroux, the world has become more complex and alien as traditional communities
lose their sense of identity and as boundaries dissolve and merge. Real interaction
between humans is replaced with the degraded sense of relationships between objects.
Even the individual has lost his/her sense of being whole, autonomous, and complete, and
is replaced by the decentered feelings of multiplicity and contradiction.

This sense of fear over the nefarious state of popular culture conveyed by Berlin
and Giroux has also become pervasive in discussions of composition and cultural studies
and gets recycled yet again in computer-composition within the realm of cyberspace.

And the dissemination of this rhetoric extends to more recent dissertations as well,
suggesting that it has permeated the discipline successﬁrlly. For example, Patricia
Webb’s dissertation “Computing Cultures: Information Technologies and Narratives of
Self” (1998) mobilizes in one paragraph a variety of maneuvers ﬂom the rhetorics of fear
and loathing:

These ideas about the poststructural nature of writing are widely accepted and

embraced by compositionists. Therefore, I am not trying to persuade readers that I

am offering a revolutionary reading of writing practices; instead what I am trying

to do is to offer a model for how to teach others this view of writing—others who

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are constantly barraged with the cultural production of the modernist self

(“Reeboks let UBU. You’re an individual,” screams advertising) . . . . I am also

arguing that in the shifting terrain we call the virtual age that the debate over who

gets to shape the possibilities for subjectivities is currently up in the air. And I

argue that we need to push students to explore and engage in alternate conceptions

to the traditional capitalist line of reasoning—the Net is for business. It is a tool

for marketing. It should be controlled by “Us” and used by “them.” (156)
Students are ﬂamed as “others,” as the intellectually inferior counterparts to the
intellectually superior teachers who really know the truth about the deceit being
perpetrated on them by popular culture. The level of fear over student naivete reaches a
type of ﬂenzy with the claim that students are “scream(ed)” at by advertising, they “are
constantly barraged with the cultural production of the modernist self.” This rhetorical
scheme seems to assume that students really do have a self or an identity they can access,
but are prevented ﬂom determining this truth on their own because capitalistic popular
culture interpellates them into modernist individuals.

The problem of modernist subjectivity is complicated for Webb by popular
culture’s insistence on poaching “the shifting terrain” of the virtual age and transforming
it to its own ends. Her concern over whether cyberspace serves the dark-forces of
capitalism or more liberating possibilities is not unlike the tension found in the movie The
Matrix (Warner Brothers 1999). Here the characters live in a world that is “largely a
phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stirnulations” (Hoggart 45), a world of
human making at the second hand, a false reality perpetuated by the false consciousness

of humans. Humans created artiﬁcial intelligence, an invention that led to a battle

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between machines and humans, destroying the environment and rendering the earth a
dark, deserted wasteland. Created by machines, the Matrix is a giant dream machine, a
neural interactive simulation, used to pacify humans who are kept alive to be used as
batteries, the power source of the Matrix. In a similar way, Webb regards popular culture
and its attendant “traditional capitalist line of reasoning” as fashioning cyberspace into a
space to pacify humans and perpetuate false consciousness. Popular culture tells us “the
Net is for business, It is a tool for marketing,” it is controlled by corporations (“Us”) and
dupes the unknowing masses (“them,” students) into capitalistic individualism. In other
words, popular culture threatens to undermine cyberspace—what might otherwise be a
safe haven for students—by transforming it into the new capitalist altar at which students
must bow down.

Having set up students as dupes, popular culture as bad, and technology as
potentially liberating and dangerous, Webb has paved the way to tell her own
technological-empowerment story. While students have until now been victims of the
Matrix and passive consumers of popular culture, using technology can make them
“agents in the shaping of stories” of self:

Collaboration using Web technologies highlights not only that audiences are

listening and that writing does count and is situated, contextual and dialogic; it

also highlights that the “them” who have the technological capabilities to become
writers of the story, rather than merely readers of the “Us” story. Telling the story
of what it means to be a self on-line and in a world which is increasingly shaped
by on-line perceptions . . . is a powerful position to be in. And we need to teach

students how to use writing to become agents in the shaping of stories, rather than

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passive consumers of them. (156-157)
Webb’s concern over the danger of popular culture to students—and the ability of
technology to save them ﬂom being duped—leads her to declare that she is not concerned
with whether such interaction with technology makes students better writers. Instead, she
is concerned with whether her students learned to resist contamination by dangerous dirty
techno-culture:
Did this project make them better writers? Are there before and after writings that
quantitatively illustrate that students wrote better because they were introduced to
web technologies? I would argue that this is not the right question to be asking;
rather, I would ask, did my students use writing to question their assumptions
about writing and did they extend this discussion outward, outside of the
classroom? Yes, they did. Did they become participants in the discussions about
technoliteracies? Yes. (159)
This passage betrays anxiety over whether students learned to participate in discussions
questioning the potentially problematic and dangerous role of technology in their lives.
While such conversations are valuable, the way this analysis is arranged, the language it
deploys, and the fact that it fails to consider whether or not student writing improved,
shows that its primary concern is teaching students to break out of their previously
imposed postmodern ideological daze and protect themselves ﬂom the onslaught of
encroaching techno-culture, a techno-culture that dictates how they can act and the
identities they can construct. Students previously failed to look beyond the carefully
sutured false reality of the Matrix and question their unexamined and oppressive beliefs

about writing, technology, and popular culture; and they previously failed to question

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their assumptions about technoliteracies and how they are capable of controlling their
lives and identities. Instead of exploring the ways computer technologies can be used to
enhance writing instruction and assist student in becoming more effective writers,
Webb’s analysis is geared toward using Internet technologies to discipline the student
subject into recognizing and correcting his or her failure to understand the “true nature”
of reality.

Both Webb’s argument and the ﬁlm The Matrix exemplify how popular culture,
capitalism, and technology have always maintained a strong and yet uncomfortable
relationship with one another. And this awkward relationship becomes a point of
contention and contradiction for computer-compositionists. These scholars are in the
difﬁcult situation of combining Berlin’s and Giroux’s mistrust of capitalism and
postmodern sensibilities with technology’s promise of individual ﬂeedom in cyberspace
and the opportunity “to be whatever you want to be” by manipulating the codes and
images of postrnodernity. The way computer-compositionists often come to square these
contradictory impulses is by locating a space where technology is not a force to be feared
entirely (like capitalism) and by highlighting how it can be reigned in and subdued.

While popular culture and capitalism often serve as an evil other in computer-
composition, sometimes the actual entity of fear is something much more ambiguous. In
these cases, the specter of fear manifests itself as a generic type of “oppressive
ideology”—which acts as a kind of negative transcendental signiﬁed—that students are in
danger of being consumed by and ﬂom which they must be rescued. Accordingly, this
ideological force has made the world a more dangerous and complicated place for

students to live in and understand. Laura Sullivan’s “Wired Women Writing: Towards a

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Feminist Theorization of Hypertext” offers a careful feminist theorization of hypertext in
general as well as insightful discussions about the value of feminist activist
autobiographical hypertexts in particular. However, the rhetorics of fear and loathing are
also dispersed subtly throughout her discussion, a gesture that operates as leverage for the
rhetoric of promise later in her article. One of her main arguments is that students are
terrorized by dominant and oppressive ideologies, and she offers up hypertext as a way to
bring about social transformation: “It is my hope that ultimately the production and
consumption of these feminist hypertexts produces deep transformations, both personal
and social” (51). This argument—that hypertext technology can facilitate deep “personal
and social” transformations and hence protect students—is reliant on the assumption that
there is something ﬁom which students must be rescued. Sullivan’s article creates just
such a something by repeating the phrases “ideological oppression” and “internalized
oppression” repeatedly (37, 39,40, 41, 43). The rhetoric of fear generated through the
repetitive references to generic “oppressive ideologies” sets the foundation for the
narrative of crisis that students require protection and salvation.

Sullivan’s work also makes the peculiar move of arguing that “real” events or
conditions of existence can be “described and critiqued” ﬁnally and accurately by
appealing to mystical forces. She explains that

In the hypertexts the students and I created, ﬂeed ﬂom the conventions of

formal academic writing that specify that we must produce an argument

that proceeds through a series of reasoned points to a logical conclusion,

we included mythical, mystical, poetic, and unconscious perspectives,

which allow a more reﬂexive commentary on the real events described

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and critiqued. (44)
This argument activates a number of binary oppositions—linear/hypertext, conscious/
unconscious, and linear reality/mystical cyberspace—where the later terms in each set of
binaries represent a paradoxical movement to validate a more amorphous and ﬁagmented
place as the location of the real and the whole. A perplexing conclusion is drawn: by
inhabiting online spaces and by incorporating “mythical, mystical, poetic, and
unconscious perspectives,” students will gain clarity in mysticism and critical
consciousness in unconsciousness.
The ultimate effect is akin to Jean Baudriallard’s sirnulacra, where the hyperreal
becomes the real, the whole, the location of desire. Sullivan continues:
The experiences of my students and me in making these hypertexts involve
dynamics which are often not entirely explainable. For the unconscious
dimension of the hypertext is not only a counter to the patriarchal privileging of
rationality, it is also an acknowledgment of the power of mystical forces. When
the students and I beckon the unconscious, the dreams come. And, there is often
an uncanny aspect to these dreams. During the making of my ﬁrst hypertext, I
began to have dreams in hypertext. In these dreams, I was disembodied, and I
would click on the screen to get to the next part of the dream. (44)
The hyperreal of hypertext is “not entirely explainable,” counters rationality, and
acknowledges mystical forces. But within her rhetorical scheme, hypertext and
cyberspace dreams are a source of wholeness and salvation, and work to contain threats
of nightmares and ideological oppression.

Given the anxiety created by the interdependence between capitalism and

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technology, it is not surprising that the discipline also disseminates the rhetoric of fear by
tapping into contemporary angst about how students may be deceived into submission by
capitalism as an evil other (ﬂom which students can be rescued by technology). Sullivan
also deploys the rhetoric of fear as a type of shorthand to quickly yet decisively represent
students as in danger of being overwhelmed by capitalistic ideologies: “In the
postmodern social climate in which we live, late capitalism thrives on cynicism and
leaves us in a quagmire of futility” (49). Dominant culture and mass media are also
imbricated as dangerous forces within capitalism: “Multiple voices and perspectives in
the hypertexts demonstrate powerfully the contradiction of living under the regime of
contemporary capitalism. Deconstructions of subjects, ourselves and others, are situated
within deconstructions of texts of the dominant culture, including those texts produced by
the mass media” (51). In this image students are ﬁgured as mired down and crushed by
the mighty regimes of capitalism that force them into linear thinking. Technology,
accompanied by the aid of the instructor, can pull students ﬂom the melee. The images
invoked are cliches in our popular culture landscape. They are like the moments in Pink
Floyd’s The Wall when students, bent on suicide, march in line off a plank into the
homogenizing meat-grinder of capitalism, or in The Dead Poet ’s Society, when students
are enticed to emerge ﬂom the shackles of rationality and recite poetry ﬂom atop their
desks. The problem with Sullivan’s argument is that it is in the mystical world where
students really ﬁnd themselves, where they retreat ﬂom the meat-grinder and sing ﬂom
their desks, and everything else on the opposite side of the binary is considered perilous.

What scares her is becoming mired in linearity and being denied access to ﬂee-ﬂoating

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deconstruction.

Having ﬂamed students as dupes, capitalism and mass media as regime-like, and
hypertext as liberating, Sullivan can now tell her own technologically-enhanced tale of
redemption. While students have up until now been passive consumers of culture and
mass media, creating hypertexts can help them break ﬂee ﬂom the temporal bonds of the
Matrix-like regime of capitalism: “Hypertext allows us to transcend this futility, for it not
only gives us the ability to arrange information in novel ways spatially, it also encourages
the manipulation of temporality, especially through an interweaving of the past, present,
and future” (49-50). Her rhetoric retreats into a type of cyber-romanticism, where
oppression can be transcended and truth can be located if we could only manage to ﬂee
ourselves ﬂom the bonds of temporality.

Because computer-compositionists sometimes ﬁnd themselves in a struggle to
control the terror of technology, another way the rhetoric of fear emerges is by
constructing computer technology itself as an evil other which must be contained. Gail
Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe are two proliﬁc scholars at the forefront of computer-
composition scholarship and research: for many years now they have spoken out about
not only the potential pedagogical beneﬁts of technology, but also the dangers of
passively incorporating technology into our classrooms and simply reproducing existing
social inequities. However, at times Hawisher and Selfe also reproduce the existing
assumptions about student lack of vision and reenact the rhetorics of fear and loathing;
and the fact that even these leading scholars at times appeal to these rhetorics highlights

their pervasive and seductive nature. It is understandable that the title of their 1997

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textbook—Literacy, Technology, and Society: Conﬁonting the Issues—suggests that it
will focus on how students must confront certain issues to be saved ﬂom ideological
domination, since issue-dominated readers often dominate sales. Yet the title also
insinuates that students are in danger of being crushed by their culture, and in this case it
is technological culture that is threatening their existence. Aesthetically, even the book’s
cover subtly contributes to the idea that technology is an evil entity which is threatening
to conquer the world and therefore must be harnessed back into control. The textbook’s
cover, which showcases a centered globe of the earth encased within a television set, with
yellow, orange, and red energy rays emanating outwards, conveys a sense of fear that the
earth will soon be subsumed by digital forces.

The title of Hawisher and Selfe’s textbook also indicates that it will take a type of
cultural studies approach to education and society. It implies that by “conﬂonting” a
wide array of contemporary issues surrounding education, technology, and society,
students will learn how to resist ideological control. Accordingly, the textbook is
divided into ﬁve different content areas that have been identiﬁed as important for
students to conﬂont, each providing a variety of reading selections. For the purposes of
this study, what is striking about Hawisher and Selfe’s introduction to each of these ﬁve
sections is the language they deploy. At times, the language used in these introductions is
almost deterministic about how student thoughts, their world, and really their very
freedom is being inﬁltrated and threatened by various forms of technology. Such
alarming language suggests that students had better come to see the truth and confront

how computer technology is encroaching on their lives, legal system, popular culture, and

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educational institutions so that they can resist or subvert it. For example, the introduction
to the section on “Ethics, Law, and Technology” explains that “Indeed, the explosion of
popular computer use in the last decade and the rapid expansion of the lntemet have
created a situation in which humans must re-think almost everything that they know about
communicating with one another. It is an exciting and terrifying project to undertake”
(259). Students are not merely encouraged, but rather are ordered that they “must”
reanalyze almost everything they think they know about communications in the twenty-
ﬁrst century. Such an endeavor, they are warned, is “terrifying” but nonetheless
necessary. This section seems to betray a type of fear over the chaos of cyberspace, to the
extent that new laws are needed that will “govern information, authorship, and ownership
in electronic environments” (269). This claim also seems to rely on the assumption that
the concepts and practices of original authorship and capitalistic ownership will remain
unaltered; what must be altered instead are the laws. This presumption perhaps also
hints at an unconscious desire to maintain the status quo in the face of adversarial
technological forces.

The rhetoric of computer technology itself as an evil other also makes brief
appearances in computer-composition scholarship, emerging just long enough to escalate
the level of fear and thereby making whatever solution the article is proposing that much
more attractive. For example, Vicki Tolar Burton’s and Scott Chadwick’s “Investigating
the Practices of Student Researchers: Patterns of Use and Criteria for Use of lntemet and
Library Sources” (2000) makes the reasonable argument that it is important for students

to learn how to locate, evaluate, and cite electronic sources. It seems a bit odd, therefore,

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when the rhetoric of fear is deployed several times at the very end of their article. Within
the last two pages, Burton and Chadwick throw an array of alarming warnings at their
reader. We are assured that this is the appropriate time to talk with students “about ‘safe

9”

text (324). By repeating associations of the lntemet and digital resources with
promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases—they state that “The parallel with safe sex
not only works metaphorically, but might also help students remember important
questions to ask of their sources” (325)—the rhetoric of fear about potentially dangerous
technology is engaged. Much like Charles Paine’s argument that rhetoricians Edward T.
Charming and A. S. Hill viewed composition as a countercultural force that could help
students resist dangerous types of popular culture and communications, Burton and
Chadwick conclude that by critically evaluating lntemet resources, students will avoid
contamination and construct “healthy arguments, healthy writing, and healthy academic
lives” (326). They betray an almost obsessive-like compulsion over containing the threat
of technology, suggesting that student should ask of all lntemet sources, “How will using
this source affect the health of my argument?” (325). Furthermore, it is the responsibility
of faculty to teach students how to conduct research in such a way so as to avoid “the
one-night-stand research paper,” (325) adding a sense of sexually charged desire to a
relationship that already frames the teacher as in control of the student. While the authors
acknowledge their use of these sexual disease metaphors, and while it is important to
teach students to critically analyze sources, these metaphors nevertheless functions as yet

another device within the rhetoric of fear. Computer technology is forever changing

academic standards and procedures, it is bringing in new “partners,” which may in turn

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expose students to new and dangerous diseases and necessitates this new level of
cautionary fear. In the end, Burton and Chadwick disseminate a rhetoric of fear very
similar to that of Charming and Hill. While the former used rhetorical training and the
later used the analysis of lntemet sources, both attempt to “safeguard students and
citizens from a dangerous world of discourse, rather than trying to activate them as
responsible, contributing citizens” (Paine ix). Such training shortsightedly makes
students themselves, and not their rhetorical acumen, the subject of the course.

The rhetoric of fear that students are in danger of being consumed or destroyed by
various social and cultural forces contributes to the rhetoric of loathing over the student’s
incompetence to comprehend and resist these same dangerous forces. And in turn, each
of the computer-composition works discussed above, by virtue of their disseminating
some type of rhetoric of fear, construct student lack in a particular way. For example,
fear over the dangerous inﬂuences of popular culture contructs student lack as an inability
to decode the signs of cyberculture or postrnodemity, and fear over the ways technology
is changing how research is conducted contructs student lack as a failure to contain the
threats of techno-contamination. Regardless of the speciﬁc threat or evil other which is
terrorizing students, the resulting rhetorical act of constructing some type of student
failure or deﬁcient remains the same. And just as computer-composition carried echos of
the fear expressed earlier by J ames Berlin and Henry Giroux, computer-composition also
carries echos of the loathing expressed earlier by compositionists as well. As noted
earlier, Marguerite H. Helmers’s Writing Students: Composition Testimonials and

Representations of Students (1994) recognizes this pattern of loathing student limitation

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and critiques practitioner lore for relying on the genre of testimonials that represent
students as unintelligent or childish. For example, Marilyn Cooper has recently argued
that students “are confused and often frightened by the variety of cultural values they
encounter; and they feel helpless to participate in any meaningful way in decisions being
made about social and political issues that affect them” (“Marilyn Cooper’s CCCC
Statement”). And James Berlin fears that students will “become instruments of the
language of others ” (Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures 101). Berlin’s word choice
constantly reminds us of the perilous position of students. They are “reluctant,” “passive

,9 “

receivers, passive victims,” who, following the standard postmodern cant, live in a
“decentered world, a realm of ﬂagmentation and incoherence, without nucleus or
foundation for experiences . . . . The world of fast foods, fast cars, and fast fads” (46-47).
While Helmers concludes that representations of student lack are so well
ingrained in the ﬁeld that they cannot be disrupted by either a shift in epistemology or an
alteration of ethos, it appears that a shift to computer-contexts alone is often inadequate to
bring about such a disruption as well. Michael Joyce’s Of Two Minds: Hypertext
Pedagogy and Poetics (1995) follows the testimonial genre Hehners criticized for
representing students as child-like, lacking, and in need of discipline. In the by now
foundationally popular “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts,” Joyce
deﬁnes the qualities of these two different types of hypertexts and their respective
pedagogical “perils” and “promises” (40). The majority of this chapter explores
characteristics of exploratory and constructive hypertext, and when Joyce turns to

discussing actual student experiences, he makes the interesting move of focusing

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primarily on “developmental students.” In contrast to “the technical or creative writing
students” he had also worked with, these “developmental students make minimal use of
the complex linking and on-screen hypertext capabilities of our program” (50). He states
that his decision to focus on one member of this group in particular is in accordance with
the genre of “that most unstable currency, the teaching anecdote” (50). His explanation
for doing so is that, by focusing on a lacking student, he will more convincingly prove the
revolutionary power of hypertext to ﬂee all types of students ﬂom their personal
limitations:
By doing so, 1 hope to suggest that the challenge of hypertext to traditional
structures can take on commonplace dimensions and that disenfranchised
students, like expert learners, can use such tools to empower themselves in
transforming knowledge to their own ends. (50)
For the purposes of this study, what it telling about Joyce’s teaching anecdote is that it
uses, just as Helmers had warned us against, tropes that highlight “the stupid . . . and
childish aspects of college writers” (1). He clearly explains earlier in the article that he
had worked with more advanced technical or creative writing students, yet he makes the
decision—perhaps because this approach more forcefully proves his point—to focus on
developmental students. By focusing on the representation of a deﬁcient student, Joyce
invokes the rhetoric of loathing: there is a distinct sense of lamenting how
“disenﬂanchised” students must be saved ﬂom their lack of insight, their inability to
transform “knowledge to their own ends,” or, in other words, their inability to even think

for themselves. It is as if in an effort to more powerﬁrlly argue for the value and promise

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of hypertext, the image of a failing student (delivered in the form of the teaching
anecdote) is intentionally constructed.

This decision to focus on lacking students in order to prove more powerfully the
value of hypertext can be found in other computer-composition scholarship as well. For
example, in Hypertext 2.0, George Landow goes to great lengths to contrast novice
students with experts. In the chapter “Reconﬁguring Literary Education,” Landow’s
overarching argument is that hypertext models scholarly and scientiﬁc reading and
writing strategies (225-228). However, when explicitly discussing how hypertext affects
students, he repeatedly constructs an image of a novice student struggling against
academia. These novice students “continually encounter problems created by necessary
academic specialization” (225) and desire to experience “the way an expert works” (226).

Furthermore, “even novice students . . . have the opportunity of following individual
topics in more depth” (227). Landow, like Joyce, constructs an image of a failing student
(in this case a novice student) who can be redeemed ﬂom ignorance by technology, thus
making the promise of hypertext that much more striking.

Another way student lack is often constructed in computer-composition
scholarship is through the negative example that students will have to become mirror
images of their teachers in order to survive in this more technologically-sophisticated
environment. Barbara Blakely Duffelmeyer’s “Critical Computer Literacy: Computers in
F irst-Year Composition as Topic and Environment” (2000) is concerned with the extent
to which students are capable of critiquing and resisting popular cultural narratives which

portray technology as inherently beneﬁcial or inherently evil. Duffelmeyer’s work

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usefully draws attention to the fact that US. society disseminates conﬂicting narratives
about the value of technology in its culture, which in turn may affect how students view
and use computer technology in their everyday lives and in their academic careers.
However, the rhetoric of loathing seeps into Duffelrneyer’s discussion, and in this
particular instance acts as a way to signify a desire to recreate lacking students—who
arrive in their freshman composition course completely void of critical computer
literacy—into the much more attractive image of the informed and critically resistant
teacher: “if students don’t concomitantly acquire critical computer literacy, they will not
be able to affect the conditions of their lives, for it is critical computer literacy that allows
us to comprehend our relationship with computer technology and its uses, possibilities,
and meanings” (290). This sentence subtly shifts activity away ﬂom “students” and onto
“us,” that is, onto teachers who are ideologically aware and already possess critical
computer literacy. Unless students become like “us,” like teachers, students “will not be
able to affect the conditions of their lives.” This is a sweeping claim: teachers have the
knowledge to “comprehend” their relationship with technology and its uses, but students
do not. Given that many students have grown up much more immersed in and aware of
how to use technologies to their own ends than teachers, such a claim carries a ring of
condescension. Duffelmeyer concludes this paragraph by again mixing references to
students and teachers, while the context clearly marks the students as the ones who will
pay most dearly for their lack of critical consciousness: “Without critical computer
literacy, we may ﬁnd it difﬁcult to be productive, active subjects in this new environment

where we function as teachers and students” (290). Since she has previously labeled

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teachers as possessing this critical literacy, and since the entire article is about identifying
student acquiescence to wrong ideas about computer technology, this concluding sentence
serves as another expression of loathing over student failure. Duffelmeyer reinforces the
concept of lack by highlighting how student failure to gain critical computer literacy will
prevent them being “productive” and “active.” In contrast to Burton and Chadwick, who
talked in metaphors of sexual disease and ﬂamed student lack as an inability to have “safe
text,” Duffelmeyer ﬂames student lack as a failure to be productive and active.

Computer-composition scholarship also tends to emphasize the vulnerability of
students when they are ﬂamed as prey to larger cultural forces. As noted earlier in this
chapter, such negative representations of students seem to follow the trend found in
earlier composition scholarship that popular culture had become too complex for students
to comprehend (Berlin; Giroux). Several pieces of scholarship also critiqued earlier in
this chapter—such as Webb’s “Computer Cultures,” Sullivan’s “Wired Women Writing,”
and Hawisher and Selfe’s “Ethics, Law, and Technology,”—-follow this trend as well.
While Webb is concerned with advertising, Sullivan with generic types of dominant and
oppressive ideologies, and Hawisher and Selfe with the changing nature of copyright in
cyberspace, the arguments in each of these pieces of scholarship is grounded on negative
representations of students as vulnerable to larger cultural forces.

Duffelmeyer also pursues this pattern when she reworks Christina Haas’s claim to
argue that students are in peril of accepting dangerous cultural assumptions about
technology unless they are taught to both study and use digital technology: “Without

such an endeavor, Haas (1996) asserted that literacy teachers (and I am adding their

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students) are prey to disabling cultural assumptions (i.e., comfortable thoughts) about
technology” (291). Not only do students lack essential intellectual tools to understand the
world surrounding them, but they are “prey” as well, in danger of being destroyed by their
sophomoric droughts. Duffelmeyer continues to say that “ﬁrst-year composition can and
should be the site where students begin to develop the requisite cognitive skills to
participate not only in the complexity of the academic community but also in a ‘critique
of ideology and culture, of the hidden forces of institutional and social structures that
shape thought and give meaning to our lives’ (Greene, 1990, p. 160)" (291). It is as if
Duffelmeyer is suggesting that before entering college as ﬂeshmen, student lack is so
extreme that they live in a cocoon of intellectual darkness, without the most rudimentary
cognitive skills, preventing them from understanding even their own thought or lives; it is
during ﬁrst-year composition that student ﬁnally “begin” to develop such skills. While it
is appropriate to assume that all students can continue to improve their writing, just as all
graduate students and faculty can continue to improve their writing throughout their
academic careers, what is problematic here is the extreme and negative representation of
ﬁrst-year composition students as completely void of basic cognitive and writing skills.

This disgust over student inadequacy reaches a fervent pitch alter Duffelmeyer
aligns herself with Peter McLaren’s argument about the dangers of “dominant culture”:

Despite the desirability of encouraging critical literacy, our culture exerts

an enormous and insidious inﬂuence against it. Peter McLaren (1989)

pointed out that the dominant culture creates “dreams and desires . . . (i.e.,

stories, ideals) against which all individuals are expected to live their lives

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. . . a ‘common’ worldview, disguising relations of power and privilege . .

.” (p. 174). Students beginning their college experiences generally have

for so long been immersed in this hegemony that even to question, let

along reject or change, these values of the dominant discourse speciﬁcally

related to computer technology clearly feels to them “unnatural, a violation

of common sense” (McLaren, p. 175). (292)
Here we have an example of how the rhetorics of fear and loathing seamlessly merge
together to create powerful stories in computer-composition. This paragraph has
everything: a bold assumption that “critical literacy” is lacking in students, fear that our
culture enforces “enormous and insidious inﬂuence against” critical literacy, and fear
over “‘common’ worldviews” which of course blind students as to the real “relations of
power and privilege.” Further, this passage offers insight into the extent to which desire
and longing are caught up in professional representations of lacking students: instructors
“desire” and “encourage” critical literacy, even though U.S. culture “insidiously” ﬁghts
against it. After evoking these popular stories about dominant culture—which are so
“common” in computer-composition that Duffelmeyer barely bothers to expand on them
—the rhetoric of loathing student lack is easily inserted and, indeed, functions as a way to
initiate a type of relief which will counteract the devastating rhetoric of cultural crisis. In
other words, the rhetoric of cultural fear is so unpleasant and unavoidable, it is a relief to
turn to the rhetoric of loathing student inadequacy. First, we can take a type of pleasure
in the fact that students entering college have been continually “immersed in this

hegemony.” There is no reason to question this assumption or even to complicate it.

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Next, we can reafﬁrm how necessary teachers are in the process of bringing students to
“true sight,” because students are so submerged in this hegemony that they are incapable
of even questioning, “let alone reject or change,” their beliefs. Teachers can rest assured
in their loathing of student inadequacy, because students will not risk the “unnatural”

feeling that they are violating “common sense” in order to question dominant beliefs.

Repeatedly, if unevenly, computer-composition scholarship deploys the rhetorics
of fear and loathing to represent students as lacking subjects who are in danger of being
consumed by evil forces in contemporary society. The rhetoric of fear often manifests
itself through descriptions and lamentations about how the world has entered a
postmodern era and subsequently has become a more dangerous and confusing place for
students. The causes of our increasingly perilous world are many, and they range ﬂom
the degenerative forces of popular culture, to homogenizing capitalism, to the infective
qualities of computer technology and cyberculture. The rhetoric of loathing the failure of
students to survive in this more complicated, postmodern world is bolstered by these
descriptions, constructing student lack as an inability to decode the sign of cyberculture or
postrnoderrrity and through images of students as childish and unable to think for
themselves.

By stitching together an image of the student as vulnerable and lacking, the

rhetorics of fear and loathing play an important precursory role in setting the stage for the

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rhetoric of promise. What we see in these critiques, then, is the retelling of a familiar
story: after setting up students as dupes, some aspect of contemporary society or culture
as bad, and technology as potentially liberating, scholars are ﬂee to pave the way to tell
their own technological-empowerment story. The rhetorical development of these

empowerment narratives is examined in the next chapter.

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Chapter 4
The Rhetorics of Promise and Fertility

Narratives of technological empowerment and liberation pervade our everyday
existence and popular culture through a variety of mediums: tales of how various
technologies can improve our lives or lead us to life-altering epiphanies are found in
jingles on commercial television, in annoying pop-up boxes on the lntemet, in the ballads
of mainstream music on the radio, in the words and images of print advertisements in
more traditional paper magazines, and in tales of redemption in mainstream Hollywood
ﬁlms. Television commercials for Cingular Wireless tempt us into believing that, by
merely buying a cellular phone, we will be transported to a place without stress or
responsibility (rock concert) and have access to heretofore inaccessible ﬂeedom
(“Everywhere the world over it’s so easy to see, people everywhere just gotta be ﬂeel”).
High-priced automobiles are pitched to audiences as vehicles that, with their
technologically advanced Geo-Positioning Systems (GPS) and ability to navigate us out
of the frenetic city and into the country, will allow us to provide our children with the
education they really deserve, an education grounded in imperialist images of an empty
and untainted ﬂontier ripe for conquering. In television and print advertisements for
Sports Utility Vehicles, students are ﬁrst shown inefﬁciently sitting at desks in rows
before they are transported in SW5 into the wide-open ﬂontier with acres of green land
and waterfalls. And in the past few years, Hollywood and commercial television have
produced an array of ﬁlms and programs that show a fascination with the power of newer

technologies to both enslave and liberate humanity (The Matrix, Johnny Mnuemonic, The

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X-Files: Fight the Future, Dark Angel, Andromeda).

Given how widespread and familiar technological liberation narratives have
become in mainstream society, it is perhaps not so surprising or alarming that computer-
compositionists, intent on ﬁguring out how lntemet and computer-networked
technologies ﬁt into our work, have also employed these narratives as well. While there
are many different ways the rhetoric of technological promise is invoked in computer-
composition, this chapter will focus on three of the more pervasive types: (1) the promise
of social, political, or personal empowerment, which is often accompanied with appeals
to liberatory or critical pedagogy, (2) the promise of achieving correct vision or correct
sight, which is often accompanied with appeals to vulgar Marxism and claims that the
teacher-as-hero can lift the veil of ignorance ﬂom students’ eyes, and (3) the promise of
liberatory technology to help students conquer the new empty cyberﬂontier and its
attendant challenges and pitfalls. To different extents, each of these three types of
technological promise also contributes to the hope of remaking the student into the
ideological or moral mirror image of the teacher. That is, the promise that technology can
empower students to see or think in particular ways often results in remaking the student
into the more ethical or socially adept image of the teacher. This hope often emerges in
expressions of teacher desire for students to be like them and take on their own wishes,
beliefs, and values. In addition, the promises that technology can ﬂee the student ﬂom
ideological control often draw upon a rhetoric of fertility that multiple virtual selves can
exist in cyberspace. However, appeals to multiplicity often function as a way to evade the
new type of ideological discipline being forced onto the student as subject. While I have

separated these kinds of promises into distinct categories for clariﬁcation, it is important

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note that these rhetorical maneuvers overlap, merge, and sometimes even contradict each

other.

The Promise of Social, Political, or Personal Empowerment

Perhaps the most common and pervasive way the rhetoric of promise is deployed
in computer—composition scholarship is by incorporating the posturing and lingo of
F reireian liberatory and critical pedagogy. By doing so, the rhetoric of promise attaches
itself to the momentum of Freire’s popularity and engages—to its own ends—commonly
accepted and rarely questioned ideas about the democratic goals of composition
instruction. Donna LeCourt’s “Critical Pedagogy in the Computer Classroom:
Politicizing the Writing Space,” (1998) serves as a representative example of how
Freireian liberatory pedagogy is reworked to serve the discourse of promise in computer-
composition. It is important to recognize that I am not criticizing the whole of LeCourt’s
article. On the contrary, her work makes some valuable contributions to how technology
may encourage students to examine the ideology of discursive contexts and explores how
students may exert agency in such spaces (277). It is perhaps possible that the rhetoric of
technological promise manages to evade detection and criticism precisely because it is
dispersed throughout such a wide range of often very effective scholarship. Nevertheless,
LeCourt’s article sets up academic discourse (291, 292) as an “evil other” and
disseminates the rhetoric of promise that technology can help students emerge ﬂom their
intellectual stupor and lead them to “true sight” about their world. Further supporting this
claim that LeCourt’s work is most concerned with saving the writing subject ﬂom its own

inadequacy is the fact that it does not discuss how to integrate newer computer

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technologies in ways that will enhance writing instruction or student experiences
producing situationally appropriate and context speciﬁc texts: instead, it explores
different ways computer networked discussion technologies and hypertext can get
students “to see” true reality.1

LeCourt engages the vulgar Marxism of Freireian pedagogy by ﬂaming students
as blind to the true nature of reality and unaware of their location, or state of oppression,
within that reality. Freire uses the word “conscientizacao” to refer to the state of self-
consciousness one must achieve in order to understand truly the various social, political,
and economic forces that converge to create true reality. Freire explains in Pedagogy of
the Oppressed that “the conviction of the oppressed that they must ﬁght for their
liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their
own conscientizacao” (49). And in her Forward to Freire and Donaldo Macedo’s
Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (1987), Ann E. Berthoff explains that
“[t]eaching and learning are dialogic in character, and dialogic action depends on the
awareness of oneself as knower, an attitude F reire calls conscientization
(conscientizacao)” (xiii). In other words, F reire is concerned ultimately with an
“attitude” he calls “conscientization,” and teachers help and guide, but do not force,
students to develop this attitude. While LeCourt does not explicitly use the term
“conscientizacao,” she makes a similar rhetorical gesture by constantly repeating the
phrase that computer-composition instructors must help students achieve “true sight” or
true understanding. She explains that by “writing hypertexts and interrogating how

newsgroups allow for a multiplicity of meanings, students can come to see how

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discursive contexts, although ideological, are open also to their manipulation” (286,
italics added). She continues by arguing that “students also need to see how they already
enact such multiplicity” (287, italics added), and “students can begin to see that their
writing (and hopefully other forms of action) need not simply reproduce dominant
ideology’s attempts to reforrnulate their thinking and perspective on the world but might
also serve as a material practice that can intervene into the ideologies of a text’s context
and the context’s effect on self” (291, italics added). By repeating her commitment of
helping students “to see,” LeCourt is reenacting her own version of Freire’s
“conscientizacao.” She concludes by explaining that “only by foregrounding such a
personal imbrication in the ideological effects of language can we, as critical teachers
interested in social transformation through writing, encourage students to see the material
effects of ideology such that they might be interested in acting upon them” (292, italics
added). She exerts a great deal of energy getting students to see various things—
discursive contexts, their multiplicity, the material effects of ideology—but exerts little if
any energy getting students to practice producing and situating texts in different social
and historical contexts. Her word choice constantly reminds us of the perilous and
passive position of students. They are overwhelmed by dominant ideology, in need of
social transformation, and automatically assumed to participate in ideological
reproduction.

LeCourt aligns her argument with both James Clifford’s (1991) claim that the
“good” writing subject has unknowingly internalized the ideology of academic success

and so only imagines that he or she ﬂeely chooses between options, and with Patricia

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Bizzell’s (1986) claim that students are unaware that “discursive forms may inscribe
certain ways of thinking” because they have gained institutional and social power ﬂom
writing in academically sanctioned ways. She summarizes how students have unwittingly
become pawns of ideology and highlights the teacher’s role in ﬂeeing students ﬂom its
grip:
Their familiarity with the discourse combined with the ideologies of individualism
and schooling inscribe a value system whereby writing subjects are predisposed
not to examine the ideological positioning orchestrated by writing contexts,
making a critique of the writing space extremely difficult. The task for the critical
composition teacher, then, becomes making such ideological inﬂuences apparent
to students through an examination of their own writing practice. (278)
Here we are explicitly told that it is the job of the composition instructor as authoritative
sage of the real to make “ideological inﬂuences apparent to students.” LeCourt even
directly associates her work with Freire while seemingly unaware of the problematic
narrative of promise she had endorsed: “Making the inﬂuence of discursive context on
text production open to critical scrutiny is where writing technologies can best support
critical literacy’s goals. As in all critical literacy teaching, the goal of reﬂection is to
make the invisible visible so that it can be acted on differently—to pose, in F reireian
terms, the existential problem of how self is imbricated in ideology” (278). Using
technology in the writing classroom to encourage students to analyze the discursive
contexts of texts is an important goal when it is aimed at helping students become more

rhetorically ﬂuent, but the claim that the invisible must be made visible to unsuspecting

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students veers this discussion into the realm of disciplinary technologies of the self (this

9“

act will ameliorate students existential problem of how self is imbricated in ideology”).
It is important to recognize that the rhetoric of promise is disseminated in uneven
ways even within a single study or piece of scholarship. For example, even though
LeCourt at times explicitly associates her work with Freireian liberatory critical theory, at
other times she carefully complicates such complicity. The section on “Constructing
Agency: The Question of the Writing Subject, Ideology, and Text” shows how the
rhetoric of promise may overlap, converge, collapse, and sometimes contradict itself.
LeCourt contrasts Freire’s concept of the subject as authentic and “grounded in an
essential hmnanity” with the postmodern concept that the subject is completely
interpellated by discourse and ideology (284). Yet she quickly distances herself ﬂom this
hard-line postmodern stance by noting James Berlin’s position that while writing can
result in “a simple accommodation to hegemonic codes . . . it usually involves a
negotiated transaction and even resistance . . . . (x)” (284-285). LeCourt ﬁnally aligns
herself with Trimbur’s claim about the “leaky” nature of culture: “The contexts available
for writing subjects are probably best imagined as ‘leaky sites of struggle and ongoing
negotiation where no outcomes can be guaranteed in advance’ (1993, p. 130)” (285). In
other words, while LeCourt wants to lay claim to the promise that technology can save
students ﬂom ideological domination, at the same time it is essential that she distance
herself ﬂom the idea that students are completely duped by culture, lest she be accused of

oversimpliﬁed technological determinism. So she negotiates a ﬁne line between these

two extremes by appealing to the notion of “leaky culture.”

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A similar contradiction emerges when LeCourt defends “critical pedagogy” ﬂom
the accusation that it is outside ideology:

Interrogating positions in these ways prevents a critical pedagogy ﬂom simply

valorizing the difference of lived experience as authentic and somehow less

ideological than academic discourse and, thus, not open to scrutiny. Instead, by

pursuing what authorizes such potentially oppressive positions, students are asked

to look at how they come to internalize the subject positions offered within the

contexts of oppressive cultural discourses and begin to question them. (288-289)
By helping students see “what authorizes such potentially oppressive positions,” they may
then come to see the “oppressive positions” they occupy and question them. While
LeCourt is sensitive to the concern that academic discourse and “lived experience” are
both imbricated in ideology and therefore are both open to scrutiny, she still operates
ﬂom the assumption that students are already and unknowingly entrenched within
“potentially oppressive positions” and “oppressive cultural discourses.” By helping
students use computer networked discussion technologies, teachers will also be helping
students interrogate these oppressive positions or discourses created by the degenerative
nature of postmodern popular culture. The crux of LeCourt’s argument about the value of
networked discussions and hypertext in the composition classroom is, in the ﬁnal
analysis, reliant on the rhetoric of promise that ideologically duped students can be saved
ﬂom false consciousness with computer technology.

As the above analysis of LeCourt’s article suggests, the language of Freireian

liberatory and critical pedagogy is often uncritically deployed in computer-composition

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scholarship in the services of democratic education. As a result, sweeping and over-
generalized claims are often made about the deﬁciencies of students, which means that
their improvement is often taken as a given and appropriate goal of the writing course. In
“Re: Ways We Contribute: Students, Instructors, and Pedagogies in the Computer-
Mediated Writing Classroom” Sibylle Gruber acknowledges that computer-mediated
communication does not automatically alter classroom practices and may even increase
face-to-face and online conﬂict. Given these appropriate and reasonable admonitions, it
is all the more interesting how Gruber still engages a superﬁcial version of liberatory and
critical pedagogy. We are told that computer-mediated classrooms can “empower
students,” “liberate students,” and facilitate dialogical action and enhance “authentic
thought” (76). Roxanne Kent-Drury endorses networked computer classrooms as a way
to make students into “critical analysts rather than passive consumers of technology,” and
Comstock and Addison claim that “[s]howing our students how the lntemet is used in the
construction of identity and community may lead to more dialogic, liberatory, and
democratic classrooms” (252). By ﬁrst ﬂaming students as deﬁcient subjects—they are
passive consumers who lack empowerment, liberation, and authentic thought—the
promises of technology, couched in the lingo of liberatory theory, are ﬂee to step in and

save the student ﬂom his or her inadequacy.

The Promise of A ch ieving “Correct Vision ” or “Correct Sight”
As discussed previously in Chapter 1 of this dissertation, composition scholarship

that is informed by critical pedagogy often takes a vulgar Marxist approach to ideology as

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a type of “false consciousness” which can be lifted ﬂom students with the help of a
knowledgeable writing teacher. Even James Berlin’s work, which contributes
sophisticated theoretical work to the ﬁeld with studies on the ideological grounding of
writing instruction and educational institutions, carries strains of this “correct vision” and
crude Marxist discourse. For example, Berlin aligns himself with Ira Shor’s approach to
liberatory pedagogy and represents students as in need of salvation and teachers as givers
of true sight:
Among the most important forces preventing work toward a social order
supporting the student’s “full humanity” are forms of false consciousness—
reiﬁcation, pre-scientiﬁc thought, acceleration, mystiﬁcation—and the absence of
democratic practices in all areas of experience. Although Shor discusses these
forms of false consciousness in their relation to working class students, their
application to all students is not hard to see . . . . (“Rhetoric and Ideology in the
Writing Class” 490)
Berlin represents students as being deprived of their “full humanity” by an array of typical
adversarial Marxist forces (reiﬁcation, acceleration, mystiﬁcation). He extends this
analysis to apply to students in different economic positions as well, as we are told that
even those lucky enough to avoid the label of working class are no longer exempt ﬂom
the ignominy of “false consciousness.” Berlin even echoes Freire’s and Shor’s language
that students have become victims of popular culture when he explains that writing
courses must “empower them [students] to become agents of social change rather than

victims” (“Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” 491 ).

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The use of simplistic Marxist terminology extends beyond composition and
bubbles over into computer-composition as well. For example, by yoking the metaphor
of empowerment to vulgar Marxism in his description of the value of technology in the
writing classroom, Michael Joyce enacts yet another re-worked version of F reireian
liberatory pedagogy:

What I saw in my student Les was an ability to see himself as ﬂeed of these

constraints (of paper-print technology), constraints that he and the other students

had, admittedly, ﬂeed themselves of long before either by rejecting them outright
or simply by failing to learn. What had changed in Les and the others, however,
was their ability to perceive and express . . . the existence of information below
the surface of a writing and to use that awareness of structure in commonplace

fashion to empower themselves. (51)

Joyce’s explanation invokes images of students having the veil of ignorance lifted ﬂom
their eyes. First, students are represented as not only lacking the ability to perceive
correctly the world around them, but then they are represented as lacking the ability even
to express some rudimentary dissatisfaction or discomfort with it. By writing hypertexts,
however, these same students gained the ability and perception to “empower themselves.”
Technology lifted the shroud of ignorance ﬂom Les’s eyes and gave him the “ability to
perceive and express” his ideological oppression, which took the form of the “existence
of information below the surface of a writing” which he was previously unaware. Once
Les gained true insight into this submerged structure of information, he became

“empower[ed]” and achieved a truer vision of his reality.” Far ﬂom being concerned

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with how to use technology in the writing classroom in order to help students gain
rhetorical experience by gauging the appropriate means of persuasion for a particular
situation, Joyce is focused on how to use technology to extract students from the blight of
false consciousness.

The forms of false consciousness that veil and hinder the sight of students are
quite varied in computer-composition scholarship. Over and over again in the
scholarship, students are represented as unknowingly laboring under false truths,
inaccurate ideas, or immoral beliefs, all of which can be remedied with just the
appropriate embrace of technology. In “Virtual Voices in ‘Letters Across Cultures’:
Listening for Race, Class, and Gender” (1998), Elaine E. Whitaker and Elaine N. Hill
argue that by participating in electronic e-mail discussions, students will develop personal
voices, explore their own and others’ cultures, and, most importantly, learn to identify
race, class, and gender stereotyping and hence learn to respect and accept cultural
difference (331, 335, 344). Similarly, Leslie D. Harris and Cynthia A. Wambeam suggest
that computer-mediated communication can foster the humanistic goal of helping
students become “not only more complex thinkers and writers, but also more tolerant,
accepting people” (“The lntemet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy”
(370).

Some scholarship moves away ﬂom the generic concept of tolerance to the more
speciﬁc concept of tolerance in sexual orientation. Both Susan Claire Warshauer’s
“Rethinking Teacher Authority to Counteract Homophobic Prejudice in the Networked

Classroom” and Michelle Comstock and Joanne Addison’s “Virtual Complexities:

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Exploring Literacy at the Intersections of Computer-Mediated Social Formations”
conclude that electronic learning and writing can make students less homophobic. While
both articles position the teacher as the savior who will lead students to this higher form
of consciousness, the latter article is perhaps more problematic in the way it encourages
students to study “coming out” confessionals in the name of tolerance (252-253).
Comstock and Addison conclude that “[e]ven in the most potentially liberatory
classrooms many of our students are aﬂaid or unable to examine the social, political, and
cultural implications of their personal experiences. This is especially true of politically
and emotionally charged issues such as sexuality” (252). Their hope is that students will
learn to engage “in online critical activities that directly and indirectly combat
homophobia and ageism” (253). Some computer-composition scholarship even take
students’ sense of self as their explicit concern, arguing that the false consciousness
students are blinded by is a wrong sense of self. Dean Barclay argues that student
conversations in networked computer environments encourage mental activities that
“help the writer make room for a self” (23). In “Narratives of Self in Networked
Communications,” Patricia R. Webb suggests that teachers explicitly ask students to
reﬂect on their sense of self, lest “the narrative of the stable, coherent, rational self as
embodied in the individual author” be told again and again by students in their electronic
writing. What is important about all of the above examples is that these students are
represented as unknowingly believing in false truths (there is no racism or class conﬂict,
there is no stable coherent subject position) or laboring under an immoral belief

(homophobia), and then some form of computer-mediated conversation or electronic

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writing is offered up as a way to improve the student as the subject of the course by
bringing them into correct vision.

Within computer-composition’s discourse of promise, we often see the return of
the teacher as the authoritative hero who has the power to extract students ﬂom their
oppression through the use of some type of technology. It also seems that at precisely the
moment when compositionists rely on liberatory rhetoric the most, an odd kind of
reﬂective inversion often takes place and they end up remaking students into their own
image. Susan Romano’s “On Becoming A Woman: Pedagogies of the Self” examines
electronic discussion transcripts for evidence of teachers discussing their own practices
and for evidence of female students discussing narratives of the self (251). Romano
assumes that while students inherently have certain selves, they are often unable to
identify with them. Her answer to this dilemma is to invest teachers with the momentous
power to “make offers to students of possible selves,” which students may then decide to
take up and occupy (265-266). Teachers are ﬂamed as the heroes who can save students
from identity chaos, and therefore they also fail students when they do not offer them
these “possible selves” or spaces outside of oppressive discourse (266).

Marilyn Cooper draws a similar conclusion about the special role teachers play in
saving students through the promise of technology. In “Postmodern Possibilities in
Electronic Conversations,” Cooper does a superb job explaining how the shift ﬂom
modem to postmodern ideas initiated a corresponding shift ﬂom the concept of
knowledge as a universal truth represented by rational individuals with transparent

language to the concept of knowledge as a partial truth created by contradictory

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individuals and constructed by language (143). She goes on to argue that computer-
mediated communications can teach students about ‘ﬁrnassimilated otherness” and,
through “paratactic juxtaposition of ideas and perspectives,” teach students to understand
better the “issues and problems that conﬂont them” (157). Furthermore, teachers should
follow Ira Shor’s cue, Cooper continues, and act as an authoritative leader: “Foucault’s
description of his method suggests a role for teachers like that described in the Freireian
model by Ira Shor, where the teacher is ‘a problem-poser who leads a critical dialogue in
class’ (31)” (158). In the end, Cooper returns to the representation of the teacher as a
powerful ﬁgure who will guide students to a vision of truth: “In order to have ‘the
legitimacy of a common enterprise,’ the re-presentation of student problems must focus
on helping students become aware of the complexities and contradictions within their
own discourse on and within their own experiences with the problems, rather than on
explicating an official or authoritative perspective on the problem” (158). The teacher-
sage must select which problem to re-present to the student, and then the teacher will
guide the student to become “more aware” of the “complexities and contradictions” the
student experiences with that particular problem. The language moves seamlessly
between the student’s lack (his or her inability to understand their “experiences with
problems”) and the instructor’s role in leading the student to critical consciousness and
understanding.

The endgame of the rhetoric of promise is often a return of the repressed, a re-
suturing of the position of truth, a recognition of the inherent value of liberatory

pedagogy. It is similar to how Henry Giroux and others cultural critics, in their nostalgic

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desire for the lost public sphere, rely on a Marxist vision that will unite cultural workers
(i.e., writing instructors) and the oppressed (i.e., writing students) in a mystically
underlying bond in an effort to fulﬁll the true needs of the people. Expressing the crisis
in terms of the rhetoric of fear over student inability to understand this increasingly
postmodern world neatly provides a shortcut for representing students en mass as
oppressed. And the celebratory narratives of promise that writing in computer-mediated
contexts can help students learn how to decode the signs that control their lives and hence
be released ﬁnally ﬂom the technological embrace of corporations, media, or popular
culture is also a convenient way to appease fears. At base of the rhetoric of promise is an
imagined desire on the part of students to break ﬂee of these oppressions and align
themselves with a radical pedagogy, thereby making passive and naive students

dependent upon ideologically aware teachers.

The Promise of Conquering the Cyberfrontier

In Fragments of Rationality, Lester Faigley argues that composition’s old
narrative of progress is being retold through the newer narrative of process. In a parallel
move, I argue that computer-composition is now retelling the old narrative of progress
through a repackaged narrative of technological promise. Indeed, this new myth of
technological promise may not always be couched in terms so obviously problematic—
for example, by using terms like “enlightening” or “empowering” students to see “the
tru ” they failed previously to see. Yet while computer-composition may not reductively

claim that simply using newer technologies will ﬂee or enlighten students, it does show

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an interest in controlling students through narratives of technological progress and
proﬁciency. A new promise has emerged in recent computer-composition scholarship
that is surprisingly traditional: students must learn these new forms of writing and
communicating in technological environments in order to be ﬂee, there is a new empty
frontier out there, and if students want to graduate, get a job, and live the capitalistic
American dream, then they had better learn how to survive in this new electronic ﬂontier.
Metaphors which ﬂame cyberspace as a new empty frontier that students must be
taught to conquer can be viewed as yet another repackaging of liberatory pedagogy. As
Dasenbrock suggests, even though the discipline may realize the problematics of focusing
on student subjectivity, it still seems to do precisely this: “While the ﬁeld now seems
aware of the complications, futility, and self-serving potential of concerning ourselves
with students’ senses of self, we still spend a great deal of effort worrying about their
“identiﬁcation with or alienation ﬂom society” (8). So while the new myths of
cyberspace mirror composition’s old worry over student “identiﬁcation or alienation”
from society, they manage to avoid using words like “empowerment” or “enlighten,”
which set off warning signals that students are being viewed as completely duped by
ideology. They still draw upon the anxieties of composition professionals——such as the
need to maintain control in the classroom and the need to be viewed as knowledgeable—
and they still represent students as failures, but it is rephrased in such a way so as to avoid
the conundrums of vulgar Marxism, Althusser’s interpellation, and Foucault’s double-
bind.2 The latest way of saying this, then, is that students must master a given technology

and change with the times—or else they will continue to be mystiﬁed by technology and

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labor under false consciousness.3

Narratives of cyberspace also tend to assume that composition instructors are ﬂee
ﬂom ideology, so that they alone can teach their students to harness productively the
power of technology outside of the inﬂuences of ideology. It is possible therefore to view
these narratives of cyberspace as a displacement of the same concerns about student false
consciousness and alienation ﬂom society; in other words, they reﬂect a new bread and
circuses of the student as the subject of writing courses, only this time the carnival takes
place in a technological environment. The colonial desire to identify student lack and to
discipline the subject into enlightenment still appears to be played out in computer-
composition even in newest space of the cyberﬂontier. These concerns once again take
on life in the ﬁeld within newer concerns to teach students about newer technologies.

In his Preface to Writing for the World Wide Web (1998) Victor Vitanza explicitly
invokes the ﬂontier and accompanying pioneer metaphor: “Go Web, Young Men and
Women; Go Web. The West is closed, and outer space is too far . . . . So venture into
Cyberspace! And be one of its pioneers” (ix). This metaphor resurfaces throughout the
textbook, like when he encourages students to “light out for the virtual territory ahead and
check out those pages” (117). Vitanza’s deployment of this metaphor suggests that he is
seized by conﬂicting desires: he wants to embrace technologies that will help students
write in the twenty-ﬁrst century, but he also returns to an oddly traditional representation
of naive students as Mark Twain characters lighting out to unknown territories.

While Vitanza enthusiastically applies the ﬂontier metaphor to the World Wide

Web, Kristine Blair more tentatively conceptualizes electronic dialogue environments as

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unexplored virtual communities that “enforce both empowering and disempowering
ideologies” (“Literacy, Dialogue, and Difference in the ‘Electronic Contact Zone’” 317).
Importantly, she acknowledges that binary representations of electronic discussions
spaces as completely empowering or completely oppressive are overly simpliﬁed: “[a]s
we become more familiar with electronic networks . . . we are replacing our initial
utopian labels with labels of conﬂict, particularly terms such as electronic contact zones”
(318). Students will ﬁnd that “the risks of cultural conﬂict are certainly worth taking,”
because it will lead to their personal growth as individuals and as citizens (326). A
liberatory rhetoric of promise pervades her discussion as well, concluding with the claim
that online dialogue and the cultural conﬂicts it gives students the opportunity to confront
are valuable because they make students more aware and tolerant of difference. She
represents electronic contact zones which are neither completely safe or dangerous, but
she also represents them as spaces where students can earn liberation or empowerment as
a result of successfully navigating these unknown territories and conquering the cultural
conﬂicts presented therein: “For students to experience liberation, empowerment
collaboration, and community building, it is vital that we examine the existing electronic
spaces that do or do not allow for such goals to ﬂourish, including the continuum between
utopia and heterotopia” (3 26). Blair does not whole-heartedly frame cyberspace as a
liberatory location, but she does frame it as a location students have the opportunity to
occupy and conquer conﬂicts in the name of tolerance. Sometimes this preoccupation
with cyberspace as a distinct location takes on an additional caveat, where fertile

multiplicity in subject formation is imagined as a way to release the student subject from

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ideological control.

The Rhetoric of Fertility

The promise that technology can free the student from various forms of
ideological control often draws upon arguments that multiple virtual selves can exist or
be created in cyberspace. Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s The War of Desire and
Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1998) and Sherry Turkle’s Life on the
Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1997) are frequently referred to as evidence
that online interactions are free from ideology or that cyberspace does indeed undercut
notions of the Enlightenment, autonomous, and self-consciously knowable self. Both
Stone and Turkle argue that cyberspace is the perfect proving ground for claims that the
self is multiple, fragmented, and constantly shifting. Because people can escape their
bodies in cyberspace, a variety of boundary crossings—such as sexual, class, age, race,
ethnicity, gender, etc—are possible and indeed encouraged. And such boundary
crossings permit people to explore better their true or real selves. Yet once again we see
the problem that the rhetoric of the student as subj ect—this time the subject is formulated
as multiple and free to explore alternative identities in cyberspace—enforces yet another
type of ideological control onto students while downplaying how technological
environments may assist them in gaining practice producing texts. When computer-
compositionists pick up on the isolated idea that the subject is liberated in cyberspace,
they often weave it into the rhetoric of the student as subj ect—but in this case the subject

is multiplied, dispersed, and fragmented.

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Turkle’s claim that the computer screen is the newest space where we interact
with the world and compose ourselves is understandably very appealing to computer-
compositionists trying to make sense of the intersection of technology and writing:
“Computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual. We
are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking
about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity” (26). It is in this sense
that some compositionists have used writing with computers as a way to think about
students “having” multiple voices that may be stiﬂed in more traditional writing courses.
Turkle tells a personal story comparing how the student may be standardized in both a
writing class and a programming class. In a French composition class in which she was
required to write an essay in three parts over three-weeks, an outline was due the ﬁrst
week and the essay written over the remaining two weeks (50). Her approach was to
read, take notes, write the paper, and then write the outline, all before the ﬁrst week even
ended. She explains that she came to think of her kind of writing as wrong. Turkle then
describes a parallel story about the differences between the “modernist style” of
programming taught at Harvard, which is “rule-driven and relies on top-down planning,”
and the “bricolage” approach with is “bottom-up” (51). Lisa, a Harvard student, resisted
the modernist style and “came under increasing pressure from her instructors to think in
ways that were not her own. Her alienation did not stem from an inability to cope with
programming but rather from her preference to do it in a way that came into conﬂict with
the structured and rule-driven style of the computer culture she had entered” (53). By

now this has become a common claim in composition: that modemists rules prevent

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students from thinking in ways that are not their own. However, all this assumes that
there is a way to think that gets at the true essence, the true identity or self, of a person. It
is in this context that Turkle offers up computer interaction as providing a method or a
space where people are free to think more true to themselves in a bricolage fashion.
Turkle argues that it is beneﬁcial for people to experience multiple selves by
providing numerous examples of people’s experiences in computer-mediated
environments, such as in online discussions, M005 and MUDs. Her argument about
MUDs, that they “imply difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation” (185),
has become a foundation in MUD theory. While Turkle’s scholarship does consider
some negative results of computer-mediated communications, her work is most often
referred to by computer-compositionists as evidence of the positive potential of
technology to help people achieve a kind of liberation by locating their multiple virtual
selves. A useful example of such evidence is found in the “Aspects of the Self” chapter
where the anonymity of many MU Ds is viewed as “provid(ing) ample room for
individuals to express unexplored parts of themselves” (185). She quotes a 26 year old
clerical worker as saying “I’m not one thing, I’m many things. Each part gets to be more
fully expressed in MUDs than in the real world. So even thought I play more than one
self on MUDs, I feel more like ‘myself’ when I’m MUDding” (185). Turkle believes that
this confession shows that “In real life, this woman sees her world as too narrow to allow
her to manifest certain aspects of the person she feels herself to be. Creating screen
personae is thus an opportunity for self-expression, leading to her feeling more like her

true self when decked out in an array of virtual masks” (185). And with this example it

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becomes increasingly clear why Turkle’s claim that a person can be more their “true self”
in cyberspace is so appealing to computer-compositionists’ desire to help students ﬁnd
their “true voices” or “true selves.”

Stone make several of the same arguments as Turkle within the more general
context of the conﬂicting desires people experience about the role of technology in their
lives at the end of the mechanical age. But like Turkle, Stone also draws similar
conclusions that emphasize the multiplicity of the subject in technologically mediated
environments. She explains that she is interested in cyberspace because it is a social
environment (3 6), and as such some of the interactions which take place in it are
“stereotypical and Cartesian, reifying old power differentials,” while others are “novel,
strange, perhaps transformative, and certainly disruptive of many traditional attempts at
categorization” (3 6). She also says she is interested in cyberspace because “the identities
that emerge from these interactions—fragmented, complex, diffracted through the lenses
of technology, culture, and new technocultural formations—seem to me to be, for better
or worse, more visible as the critters we ourselves are in process of becoming, here at the
close of the mechanical age” (3 6). Stone merges the disruptive nature of cyberspace with
it opportunity of “becoming” and concludes that “[t]he cyborg, the multiple personality,
the technosocial subject, Gibson’s cyberspace cowboy all suggest a radical rewriting, in
the technosocial space . . . of the bounded individual as the standard social unit and
validated social actant” (42). While Stone argues, like Turkle, for multiplicity in subject
formation, she adds the unique component of human desire for multiplicity. To Stone,

the technosocial space of M005 and MUDs are “a base camp for some kinds of cyborgs,

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from which they might state a coup on the rest of ‘reality”’ (39). The claim that people
gain a stronger or more accurate hold on “reality” in cyberspace offers some prescient
insight into computer-composition’s tendency to regard the use of technology in the
writing classroom as a way to help students break out of enforced false-reality or false-
thought.

Turkle’s and Stone’s claims about what happens to the subject in cyberspace and
virtual reality systems were foreshadowed by earlier claims for the multiplicity of the
subject in hypertext environments. These pedagogical claims for hypertext ranged from
the reserved to the exuberant, and it is understandable that earlier scholarship tended to
make more revolutionary claims. And it is also understandable that, like more traditional
composition scholarship before it, hypertext scholarship uses the terms “voice,” “self,”
and “author” interchangeably, which complicates and muddles its arguments. However,
what consistently returns in the scholarship is the assertion that because the “voice” of a
text is decentered in hypertext, the identity or author is likewise decentered and therefore
freed and permitted to multiply. For example, George Landow tells us that an author in
hypertext is “a decentered network of codes” in contrast to the author in print which is a
modernist uniﬁed “I” (Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory
and Technology 73-74). Jay David Bolter comes at the discussion from a slightly
different perspective and argues that the experience of writing hypertext can make the
author aware of his or her multiple consciousnesses (Writing Space: The Computer,
Hypertext, and the History of Writing 233-234). And in the Preface to Writing Space:

The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (1991 ), Bolter admits that he

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“argue(s) rather cheerfully that the computer is a revolution in writing” (ix). His
argument revolves around the assertion that since writing is manipulating signs,
computers provide a new “ﬁeld” to experiment with that manipulation (10). Hence, the
computer “offers us a new writing space” which promises to revolutionize almost every
aspect of written communication and especially the role of the author (10): “This tension
leads to a new deﬁnition of unity in writing, one that may replace or supplement our
traditional notions of the unity of voice and of analytic argument” (Bolter 9).

The rhetoric of multiplicity and fertility which often accompany the promises of
computer technology seem to ﬁmction as a way to evade the problem of composition’s
standardization of a current-traditionalist and humanistic subject. The rhetoric of fertility
is used, for example, by scholars arguing for multiple subjectivities. As previous chapters
explained, it is a commonly accepted story that traditional composition disciplines
students into authentic, knowable, and singular modernist subjects. If computer-
composition is going to avoid the same problem, it must offer an alternative to this well-
wom story. Hence, the problem of the authentic singular subject is intimately tied to the
rhetoric of promise and fertility in computer-composition, because it is precisely this
problem which gives existence to the promise of technology as savior and fertile
procreator. While computer-composition resources and lore cautiously warn us against
technological determinism, we still see the emergence of the rhetoric of fertility which
uses the language of reproduction, multiplicity, and re-creation as a type of shorthand to
say that technology frees the repressed singular subject (which is blinded by culture’s

oppressive discourses and social structures) and instead lets the subject be free and

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multiply.4

Some contemporary computer-composition scholarship approaches the treatment
and representation of the subject in a more cautious way, avoiding the extremes of pure
euphoria or absolute doom. For example, while several chapters in Todd Taylor’s and
Irene Ward’s edited collection Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet (1998) are more
cautious about celebrating the liberatory value of lntemet technologies, they still show an
obsession with analyzing the student subject either from the perspective that a humanist
Enlightenment subject is a sham or else that subject multiplicity is dangerous and hinders
action. It is not surprising, then, that many of the chapters also show a deep ambiguity or
uncertainty with regard to just what exactly they are arguing about the subject in
computer-mediated environments. In “Our Bodies? Our Selves? Questions About
Teaching in the MUD,” Raul Sanchez seems conﬂicted about the value of using such
technologies in teaching. He acknowledges that a common argument for the use of
MUDs/MOOs is that “such technology allows students to explore multiple subjectivities”
(102). Yet he quickly vacillates to give a cautionary caveat: “what usually passes for
multiple subjectivity in a MUD is in fact the illusion of a uniﬁed Enlightenment subject
trying on different roles but nonetheless maintaining the idea of a core being that exists
apart from discursive exigencies” (103). He concludes with the slightly enigmatic
comment that he dislikes the implications of this technology which teaches students to be
“alone together,” with their backs to each other, facing computer screens. Sanchez shows
some desire for the postmodern subject to freely multiply in MU Ds and MOOs, but he

also shows fear over the complete abandonment and isolation that may also occur.

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Beth E. Kolko’s “We Are Not Just (Electronic) Words: Learning the Literacies of
Culture, Body, and Politics” also displays ambivalence towards the supposed value of
lntemet technologies to let the subject multiply. She questions the merit of scholarship
which says the body disappears completely in virtual interaction: “1 would like to show
some of the ways the decentered subject of the M00 is posited and then discuss some
strategies for recuperating both political possibility and accountability from these
arguments” (62). She concludes that teachers should not let ideas about fragmented
subjects dilute the political power and accountability of students when writing in virtual
spaces. Johndan Johnson-Eilola also shows some ambivalence in regard to the value of
Internet technology for teaching in “Negative Spaces: From Production to Connection in
Composition.” He argues that while composition theorists and practitioners have for
many years explored the idea of subjectivity as a multiple, dynamic and contradictory set
of forces, they still maintain very traditional ideas about authorship, ownership, media,
intertextuality, and process theory. He suggests that the common argument that newer
computer technologies, unlike contact and border pedagogies which still reinforce
modernist individualism, free subjects to multiply throughout time and space:

On the one hand, contact and border pedagogies rely on an older model of text in

which subjectivities work valiantly . . . through personal, internal battles

negotiating two opposing worldviews; on the other hand, experts working in
massive information contexts negotiate differences and connections on a much
vaster scale including sometimes thousands of different factors and cultural forces

. . . . We are closer here to Frederic Jameson’s cognitive mapping . . . (which)

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describes the ways that subjects position themselves provisionally and multiply in

relation to the world and history. (24)

In the beginning, Johnson-Eilola questioned whether it was useful to focus on notions of
authorship or subjectivity. Yet by the end he positions his work within earlier debates
about subjectivity, placing his ideas alongside those of Jameson’s cognitive mapping,
which regards subjectivity as constantly shiﬁing and multiplying in different social and
historical contexts. Sanchez, Kolko, and J ohnson-Eilola each begin by doubting whether
a focus on the writing subject is productive and by questioning the claim about subject
multiplicity in cyberspace, which in a way is a kind of improvement over the scholarship
which takes these concepts as a given. However, they each also end up, in the end, by
reaffirming that it is proper and right for computer-composition to focus on students’
sense of self, and they re-disseminate the rhetoric of fertility and multiplicity.

A stronger and more celebratory version of the rhetoric of fertility of’ten emerges
in feminist computer-composition scholarship. In this scenario, the rhetoric of promise is
that computer technology can help students see how gender dynamics in society, the
classroom, and/or academia silence and oppress them. The rhetoric of fertility is then
often invoked as a way to enact the promise of computer-technology provided through
computer-composition. For example, Donna LeCourt and Luann Barnes’s “Writing
Multiplicity: Hypertext and Feminist Textual Politics” (1999) argues that creating
hypertexts within a feminist pedagogy carries the potential to ﬁnd a place for
marginalized voices and challenge the gendered power relations of academic discourse. It

is important to note that I am not arguing that gender dynamics do not play a part in

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society or education. Rather, what I am interested in analyzing is how the authors
represent the writing student as lacking the ability, the awareness, and even the strength to
make their true gendered selves be heard, how they carefully stitch together the rhetoric of
promise and fertility to claim that technology can free naive students to see the “true”
reality of their gender oppression, especially in academic contexts. In other words, the
authors are already working from the assumption that students are silenced and oppressed
because of their gender. It is the rhetorical moves the authors make with respect to
constructing students as unaware of their gender oppression—and technology as the
savior capable of making students aware of this oversight—that I am interested in
analyzing.

LeCourt and Barnes explain that “writing multivocal hypertexts can help make
students more aware of the multiplicity of their subject positions and the ways in which
academic contexts try to silence those positions” (55). Here is one of the most common
rhetorical moves: their study will make students “more aware,” which quickly and yet
decisively situates students as always and already passive, blind, and easily manipulated.
And in this particular example, it is academia itself from which students must be
liberated. Another fascinating aspect of this article which must be considered is that
while the authors make claims about student experiences writing hypertexts, their
research is based on the hypertext writing of Barnes, one of the authors. It is curious that
a piece of scholarship that discusses the use of technology in a writing course studies an
author-produced text instead of a student-produced text; LeCourt and Barnes use as

evidence one of their own texts to support their argument about student texts. While this

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decision could be taken as proof of subject multiplicity (Barnes is writing as a female, as
an author, and as an instructor of the course), it could also indicate that the authors
assume that students are incapable of creating complicated hypertexts which could
produce the results their study required. In any case, LeCourt and Barnes acknowledge
that “merely engaging in the seemingly disruptive practice of computer-mediated
communication (CMC) does not lead to a new perception of self and writing; instead, it is
more likely that students will reproduce humanist concepts of self and author” (69). It is
important to note that LeCourt and Barnes argue that it was the fact that they emphasized
gender issues in general, and gender issues in Barnes’s own life in particular, that made
the hypertext writing activity useful. In other words, without the teacher prodding
Barnes’s to consider explicitly her own gender oppression, the writing activity would
have been less effective.

LeCourt and Barnes explain that “many ways in which she acceded to an
academic context in the hypertext were made available only by our dialogic questioning
of the text” (69). In other words, Barnes (as student) would have remained unaware of
academic discourse’s ideological pull if the teachers had not made her aware of it. The
way that Barnes “acceded to an academic context,” her ideological blinding, was
explained to her by the teacher’s “dialogic questioning.” Here again we see some familiar
rhetorical strategies: an initial denial of technological determinism, assumptions of
student lack and inability, the rhetoric of promise that technology (in this case hypertext)
can raise student awareness about their oppression (in this case gender oppression), and

then the shorthand of fertile “multiplicity” as a way to evade the fact that the student has

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yet again been disciplined into something more along the lines like the authors ﬁnd
acceptable (in this case, as more aware of the ways academia silences feminist voices).
They conclude that “Perhaps the primary reason to encourage such writing, however, lies
in its potential for social change and personal empowerment. Whether the texts produced
for class actually enact a textual politic seems less important than what students may
learn in the process—the need to interrogate the discursive grounds of achieving authority
such that they can write differently in the other contexts which would silence both their
alternative voices and the challenges those voice might make to the contexts’ ideology”
(69-70). Here they deploy the rhetoric of promise in such a way so that their study
appears to avoid the criticism of ideological naivety itself.

LeCourt and Barnes conclude that the primary reason to use technology in the
classroom is not to improve student writing, but rather for “its potential for social change
and personal empowerment.” Hence, the return to the afﬁrmation of the rhetoric of
promise that technology can lead students to correct personal insight that they previously
lacked. And they conclude that the text that is actually produced is not, in the ﬁnal
analysis, at all important at all; rather, what is important is that students come to see that
their failure to “interrogate the discursive grounds” of authority lead to the silencing of
their “multiple voices.” Student failure to perform such interrogations is what leads to
their ideological domination. But LeCourt and Barnes seem unaware of the ideological
force they themselves have just applied to students: they claim to have found a way to
help students see their ideological oppression, but have in that very act forced their own

student-in-need-of-coming to the sight of their own domination ideology on students.

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Given how saturated our mainstream popular culture has become with tales of
technological liberation, it is understandable that computer-compositionists, in their
efforts to come to terms with lntemet technologies, have also relied upon these tales as
well. After the rhetorics of fear and loathing construct students as mired in oppression or
ignorance, the stage is set for the rhetoric of technological promise to emerge and extract
students from their limitations. The breadth of these promise—which range from the
promise of social, political, or personal empowerment, to the promise of achieving
correct vision or correct sight, to the promise of conquering new and potentially
dangerous cyberfrontiers—reﬂects the breadth of concerns in computer-composition and
also shows that this sub-discipline still strongly draws upon superﬁcial concepts of
critical pedagogy and vulgar Marxism. These different types of technological promise
also unevenly reﬂect the desire of instructors to refashion students into their own moral or
intellectual equivalent. Finally, the various promises that lntemet technologies can
release student from ideological manipulation often call upon a rhetoric of fertility that
multiple selves can exist and ﬂourish in cyberspace. Far from acting as a panacea,
however, such appeals oﬁen function as a way to elude the new type of ideological
control being forced onto the student as subject. While these rhetorics of promise and
fertility problematically employ lntemet technologies to discipline student conscience, the

ﬁnal chapter of this dissertation explores alternative ways of writing scholarship that

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employs lntemet technologies to assist students in learning to write more effectively.

 

' As is often the case in computer-composition scholarship, one of the reasons LeCourt’s
article may unproblematically invoke the rhetoric of promise is because it relies on
teacher testimonial (277).

2 It is as if the ﬁeld reached this impasse when Foucauldian theory did not get us out of
this conundrum (we could not admit teachers were free from ideology and students were
embroiled in it, because to follow Foucault means to accept that there are no individuals).
However, we could not rely on Althusseur for similar reasons. What this amounted to
was saying students, unlike teachers, were ideologically naive and therefore we should
focus on how to use computer-composition technology as a way to free students.

3 Anecdotal evidence supporting this claim is found at publisher Prentice Hall’s website,
which lists the majority of its computer-composition resources under the category
“Freshman Composition.” By now it is an unfortunate cliché’ that freshman composition
is the site of the most unprepared and lacking students, and so by linking computer-
composition with freshman composition, the website implies that these resources are
geared at rectifying the deﬁciencies of freshman, the most needy of all students. It is of
course unfair to use a publisher’s online catalog as evidence that the discipline of
computer-composition represents students as failures, but it does add some credence to
my larger argument that computer-composition resources still apply the rhetoric of the
student as the subject of the writing course.

4 Laura L. Sullivan’s “Wired Women Writing: Towards a Feminist Theorization of
Hypertext” and Comstock and Addison’s “Virtual Complexities: Exploring Literacy at
the Intersections of Computer-Mediated Social Formations” also conclude with a turn to
multiplicity of the subject in cyberspace as a way to avoid suggesting that their arguments
force a narrow type of thinking onto students.

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Conclusion
Reevaluating How We Create Perspectives in our Field:
A Call for Vigilant Rhetorics

While the historical chapter of this dissertation suggests that computer-
composition’s disciplinary treatment of the student as the subject of the writing course is
indebted to earlier models of composition pedagogy and theory, the analysis chapters
show that this rhetoric of the student subject becomes particularly problematic in
computer-composition. The rhetoric deployed in the ﬁeld is often more overstated,
making grandiose claims about the hyper-reality of cyberspace or extravagant promises
that chatrooms, listservs, hypertext, or MOOs and MUDs can release students from
ideological oppression, as computer-composition scholars strive to understand the role of
newer technologies in the writing classroom. This dissertation’s primary contribution to
the ﬁeld, then, is that it brings to the forefront the suggestion that it is essential that
computer-composition scholars come to understand better how we create perspectives in
our ﬁeld, the problems that arise from these perspectives, and how we go about
discussing the promises of newer technologies in our classrooms. By being vigilant
about the rhetorics we employ and the representations of students that we construct in our
scholarship, the ﬁeld can avoid debilitating visions of the student subject and move
toward focusing more on student writing as the subject of writing courses, on the ways in
which newer technologies can enhance writing instruction (i.e., enhance collaboration,
facilitate peer-response, explore writing in online environments), and provide students
with increased opportunities to produce context-speciﬁc and audience-appropriate texts.

As chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation argued, the ﬁeld of computer-composition

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often takes students themselves as the subject of the writing course and represents them
as in need of enlightenment and salvation through the rhetorics of fear, loathing, and
promise. This dissertation argues that the ﬁeld needs to turn away from studying how to
use lntemet technologies to save inadequate students from their own failings or from a
more dangerous postmodern world and instead turn toward using them to help students
become more effective writers. This study also suggests that the ﬁeld could beneﬁt by
developing alternative scholarly genres that take writing itself, and not students’ moral
redemption or social salvation, as the subject of research and debate. When computer-
composition scholarship is grounded in images of student lack or need, its arguments are
diverted subtly away from using newer technologies in the service of writing instruction
and towards using newer technologies in the service of liberating students from their
inadequacies. For instance, one of the more common genres found in computer-
composition scholarship is the teacher testimonial, a form identiﬁed earlier as
problematic because it often relies upon representations of lacking and failing students.
Likewise, when computer-composition scholarship draws upon narratives of social
turmoil, postmodern crisis, or technological disorder or infection in an effort to set the
context that the scholarship at hand is important, its conclusions are diluted into
something more along the lines of a moral salvation tract and contribute little to the ﬁeld
in the way of using lntemet technologies to enhance writing instruction.

This conclusion recommends that the ﬁeld consider alternative ways to write
computer-composition scholarship, ways that will focus on the types of writing and
pedagogical activities supported and enhanced by newer lntemet technologies. Some of

the ways that computer-composition scholarship can move away from taking students

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themselves as the subject of the course, and move towards taking writing as the subject of
the course, is by focusing research on how to deploy lntemet technologies in ways that
enhance student opportunities to practice older rhetorical arts, focus course content on
antifoundational ideas of rhetoric, and produce audience- and situation-speciﬁc texts;
allow for the integration of face-to-face and online interaction; encourage collaboration
and peer-response; expand classroom boundaries, enhance classroom materials, and
transform student publishing; make face-to-face classroom time more efﬁcient; allow for
student directed and point of need instruction; remind us that there are new rhetorical
considerations to take into account with online texts; emphasize the value of visual
literacy, information architecture, and web usability for producing user-centered texts;
and highlight the importance of digital information management. It is essential to
emphasize that any type of computer-assisted writing course in and of itself does not
inherently use technologies in these more productive ways; rather, it is in the design of
particular courses, the uses to which the technologies are put in particular courses, that
amount to a turn in computer-composition away from the student as the subject of the
course to writing as the subject of the course.

This study also makes the argument that computer-composition scholarship—if it
is to focus on using newer technologies to help students become more effective writers—
should be informed by a deﬁnition of antifoundational rhetoric. If computer-composition
scholarship is to remain relevant, expand our understanding of the ways that newer
technologies may enhance composition pedagogy, and expand our understanding of how
writing may change in online environments, it is imperative that this scholarship

relinquish its association of newer technologies with foundational ideas of rhetoric and

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humanistic values of truth. Such associations lead to simplistic claims that the
technologies themselves are inherently objective or liberating, which then opens the door
to simplistic claims that the technologies themselves can lead students to some type of
objective truth or salvation. Arguing that computer-composition scholarship should be
informed by antifoundational concepts of rhetoric means that future scholarship should
discuss, explore, and research the ways that lntemet technologies can be used to help
students understand better how language works in different situations and the ways that
newer technologies can give students increased opportunities to produce (and not merely
critique) persuasive arguments. Computer-composition scholarship that is grounded in
antifoundational concepts of rhetoric assumes that, in order to become more effective
writers, students need to be given opportunities to gain practice creating and situating
texts (as opposed to locating their true humanist selves) within particular historical and
social contexts; gain practice producing texts (as opposed to merely analyzing preexisting
texts); and gain practice exploring the use of language and how language practices may
change in online environments (as opposed to exploring metaphysical and humanistic
ideas of truth). An antifoundational approach to rhetoric also assumes that language, as
“constructed, contingent, and constitutive of social orders,” can produce real material and
social change in the world (Donals and Glejzer 3). Yet it is careful not to present “truth”
as something students can achieve through the act of discovery and then convey without
interference with transparent language. Instead, it emphasizes that truth is a discursive
practice that is always contingent; at best only momentarily agreed upon through
language, negotiation, and debate; and foregrounds how language functions in different

mediums and in different contexts to achieve momentary consensus.

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An important distinction may be made between the ethical shaping of the student
subject and considering the ethical uses of rhetoric. While there may be ethical uses of
effective rhetoric, this is a very different issue than endorsing the ethical transformation
of the student subject. To this end, this dissertation has focused on critiquing computer-
composition’s tendency to use lntemet technologies in order to bring about the moral or
ethical salvation of students. However, when inviting students to think about using
rhetoric for real reasons in real spaces, how might discussions about the ethical uses of
rhetoric be approached, again without the concomitant shaping of the student as subject?
One possible research area that could offer insight into this conundrum is the examination
of the relationship between ethos—or “the character or reputation of a rhetor” (Crowley
Ancient Rhetorics 337)—and the subject. Such an examination does not assume that the
rhetorical concept of ethos is necessarily pinned to the subject. While the question of the
ethical uses of rhetoric is not the same as the question of ethos, such an examination
might provide ways to discuss the matter of ethical uses of rhetoric in a writing class
without thrusting another type of disciplinary technique onto the student subject.

Given contemporary computer-composition’s tendency to focus on the nature of
student subjectivity and matters of student salvation, this study suggests that the ﬁeld
should carefully ground its research and scholarship on an antifoundational theory of
rhetoric because it dispenses with the facade that there is any type of “true essence” to
subjectivity and instead focuses on the production of situationally effective texts.
Antifoundational rhetoric does not concern itself with the morality or social conscience of
students and it avoids the other contemporary theoretical conundrum of reducing

subjectivity to either a completely rhetorical construct or a preexisting entity completely

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outside the effects of language. Instead of interpellating students into a liberal humanist
or poststructuralist subj ectivity—which, respectively, teaches students that they can turn
inward and locate an authentic position from which to write or that they can turn outward
and throw off the shackles of social conditioning—computer-composition scholarship
should explore ways that newer lntemet technologies can provide students with practice
producing and discursively positioning their texts within various situations and
circumstances.

Instead of focusing on the discipline or standardization of the student, computer-
composition should turn towards studying how lntemet technologies can enhance student
writing experiences. This chapter concludes with some suggestions for possible future
areas of research which focus on effective uses of lntemet technologies in the writing
classroom, and it makes an effort to do so without conjuring up images or representations
of deﬁcient students. In other words, both the content and the form of this ﬁnal section
make an argument: computer-composition research and scholarship should focus on
studying the integration of newer lntemet technologies in ways that will enhance writing

pedagogy and student opportunities to become more effective writers.

I hope to point out that the lntemet is not a foreign land or a beautiful paradise but
a writing tool that can help our students understand basic academic and rhetorical
strategies. We must remember, for instance, that the Latin word for introduction,
exordium, originally “meant ‘beginning a web’—by mounting a woof or laying a
warp,” a wonderful metaphor that calls on writers to weave the multiple strands of
their work into a pattern that will entice and entrap the reader (Corbett 1971, 303).
That is to say, webs are familiar territories for rhetoricians. (195)

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— Dean Rehberger “Living Texts on the Web: A Return to the Rhetorical
Arts of Annotation and Commonplace” (2000)

Computers provide peer interactivity and a reading-writing arena that support a
new rhetorical base for instruction (or provide the old collaborative base with
new, enabling functionality). (139)

—- Fred Kemp “Computer-Mediated Communication: Making Nets Work
for Writing Instruction” (1998)

Though the ability to develop arguments, write descriptions, or adhere to other
traditional rhetorical forms will remain a requirement for any writer, we cannot
ignore the new writing spaces. E-mail, the World Wide Web, electronic meeting
rooms, companywide “intranets,” and various kinds of computer conferencing are
becoming as important in some organizations as more traditional work forms.
Also, the opportunities for exciting new prewriting exercises, new collaborative
groupings, and new connections with text are there before us in the network-based
classroom. We need to think not only about the new kinds of writing students
will be doing, or are doing, but also about the new opportunities for teaching
writing. (205)

— Trent Batson “Rhetorical Paths and Cyber-Fields” (1998)

This ﬁnal section of this conclusion weaves together strands taken from the above
three quotes in an effort to entice the reader into acknowledging the practical ways
lntemet technologies can be carefully integrated into writing classrooms in order to
improve writing instruction and pedagogy and assist students in becoming more effective
rhetoricians. From Dean Rehberger I borrow the ideas that “webs are familiar territories
for rhetoricians” and that the lntemet can be used as a powerful writing tool to help
students gain a sophisticated understanding of academic and rhetorical strategies, mix in
Fred Kemp’s commitment to the value of networked peer-interaction, and then ﬁnish

with Trent Batson’s call to consider new types of online writing and online pedagogy.

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Older Rhetorical Arts, Antifoundational Rhetoric, and Producing Audience- and
Situation-Speciﬁc Texts

Newer lntemet technologies can be integrated in the writing classroom in ways
that give students practice with older rhetorical arts. As Dean Rehberger argues, “the
texts on the lntemet—homepages, Web resources, e-mail, listservs, MOOs, newsgroups,
and chats—take us back to the time before the printed book, to a sense of writing as more
ﬂuid and malleable. The skills of the lntemet hearken back to older rhetorical arts of
linking, cataloguing, annotating, and collecting, rhetorical arts that remain the primary
tropes of academic writing” (194). The production of Internet texts—such as creating
online research Web resources or synchronous or asynchronous online discussions—asks
students to collect and catalogue information online and then deploy that information in
the form of paraphrases, quotations, and imitations. These activities remind us of the
ﬂuid nature of writing and the corresponding way that we often ﬁnd so-called
“originality” in synthesis. Producing such lntemet texts therefore also encourages
students to complicate traditional modernist humanist notions of what it means to be a
rhetorician; in other words, modern concepts of individual authorship and modern
concepts of unique and original meaning-making are disrupted with online textual
productions. These conceptual disruptions correspond with Myron Tuman’s argument
that authorship in the future may rely less on the idea of individual creativity and more on
thirteenth century ideas that a producer of text takes on many different roles:

The future of authorship may have less to do with a single vision of writing

deﬁned in terms of invention, creativity, and copyright than with earlier, multiple

visions. In the thirteenth century, for example, Saint Bonaventura spoke not of

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one type of producer of books but four: scriptor, one who “might write the works

of others, adding and changing nothing”; compilator, one who “writes the work of

others with additions which are not his own”; commentator, one who “writes both
others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his
own for purposes of explanation”; and, ﬁnally, auctor, one who “writes both his
own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for

purpose of conﬁrmation (Eisenstein, 1983, p. 84). (64)

Both Rehberger’s and Tuman’s comments emphasize that writing in electronic
environments takes us back to a time before ideas about authors, texts, and writing had
become rigid and standardized. While Rehberger focuses on how the skills of the
lntemet mimic older rhetorical arts, and Tuman focuses on how the concepts of
authorship may change in the future, both ultimately make the argument that writing in
online environments returns us to a focus on the ﬂuid nature of language, meaning-
making, and authorship.

Creating lntemet texts not only permits students to practice the older rhetorical
arts of cataloguing, annotating, collecting, and linking, but it also permits the integration
of activities that reinforce the antifoundational nature of language as well. For example,
synchronous and asynchronous communication tools facilitate collaboration, which
highlight the importance of negotiation in all meaning-making; electronic types of
document exchanges, such as electronic e-mail attachments or Blackboard 's dropbox,
facilitate peer-response, which highlight the importance of considering one’s audience
when developing persuasive arguments and engaging in debates; and the online

publishing opportunities provided by the World Wide Web highlight the importance of

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writing for particular audiences and producing and situating texts within speciﬁc social
contexts (V anHoosier-Carey 404). For instance, students could collaboratively study
and write a review of a media element for several different audiences (such as a review of
a piece of music or a ﬁlm written for high school students, parents, and a national
newspaper) and then publish these reviews online. First, groups negotiate meaning-
making, compose their texts collaboratively, and workshop their reviews inside and
outside of class with any combination of chatrooms, forums, listservs, and electronic
document exchanges. Second, the groups publish their reviews online, review their
peers’ work, and then write a collaborative reﬂection on how the reviews written for
different audiences differed in terms of language use, style, tone, and evidence cited.

In addition to deploying several newer technologies in ways that enhance the
writing process, collaboration, peer-response, and an awareness of the importance of
producing texts that are audience and situation speciﬁc, this sample assignment asks
students to think about antifoundational rhetoric on a metaconitive level (i.e., students
composed collaboratively a textual production and then reﬂected explicitly on the
different ways language was used for different audiences in order to create effective
arguments and negotiate points of conﬂict). The way that lntemet technologies can be
used in the writing classroom to focus course content explicitly on the nature of language
and language use itself is perhaps one of the most overlooked advantages of integrating
newer technologies into the writing classroom. It is important to note that this
assignment is only one example of how to employ lntemet technologies in ways that will
give students experience producing situationally appropriate and persuasive arguments

for different types of readers, thereby facilitating student understanding of

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antifoundational rhetoric, or how language functions in different situations and is
audience speciﬁc. This is not to say, however, that such goals could not be achieved in a
traditional face-to-face classroom; rather, the argument here is that newer lntemet
technologies can be deployed in ways that enhance the effectiveness of important
composition pedagogical activities, such as collaboration and writing for real audiences.
As such, promising areas for future research include studying which lntemet texts help
students gain practice with which rhetorical arts (i.e., which types of lntemet texts
provide students with practice collecting information, paraphrasing, and cataloguing) and

developing best practices for teaching the production of lntemet texts.

Integrating F ace-to-F ace and Online Interaction

lntemet technologies allow the design of hybrid courses, which integrate, rather
than merely supplement, face-to-face student/student and student/instructor interaction
with virtual learning environments and activities. This type of interaction model is
especially suitable for applying technologies in ways that help students become better
rhetoricians because it takes the best of online language use (such as using forums, online
databases, and the lntemet as a tool for learning basic academic and rhetorical strategies)
and combines it with the more practical uses of technology (such as electronic draft
exchanges, online publishing, and expanding classrooms boundaries). In addition, the
combination of face-to-face and online interaction takes advantage of several other
important pedagogical beneﬁts which have recently been the subject of a great deal of
contemporary research. For example, the course design structure which combines and

integrates online and face-to-face interaction is increasingly regarded as more effective

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than either a completely online course or a completely face-to-face course because it mix
of environments appeals to a wide range of student learning styles, accommodates a
variety of student schedules, and incorporates diverse media. Amy Warner argues that a
course model which combines face-to-face and online components is more pedagogically
effective because its mix of multimedia, audio, and visuals appeals to students with
different learning styles and preferences, and its ﬂexibility appeals to students with hectic
work schedules or family obligations (“An Urban University’s Approach to Anywhere,
Anytime Learning”). Two recently released articles make similar claims: in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Young argues that not all students excel in the
lecture format and that face-to-face instruction is not always best, and in Technological
Horizons in Education, Stells Perez and Rob Foshay present a study in which students
excelled in a hybrid math course. Although these articles do not discuss writing
instruction in particular, they do provide evidence that hybrid course models appeal to
diverse student learning styles, facilitate collaboration, and provide a way to deal with
lower-level classroom concerns, thereby protecting face-to-face classroom time for more
sophisticated writing-related activities. On a general pedagogical level, then, courses
which integrate face-to-face and online components are preferable to completely face-to-
face or completely online courses for the following reasons: (1) they allow students to
maintain more ﬂexible schedules, (2) they maintain direct contact between instructor and
students, (3) they allow instructors to focus classroom time on higher-order concerns
while using technology to take care of more mundane and repetitive course tasks, (4) they
have a lower dropout rate than distance education courses, (5) they allow institutions to

use classroom space more efﬁciently, (6) they help class members establish a sense of

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community for collaboration, and (7) they give students a stronger sense of course and
institution identity (Bonk; Brown; Draves; Nahmoud).

Another reason a hybrid course, with its mix of face-to-face and online
interaction, is an appealing instructional model is because it can be designed using a
variety of technologies, which means that it could be implemented at educational
institutions with diverse technological resources. For example, computer-mediated
communications for the course could use commercial or institutional e-mail systems,
listservs, forums, or chatrooms; draﬁ exchanges and peer-response could use a variety of
commercial collaboration programs (such as Blackboard or WebCT), university-based
server access (for example, Michigan State University’s AF S system), or networked
computers. And course content could be delivered using any of the above options,
through CD-ROMs, or through static or interactive web pages. Such a hybrid course
model can therefore be adapted for use across a wide range of institutions with access to a

wide range of technologies.

Collaboration and Peer-Response

Newer lntemet technologies can also be integrated into writing classrooms in
ways that assist students in becoming more effective writers by enhancing collaboration
and peer-response with computer-networks and networked interactivity (Kemp;
Palmquist and Zimmerman). Collaboration and peer-response in turn put into practice
the antifoundational rhetorical principles that all meaning is contextually bound and that
truth is not a matter of objectivity, but rather a matter of negotiation and debate.

Collaboration in the writing classroom highlights the social and mediated nature of

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meaning-making, the dialogic nature of language, and the importance of considering
one’s audience when writing (Faigley). While not all university or college writing
programs have access to their own home-grown web-based writing and editing soﬁware
applications, Fred Kemp’s discussion of Texas Technological University’s TOPIC (Texas
Tech Online-Print Integrated Curriculum) can be applied to commercial programs as
well. He argues that the most important part of learning to write is receiving real
feedback ﬁom real peer-audiences and then revising based on this feedback, and the
networked interactive capabilities of TOPIC accomplish precisely this. Kemp’s analysis
is an excellent example of starting with a theoretical premise and then designing
computer-assisted writing instruction accordingly (i.e., students learn to write more
effectively by writing for real audiences and engaging in constant peer-response and
revision).

As mentioned above, newer lntemet technologies permit the design of hybrid
courses, which integrate both face-to-face and online interaction and writing
environments. Starting with the theoretical premise that collaboration and peer-response
assist students in gaining rhetorical expertise because these activities emphasize the
antifoundational quality of language and the negotiated nature of all meaning-making, a
hybrid course model integrates technologies in ways that highlight these textual
characteristics. This type of course model allows collaboration to ﬁrst take place in a
face-to-face environment and then move into synchronous or asynchronous online spaces
such as chatrooms, forums, listservs, or even MOOs or MUDs. A hybrid course model
facilitates collaboration because peer-response can ﬁrst be introduced, modeled, and

practiced in the real-life classroom, where students can observe their peers participate in

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this activity and ask questions about the process. After gaining structured and supervised
ﬁrst-hand experience with peer-response in the face-to-face classroom, this activity can
be moved efﬁciently into online environments, where electronic drafts are exchanged by
sending them as e-mail attachments, posting them at a course website, or submitting them
to a document drop-off box at a course website managed through commercial software.
Sharing drafts outside of class means that students begin the peer-response process
outside of the physical and temporal boundaries of the classroom. Because students will
have already read and responded to their peers’ writing outside of the classroom, when
the class does gather for face-to-face interaction, this time can be used for higher-level
activities such as rewriting or revision. By bringing the online peer-response back into
the classroom, a type of doubling reinforcement takes place and both the facel-to-face and
online collaborative activities are enhanced. The practice of integrating face-to-face and
online collaboration and peer-response is an area that deserves further research in
computer-composition scholarship. Additional research directions could include gauging
the effectiveness of integrating peer-response in both face-to-face and online contexts,
comparing the types of peer-response occurring in different kinds of hybrid courses with
the types occurring in entirely face-to-face or entirely online classrooms, and developing

guidelines or sets of best practices for how to implement effectively such integration.

Expanding Classroom Boundaries, Enhancing Classroom Materials, and
Transforming Student Publication
lntemet technologies can be used to make the writing classroom more efﬁcient by

expanding classroom boundaries, enhancing classroom materials, and transforming

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student publishing. The idea that teaching with technology can expand the borders of the
classroom is not a new idea. However, it seems that sometimes this simple practice is
overlooked or disregarded precisely because of its simplicity and ease of implementation.
Nevertheless, it remains that posting course syllabi, class procedures, assignments,
announcements, and other course materials online has the beneﬁts of making these
materials available to students at any time and permitting instructors to revise them
accordingly. Enhancing classroom materials through lntemet technologies can contribute
to enhancing student writing because course materials can be revised in light of class
discussions and student questions or to adjust for strengths and weaknesses in student
writing. For instance, if an instructor posts a writing assignment on a webpage or at a
class Blackboard site but then decides that students are ready to move on to a more
sophisticated or complicated writing activity, the assignment can be easily revised online
and adjusted to student needs (i.e., an assignment that focuses on quoting resources and
signal phrases could be adjusted to focus on paraphrasing instead). Classroom materials
can also be enhanced by adding relevant hyperlinks; for examples, an assignment can be
improved by adding links to ﬁequently asked student questions, revision checklists,
annotated descriptions, or external sites dealing with speciﬁc rhetorical forms or genres.
While there are already large amounts of classroom materials already posted on the
lntemet, another area that requires further study is the extent to which these materials are
revised in light of the trajectory courses take during the term. In particular, the ﬁeld
could gain from a systematic study of when, why, how, or how often course materials are
revised online and the extent to which this practice contributes to more effective writing

instruction or to an increased focus on student writing.

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As scholars are increasingly pointing out (Eyman; Egbert and Jessup; Smith),
enhancing student publication with online alternatives is another way to make writing and
rhetoric central in the wring classroom. Web-based publication differs from more
traditional paper publication in that it is more efﬁcient, collaborative, and encouraging of
ongoing revision and editing (Educonsult: [Re ]Envisioning the Classroom in the Digital
Age). Because online publication is less expensive than traditional paper publication, it is
more likely that it can become an ongoing activity in the writing classroom, increasing
the extent to which students write for real audiences and for public consumption. Online
publication is also more collaborative in the sense that students can more easily work on
a single electronic document in online environments and review and respond to peers’
work after it is published on the World Wide Web. And by foregrounding the importance
of publishing student texts, writing and revising for real audiences and writing as a way
to get things done in the world is also emphasized. For example, a group research project
could involve developing a website and corresponding printable documents for a local
non-proﬁt or student organization; in both cases, students are asked to gauge the
prospective audience and to produce appropriate written texts and documents
accordingly, thereby heightening student awareness of producing audience-speciﬁc text.
The variety of newer lntemet technologies also means that online publication can be put
into practice at institutions with a wide range of resources; for instance, courses could
use Microsoft’s F rontPage, Netscape’s Composer, server space and webpage templates
available at the commercial site Yahoo.’, or commercial course management programs
that incorporate their own online publication tools. While a great deal of research has

been done on publishing student texts in the more traditional sense, the practice of

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publishing student texts on the World Wide Web deserves additional study. In particular,
computer-composition scholarship could beneﬁt from research that studies best practices
for teaching online publication in the writing classroom and in what ways, if any, texts
changed when composed for and published in online spaces for public consumption (i.e.,
the extent to which text conformed to web-based conventions of writing, such as
chunking, relevancy, and titling, and the use of visuals to enhance or elaborate on

content).

Making F ace-to-F ace Classroom Time More Eﬂicient

Newer lntemet technologies can be integrated into the writing classroom in ways
that facilitate using online spaces to deal with lower-level activities so that more in-class
time is available for higher level face-to-face activities, which in turn means that more
class time is available to focus on student writing. For example, by posting instructor
comments with interactive links, developing modules that explain technical procedures
(such as creating webpages in Dreamweaver, creating and manipulating images in
Photoshop or Fireworks, using ﬁle transfer protocol software, or accessing and saving
work to school or university provided server space), or beginning peer-evaluation
workshops outside of class with electronic documents, classroom time is reserved for
focused discussion of student writing-related questions, responses they have already
begun to formulate, or higher-level writing activities. Computer-mediated
communications—such e-mail, listservs, forums, chatrooms, or other communication
tools found in commercial class management programs—can be used to begin or extend

class discussions about readings, activities, or assignments (Faigley; Tomow). Not only

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can these online communications facilitate student preparation for in-class work, but
because instructors can review student comments and gauge student understanding in
these spaces, they also assist instructors in developing in—class discussions, activities, and
assignments that are directed at student questions or concerns. Likewise, students can
also review their peers’ comments in these spaces for suggestions on how others

approached a particular writing situation, activity, or course reading.

Student Directed and Point of Need Instruction

lntemet technologies can also be deployed to provide student directed and point
of need instruction by developing online rhetorical exercises or a database of rhetorical
activities. Such lntemet-enhanced activities could give students more opportunities to
practice different composing conventions or strategies outside of the classroom, such as
practicing a certain type of bibliographic format or experimenting with strategies for
making prose more active. A range of classical exercises or activities—from practicing
analytic or etymological deﬁnitions, to imitating and paraphrasing, to producing ﬁgures
of thought or tropes—could be adapted to an online and interactive database as well. In
particular, developing a database based on the elementary rhetorical exercises
progymnasmata could be an especially effective way to provide meaningful student
centered and student directed instruction. As Crowley explains in Ancient Rhetorics for
Contemporary Students, “The progymnasmata remained popular for so long because they
are carefully sequenced: they begin with simple paraphrases and end with sophisticated
exercises in deliberative and forensic rhetoric. Each successive exercise uses a skill

practiced in the preceding one, but each add some new and more difﬁcult composing

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task” (282). While there are currently several academic websites that provide static
deﬁnitions of rhetorical terms and exercises, the design of an interactive database that
asks students to actually practice these exercises in a sequenced manner while
increasingly the level of difficulty or adjusting to student strengths and weaknesses could
enhance writing instruction.

An online database resource could also facilitate student directed and point of
need instruction by permitting students to work at their own pace and make deliberate
decisions about what areas they struggle with and would like to practice. Such a database
also serves as an example of a way in which lntemet technologies can be integrated in the
writing classroom so that the face-to-face classroom time is more productive and focuses
more on student writing because it frees up class time for students to ask directed
questions or receive feedback from their instructor and peers. But the integration of
online rhetorical exercises can also be implemented in such a way so as to emphasize
collaboration in the writing classroom as well. For example, while students may
complete some progymnasmata exercises individually, one group each week may review
and respond to the exercises of their peers, a collaborative and reﬂective activity that will
be facilitated by database technologies. The design of an online interactive database of
rhetorical exercises or activities that adjusts itself to students’ writing strengths and

weakness is a prime area for further computer-composition research and development.

New Rhetorical Considerations to Take Into Account with Online Texts

Not only can lntemet technologies help students gain practice with more

traditional types of writing, but they can also highlight new ways to write, or new

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rhetorical considerations to take into account, when producing online texts. This use of
lntemet technologies is sensitive to Trent Batson’s call to consider “the new kinds of
writing students will be doing” in online spaces, as well as the new pedagogical
opportunities these spaces will facilitate. As Fred Kemps argues
Unless we plan on transporting our students back to the nineteenth century on
graduation, we must prepare them to use words in a rapidly expanding electronic
environment. The lntemet, especially, and the easily navigable World Wide Web,
are rapidly becoming pervasive, exerting an inﬂuence on society at a speed never
before seen by even the most transformative technologies. (“Computer-Mediated
Communication” 144)
In this rapidly changing electronic environment, writing for print and writing for the web
involve deploying different rhetorical strategies. While writing for print prizes linearity,
clarity, and the development of arguments, writing for online spaces prizes the chunking,
labeling, and relevancy of information, consistency in navigation, the relationship
between words and visuals, and the logic of linking (Lyons Essential Design for Web
Professionals 34). These newer rhetorical values are in part affected by people’s online
reading practices, considerations that writers also need to take into account when
producing online texts (Nielsen “How Users Read on the Web”). For example, people
prefer to scan online text and to read without having to scroll down the page, they ﬁnd
information that is “chunked” together most easy to scan and comprehend, and they are
willing to invest only about 3-4 seconds at a site in order to ﬁnd what they are looking for
before moving on to another site (Lyons Essential Design for Web Professionals 35;

Helinski “Web-Site Usability Engineering”). Because researching and reading online

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texts can become central in courses which integrate newer lntemet technologies, students
can reﬂect on their own online reading practices and take them into account when
producing their own online texts as well.

When students use lntemet technologies for producing both online and offline
texts, it highlights that differences exist between online/offline reading, online/offline
writing, and designing documents for online/offline environments. The act of vacillating
between more traditional types of writing and online/web writing is in and of itself useful
because it encourages students to compare and contrast the different ways language is
used in these different situations, thereby becoming more effective rhetoricians in both
contexts. For instance, a writing class could present the development of the navigation
scheme for a website as akin to the development of a thesis statement for a traditional
argumentative paper. Students can therefore apply experiences and observations gleaned
from designing the content/buttons for a navigation bar to writing a thesis, and vice versa:
both act as a type of blueprint for the reader, the construction of both carries important
implications for what a text will achieve or argue, and both can be revised continually
throughout the writing and development process. In turn, students are encouraged to take
rhetorical experiences learned in online environments—such as the importance of
keeping relevant information grouped together and carefully gauging your audience

expectations—and apply them in traditional composing environments as well.

Visual Literacy, Information Architecture, and Web Usability

When a writing course asks students to practice composing webpages and other

types of electronic documents (such as pdf documents, online magazines, or newsletters),

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it moves beyond teaching purely textual rhetoric to teaching visual rhetoric as well.
Although the ﬁeld of computer-composition does not seem to agree on a precise
deﬁnition of or approaches to teaching visual rhetoric, these points of dispute are not
necessarily a hindrance because visual literacy can be taught as a set of rhetorical choices
the writer must make within a speciﬁc situation and not as absolute rules. Even though
there is debate among compositionists about how best to teach visual rhetoric, in general
there seems to be a growing consensus that classes that teach writing for the World Wide
Web must expand to include this type of literacy as well. Sean D. Williams argues that
writing instruction based on only words is antagonistic to the very idea of literacy,
because our society is highly visual and multirnodal. He calls for a composition
pedagogy that incorporates verbal and visual instruction (“Part 2: Toward an Integrated
Composition Pedagogy in Hypertext”).

Computers and Composition recently dedicated an entire issue to the topic of
visual literacy. Patricia Sullivan’s “Practicing Safe Visual Rhetoric on the World Wide
Web” argues that because safe approaches to visual rhetoric are based on print values,
they are insufﬁcient models for teaching visual rhetoric for the lntemet. But she does
insist that because the lntemet is multimedia-based, it is absolutely essential to teach
visual rhetoric along with writing for the Web: “In general, if we teach writing for the
Web without an awareness of the visual dimensions of the meaning we risk a great deal.
Visual meaning is even more important in Web space than it is in print because animation
and video are added more easily to a Web site than to other writing. Thus, ignoring the
visual dimensions of rhetoric is avoiding an understanding of a major component of the

power of writing on the Web” (118). In their articles in the same volume, Sean D.

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Williams and Anne Frances Wysocki also agree that it is essential for visual rhetoric to
be taught in composition classes. While Williams presents a design model based on
process-pedagogy as a productive way to teach visual rhetoric, Wysocki makes the
argument that the discipline needs to reﬁne the categories it uses to teach visual rhetoric
now that visuals are no longer limited to supporting text, but rather make arguments and

assertions on the lntemet.

The hybrid course model discussed previously is an especially appropriate
medium for teaching visual rhetoric because its combination of traditional and online
writing highlights the ways that visuals may function differently in online environments
as opposed to print environments, thereby stressing how visuals may function differently
within various online and print environments as well. In other words, because a hybrid
model integrates both traditional and online writing environments, a structure which
emphasizes how all meaning-making is contextually bound and continually negotiated
(i.e., different considerations must be taken into account when writing for print or online
audiences, such as page layout, the size and types of visuals used, and the length of
sentences and paragraphs), it is an ideal medium for treating visuals as part of a larger set
of discursive practices. Writing for real audiences in online environments also highlights
how visuals work alongside with text to negotiate meaning with the audience and how
different types of visuals perform different functions or carry different meanings in
diverse social or cultural contexts. As Louis Rosenfeld argues, visual literacy “[i]s much
more than creating pretty pictures. It is geared more toward creating relationships
between visual elements and determining their effective integration as a whole. On a

page, printed or HTML, these elements include white space and typography as well as

182

images” (16-17). Producing online texts also introduces students to the concept of visual
architecture, which is “the use of a particular method of building visual information and
balancing communication between images and words” (Guevin “Visual Architecture:
The Rule of Three”). Visual architecture also emphasizes that the visual and textual must
be brought together in a design that “makes sense” to the audience (V anHoosier-Carey
“Rhetoric by Design: Using Web Development Projects in the Technical Communication
Classroom”). Integrating newer lntemet technologies into the writing classroom, then,
enhances student exposure to the concept of visual architecture as a way to build different
relationships between words and visual objects, such as pictures, graphs, illustrations,
area boxing, layout and titling. In addition, the practice of creating digital documents that
balance meaning between images and words in a design that “makes sense” to the
audience highlights the importance of creating documents that are user- and reader-

centered.

As the above discussion on reader-centered visual design suggests, integrating
newer lntemet technologies into the writing classroom also enhances the ways in which
students can apply the concepts of visual rhetoric, web usability, and information
architecture to their own written discourse in order to produce user-centered texts.
Information architecture is a web design concept that asks students to think rhetorically
about the different ways information can be organized and structured in order to meet the
varying needs of users and contexts, a task that often require meta-discursive
negotiations. While the categories and organizational structure of information must often
be highly complex in order to meet the needs of audiences, they must also be designed in

ways that disguise this complexity while enhancing usability (Rosenfeld and Morville

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Information Architecture for the World Wide Web). It is from this perspective that the
concept of information architecture can be used in the writing classroom not only as a
way to develop rhetorically effective web sites, but also as a way to enhance student
thinking about the rhetorical complexity and usability of any written text.

The kinds of online and digital writing projects supported by Internet
technologies—such as developing visual or information architecture schemas and
electronic documents for a website for a non-proﬁt organization, academic department, or
student organization—ask students to look at visual rhetoric, information organization,
and usability concerns in terms of what makes an effective argument. By reﬂecting on
matters of visual and information architecture and usability and as a way to meet the
needs of audiences and create effective context-speciﬁc texts, students are encouraged to
apply these same criteria to their own traditional and digital textual productions as well.
For example, current web usability studies suggest making “the site’s purpose clear:
explain who you are and what you do,” emphasizing the site’s high-priority content in
order to help readers/users ﬁnd what they need or are looking for, using speciﬁcs as
opposed to abstractions, and using meaningful graphics as powerful content
communicators (Nielsen “Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability”; Helinski “Web-
Site Usability Engineering: Designing and Building a Quality Web Site”). Theories of
web usability can also be particularly effective for encouraging students to think about
reader-centered writing and user-centered revision because they call attention to audience

considerations and the contexts of reading.

Integrating web usability criteria into writing courses, then, aids students in

developing audience awareness in both traditional and digital environments.

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Furthermore, web usability can be approached in the writing classroom as a type of meta-
discourse; by researching, writing about, reﬂecting on, and actually creating web designs,
students gain a meta-cognitive language of critique to apply to their own writing.
Integrating lntemet technologies into the writing classroom therefore encourages students
to work with web usability criteria as a way to think about their own texts as pieces of
visual rhetoric. As this discussion suggests, a promising area for future computer-
composition research includes studying further the correlation between designing for the

web and writing for more traditional paper environments.

Digital Information Management
Given the exponential increase of information available on the lntemet every

year, strategies for managing information and print and digital documents are essential

requirements for effective writing in the digital age. It has been estimated that the
[w]orld’s total production of information amounts to about 250 megabytes for
each man, woman, and child on earth. It is clear that we are all drowning in a sea
of information. The challenge is to learn to swim in that sea, rather than drown in
it. Better understanding and better tools are desperately needed if we are to take
full advantage of the ever-increasing supply of information. (Lyman, Varian,
Dunn, Strygin, and Swearingen “How Much Information?”)

Newer lntemet technologies can be integrated into the writing classroom in ways that

gives students practice with the tools and strategies required “to take full advantage of the

ever-increasing supply of information.” As the rate of information production increases,

the importance of gaining experience with information management increases as well.

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Not only can newer technologies be used in the writing classroom to give students hands-
on experience with data management tools, but they can also be integrated in ways that
enhance student experience with digital information management practices such as ﬁle
organization strategies and how to navigate and search increasingly complex databases.
Studying the ways that different websites, databases, or search engines manage
information provides students with strategies for dealing with the proliferation of
meaning and information in their own textual productions. In turn, writing courses
should provide students with experience researching and organizing this information so
that they can access and incorporate it into their own writing. There are a variety of
newer information management skills and research strategies that are therefore important
for being an effective rhetorician in the twenty-ﬁrst century, including managing digital
ﬁles, creating meaningful ﬁle structures, searching increasingly complex databases, and
using bibliographic software. Integrating lntemet technologies into the writing classroom
means that students can be asked to work with digital documents, pdf documents, ﬁle
attachments, ﬁle transfer protocols, and to negotiate the organization of these materials in
their own textual productions as well as in their e-mail, Blackboard course sites, server
spaces, and on their personal computers. By incorporating newer lntemet technologies in
the writing class, students are provided opportunities to practice newer types of
information management, such as strategies for dealing with the proliferation of ﬁles and
digital documents, organizing their hard drives for easy document retrieval, practicing
meaningful ﬁle naming and effective saving strategies, as well as learning about

appropriate computer maintenance, such as virus protection and backup practices. As

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this list of newer computer-related strategies and skills suggest, digital information

management is a key area of research for future computer-composition scholarship.

As computer-compositionists continue to research and theorize the practical uses
to which lntemet technologies can be applied in the writing classroom—uses that will
take student writing as the subject of the course—it is important that they take care to
avoid deploying the exaggerated rhetorics of fear, loathing, and promise. The analysis
chapters of this dissertation argue that the ﬁeld of computer-composition too often
focuses on the student as subject, which makes it more likely that scholars will lapse back
to ﬁctive stories of student redemption or technological determinism. The danger of
making students themselves the subject of any writing course is that it focuses on helping
them attain personal, political, social, or cultural empowerment, when a writing course
should focus on helping students learn to write more effectively for a variety of audiences
in a variety of situations. Contemporary computer-composition scholarship that deploys
this rhetoric of the subject can be debilitating and may not be the most effective way to
help students improve their writing. This dissertation’s principal contribution to the ﬁeld
is that it highlights the importance for computer-composition scholars to understand
better how we create representations of students and perspectives in our ﬁeld, the
problems that arise from these representations and perspectives, and how we go about
discussing the promises of integrating newer technologies into our classrooms. This

dissertation further suggests that the ﬁeld could beneﬁt by developing alternative

187

scholarly genres that take the different ways that newer lntemet technologies can support
student writing and enhance writing instruction—and not students’ moral redemption or
social salvation—as the subject of research and debate. The ﬁeld would do well to
remember Dasenbrock’s cautionary statement that “[i]t is deeply ironic that composition
theorists . . . are now themselves displacing writing from the center of attention of the

writing course” (8).

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