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CULTURAL RHETORICS:
WRITING AND DISCIPLINARITY AT THE INTERSECTION OF
BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES AND RHETORIC
by

Anthony J. Michel

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

Program in American Studies

2002

ABSTRACT
CULTURAL RHETORICS:
WRITING AND DISCIPLINARITY AT THE INTERSECTION OF
BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES AND RHETORIC
By

Anthony J. Michel

This project reads scholarship on the intersections of cultural studies and
composition to argue that the counterdisciplinary emphasis of British cultural studies has
been eliminated in U. S. composition and rhetoric studies. In response to the de-
politicization of cultural studies that results from the elimination of concerns over
disciplinarity, this project advocates a strategic recovery of British cultural studies and
demonstrates how the counterdisciplinary focus of cultural studies helps intervene in
contemporary scholarship in composition and rhetoric. This project then demonstrates
the uses of cultural rhetorics, for composition scholarship and pedagogy, through critical
readings of Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace and Julie Dash's ﬁlm, Daughters of the

Dust.

To Amy and Leo

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee chairs, Dr. Diane Brunner and Dr. Dean
Rehberger, for their support and encouragement throughout my work on this project.
Without their guidance, care, and intellectual contributions, this project would not have
been possible. I would also like to thank Dr. Kathleen Geissler, Dr. Laura Julier and Dr.
Sharon Thomas, who have contributed in various ways to the development of the ideas in
this dissertation. '

Additional thanks to Dr. Daniel Mahala and Dr. Craig Bartholomaus who
introduced me to the conversations that permeate this dissertation, and who encouraged
me to believe that I could contribute to them. Without their friendship and guidance, I
would not have known the important challenges and satisfactions that continue to shape
my scholarship and teaching.

I also wish to thank the ﬁiends and family members who have served as crucial
sources of knowledge, support and intellectual inspiration: Anthony N. Michel, Leone
Michel. Mary Reed, Kathy Jorgensen. John Michel, Pat Michel, Amy Rosewarne, Krister
Friday, Jeff Janowick, Frank Manista, Joy Palmer, Mike Carignan, Paula Rosinski, Lee
Kellog and Jean Kerver.

I want to especially thank my partner and ultimate editor, Amy Couture, and our
son Leo Anthony, who in their inimitable ways continue to remind me about what's
important.

Finally, I would like to thank my "Omi," whose courage and spirit taught me the
value of perseverance and fortitude that has sustained me through all of the challenges in
my life. I miss you, Omi.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1
Cultural Studies, Social-Epistemic Rhetorics and Cultural Rhetorics .................... 6
Cultural Rhetorics .............................................................................................. 10
Cultural Studies, Disciplinarity and the Purpose of the Writing Class ................. 13
Rhetoric of Research: Reading the Institutionalization of Cultural Studies ......... 17
Limitations ........................................................................................................ l9
Disciplinarity and the Modern University ........................................................... 20

CHAPTER ONE

NO WAY OUT: CULTURAL STUDIES AND DISCIPLINARITY

IN COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC ......................................................................... 28
Counterdisciplinarity in the Classroom. .............................................................. 32
Pedagogy and Disciplinarity .............................................................................. 34
Disciplining Cultural Studies in English ............................................................. 38
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 58

CHAPTER TWO

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES, COUNTERDISCIPLINARITY

AND U.S. ENGLISH STUDIES ................................................................................... 60
British Cultural Studies and the Question of Orthodoxy ..................................... 61
Counterdisciplinarity and the Institution of British Cultural Studies ................... 64
British Cultural Studies, Marxism, and the Question of Disciplinarity ................ 69
Semiotics, Poststructuralism and the Postdisciplinary Subject ............................ 79
Cultural Studies and English Studies in the US. ................................................ 83

CHAPTER THREE

FRAMING THE QUESTION, QUESTIONING THE FRAME:
CULTURAL STUDIES, DISCIPLINARITY AND THE DEBATES OVER THE

APPROPRIATENESS OF LITERATURE IN COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC ...... 85
Framing the Question ......................................................................................... 87
Composing Histories of the Literary .................................................................. 91
Problems with Debates ....................................................................................... 92
Historical Grand Narratives ................................................................................ 95
Paradigm Shifts .................................................................................................. 97
Rethinking the Historical in Composition ........................................................... 99
Unofﬁcial Discourses: Rethinking the Literary in Composition ........................ 101
Cultural Studies and the Uses of Literature ...................................................... 103

CHAPTER FOUR
CULTURAL RHETORICS IN PRACTICE: READING AND WRITING

MARGARET ATWOOD'S ALIAS GRACE ................................................................. 106
Already Cultural Rhetorics?:
British Cultural Studies and Epistemic Rhetorics ............................................. 108
Reading Alias Grace ........................................................................................ 109
Determination .................................................................................................. 110
Un-Disciplining the Text: Alias Grace as Post Historical Cultural Rhetoric ..... 111
Alias Grace as Multi-Perspective Cultural Rhetoric .......................................... 114
Writing as Disciplinary Technology ................................................................. 118
Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Cultural Rhetorics .......................................... 120
Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 122

CHAPTER FIVE

CULTURAL RHETORICS, VISUAL RHETORICS
AND CLASSROOM PRACTICES IN JULIE DASH'S

DA UGHTERS OF THE DUST ..................................................................................... 124
The Culture Industry: Visual Rhetorics and the US. Film Industry ................. 127
Technologies of Visual Rhetorics ..................................................................... 132
Displacing the Colonial Subject ....................................................................... 135
Classroom Implications of Visual Rhetorics:

Negotiating Signiﬁcance in Student Writing .................................................... 140
The Culture Industry: Visual Rhetorics, the Academy and Student Writing ...... 14]
Technologies of Student Visual Rhetorics...............t ........................................ 146
Displacing the Student Subject .................. _ ....................................................... 147
Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 149

CONCLUSION

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF CULTURAL RHETORICS ........................................... 151

WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 156

vi

Introduction

Whether writing is seen as the instance of the law, the loss of
immediacy, or the subversion of the master, whether it opens up a
stance of domination, a space of exile, or the pathway to ﬁ'eedom,
one thing, at least, is clear: the story of the role and nature of
writing in Western culture is still in the process of being written.
And the future of that story may be quite unforseeable, as we pass
ﬁom the age of the book to the age of the byte.

Barbara Johnson, p. 48-49

This political dimension is one legitimate reason there is concern
about the establishment of a cultural studies orthodoxy, about
cultural studies' inclusion within the tradition academy, or about
the incorporation of its work and its challenges within more
conventional academic discourses.

Graeme Turner, p.6

This project grows out of three different experiences: work in a professional
business setting, academic research in the ﬁelds of composition and rhetoric and cultural
studies, and the teaching of writing. In fact, the focus of this dissertation on teaching
practices that encourage students to analyze the oﬁen invisible ways that knowledge is
produced and organized, ﬁrst came to mind in my work outside the academy.

Prior to entering graduate school, I spent a number of years working as a
litigation support representative (a euphemism for sales person) for a company that
helped attorneys in the various phases of trial preparation. The company, located in
downtown Kansas City, was divided into two ﬂoors that illustrated a split between those
whose ideas mattered and those who were not paid to think. The sixth ﬂoor, where

mamgement, sales and administrators had their individualized offices, served as the

company's seat of power--as the seat of power where one might imagine that important
decision behind closed doors. On the seventh ﬂoor, production did its work in a labyrinth
of photocopy machines, computers and ofﬁce supplies, organized around work stations in
an open space that that facilitated surveillance.

What became even more evident as I worked for the company longer was that all
manner of company business--from who answered the phone calls to how proposals were
writtenuwere determined by the assumptions about knowledge of those who were at the
top of the company. When, for example, an African American male was denied a
promotion to in-house sales representative, it was widely speculated that management
had concerns about how clients would perceive his "dialect." And when I wrote
proposals for clients, they were often rewritten by my manager who wanted to include
several pages of biographical information about the company. What became apparent,
then, was that despite notions about what counts as good writing or speaking--ideas I
learned in college--what counted as privileged knowledge in the company was what
management decided.

My experiences at this company invited comparisons between the business world
and academia tlmt bear strongly on this argument for a pedagogical approach that focuses
attention on the production of knowledge and the possibilities of resistance ﬁom within
such institutions. Questions about the way power functioned in concert with the
production of knowledge which arose at the litigation support company, encouraged me
to enroll in a graduate program in composition and rhetoric and cultural studies--two

areas that offered models of institutional power.

As an account representative I traveled between these two ﬂoors, bringing orders
to the production people on the seventh ﬂoor and working with the “suits” (of which I
was one) on the sixth ﬂoor. Over drinks at the comer bar, production workers treated me
with an odd mixture of resentment and reverence. They checked what they said in front
of me for fear that I might "narc" on them for their disparaging comments about
management. At the same time, they referred to me (and other members of the sixth
ﬂoor) as "educated," "sophisticated" and even "cultured." Conversely, members of the
sixth ﬂoor embraced me as one of them and included me in their often-disparaging
conversations about production workers’ lack of intelligence and sophistication.

What struck me as I worked for this company was that the stark division between
the sixth and seventh ﬂoor employees was reinforced by many subtle assumptions about
where privileged knowledge comes ﬁ'om. For example, upon entering the Sixth ﬂoor, one
would encounter the trappings of high culture, including a series of paintings that adorned
the hallway, ornate woodwork, and a reception area surrounded by well-manicured
plants. To emphasize the individuality of management, each ofﬁce had its own aesthetic.
While the Vice President's ofﬁce featured a bookshelf ﬁlled with canonical texts, the
President's oﬂice was ﬁlled with delicate model ships.

These ﬁne touches were contrasted with the drab uniformity of the seventh ﬂoor
where individual workstations were identical to one another. In contrast to the
furnishings and artwork that one encountered on the sixth ﬂoor, upon entering the sixth
ﬂoor you would see a clock with time cards. Above the clock was a directive that stated
"All employees MUST have their time cards signed by a supervisor. You WILL NOT BE

PAID if your time card has not been signed." In essence the sixth ﬂoor had an air of a

place where people were busy making important decisions; it was the place where the
thinking and writing was done. The seventh ﬂoor was the place where one was written to
and about.

I have since come to view that these subtle expressions of individuality, thought
and language were much more important in shaping the employees' perceptions, than the
ofﬁcial documents that might contradict them. Despite the company's ofﬁcial statements
about "taking care of our own" and being an "equal opportunity employer," for instance, I
never saw anyone from the seventh ﬂoor move "up" the company ladder when positions
were advertised in house. In some cases this was because seventh ﬂoor employees were
not interested in the type of work that was done on the sixth ﬂoor. In other cases, seventh
ﬂoor employees simply did not apply for the jobs because they felt that they lacked the
polish required to ﬁt in with the suits. And in the many cases where seventh ﬂoor
employees did apply for positions in management or administration, they were
overlooked.

Over time seventh ﬂoor employees found ways to resist what they saw as
discriminatory hiring practices. In response, for example, one or more employees would
leave copies of articles on corporate racism in the seventh ﬂoor break room. Other
employees stole equipment or supplies that they reasoned were owed to them in lieu of
promotions. These acts of resistance to discriminatory hiring practices arose because
some of the employees accurately "read" the invisible barriers to their own advancement
and acted accordingly. However, these acts of resistance were rare and had little impact

on business as usual, in part because many of the employees like me failed to see and

contest the more subtle ways that power circulated through the organization of privileged
forms of knowledge in the company.

As I continued to work in business, moreover, a dialectical relationship developed
between my graduate work (and teaching) and my work at the litigation support
company. Ultimately my "study" of the business, the texts I was reading and the classes I
was teaching, led me to the conclusion that serves as the impetus for this project: more
scholarly work needs to be done that focuses on how to prepare students to negotiate the
various forms of knowledge production they encounter in both academic and non-
academic institutions. What is the relationship between the organization of knowledge in
a specific institution and the cultural politics? What approaches to the teaching of writing
might encourages students to "read" and negotiate a given company? Industry?

Just as I was interested in the racial and gendered implications of who produced
official knowledge in the litigation support company, I was drawn to scholarship in both
cultural studies and social epistemic rhetorics that focused on the problems associated
with the way academic institutions have historically organized knowledge around
disciplines. As a result, this dissertation argues for a pedagogy located at the intersections
of cultural studies and rhetoric that encourages students to "rea " the ways tint
institutions produce knowleges which privilege some people and exclude others.
Moreover, this study assumes that developing abilities to read the production of
knowleges will enable means of resisting such practices.

The speciﬁc questions that this dissertation seeks to address are: are resistant
approaches to writing instruction based on cultural studies theories possible from within

the "hegemonic" academy? Are they desirable? What would such pedagogies look like?

And, ﬁnally, if such pedagogies are possible and desirable, how might they encourage
students to "read" and resist institutions like the litigation support company (or the many
other types of institutions they may encounter in their lives) as sites of cultural
production? Chapters One through Three address these questions through strategic
analyses of the intersections of cultural studies and English studies in the U. S. In
Chapters Four and Five, the focus shifts to consideration of speciﬁc pedagogical practices
called cultural rhetorics that are based on theories in British cultural studies and U. S.
social-epistemic rhetorics. Through readings of Margaret Atwood's historical novel,
Alias Grace, and Julie Dash's ﬁlm, Daughters of the Dust, these two chapters explore
ways textual analyses of historically produced images encourage students to develop a

critical perspective to negotiate both academic and non academic institutions.

Cultural Studies, Social-Epistemic Rhetorics and Cultural Rhetorics

This dissertation seeks to put into dialogue two strands of critical scholarship that
are marked by widely divergent assumptions about the possibility for oppositional
writing pedagogies from within the academic institution. Theorists like Berlin, Michael
Vivian, and Karen Pitts, and many others have sought to incorporate assumptions about
language found in social-epistemic rhetorics with cultural studies theories. Berlin deﬁnes
social-epistemic rhetorics as the "study and critique [of] signifying practices in their
relation to subject formation within the ﬁamework of economic, social and political
conditions" (Berlin, Rhetorics, 77).

One of the common assumptions of these theorists is that the classroom and

textual practices are never politically neutral acts, but that they are implicated in the

struggle for social power. Berlin's conception of cultural studies stresses the critical
concepts of ideology and rhetoric where "any examination of a rhetoric must ﬁrst
consider the ways its very discursive structures can be read so as to favor one version of
economic, social, and political arrangements over other versions” ("Rhetoric and
Ideology" 477).

The pedagogy that emerges from this theory tends to emphasize reading texts for
their embedded ideologies, and ignores the very economic and political arrangements to
which he refers. In Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures, Berlin spends a great deal of time
outlining the "democratic" project of social-epistemic rhetorics that culminates in
classroom practices where students read popular texts like Growing Pains and Roseanne
to understand the ideologies inscribed. However, this focus on reading for ideology too
often stresses a close reading of the text to the exclusion of an analysis of invisible logics
and material considerations shaping the production of knowledges in the ﬁrst place.

Although he invokes a cultural studies' focus on ideology as a critical concept,
Berlin's focus on reading pOpular texts for resistance does not place resistant ideologies in
the context of that "hegemonic" academic institution. Berlin, for instance, ignores a
number of questions that might encourage students to consider how what Roseanne
"means" is dependent upon the contexts in which one reads. There are a series of
questions, for instance, that might locate the students reading of the text in the context of
the academic classroom. What does it mean to read Roseanne in an English class, as
opposed to reading Shakespeare? Why might we teach popular television shows in the
ﬁrst place? How is the meaning shaped by the location of the composition classroom

within a midwestem university? In late twentieth century? As taught by a male

’4 A; E ‘4 /

w

professor? And how might such readings help students understand the way the production
of knowledge in the academy relates to class issues? At the same time, Berlin's use of
Roseanne invites consideration of popular television as a form of cultural production.
What if any problems did Roseanne have in getting the program produced? What
signiﬁcance can we ﬁnd in the fact that Roseanne is one of the very few programs in
recent history that has focused on class as a central issue?

In much of the work on social epistemic rhetorics, there is little attention to
"discursive structures" in which students are asked to produce their texts,l thereby
reinscribing distinctions between the texts students "read" as "sites of resistance" and
student texts. Cultural rhetorics expands on this focus on ideology to include a rhetorical
analysis of how all textual productions, including students' texts, are locally situated sites
of production that can be usefully explored with reference to their disciplinary (and
disciplining) functions.2

The optimism surrounding cultural studies approaches to composition that we see
in Berlin and others contrasts with the conclusions of critics like Sharon Crowley, Henry
Giroux and Ma'sud Zavaradeh who argue that the politics of the classroom are shaped by
its ﬁmction within the "hegemonic" academic institution. Giroux and Zavaradeh, for
instance, have argued that the location of the writing class within the dominant institution
precludes the effective use of cultural studies as oppositional to the institutional politics

of the academy.

 

' The most notable current exception is the recent proliferation of theories involved in "writing and
computers.” In this growing subgenre of the ﬁeld, attention is often given to the differences and
similarities between computer-mediated images and more "traditional forms."

2 While Berlin in Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures, spends hundreds of pages detailing different rhetorics
and their assumptions about language, he Spends very little time addressing the various forms through
which ”writing" may take and the factors the circumscribe their production.

Sharon Crowley, moreover, has persuasively argued that the institutional ﬁrnction
of the writing class as a "mode of surveillance for dominant discourses"3 mitigates
against any attempt to develop "oppositional" pedagogies. In fact, in her controversial
Composition in the University, Crowley calls for an elimination of the ﬁ'eshmen writing
requirement, based on this function of the writing class.

The assumptions of Crowley, Giroux, and Zavaradeh, therefore, are in tension
with the more Optimistic (about the possibility for oppositional pedagogies) assumptions
of people like Berlin and F itts who, despite the marginalized position of the writing
classroom, continue to see in it the possibility for resistant practices.

Why do these scholars, who otherwise share many of the same assumptions about
language and its social functions, read the politics of composition and rhetoric and the
writing classroom in such different ways? What model of institutional power is assumed
in these arguments? And what are the implications of institutional criticism for cultural
studies pedagogies? An analysis of the intersections of cultural studies and composition
provides some possible answers to these questions. First the different conclusions can be
seen as a result of the different contexts of their analysis. While Crowley focuses on
composition and rhetoric in terms of its institutional history, particularly in relation to its
relationship to literary criticism and humanism, Berlin links his pedagogical practices to
theoretical assumptions about language and reality. What is missing in these and other
treatments of cultural studies and composition is an exchange that draws on the strengths
of cultural studies to develop a social model and of rhetoric to develop reading strategies

and pedagogical practices that will function from within the institutional structure of

 

3 Crowley ascribes this function to the freshmen writing requirement in Composition and the University.

English studies. One promising way of developing such an approach is to build on the

emerging ﬁeld of cultural rhetorics.

Cultural Rhetorics

The version of cultural rhetorics advanced here contributes to two strands of
critical thought in the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric: social epistemic rhetorics and
institutional criticism on the function of the writing course. Before attending to the
Speciﬁc deﬁnitions of these two areas, however, it will be useﬁrl to place them in the
context of other uses of the term cultural rhetorics.

The most inﬂuential usage of cultural rhetorics comes from Thomas Rosteck's
edited anthology, At the Intersections: Cultural Rhetorics, a text which emerges from
scholars in speech communications to develop critical readings of popular texts. In
addition, a number of arguments stress contemporary similarities between the two ﬁelds.4
Rosteck sums up the position of many of the contributors who view cultural studies and
rhetorics as almost identical,

both aiming to reveal the relationship between expressive forms and social
order; both existing within the ﬁeld of discursive practices; both Sharing
an interest in how ideas are caused to materialize in texts; both concerned

with how these structures are actually effective at the point of

 

‘ James Aune argues that rhetoric is "especially adept at analyzing political strategy but rather week at
mapping trajectories of popular desire; on the other hand cultural studies is robust in drawing attention to
issues of gender, paformance, and desire in popular media but rather unconcerned with analyzing
conventional political discourse" (7).

‘consumption’; and both interested in grasping such textual practices as
forms of power and performance. (2)5
Despite its focus on readings (in contrast to pedagogical practices), this anthology
provides a good ﬁarnework for understanding some of the critical concepts and theories
of the term that can then be adapted to the present concern over the teaching of writing.
In his introduction Rosteck argues that cultural studies counters an overemphasis
in rhetoric on “straight textual analysis” and “direct observation of audiences alone” with
a "model of how discourse is always a product of wider social formations and reﬂects
necessarily the materialization of the ideology that gave birth to it" (22).6 James Aune
also ﬁnds rhetoric lacking in its focus on oratory and public address which, Aune
contends, cultural studies complements through a concern with "subcultures" and the
"everyday." 7 Maurice Charland, moreover, suggests that cultural studies provides more
sophisticated methodologies as alternatives to traditional rhetoric's move ﬁ'om idealism to
positivism ("Rehabilitating," 262).“
While these arguments provide useful ways to think about cultural studies and
rhetoric, they often ignore the shifts and ﬁssures that constitute rhetorical traditions. I am

not sure, for example, how epistemological rhetoricians like Vico, Nietzche and Kenneth

 

5 This position is consistent with Gronbeck who, reading the Partisan Review of 1930s, "sees the crucial
break coming under the inﬂuence of positivism, with the cultrnal-rhetorical and critical models of
intellectual critique being replaced by a social scientiﬁc paradigm increasingly interested in description,
categorization and prediction, less with political critique and theorization" (5).

6 It offers a more sophisticated sense of the text-history-audience-critic relationship and also the crucial
relationship between texts and critical methodologies, namely, how history and ideology shape readings
and critical work”

7 Anne, suggests that rhetoric has been characterized by an overemphasis on official discourse at the
expense of context and history which cultural studies helps address (Anne).

3 Charland argues that because of this methods, traditional rhetoricians have often "assume[d] a naive
stance towards practices of public discourse as they really occur," and Rosteck adds that "public
communication nowadays has changed in ways that render traditional model of intentional persuasive
agenda and subject-centered producer of discourse rather quaint" (10).

ll

Burke would ﬁt into Charland's notion of rhetoric as a move from idealism to positivism.
Moreover, it is difficult to argue that ancient rhetoricians like Aristotle and Seneca were
somehow concerned with "straight textual analysis" to the exclusion of "wider social
formations." Notwithstanding this problematic reading of the rhetorical tradition, these
theorists give important stress to a lack in many formulations of rhetoric of a social
model that locates the text within multiple related contexts.

The picture of cultural rhetorics advanced by Rosteck and others can be usefully
enhanced and complicated for a consideration of how we might facilitate oppositional
practices in writing within the context of the academy. In contrast to Rosteck, who
invokes broad deﬁnitions of both cultural studies, however, this usage merges the speciﬁc
areas of British cultural studies and social-epistemic rhetoric.

Cultural studies is a counterdisciplinary set of theoretical assumptions and
institutional practices concerned with the ways that language functions to sustain and
resist dominant social formations. The revisions of old Marxism ﬁ‘om British school
theories stress the cultural politics inherent in the development of orthodoxies. Much
work in cultural studies has focused on the role that the academic institution plays in
sustaining such orthodoxies as academic disciplines. I stress a precise deﬁnition of
cultural studies because, as a highly controversial body of critical thought, it has been
loosely employed in ways that are not oppositional or counterdisciplinary. Being speciﬁc
about this deﬁnition is particularly important to this dissertation as I argue that U. S.
cultural studies and composition have tended to strategically ignore these concerns. In
fact, a good deal of the ﬁrst section of this dissertation (Chapters One through Three)

serves to illustrate the process of de-politicization of cultural studies as it has moved from

12

the British school to the U. S. academy. In recovering both the focus on the production of
knowledge and the counterdisciplinary perspective of British cultural studies, then, I
assume that full participation in different institutional settings is largely dependent upon
the ability to read them rhetorically. I focus on how that which becomes common sense is
actually produced and sustained through invisible logics that are supported by the
structure of the environment.

This conception of cultural studies converges with the speciﬁc area of social
epistemic rhetoric characterized by a concern for the social effects of language use in
Speciﬁc contexts. This deﬁnition comes ﬁ'om Berlin, who usefully contrasts social-
epistemic with "current-traditional" rhetorics, which assume that language functions as a
mirror reﬂection of reality. Social-epistemic rhetorics, which assume that language is
opaque and polysemic and therefore what a speciﬁc text or speech utterance "means," is
dependent upon its speciﬁc context and assumes that language shapes perceptions of
reality with important implications for the way people are categorized along lines of race,

class, gender and other markers of cultural identity.

Cultural Studies, Disciplinarity and the Purpose of the Writing Class

One way to understand the tensions between oppositional pedagogies and the
dominant institution, I will argue, is through attention to concepts of disciplinarity and
disciplinary formations. Disciplinarity here refers to the organization of knowledge into
speciﬁc spheres and to the ways that individuals are disciplined through institutions along

lines of race, class and gender. Disciplinary formations refer to academic and non-

l3

academic institutional sites through which texts are produced to discipline the individual
through the organization of different types of knowledge.

Many in the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric have sought to counter its
marginalized status by arguing for its separate disciplinary status. In light of
counterdisciplinary theories like cultural studies, it is instructive to question whether this
approach has not, ironically, maintained problematic assumptions about writing. Without
attempting to undo the hard-fought gains towards academic legitimacy, this project
considers how the development of a counterdisciplinary orientation ﬁ'om within the ﬁeld
might facilitate critical pedagogies based on social-epistemic rhetorics and cultural
studies.

Crowley's argument suggests something of the difﬁcult position involved in
institutional criticism in composition and rhetoric. Many of the established theorists in
the ﬁeld, like Crowley, have seen it gain institutional status as a separate discipline.
Crowley's texts echoes many other works that attribute the problematic past with
composition's relationship to literary criticism and celebrates its gradual distinction from
literary criticism.

In asking this question, I am assuming that the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric
is often characterized by what Gregory Jay refers to as a "disciplinary drive." And while
Crowley and others give persuasive testament to the importance of such a drive, it is
worthwhile, if presumptuous, to consider the blind spots of such a drive. Because this
dissertation is concerned with cultural studies, deﬁned here as a counterdisciplinary set of
theories, the question of disciplinarity is particularly germane to its focus. This question,

it seems to me, is all the more important if we assume as I do that what counts as

14

knowledge in the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric is often Shaped by factors "outside"
the ﬁeld. I am contending that this disciplinary drive is negotiated in multiple related
spheres of the work of composition and rhetoric. The ﬁrst half of this project assumes
that the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric is not deﬁned only by scholars in the ﬁeld but
that the separation between composition and rhetoric and other ﬁelds is a ﬁmction of an
institutional structure that is reinforced at the level of scholarly publications.

It may be objected that a focus on cultural studies is aﬁeld ﬁom the project of the
writing classroom which is, after all, designed to teach people to write. Certainly as a
teacher of writing, I believe tlmt writing skills ought to be part of the project of
composition and rhetoric. In my teaching, however, I have found that a cultural rhetorical
approach is not only consistent with developing skills; it can signiﬁcantly contribute to
them.

At the same time that I view writing skills as a valued objective of the
composition course, I think that we need to address that the students' understanding of the
Speciﬁc context of the university, its structure, and its limiting and enabling conditions,
contributes much more to student success than is generally assumed. For example, I
taught a class for students who had received a 1.5 or lower in the fieshmen writing class.
I asked the students to write literacy narratives that included their experiences in the
freshmen course. I feared that this assignment amounted to something like a forced
confession; however, these concerns were allayed when well over half of the students
stated that the reason they did not do well had nothing to do with their writing or critical
thinking skills. The reason these students did poorly is that they were unable to get up for

the 8:00 am. class.

Wlmt could I have these students do that would somehow help them succeed and
develop critical skills? Should I have them ﬁll in time management calendars? Advise
them to sleep in their clothes? Buy them alarm clocks? What became apparent was that
they simply lacked a certain understanding of the institution itselfand their relationship
to it. For most of these students the problem became one of considering, more
thoughtfully, how to schedule courses.

A more interesting line of development for my purposes is the “Writing Against
the Disciplines” which implies a critical interrogation of the disciplinary frames. My
own concern here is more consistent with this approach; however, it is critical to address
the purpose of such an approach and it is in this focus that I ﬁnd cultural studies and
rhetoric to supply a critical ﬁ'amework for the classroom. In other words, the reasons for
“writing against the disciplines” can be many and varied; what I would like to suggest is
that such an approach he used in the service of a cultural politics that encourages students
to focus on writing skills as a means for effecting social power.

Readings of imaginative ﬁction encourage students to develop critical
perspectives about how institutions organize and maintain common sense notions of
knowledge, and the broader social and cultural implications of such practices and
strategies for ‘eriting against” such tendencies. In this sense “writing across the
disciplines” is an accurate label only to the extent that “disciplines” extend beyond the
academic notion of the term to include the different ways that knowledge is organized

and maintained in non-academic forums as well as in the academy.

l6

Rhetoric of Research: Reading the Institutionalization of Cultural Studies

AS a method of analysis and a source for pedagogy, this conception of rhetoric is
concerned with how a text achieves speciﬁc effects through narrative forms (Soter 59).
In addition, as theorists like Kenneth Burke and James Berlin have argued, rhetoric has
been concerned with how these effects can be understood to ﬁmction in the speciﬁc
contexts of their production and consumption. A cultural rhetorical method for reading
scholarship on cultural studies and English. is concerned with how a text achieves
Speciﬁc effects through narrative forms, the meanings irnbedded in the construction of
arguments, and the social effects of such arguments (Soter 59).

Many of the responses focus on the immediate institutional context of the
academy: “I want to get a good grade,” “I want to learn how to be a doctor, lawyer,
police ofﬁcer,” to the more general: “I want to learn to communicate better,” “be a better
person.” And, of course, many of the students respond with vocational and professional
interests in mind: “I want to get out of here so I can start making money,” and, more
ﬁankly, “I want to get out of this class so I can get on to the ‘real’ courses that will make
me a doctor, or a lawyer.” These responses all bridge the very speciﬁc location of the
classroom with some sense, however nebulous, of the opportunities that their work in the
classroom will provide them in the ﬁrture.

The institutional, political and social institutions that produce and legitimate
certain types of knowledge continue to be suppressed in composition and rhetoric in the
interest of establishing composition and rhetoric as a separate discipline. The ﬁeld of
composition and rhetoric is at a place where it can better interrogate the blind spots and

limitations of own "disciplinary drive." Doing so, however, requires more attention to

17

the institutional locations as sites of production--classrooms, committee meetings and
scholarly forums--that maintain exclusionary practices.

Analyses of research in the ﬁelds of rhetoric and composition and cultural studies
have a speciﬁc argument in mind: despite much useful criticism on ways to read and the
relationship between theory and pedagogy, cultural studies has been incorporated into the
US. English department, thereby maintaining the traditional, marginalized status of
composition and rhetoric. Without a signiﬁcant disruption of the disciplinary framework
of writing and other ways of knowing, composition remains in a marginalized status, and
writing practices in the academy will continue to be guided by what Sharon Crowley
refers to as the screening process for dominant discourses.

What this type of rhetorical analysis provides that I think is missing in Crowley's
now-famous argument for the removal of the universal writing requirement is an
emphasis on how academic scholarship itself maintains problematic disciplinary
divisions. In this sense, I do not view the texts that I analyze here as primarily
representations of or arguments about the institution of English studies. Rather, drawing
on Foucault's conception of the state as a condensation of discourses, I assume that these
texts are part of what we refer to as the institution of English studies. In saying this,
however, I do not mean to suggest that these are the only or the primary components of
the academic institution. My orientation to reading texts is also inﬂuenced by Raymond
Williams' cultural materialism to analyze how texts are situated in the material conditions
surrounding their production circulation.

The following texts present a selective history of cultural studies' reception in

English studies over the past ﬁfteen years: James Berlin and Michael Vivian's Cultural

l8

Studies in the English Classroom (1992); Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff, in English
Studies/Culture Studies (1994); Karen F itts and Alan France's Left Margins: Cultural
Studies and Composition Pedagogy (1995) and Thomas Rosteck's At the Intersections:
Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies (1999). An analysis of these anthologies
suggests a gradual process of strategically particularizing cultural studies in ways that
removes the critical question of disciplinarity and its political possibilities.

Anthologies have become the primary genre that comes out of the engagement of
cultural studies and rhetoric. The central feature of the anthology is to ﬂame a series of
discussions in a way that draws on joint assumptions, which also leaves room for
"dissensus." Thus, the anthology, in allowing for dissensus under a unifying set of
questions or assumptions, appears to be particularly well-suited to discussions of cultural
studies. The anthology seems particularly effective for this type of construction of
cultural studies. However, as I have suggested in my readings above, it is critical with
such texts to consider the very act of framing the debates in the introductions as critical
interventions in the debates themselves. While the following analysis draws on many
different and often contradictory forms, including contributions to these texts, it is
instructive to consider the extent to which the anthology itself as academic form both

constrains and enables the arguments that are developed about cultural studies.

Limitations
It is important to clarify that while this project accepts that a primary concern of
composition and rhetoric is to help students become "better writers," this project gives

limited attention to the debates surrounding speciﬁc strategies, approaches, and

19

assumptions regarding the teaching of writing skills. Although such practices are
important, I focus instead on the political and social effects of writing instruction.

In addition, this project does not develop an analysis of the work in British
cultural studies over the last ten years. Instead it follows a line of trajectory of the British
school through its recent engagement with postcolonial criticism. A more developed
treatment of the speciﬁc arguments, theorists, and locations of the British school, then,

remains an important line of inquiry for future scholarship.

Disciplinarity and the Modern University

The status of composition studies has been hotly contested over the past thirty
years, as it has gradually gained disciplinary legitimacy. However, this dissertation looks
at the "blind spots" that result from what Gregory Jay has called the "disciplinary drive"
in composition and rhetoric (675).

I am using disciplinarity as a trope that draws on Foucault's conception of
"disciplining" which he describes in Discipline and Punish as a form of "political
anatomy of detail" which produces "docile bodies" through the organization of
knowledges (137-138).9 Such disciplinary institutions, as Foucault remarks elsewhere,
maintains the necessary link between power and knowledge (Power/Knowledge 52).

Understanding the way the university contributes, through its disciplinary
formations, to social power, requires attention to the emergence of the modern university.

In Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton associates the development of the bourgeois

 

9 For Foucault disciplinarity serves two related functions that are critical to my understanding of
contemporary composition and rhetoric. It refers to the organization of knowledge through institutions like
the educational system, hospitals and the military (Discipline 137-138). Importantly, the organization of
knowledge through such institutions also serves to discipline individuals through the "exercise of

20

subject with the emergence of the Western nation state. The shift ﬁom the decentered
power of feudalism towards a more centralized national government, Eagleton argues,
required a means through which social order can be maintained "hegemonically" (27).
While the emergence of nation states in Europe involved coercive mechanisms, the
stability of the nation depended on the emergence of "A new kind of human subject—
sensitive, passionate, individualist" (27). As a result of this concern over maintaining
power, Eagleton argues, there must be a means through which the individual subject will
police him/herself. "There is a world of political difference," Eagleton argues, "between
a law which the subject really does give to itself, in radical democratic styles, and a
decree which still descends from on high but which the subject now 'authenticates'" (27).
The difference, Eagleton contends, is that this new bourgeois subject is also capable of
developing strategies that are counter to the interests of the ruling power structure.
Sustaining social order of the emerging bourgeois middle-class requires a de-
centered means through which the nation state encourages the individual to manage
her/his own sense of propriety. "For power to be individually authenticated," Eagleton
continues, "there must be constructed within the subject a new form of inwardness which
will do the unpalatable work of the law for it, and all the more effectively since that law
has now apparently evaporated" (27). Eagleton locates the moment where aesthetics in
the form of social control over taste and sensibility becomes a separate sphere of
knowledge. That emerges Simultaneous to this new bourgeois subject, through "self-
policing." The subject in this formulation internalizes an association between his/her

liberty with "the historic victory of bourgeois liberty and democracy over the barbarously

 

inﬁnitesimal power" and "meticulous control of the operations of the body. . . which assured the constant
subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility" (137).

21

repressive [feudal] state" (27). For Eagleton, control of aesthetics and history, taste, and
sensibility are critical to legitimizing the nation state as the locus of power.

Eagleton's analysis links the development of the modern bourgeois subject to the
development of separate spheres of knowledge that would impact the disciplinary
formation of the modern university. Sharon Crowley enhances Eagleton's analysis by
arguing that the focus on aesthetics in the US. "stimulated important changes in liberal
arts education, which is an important site wherein modern bourgeois subjectivity is
developed and disciplined" (Composition 32). In essence, the critical importance given
the aesthetic in the development of separate spheres as ideological means of maintaining
social order is more than coincidental to the notion of individual subjectivity. For
Crowley, this association between the emergence of the bourgeois subject, its attachment
to the nation state, and its relationship to the development of spheres of knowledge that
are ontologically separated, have problematic effects for the study of rhetoric and its
development as a disciplining mechanism in the US. academy. "This shift in the focus of
rhetorical education-away from civic virtue and toward the bourgeois project of
self-improvement—coincided with the demise of rhetoric as a ﬁeld of study" (34).

My point in reading Eagleton and Crowley's conception of the aesthetic and its
gradual impact on the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric is to establish the links between
the modern bourgeois subject, the establishment of academic disciplinary formations, and
social politics. For Eagleton and Crowley, the bourgeois subject is interrelated to the
sustenance of the nation state. These concerns, moreover, are intimately connected to the

development of disciplinary spheres in the modern university which maintain the distinct

22

ﬁmction of the ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition to "discipline and maintain the dominant
subjectivity" (Crowley 34).

It is not difficult to understand, given this formulation of the disciplinary structure
of the modern university, how the project of cultural studies has maintained a critical
perspective towards the established borders of modernity. Yet as my example above
suggests, rather than giving over one series of (modern) assumptions for another (cultural
studies/postmodem), the classroom is often a location for the interweaving of multiple,
often contestatory assumptions about what counts as knowledgeassumptions that reﬂect
competing ideas about the subject.

I will argue that US. English studies gradually retreats from the
counterdisciplinary focus of British cultural studies. While I have no interest in
establishing the British School as an orthodoxy, Chapter Two seeks to strategically
recover this movement as a means for rethinking the unique disciplinary situation of
contemporary composition and rhetoric in the US. Consequently, I will be employing
British cultural studies and its movements since the formation of the Birmingham Center.
This usage will also draw, like the British School itself, on a wide array of theories,
including structuralism, poststructmalism and postcolonial theories.

In an attempt to locate cultural studies in the speciﬁc context of US. composition
and rhetoric, I will focus on the intersections of British cultural studies and the ﬁeld of
rhetoric and composition in the US. This intersection involves a call for a focus on what
Berlin refers to as “technology[s] for producing consciousness" (Rhetorics 108-109)
through a “multiplicity of formulations” including media, ﬁlm, and photography (108-

109). The following outline of chapters describes a developing argument that draws on

23

such a "multiplicity of formulations" in academic scholarship, ﬁlm and historical ﬁction,

to develop a critical pedagogy.

Chapter One:

No Way Out: Cultural Studies and Disciplinarity in Composition and Rhetoric

This chapter provides both a critical analysis and a literature review of scholarship at the
intersections of cultural studies, rhetoric, and composition in the US. This chapter
argues that the counterdisciplinary focus, associated with British cultural studies, has
been shom away ﬁ'om uses of cultural studies that ﬁt into existing disciplinary formations
in English.

This chapter views the intersections of cultural studies and rhetoric and
composition in the US. as a site of unresolved tension between the modern subject
implicit in the disciplinary formation of the contemporary academy, and the post modern
challenge to this conception of the subject. Through a rhetorical analysis of academic
texts on the "intersections" of cultural and English studies in the U.S., I argue that a
important feature of cultural studies in US. English studies has been the gradual
elimination of the counterdisciplinary perspective. I contend that scholarship on cultural
studies in US. English programs leaves the disciplinary subjects (read literary critics,
rhetoric and composition, anthropology, sociology) at the same time that it seeks to
critique the notion of subjectivity upon which they are based. Moreover, I argue tint the
counterdisciplinary focus associated with British cultural studies has been shom away

ﬁ‘om uses of cultural studies.

24

Chapter Two:

Recovering British Cultural Studies and the Critique of the Disciplinary Subject
Reading British cultural studies through early "founding texts" of Raymond Williams,
Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson, and its engagement with structuralism, and
poststructural theory, this chapter argues that the counterdisciplinarity challenge to the
structure of modern university is integral to the British school. Moreover, this chapter
argues tint cultural studies supplies a framework for rethinking composition and rhetoric

US. through the development of a counterdisciplinary perspective.

Chapter Three: Disciplinary Tendencies: Debates over Literature in Composition
This chapter analyzes the Tate-Lindemann debates over the uses of literature in
composition as emblematic of a tendency in composition and rhetoric to ignore the
possibilities of cultural studies theories that might suggest a strategic use of imaginative
ﬁction. Since many of the contributions to these debates are based on histories, this
chapter becomes a strategic meta-history that reveals 1.) that the tendency to ”read" the
history of rhetoric and composition in opposition to literary criticism is often based on a
"disciplinary drive" in US. composition and rhetoric, and 2.) that cultural studies,
provides a means for thinking of a counterdisciplinary orientation. This chapter
concludes with an argument for imaginative ﬁction that illustrates a counterdisciplinary

orientation ﬁ'om with the dominant institution.

25

Chapter Four:
Towards a Cultural Rhetorics for US. Composition and Rhetoric

Chapter Fom' shifts the focus from scholarly texts on cultural studies and
composition to the emergent subﬁeld of cultural rhetorics. First this chapter argues that
these two bodies of research, like the work on cultural studies and composition, too often
ignore the critical question of disciplinarity. It then seeks to reclaim a cultural rhetorics
with a counterdisciplinary perspective through a cultural rhetorical reading of Atwood's
novel. This chapter puts the theoretical ﬁamework developed in Chapter Three into
dialogue with scholarship in rhetoric as a means for developing a counterdisciplinary
approach to work in the ﬁeld. It focuses speciﬁc attention on the work of Kenneth Burke
and James Berlin as offering promising ﬁ'ameworks for understanding rhetoric and
writing as social discourses that must mediate multiple institutional ﬁmctions through
various forms.
Chapter Five
Cultural Rhetorics, Visual Rhetorics and Classroom Practices in Julie Dash’s
Daughters of the Dust
This chapter serves two purposes. First, it demonstrates visual rhetorics of a postcolonial
ﬁlm as a speciﬁc type of cultural rhetoric that extends the trajectory of British cultural
studies to postcolonial criticism. Second, this chapter explores pedagogical practices that
de-center writing as a Speciﬁc mechanism of communication to be read in relation to
other forms.

A story about the last days of Aﬁ'ican American Gullahs living off the coast of
South Carolina before they migrated to the mainland, Daughters of the Dust places

various forms of representation (writing, ﬁlm, and photography) side by side to dramatize

26

their limitations in telling the story of the Gullahs. These dramatizations, moreover, are
linked to empirical science and the notion of progress through the character of Mr. Snead,
a mainlander who has come with his photographic gear to document the historic day of
migration. The shifting narrative perspectives and disorienting use of visual imagery
create a pastiche weaving together the stories of multiple characters—living, dead and
unborn. I argue that Daughters of the Dust constitutes a cultural rhetoric in its focus on
how class and race-based subjectivities are constructed through multiple textual forms,
legitimated through empirical science. Speciﬁcally, Daughters of the Dust provides
excellent examples of how various forms of writing lmve been attached to empirical
science to create what Foucault refers to as "regimes of truth." Dash's ﬁlm, for instance,
constitutes a cultural rhetoric that dramatizes that the historical record of 20"I century
African American Gullah's was created through writing, photography, and early cinema
and scientiﬁc assumptions about what these technologies can represent. In this
formulation writing is viewed not as a mirror through which to discover an empirical

truth, but as one of many technologies through which subjectivities are created.

27

Chapter One
No Way Out:

Cultural Studies and Disciplinarity in Composition and Rhetoric

In order for cultural studies to ﬁnd an audience of US. teachers
and students, workers in the area will need to construct programs
and practices with a uniquely American ﬂavor.
James Berlin and Michael Vivian, Cultural
Studies in the English Classroom, p. xiii
It is unlikely that the disciplinary structures and mechanisms of
universities will disappear in the near future. . . it would be a
mistake to locate cultural studies within them.
Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals, p.
155
At the same time I worked at the litigation support company, I started teaching in
an English department that promoted a "cultural studies" approach to composition. The
course I taught, English 110, employed theories of James Berlin, Susan Miller and
George Trimbur into a pedagogy that would encourage "critical thinking” about the texts
and institutions that Shaped student lives. Diana George and John Trimbur's Reading
Culture was particularly well-suited, I believed, for a cultural studies approach because it
featured "reading and writing assignments . . . designed to promote a critical distancing"

(xv). Students in the course read popular texts and wrote essays to "observe and evaluate

28

as well as participate in the everyday life of contemporary America"(xv). The course,
then, had what I perceived to be two purposes: 1.) to develop reading and writing skills,
and 2.) to use these skills as they negotiated their places within social formations.

With these ideas in mind, I entered English 110, a class full of 18-year-old
freshmen, went over the syllabus, and began the ongoing process of assessing theories
about composition pedagogy against what was going on in the classroom From the ﬁrst
1 day on, when students nodded at terms like "culture" and "power," I believed that this
course was encouraging students not only to understand how individuals are "written"
along lines of race, class and gender, in popular discourse; I was also convinced that the
students were developing the skills to analyze and resist such tendencies. Students, for
example, read and wrote about newspaper articles on the controversy surrounding rap
music and the song "Cop Killer," focusing on racialized assumptions embedded in the
texts, and they used these texts to write about (and against) the way they are "written" as
members of a particular subculture.

The next semester, I optimistically took on an evening section of English 225, the
second course in the university's required sequence. In stark contrast to the demographics
of English 110, English 225, which was part of a "Continuing Education" program, was
much more diverse in student age, ethnicity, work experience, and academic background.
These differences did little to change my conﬁdence from the previous semester, and I
began the course by rehearsing a syllabus similar to the one I used in English 110.10 As I
read the course description, however, I immediately began to notice signs of concerns on

the students’ faces. Finally, a member of the class, a returning student in her ﬁfties, gave

 

'0 The primary difference between the two courses was that English 225 required students to read a novel
and to write a research paper as preparation for their other academic requirements.

29

voice to the discontent: "You are going to teach us how to write, aren't you? " Before I
had a chance to answer, other students chimed in with questions: "Aml going to be
penalized if my papers aren't political?" and "Are you going to help us prepare for the
proﬁciency test?"ll I’m sure that my responses reﬂected how ill equipped I was to
engage the students' legitimate concerns about the class.‘2 Throughout the term, the
students encouraged me to consider more thoroughly how the course "agenda" was
already prescribed by factors beyond my control, not the least of which was the specter of
the timed, proﬁciency exam which was assessed on the basis of clarity, grammar and
organization.

Part of the confusion surrounding my approach to English 225, was the result of
competing assumptions about the "disciplinary" ﬁmctions of composition studies. Many
of the students in the class objected to what they viewed as an overtly political approach
to a course that was ostensibly supposed to be about writing. While I have no reason to
believe that they necessarily objected to the politics of the cause, they certainly called
me to task for diverting attention away to the task at hand: developing writing skills.

This perception maintained, moreover, even though we spent a good deal of time writing,
revising, and rewriting papers that would, notwithstanding the course "content," help
prepare students for academic discourse.

The confusion, I have come to suspect, was the result of a dissonance between

internalized assumptions about disciplinarity. This tension was apparent in the students'

 

" After taking the two required courses, students were required to take a proﬁciency test. If they failed the
test, they were required to retake English 225.

'2 The difference in attitudes between the two courses was partly a function of course demographics.
Whereas English 110 was made up of 18 and l9-year-old freshman, this second course was an evening
course with the designation "continuing education." In addition to a few "traditional" sophomore students-
l9-year-olds in their second year of college-English 225 was comprised of a wide variety of student ages

30

reactions to reading Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and Barbara Kingsolver's
Animal Dreams. While many of the students enjoyed the texts, they continued to express
concerns that these readings—which I assume they associated with a literature course-
would detract from time we could have spent working on ways to pass the proﬁciency
exam.

English 225, therefore, brought to light two important concerns that I have since
come to identify with the way that knowledge is produced and organized in academic
research on the teaching of writing. Reactions against literary texts and political content
created tensions, in part, because of a few preconceived notions of a writing class as
skills-based. The urgency surrounding concerns about the proﬁciency exam served as a
tacit acknowledgement that the academic institution itself was concerned with
disciplining students to conform to a speciﬁc type of discourse.

I do not mean to suggest here that these students were somehow nai‘ve about what
ought to be the real focus of the writing class. These students had very good reasons to be
concerned about developing writing skill and quickly at that, and I take it as axiomatic
that writing abilities ought to be of primary concern to the writing class and a good deal
of other course. However, if scholars and teachers are going to focus on the politics of
their practices, it's better to understand and communicate how such practices are
mediated by the knowledge that is organized along disciplinary concerns.

Cultural studies and its convergence with rhetoric provide an excellent example of
how disciplinarity, as one of the primary ways the academy organizes knowledge, does

the cultural work of dividing

 

and backgrounds ranging from the 50 year-old social worker who was returning to school for the ﬁrst time
in over 20 years, to a 16-year-old Indian woman just entering college.

31

Counterdisciplinarity in the Classroom

Recovering the concerns of British cultural studies have helped me think through
many of the questions that arose in my teaching of English 110 and English 225 and in
subsequent classes. I began by questioning why counterdisciplinarity is a key concept
and whether it could provide a means for developing a critical pedagogy that focuses on
the formation of knowledge.

Fortunately there have been a number of scholarly attempts in recent years to
merge cultural studies, writing instruction and related disciplinary headings like English
studies, literary criticism and speech and communication. Analysis of these works goes a
long way towards understanding the way power functions at the site of the production of
knowledge-through the publication of anthologies--to maintain ﬁrm distinctions between
writing instruction and other ﬁelds, including literary criticism (note on Berlin and
Vivian). In terms of institutional politics, the assumption that writing instruction takes
place in a separate discipline called rhetoric and composition, might actually maintain its
subordinate position.

In addressing the concerns over disciplinarity, this chapter assumes as James
Berlin and Michael Vivian proposed in 1991 tint cultural studies signals a Shift in the
way we think about disciplinary borders. However, I will argue that such is the nature of
contemporary English studies that the convergence with cultural studies has requires
ignoring the focus on disciplinarity in British cultural studies. How could such strategies
have helped disrupt naturalized disciplinary assumptions that often make composition

function as a "screening meciumism" for dominant discourses? In what ways can we

32

rethink the relationship between scholarship and pedagogy to imagine new disciplinary
conﬁgurations?

It is clear, from my description of English 225, in particular, that there was a
tension, from the outset, between the expressed intention of the instructor to facilitate
critical thinking about cultural processes in the formation of identities, and the vocational
and academic interests of the students. In rethinking this tension, however, I am less
inclined to accept the disciplinary "fact" and to Simply incorporate some cultural studies
ideas into it. Rather, in my approach to classes like English 225 and 110, I have become
increasingly convinced of the need to mediate between these interests.

In other words, while I am not inclined to view U.S. cultural studies as somehow
separate from the radical critique of disciplinarity, I am equally concerned with the way
the structure of the academy itself shapes what counts as knowledge. But rather than
settle for this as an impasse that cannot be effectively addressed, I would like to suggest
that compositionists can turn to British cultural studies, if not for an orthodoxy or grand
narrative, then for strategic practices tint continue to disrupt and dislocate the
disciplinary structures and forms that shape their experiences in the contemporary
academy. How this could be done speciﬁcally will be the subject of later chapters.

Fashioning U.S. cultural studies as an ideal that replaces the present conﬁguration
of English studies, however, requires a radical disruption of the dominant model which I
will suggest continues to privilege literary criticism. Such a disruption must attend, I will
argue, to the problematic effects of the "disciplinary drive" in the ﬁeld of composition

and rhetoric. With this idea in mind, compositionists can seek to recover the critical

thrust of British cultural studies to develop practices and criticism that supports the

33

counterdisciplinary orientation to the modem university. The following chapters
therefore, are directed at ﬁrst recovering British cultural studies and then putting these
theories, along with their developments in the U.S., to work in analysis of scholarship in

the ﬁeld and in the development of pedagogical practices.

Pedagogy and Disciplinarity
As my experiences in English 110 and 225 suggest, cultural studies raises a
number of pedagogical questions: Is there any space for oppositional pedagogical
practices within the US. academy? Does cultural studies supply a way of thinking about
the classroom that might complicate the assumption, advanced by Sharon Crowley and
others, tint certain writing classrooms are determined more by their function for the
institution that by what goes on in the classroom? And what, ﬁnally, does it mean to be
oppositional in the US. writing classroom?
Berlin and Vivian suggest a critical distinction that is useﬁrl for considering the
pedagogical implications of composition and rhetoric. In their introduction they state that
[A]ll the essayists assembled here would not agree on this version
of cultural studies in all its particulars. They would, however,
probably concur that the classroom represents a site for working
out the theoretical, practical, and political issues identiﬁed in the
current debates over English and cultural studies. The classroom is
a proving ground for a reformulation of the relationship between
theory and practice, the two interacting dialectically in constant

revision of each other. (Cultural Studies xii)

34

Composition pedagogy as a subgenre of the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric
constitutes one such sphere and it is instructive, if we are to attempt to address the
possibility of oppositional pedagogies (and the deﬁnition of oppositional in the US) to
narrow the focus of our reading.

However, as I have suggested in my reading of France and Fitts' Left Margins,
one of the challenges facing cultural studies in the US. is a tendency to incorporate
speciﬁc theories into the sphere of pedagogy, without attention to the important
institutional factors that shape what it means and how it impacts social politics. AS a way
to address this concern, then, it is important to consider how the politics of writing
pedagogy are mediated by the academic institution. Therefore, it is particularly
instrUctive to read pedagogical arguments in terms of how what is done in the classroom
also speaks to that which is "outside" the classroom.

Many formulations of cultural studies assume a radical cinllenge to the
disciplinary structure of the modern university. Cultural studies as theorists like James
Berlin, Michael Vivian and Alan France argue, is particularly well-suited to the ﬁeld of
rhetoric and composition because it challenges disciplinary structures which have
historically marginalized composition and rhetoric. In terms of the professional ﬁelds
that constitute English studies, Berlin and Vivian, envision a much closer relationship
between literary criticism and rhetoric and composition than presently exists. For Berlin
and Vivian, cultural studies encourages us to re-think English studies that "will [continue
to] address the distinguishing features of rhetorical and poetic texts, but it will do so on
the basis of the writing and reading practices involved in each" (xi). This stress on the

similarities between the rhetorical and the poetic, both viewed as "culturally indicated,

35

historically speciﬁc codes" suggests a change in the way English studies views the ﬁeld
of composition and rhetoric as a profession and in their pedagogical approaches.

A disruption in the way we view the hierarchical distinctions between these areas
would also help counter the marginalization of composition and rhetoric. In contrast,
however, a number of theorists such as Giroux and Zavaradeh lnve argued against the
possibility of cultural studies functioning "within" the academic institution. These
theorists argue that the disciplinary formation of the academy itself is antithetical to the
political project of cultural studies, which should ﬁnd alternative locations and methods
for its work.

With the passage of time since these early arguments were proferred, we are now
at a juncture where we may gain a better sense of the potentialities and limitations of
cultural studies approaches to composition and rhetoric in the US. academy. In this
chapter I read the recent history of the convergence of cultural studies and composition
and rhetoric as a way to address the two assumptions about the possibilities and
limitations of cultural studies in English studies.

If we assume with Giroux and Zavaradeh that cultural studies can only function as
oppositional if it remains "outside" the U. S. academy, we would expect attempts to
employ it in the US. to result in its incorporation into into the existing disciplinary
ﬁamework of US. English studies. On the other hand, if cultural studies, as Berlin and
Vivian claim, presents the possibility for rethinking English studies in ways that provide
opportunities for resistant practices from "within" the academy, we would expect recent
scholarship to reﬂect shifts in the professional status and pedagogical approaches in

composition and rhetoric that employs it.

36

In this chapter I will argue tint, much as Giroux and Zavaradeh might have
predicted, cultural studies has been incorporated into the existing disciplinary structure of
English studies, thereby reducing its political effect. However, I part company with these
theorists in their suggestion that resistance from "within" is not a possibility, and I
conclude by recommending that future uses of cultural studies avoid these theorists
tendency to assume and "inside/outside" notion of institutional power.

Because the perceptions and practices of the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric are
often shaped by factors outside its inﬂuence, 1 will have not limited my research to what
scholars in the ﬁeld have to say about composition and rhetoric. Instead I read a number
of text on cultural studies and English studies. Approaching the "intersections" through
this broader perspective, I believe, ultimately focuses attention on the often ignored
impact that publication practices in the ﬁeld have in maintaining essentialized borders
between the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric and other ﬁelds. This tendency, I will
argue, is most apparent in differeing assumptions about cultural studies "means" in
scholarship in the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric and literary criticism.

In the ﬁrst section, entitled "Disciplining Cultural Studies in US. English
Studies," I will ask what impact cultural studies has on the way that composition and
rhetoric is regarded in relation to literary criticism. The reason for this focus is that
composition and rhetoric has been historically marginalized in relation to literary
criticism in ways that maintain problematic writing practices. The second section,
"Cultural Studies Theory, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Disciplinarity," then focuses on
speciﬁc arguments about the relationship between theory and practice, asking what

impact cultural studies has on how we view the different types of labor involved in

37

English studies. The assumption that informs this section is that cultural studies, as I am
using the term, provides a ﬁ'amework ﬁ'om which to challenge the historical distinctions
between theory and practice, both "within" and "outside" the ﬁeld of composition and
rhetoric. Finally, I argue in the concluding section, "Cultural Studies, US. English
Studies and the Question of Disciplinarity," that cultural studies in US. English studies
has been characterized by a retreat from the anti-disciplinary focus of early forms of

cultural studies.

Disciplining Cultural Studies in English

As I have suggested above, debates in the late 19803 and early 19905 over the
usefulness of cultural studies in the US. English department reveal competing
perceptions about the political possibilities of academic work. Giroux's argument in
Teachers as Intellectuals (1988) takes a very pessimistic view of how cultural studies
might support "Oppositional" politics ﬁom "within" US. universities and colleges. For
Giroux, the problem lies in the incongruity between the structure of the US. academy
based on scientiﬁc assumptions about knowledge and culture and those posited by
cultural studies. This scientiﬁc bias of the modern university, according to Giroux,
suggests to students that culture has "already formed" and can be "described in an
essentialist manner" through scientiﬁc models designed "to describe" and "accumulate
knowledge about a culture" (150). These assumptions are antithetical to the cultural
studies notion of culture in "the process of transformation" (150).

For Giroux the tensions between cultural studies and the US. academy operate in

the structure of the university through its traditional disciplinary formation. Scientiﬁc

38

assumptions, nnintained in traditional academic disciplines, are maintained through
borders between different disciplines that imply static, naturalized ideas about culture.
Cultural studies as an "anti-disciplinary" set of theories must, for Giroux, function at a
critical distance from such disciplines or be incorporated into them. Cultural studies, he
argues, within the academy is possible only through "movement away from our de-
contextualized conception of disciplinary practices” (150). For Giroux, then, the political
project of culttual studies is not possible until such a movement away has occurred, and
its success is dependent upon ﬁrst developing "counter-institutions" (155).

Like Giroux's comments on cultural studies, James Berlin and Michael Vivian's
Cultural Studies in the English Classroom (1992) maintains a Similar focus on the critical
question of disciplinarity. Assuming that cultural studies theories might help address the
"crises" in English studies, Berlin and Vivian stress that their notion of cultural studies
"was strongly inﬂuenced by the example of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary
Cultural Studies" (vii). For Berlin and Vivian, the British school along with other
"postmodern" theories challenges foundational assumptions that, historically, have often
separated the rhetorical from the poetic. What cultural studies "means" is nothing less
than a radical rethinking of the disciplinary framework of English studies to reﬂect the
assumption of cultural studies that "reading and writing are interchangeable because both
are interpretive; that is, both are generative of meaning rather than simply activities in the
transcription or reception of information" (x). For Berlin and Vivian, the critique of
disciplinarity is crucial to the politics of cultural studies insofar as it provides a way to
redress the asymmetrical power relationship between the discipline of composition and

rhetoric and literary criticism. The emphasis on disciplinarity, moreover, is further

39

suggested by the fact tint Berlin and Vivian devote the ﬁrst half of the text to essays on
curricular reform.

Giroux's argument suggests the impossibility of a counterdisciplinary cultural
studies ﬁrnctioning within the US. academy. The political potential of cultural studies,
for Giroux, is dependent upon its challenge of disciplinary structures. Since no such
disruption is likely to happen "in the near future," the entire project depends on
movement "outside" the academy (152).

Giroux's notion of power residing within a speciﬁc sphere, namely "inside" the
academy, however, rrnintains a notion of borders as "already formed" tint cultural
studies seeks to critique. This conception of power can be useﬁrlly contrasted to
Foucault's conception of power as a strategy. In contrast to the inside/outside dichotomy
upon which Giroux's depends, Foucault argues in Power/Knowledge tint "power is
'always already there', and tint one is never 'outside' it, that there are no 'margins' for
those who break with the system to gambol in" (141). This conception of power does not
mean, however, that "one is trapped and condemned to defeat no nntter what" (142).
Instead Foucault offers the idea of power as a strategy of which resistance is a part.
Foucault usefully offers a model of power as strategy where

there are no relations of power without resistances. . . .[R]esistance to
power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it
inexorably ﬁ'ustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all
the more by being in the same place as power; hence, like power,

resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies. (140)

40

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Smithson and Ruff both call attention to the disciplinary tensions within English studies
at the same time tint they attach them to the narrative of literary criticism through New
Criticism. What remains undeveloped in this conception is how the ﬁeld of composition
and rhetoric, with its own narratives, ﬁts into this construction of English studies. In
other words, while Smithson and Ruff present an umbrella conception of English studies,
which should include some discussion of composition and rhetoric, that also seek to
subsume the ﬁeld under the narrative of literary criticism.

In contrast to Berlin and Vivian who focus on what cultural studies might do to
the way we think about the rhetorical and the poetic, Smithson and Ruff focus most of
their attention on cultural studies relationship to literary criticism. Smithson and Ruff
argue that, as a response to the Shifting demographics of post World War II U.S.,
American New Criticism has outlived its usefulness. Just as New Criticism served as a
response to changing cultural circumstance, culture studies can be viewed as an
appropriate response to new demographics (1 1-12).

This rather one-Sided treatment of English studies is consistent with the way
Smithson and Ruff construct the phrase in the other side of their title. "The shift within
English studies, towards culture studies has," according to Smithson and Ruff,

various and sometimes conﬂicting intellectual sources. Marxism,
feminism, and cultural critique are rrnjor inﬂuences. Multiculturalism and
university ethnic studies programs are additional Signiﬁcant sources of
ideas and information. And the British cultural studies movement is yet
another Signiﬁcant inﬂuence behind changing conceptions of English

studies, in the United States.(2)

42

In fact, it is this diversity of perspectives involved in these movements that
compels Smithson and Ruff to make the strategic move ﬁom the more common "cultural
studies" to "culture studies." They acknowledge, for instance, that "some teachers and
scholars in the United States work consciously out of the British cultural studies tradition
and are comfortable with the term cultural studies" (Italics Smithson and Ruffs, 2). In an
effort to expand their operating deﬁnition, Smithson and Ruff suggest that the term also

refers to "[o]thers [who] have their roots in multiculturalism or other traditions and seem
unaware of, or uninterested in, the Birmingham Center movement. Thus 'culture studies' .
. . seems a useﬁll way to refer to the several theories of culture that inﬂuence the
direction of English studies today" (2).

Thus, Smithson and Ruffs choice of terms is guided by a laudable attempt to
speak to the speciﬁc institutional and intellectual traditions emerging out of US. English
studies. In addition to suturing culture studies to the narrative of literary criticism,
Smithson and Ruff, in sharp contrast to Giroux, argue for the inevitability of cultural
studies' institutionalization. “Profound change,” they argue, “requires its own
institutionalization If culture studies were dependent solely on a small number of
indiVidltals for its deﬁnition, continuation, and expansion—rather than on academic
inStitIltions—concem with culture would rennin a controversial logo sewn on the surface
rather than become a part ofthe antic ofEnglish studies” (3). Claiming culture studies
as a lalldatory effect of clnnge, Smithson and Ruff nonetheless warn against the dangers

0f iIlStitutionalization, particularly on the kind of dissent that they hope culture studies

can enact (3).

43

It is important to note, however, that in attaching culture studies to a narrative of
New Criticism, Smithson and Ruff effectively broaden the ﬁeld of literary criticism while
they ostensibly maintain the marginalization of composition and rhetoric. In other words,
Smithson and Ruffs conception of English studies is notably inconsistent with the
counterdisciplinary argument advanced by the British School. And while there is good
reason to challenge the dominance of the British School as the only or best conception of
cultural studies, it is equally important to identify the disciplinary conceits at work in this
broader conception of culture studies. In fact, it could be argued tint the primary effect
of Smithson and Ruffs opting for New Criticism—as a body of criticism that was based on
its disciplinary difference from other ﬁelds—as an "example" for English studies/culture
studies, is to sustain the disciplinary divisions that have supported literary criticism to the
exclusion of the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric.

Robert Con Davis' "A Dialogue on Institutionalizing Cultural Studies" (1994)
Signals a retreat from the problem of disciplinarity. Con Davis ﬂames this discussion
with Gerald Graff, Janice Radway, and Gita Rajan, by suggesting tint, in the mid-19905,
it is no longer as important to keep rehearsing deﬁnitions of what cultural studies is and
where it came ﬁ'om. "It is more appropriate now," he suggests, "to talk about the early
track record and the ﬁrnctioning of cultural studies as an institutional program" (25). In
an effort to understand the "separate and ongoing developments of cultural studies in the
United States" (30), Con Davis usefully argues that it is important to avoid tendencies to
equate it with British cultural studies. Holding too closely to any single deﬁnition of
cultural studies, Con Davis states, " would be especially misleading" because "there's so

much dissent within the ranks, disputes between the philosophical and political left and

44

right, between the theoretical and the more overtly political, and between cultural studies
and ethnic studies programs" (26). Con Davis' argument can be viewed as a sort of
compromise through which new perspectives are ﬁt under the expanded "umbrella" that
cultural studies has become, without the kind of critique that might undermine the
disciplinary structure and logic that sustains the traditional politics of the institution. It
appears that what replaces the rather thorny question of disciplinary politics, in Con
Davis' ﬁamework, is a sort of celebration of dissensus that, we can assume, takes place
through the expansion of existing disciplines. It is not difﬁcult to see in this formulation,
however, a movement away fiom the concerns that marginalized ﬁelds like composition
and rhetoric have. If Giroux's formulation gives composition and rhetoric no place from
"inside" with which to critique the intransigent institution, Con Davis simply removes the
question ﬁom the table.

The question of disciplinarity is never far ﬁ‘om the surface in discussions of
cultural studies. Towards the end of the "Dialogue," for instance, Con Davis Shifts focus
from analysis of what cultural studies has been to what it will do in the future. Janice
Radway in particular expresses her concern that cultural studies not become "disciplined"
in the ﬁrture in the sense that it becomes institutionalized "within the current structure of
the academy" (40). Notwithstanding its "current good effects," Radway expresses
extreme skepticism that cultural studies can be institutionalized "without either gutting
cultural studies of its disruptive potential or entirely changing the disciplinary divisions
and legitirnating ideologies presently underwriting most academic research" (40-41).
Radway's comments provide some insight into the differences between Giroux's

construction of cultural studies and that which Con Davis presents in the "Dialogue." On

45

one lnnd, Radway's concern over the disciplinary problems facing cultural studies in the
US. are almost identical to Giroux's concerns. Giroux, in contrast, links the political
potential of cultural studies with antidisciplinarity.

One important reason for the different perspectives is that Giroux and Radway are
operating with different conceptions of cultural studies and its relationship to the British
School. Whereas Giroux's argument reﬂects the British School's concern over orthodoxy,
Radway stresses the importance of resisting the " tendency to locate the sole origins of
contemporary cultural studies in the classrooms and corridors of Birmingham" (30). But
while she does not want to link cultural studies in 1994 too closely to the British School,
Radway does acknowledge a genealogy of sorts. "Certainly, a clear line of descent can
be drawn from the early work at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies to a
particular body of work carried out under the rubric of cultural studies. But it is my
belief that the Birmingham project constituted only on efﬂorescence of a complex,
diffuse, conﬂicted set of social practices" (30). In saying this, Radway echoes Con
Davis's recasting of cultural studies as a "general umbrella" or "rubric" under which a
number of alternative concerns can be addressed including, as is indicated in the
dialogue, concerns over postcolonial theoretical representation, speciﬁc institutional uses
of cultural studies in the US. and the increasingly heated debates over questions of
cultural studies political project.

These two constructions of cultural studies are illustrative of how the traditional
logic of disciplinarity continues to inform responses. Giroux's cautionary remarks,
echoed six years later by Radway, are based on the assumption that what cultural studies

"means" is inseparable item the question of opposition to disciplinary traditions. While

46

Con Davis might well agree that this is one conception of cultural studies, which can be
traced to the British School, the "Dialogue" reﬂects a tendency to bracket off questions of
disciplinarity tint were central to the Birmingham project. Radway's response to where
cultural studies is going, however, reinvigorates the focus on disciplinarity, but only after
more analysis of how "contingent forms of cultural practice can be embodied in
cmricular reforms and institutional reorganization." In the meantime, for Radway, it
would be best for "practitioners of cultural studies [to] forge political alliances across
disciplinary boundaries and even over the walls surrounding our academic quadrangles"
(40-41).

This tendency to avoid questions of disciplinarity is even more pronounced in
Karen Fitts and Alan France's Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition
Pedagogy (1995). Describing the texts as an extension of the pedagogy section of Berlin
and Vivian's earlier work, France and Fitts focus Speciﬁcally on how an interdisciplinary
cultural studies can help rethink pedagogy. While they acknowledge the “intense debate”
and “swirl of contention” surrounding cultural studies “outside their classrooms" (x1),
France and Fitts opt in Left Margins to emphasize how cultural studies is uniquely
positioned to address the discipline of composition. In stark contrast, in fact, to the
counterdisciplinary concerns of people like Giroux, France and Fitts emphasize the
unique features of composition and rhetoric that are common to cultural studies. The
two areas, they argue, are joined by a "family relationship" as "trans- or post disciplinary
ﬁelds of study" (xiii). Aware of the broader social and institutional politics that have
surrounded the question of cultural studies, France and F itts acknowledge that the

"contributors give scant attention in these pages to the swirl of contention outside their

47

classrooms" (x1). This lack of attention to questions of disciplinarity, however, are not
viewed as a problem for France and F itts who refer readers concerned with such
questions to the “many ﬁne works that explore this terrain" by authors like Grossberg,
Nelson and Easthope (xii).

While the texts to which France and Fitts refer, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler's
Cultural Studies and Anthony Easthope's, are useful for understanding basis tenets of
cultural studies, they do little to explore the questions surrounding the exchange speciﬁc
to composition, rhetoric and cultural studies. In the absence of such analysis, cultural
studies is in danger of becoming depoliticized as another "rhetorical strategy" or cluster
of assumptions that Shapes the content of the classroom, but does little to disrupt the
perception of writing instruction and scholarship. It is noteworthy, moreover, tint the
works France and Fitts cite as references stress the counterdisciplinary assumptions of
British cultural studies. At the very least, a reading of Grossberg, Nelson and Easthope
would seriously question the merits of the type of incorporation tint France and Fitts
undertake. As I have suggested, British cultural studies, always wary of attempts to co-
opt it into existing disciplinary formations, is a difﬁcult match for the disciplinary
tendencies reﬂected in France and Fitts' attempt to claim unique similarities. And while
these authors do provide a good reference for some of the theoretical questions and "swirl
of debates" surrounding cultural studies, they devote very little attention to the speciﬁc
circumstances surrounding the disciplinary and anti-disciplinary movements in the ﬁeld
of composition and rhetoric.

What I ﬁnd particularly interesting about these anthologies is that they represent a

narrative of retreat from the questions of disciplinarity that were so critical to the British

48

school. The centrality of disciplinary questions in Giroux and Berlin and Vivian is in
sharp contrast with France and Fitts and Smithson and Ruff, who seem to suggest a
version of cultural studies that is applicable only to practices within the classroom.

In one sense my reading of cultural studies and composition and rhetoric can be
viewed as a response to Radway's call for more analysis of the implications of
disciplinarity. I am, however, interested in looking at the British School and its speciﬁc
arguments as useful for composition studies in its employment of cultural studies. In so
doing, however, I am less concerned with imposing a set standard or deﬁnition of cultural
studies. In fact, I can readily agree with the various and sometimes contradictory uses to
which it has been put by Con Davis, Giroux and others. The focus on counterdisciplinary
assumptions of cultural studies is particularly important to scholars in composition and
rhetoric because it is a reﬂection of the institutional power of the academy itself that has
often relegated composition to the role of a Skills course shaped more by perceptions of
its institutional function (to make better writers) than by its own political orientation
towards the traditional academy (Crowley). Recovering British cultural studies, from the
perspective of composition and rhetoric as disciplinary "other," then, is an attempt to
recover the crucial counterdisciplinary edge without being mired in the inside/outside
dichotomies tint render it impossible.

One of the primary assumptions about cultural studies and composition is that it
can help challenge the hierarchical separation between pedagogy, theory, and cultural
criticism. It is through this emphasis on the pedagogical that both Berlin and Vivian
structure their text in two sections: "Cultural Studies Programs" and "Cultural Studies

Courses." Invoking critical pedagogues like Paulo Freire, Ira Shor and Henry Giroux,

49

Berlin and Vivian characterize the relationship between theory and pedagogy in terms of
two areas "interacting dialectically in constant revision of each other" (xii). The
classroom in this formulation then becomes a central place or "site for working out the
theoretical, practical and political issues identiﬁed in the current debates over English and
cultural studies" (xii). Importantly, for Berlin and Vivian, the classroom is not the only
place for assessing the politics of English and cultural studies; it is also a "proving ground
for a reformulation of the relationship between theory and practice" (xii).

This notion of the classroom as both a testing ground for theory and also a way of
rethinking the relationship between theory and pedagogy is also apparent in France and
Fitts' Left Margins. In contrast to Berlin and Vivian, for whom pedagogical descriptions
and arguments are placed next to theoretical arguments, France and Fitts, with their
emphasis on the pedagogical, seek to "reverse the invidious hierarchy that locates theory
as an elite (read 'masculine') intellectual prerogative and classroom practice as private
(read 'feminine') sphere" (xi). For France and Fitts, like Berlin and Vivian, pedagogy is
an important location of "social praxis of (too often empty or 'unrealized') rhetorical
theory and cultural criticism" (xi).

Giroux takes this focus on the pedagogical for cultural studies a step further,
arguing in "Who Writes in a Cultural Studies Class? or, Where is the Pedagogy?" for
thinking of "pedagogy as a central aspect of cultural studies and writing as a pedagogical
practice " (3). Giroux's argument, like the work of Berlin and Vivian and France and
Fitts, is strategic in the sense that he is ultimately interested in providing a rationale for

inserting pedagogical concerns into discourses on cultural studies (4).

50

In contrast, Frank Farmer argues that the theoretical language of cultural studies
tends to reinscribe the distance between privileged academic discourse and the
"everyday" discourse of students. Speciﬁcally, Farmer cites his students' responses to
theoretical essays by John Fiske and Mark Crispen Miller. His students' negative
reactions to the language in these essays, for Farmer, support his comparison between
cultural studies and elitist notions of ideology in the Frankfurt school tint situate the
critic in privileged distance from the "irrevocably degraded or commodiﬁed" cultural
forms of mass culture (qtd. in Farmer, 194).

The "central dilemma" of any cultural studies approach to writing, for Farmer, is
to make "a liberatory agenda comport with a distinctive, seemingly privileged way of
knowing" (186). The problem is tint the theoretical language of cultural studies is in
danger of reproducing a "caste system" which simply positions cultural critique as a
privileged way of excluding students by recasting what they already know (188-89). To
counter this tendency, Farmer advocates a de-centered classroom based on Bakhtin's
notions of the "superaddressee" and "anacrises" in a way tint removes the instructor as
the dominant voice in the classroom (188-89). Such a pedagogy, argues Farmer, is
consistent with Paulo F reire's conscientizacao, "a deepened understanding of the
historical and situational awareness that enables intervention and transforrnative praxis"
(205).

This relationship, furthermore, is inherently political. It is in the texts of
culture, as broadly conceived here, that the ideological battles of the

historical moment are fought. Thus, as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Ira

Shor, and others have argued, English teachers are engaged in a cultural

51

politics in which the power of students as citizens in the democratic public
sphere is at stake. The aim is to nnke them subjects rather than the
objects of historical critique . . . in a critical examination of the economic,
social, and political conditions within which the signifying practices of
culture take place. (xii)

While an increasingly large number of compositionists would agree, for instance,
tint the relationship between theory and pedagogy is inherently political, it is by no
means apparent that there is agreement with the claim tint "English teachers are engaged
in a cultural politics in which the power of students as citizens in the democratic public
sphere is at stake" and that "the aim is to make them subjects rather than the objects of
historical critique, in a critical examination of the economic, social, and political
conditions within which the signifying practices of culture take place" (in). Certainly
these are claims that are in circulation in composition and cultural studies, and Berlin and
Vivian are well-situated to nnke a contingent claim that rrnny practitioners, particularly
those aligned with liberatory pedagogy, might accept this characterization. This move,
from the consensus of their contributors to the much more speciﬁc conception of
liberatory politics, however, obscures the very contestatory ideas about the kind of
political work that cultural studies can and should do in writing instruction. Instead,
Berlin and Vivian's argument, along with those of France and F itts and Giroux, invokes
terms like "liberatory pedagogy" and "democratic politics" as the a priori and well-
accepted "aims" of composition pedagogy.

Importantly, what gets obscured in this characterization are the many institutional

and ideological challenges to this political project. For example, how does this

52

conception of the classroom address the concerns of people like Sharon Crowley for
whom what "counts as knowledge" in composition is determined by the academic
institution? How does cultural studies help address the differing perspectives about the
pragmatics of dissent from within the academic institution? The department? The social
forrrntion that helps fund the institution? While I do not want to suggest that Berlin and
Vivian must address all of the possible alternatives to their function of the writing class, I
am concerned tint they do not go far enough in addressing the speciﬁc institutional
circumstances to which, as they themselves argue, any conception of US. cultural studies
must attend.

One possible reason for the broad statements of political promise in these
' arguments is that there has been a tendency in some versions of cultural studies to ﬁnd
resistance everywhere. Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hooker Rushing, concerned with
mining the potential of cultural and rhetorical studies for critical analysis, argue that
many in cultural studies oppose all structures as oppressive and overemphasize the text as
sites of resistance. In contrast, Frentz and Rushing argue, rhetoric has been too willing to
accept dominant structures. To confront these tendencies, rhetoric and cultural studies
must view their present antipathies as a "microcosm of cultural ﬁ‘agmentation in general"
and insist that while there is nothing inherently wrong with focusing on structures,
analyses must serve the "one collective goal of both ﬁelds—namely, to build a better way
of living" (341-342).

While Frentz and Rushing are primarily concerned with critical analysis, their
conception of cultural studies here is instructive for understanding pedagogical arguments

in the contemporary institution. The tendency to View cultural studies as resistance

53

everywhere is particularly important to Frentz and Rushing as it appears to depend upon a
simplistic conception of dominant structures which they oppose. In Berlin and Vivian's
argument, cultural studies appears to be concerned with avoiding this pitfall as they stress
that "writing and reading usually are negotiated acts of discourse . . . . This activity may
result in a simple accommodation to hegemonic cultural codes, but it usually involves a
negotiated transaction and even resistance" (x). While they are careful to emphasize this
process of negotiation, the lack of attention to existing disciplinary structures, in Berlin
and Vivian, often tends to reinforce a model of the writing classroom that is consistent
with the structure of the hegemonic institution.

In his response to the essays in Left Margins, Gerald Graff stresses the limitations
of focusing on a single course "at the expense of the organization and interrelation of
courses in the curriculum" ("The Dilemma of Oppositional Pedagogy: A Response" 275).
Graff contends that attempts to nnke the composition classroom an oppositional space
create an "oppositional double bind" where instructors must be willing to accommodate
views that are conservative or else become themselves totalitarian (276). The options for
an instructor, in this case, according to Graff, are limited. Either she can deny access or
"equal time" to those who agree with dominant political formations or "dilute" their
notions of the classroom as "the free marketplace of ideas" (276). In either case,
according to Graff, the "oppositional" classroom falls short of its goals to promote radical
politics from within a free and democratic classroom.

Graffs response to this dilemma is to offer a model of classroom pedagogy that
addresses its institutional context. In response to many of the essays in Left Margins, he

rehearses his now well-known model of "teaching the conﬂicts" pedagogy designed to

54

introduce students to the "political debate in the university that enables political positions
to make sense to them" (282). For Graff, the culture wars provide such a debate and it
should be the "task of politically committed teachers . . . to make the debate a central
issue for the whole curriculum, trusting students to choose intelligently when the
competing arguments are presented to them" (282).

Graffs argument goes far in addressing the limitations of texts like Left Margins
by focusing attention on the relationship between the politics of academicians and the
broader cultural rrnnifestations of such debates. By focusing on the curriculum as
opposed to the single class, moreover, Graffs model helps address the speciﬁc location in
which writing and other forms of instruction take place, and to engage students in
political debates that concern the construction of knowledge. However, Graffs model
seems to ignore rrnny of the factors in the academic institution in favor of a speciﬁc
debate. It is not clear, for instance, how Graffs approach would address the institutional
function of the writing class as a "mode of surveillance" for dominant discourses.

Certainly, it could be argued under Graffs model that students, having been
introduced to explications of the cultural politics of language instruction, would develop
a more critical perspective of how these ﬁlter into dominant discourses. More to the
point, I think, is that Graffs formulation does little to redress the structural imbalances
that continue to place writing instruction as a skills-based course that functions to
support, rather than complicate, students' sense of social power as mediated through
social institutions. In the end, Graff's formulation would seem to focus on the concerns

of academics for students who will then fashion essays in support of this or that position.

55

One of the more heated and well-publicized attempts to put cultural studies
theories into practice in the US. academy took place at Syracuse University. The so-
called "memo-wars," named for the form of some of the more vitriolic exchanges,
demonstrate the high stakes and complex questions surrounding the politics of writing
instruction and institutional reform that are at the center of cultural studies. In an attempt
to rethink English studies in terms of critical theories, Syracuse University developed a
new curriculum in English and Textual Studies. For theorists Donald Morton and Mas‘ud
Zavarzadeh, who strenuously oppossed the the move towards textual studies, it really a
way of linking post structural theories to traditional curriculum, thereby sacriﬁcing the
materialist thrust of cultural studies. “Bourgeois institutions,” they argue, “are highly
ﬂexible and have immense powers of endurance. They obtain their ﬂexibility and their
staying power by constantly absorbing the elements of culture that oppose them; that is,
by reducing critiques to various types of reform. In other words, bourgeois institutions,
such as universities, always maintain the ideological practices needed to preserve the
hegemony of the ruling classes by constantly adapting to it . . . [and] the institution
adopts (and thus adapts to its purposes) the discourses of its adversaries” (74).

Zavarzadeh and Morton want to preserve “the notion of the ‘outside’ to the
existing system’s ‘inside’” through the concept of “disparticipation” necessary to avoid
the inevitability of resistant discourses being co-opted in service of the status quo (74).
For these theorists “disparticipation” takes the form of their own decision to boycott
committee meetings and other markers of professional citizenship, voicing their protest
through their absence. While Zavarzadeh and Morton argue for resistance from “outside”

as necessary to the radical politics of university curricular formation, they do not extend

56

their use of this concept to their discussion of cultural studies. It would seem, given their
portrayal of the university as a hegemonizing institution, that resistance fiom ‘WitMn” is
neither possible, nor desirable, as it necessarily amounts to acquiescence to the status
quo. Yet their argument for a materialist based cultural studies suggests that they do have
in mind a radical curriculum that would function from within the academy. In essence,
Zavarzadeh and Morton’s essay presents contradictory answers to the question: is a
“transformative” cultural studies possible?

In contrast to Zavarzadeh and Morton, Alan Kennedy proposes an explicit
“curricular commitment” to cultural studies as part of a wholesale refornntion of English
department curriculum. For Kennedy, cultural studies constitutes an attempt to develop
scholarship and courses that serve both the department and the broader society. Such a
program, Kennedy contends, would necessarily involve a rethinking of both literary
criticism and composition and rhetoric: “[I]f literature as an iconic object needs to be
displaced to nnke room for cultural studies, then so too does the standard course in
composition need to make room for a writing class rooted in rhetorical theory and
cultural studies” (27).

Cultural studies, for Kennedy, is useful in helping humanities educators articulate
its purpose to those “outside” the ﬁeld. This means that cultural studies needs to
articulate the values it embraces and the skills it can be said to provide its students.
Kennedy contrasts this form of institutional cultural studies with the traditional tendency
within English studies to ignore questions of values and skills and focuses instead on
reading to understand speciﬁc texts. By committing itself to the curriculum, Kennedy

means tint cultural studies enacts change ﬁom within at the same time it is able to

57

articulate clear, persuasive and practical purposes to administrators and to the public at
large. Kennedy’s approach has the beneﬁt of taking on the practical administrative side
of the intellectual question. At the same time Kennedy views his approach as an effective
way “to develop a vocabulary that will help us bridge the gap that has been evident on
occasion between rhetoric and cultural studies” (40). It is, however, not clear that
Kennedy’s formulation would avoid the kind of co-optation to which Zavardaeh and
Morton allude. Would a well-stated statement of “commitment” be persuasive to
administrators who would otherwise be suspicious of cultural studies? Perhaps, but
would such a move require cultural studies to forego its critical stance towards the
institution? We might also ask if at least some versions of cultural studies are in tension
with Kennedy’s accomodationist stance towards those resistant to it. These contributions
to cultural studies and English suggest the difficulties inherent to any attempt to explore
the convergence to two ﬁelds as vast and contested as rhetorical studies and cultural

studies.

Conclusion

In my attempt to negotiate the concern over sanctifying British cultural studies
and the British School, I have referred back to Stuart Hall's deﬁnition of cultural studies
as an "ongoing act of theoretical clariﬁcation" (4). Viewed as such, U.S. cultural studies
can look to the British School theories and institutional location as a means for a more
particularized, strategic, adaptation to the speciﬁc historical conditions of the
contemporary U.S. academy. Foucault's conception of power as strategy that is "always

already" both resistant and hegemonic, helps break down the inside/outside binary upon

58

which so many conceptions of cultural studies in the US. depend. Moreover, it helps
view the disciplinary formation of English studies as a location where power circulates
through formal and informal discourses. As such, it becomes incumbent upon scholars to
clarify and re-clarify the strategic uses to which they are putting the theoretical
assumptions of cultural studies. Cultural studies in this ﬁ'amework can be viewed as the
constantly changing site of debates over the political function of English studies and its

various ﬁelds.

59

Chapter Two

British Cultural Studies, Counterdisciplinarity and U.S. English Studies

A return to British cultural studies is one way to counter the retreat from the
questions of disciplinarity tint characterize the work in cultural studies and English in the
U.S. This chapter seeks to recover British cultural studies for scholarship and pedagogy
in the U.S. I argue tint the counterdisciplinary focus can ftlnction from "within" the
British academy and that the British school provides a useful model and theories for U.S.
composition and rhetoric to develop a counterdisciplinary orientation ﬁom within the
academy. The ﬁrst rrnjor section of this chapter entitled, "Counter disciplinarity and the
Institution of British cultural studies," places the focus on disciplinarity at the
Birmingham Center with the writings of Richard HOggart, Raymond Williams and E. P.
Thompson. I read these texts as speciﬁc responses to a class-based society as the modern
university sustains it. In the second section, "Marxism, British cultural studies and the
Question of Disciplinarity," I look at British cultural studies' use of Marxist and
postMarxist thought to challenge the disciplinary fornntion of the modern university.
These two sections lead to an exploration in the third section, "Cultural Studies and
English Studies in the U.S.," that considers the trajectory of British cultural studies for
the U.S. academy. Before developing this argument, however, it will be important to
deﬁne what I mean by British cultural studies and address the question of orthodoxy as it

pertains to the British School.

60

British Cultural Studies and the Question of Orthodoxy

Work on British cultural studies by Brantlinger and Turner has tended to focus
speciﬁc attention on its origins, particularly with respect to the work of Raymond
Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Richard Hoggart. For the purposes of this argument and
my emphasis on counterdisicplinarity, it will be important to focus on these theorists.
However, the conception of British cultural studies that I use here views the ﬁeld as a
location or "site" through which other theories emerge, nnny of which are not located in
Britain. Instead, I focus here on a strategic narrative of theories and institutions that are
characterized by the British school's concern over disciplinarity. Therefore, this narrative
not only includes theories in French Structuralism and post structtnalism; it also includes
theorists like Tony Bennett and Cary Nelson who have sought to maintain this focus.
Doing so helps develop the primary contention of this chapter: that the
counterdisicplinary focus of British cultural studies helps address the tendency, in U. S.
English studies, to ignore the disicplinary politics that circumscribe what counts as
knowledge in the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric.

In Chapter One, I argued that the concern over developing speciﬁc ﬁelds as
orthodoxy in the U.S. continues to be a primary concern for cultural studies in U.S.
English departments. This concern is inﬂuenced by the project of British cultural studies
which, as Graeme Turner has argued, deﬁnes itself, in part, through its "disruption of the
boundaries between disciplines, and through its ability to explode the category of 'the
natural—revealing the history behind those social relations we see as the products of a
neutral evolutionary process" (6). Interestingly, while the British school emerges with

this criticism of traditional orthodoxies, U.S. cultural studies focuses a good deal of

61

attention on ensuring that the British school itself does not become naturalized as an
orthodoxy.

Gayatri Spivak, voiceing concern over the inﬂuence of the British school argues
that, rather than thinking in terms of a single cultural studies, we think in terms of
multiple culture studies. Employing the term culture presurrnbly enables Spivak to
address her concern tint any formulation of culture studies adapt its theoretical
assumptions to the historical and cultural conditions of the speciﬁc locations where it is
employed (Smithson and Ruff 2-4). Thus, cultural studies in places like India, Australia,
and the United States ought to avoid at all costs simply assuming the British school
theories as some universal formulation, but as concepts that must address the
contingencies of speciﬁc historical and geographic locations. '3

As I have argued in Clnpter One, however, this concern over the hegemony of
British cultural studies has often been used to avoid questions of disciplinarity altogether.
When adapted to the U.S. institution, cultural studies often—because of its antidisciplinary
focus—is assumed not to ﬁrnction "within" the academy, or it becomes a cluster of
theories that can be selectively and seamlessly incorporated into the disciplinary structure
of the U.S. academy. Cary Nelson has been particularly critical of the latter tendency

which he contends has tended towards the de-politicization of cultural studies in the

 

'3 If it is important to consider the way cultrnal studies "translate" into another context, it is equally crucial,
as part of this process, to understand something of the speciﬁc historical and institutional conditions
shaping the production of these theories. Attempts to formulate an Indian cultural studies that borrows
theoretical concepts fiom the British School, for example, ought ﬁrst to atteld to the historical imbalances
of imperialism and the asymmetrical power relations involved in them. Such an endeavor, for example,
might address how differences in terms like disciplinarity, orthodoxy and aesthetic (to name a few) might
mean in the context of post or neo colonial institutions in Indian and how they might contrast those of the
British school. Such attempts have been particularly ﬁ'uitftll in the development of concepts like Hybridity
and lirninality.

62

U.S." For Nelson, U.S. cultural studies too often ignores the criticism of disciplinarity
and its relationship to broader social politics in order to make it "palatable at once to
granting agencies and to conservative colleagues, administrators, and politicians, but only
at the cost of blocking cultural studies ﬁ'om having any critical purchase on this nation's
social life" ("Always Already" 193). For Nelson, it is particularly important to remember
that cultural studies itself was "born in class consciousness and in critique of the
academy" ("Always Already" 192). Nelson argues to maintain a focus on the British
antecedents to U.S. cultural studies.

These arguments, however, do not necessarily mean that we either hold to some
ﬁxed notion of British cultural studies or that we jettison the theories altogether. In fact,
this very argument can be traced back to British school theorists who, as Turner suggests,
sought ﬁ'om the beginning to guard againSt a tendency to become a traditional
"discipline" itself and stressed the focus on speciﬁc institutional and social contexts in the
use of any theory. These concerns, therefore, suggest the need to be speciﬁc about the
institutional ﬁameworks out of which a speciﬁc body of theories emerges and into which
they are being brought. As Chapter One suggests, the focus on the British school has
given way to divergent theories, and we are now at the point where it is equally critical,
as Nelson points out, to clarify what we mean when we invoke the term.15

Even with these concerns over orthodoxy in mind, there are compelling reasons
to strategically recover British cultural studies for U.S. composition and rhetoric. First,

the focus on counter disciplinarity makes the British School particularly useful to the

 

'4 Ultimately, for Nelson, the issue is less a matter of ﬁxing a speciﬁc meaning (he argues that the term
itself may become obsolete) than it is important to clarify how one uses cultural studies at a historical
juncture when its association with the Birmingham project helps maintain its critical position.

63

speciﬁc contingencies of the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric in the U.S. Because of its
marginalized status within the structure of the academy, some theorists in composition
and rhetoric have looked to cultural studies to rethink practices in English. Other
theorists have drawn attention to what they perceive as the interdisciplinary focus of
composition to link it with the concerns of the British school (S. Miller). In many cases,
the focus on questions of disciplinarity has brought the two ﬁelds together. However, as I
have argued in Chapter One, often the convergence has little impact on the structure of
English studies.

Second, recent shifts in English studies in the U.S. begin by invoking, in Berlin
and Giroux, the British school and develop a conception of cultural studies as a sort of
"umbrella" term to refer to multiple practices. These moves can be regarded as both a
useﬁll theoretical reaction against the threat of orthodoxy and, importantly, a rhetorical
strategy tint ernbles theorists to avoid the thorny questions of disciplinarity. Finally, I
seek to recover a perspective fiom which to develop critical readings of the ﬁeld of
composition and rhetoric tint help move its practices towards a counterdisciplinary U.S.

cultural studies from "within" the academy.

Counter-disciplinarity and the Institution of British Cultural Studies

From the time of its inception in the 19608, the Birmingham Center was
concerned with the same question tint I have argued contemporary cultural studies in the
U. S. faces: what are the political implications of disciplinary assumptions about

knowledge? For early British school theorists, the responses to this question focused

 

'5 The focus on rhetorical theory and pedagogy in the U.S. in Chapters 4 and 5 can be viewed as two
responses to the need to develop more speciﬁc conﬁgurations of the institutions into which British cultural

primarily on class-based social divisions as they were sustained by disciplinary
formations of the British academy. As Patrick Brantlinger argues in Crusoe's Footprints,
the authors of "founding texts" in British cultural studies sought to rethink the concept of
culture from that of an object of critical scrutiny to "a category that transcends or
transgresses various disciplinary and theoretical boundaries" (3 7).

Another reason that the early British school lends itself so nicely as a model for
U. S. composition studies is that it developed as a speciﬁc response to exclusionary
tendencies in literary criticism As Berlin, Crowley, and many other theorists have
stressed, the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric has historically been deﬁned by its
relationship to literary criticism and its assumptions about language. In the early British
school, much of this early effort focused on developing alternatives to the Leavisite
tradition in literary criticism which, as Richard Hoggart, the Center's ﬁrst Director,
outlines in his inaugural address of 1963, were dominant in England at the time he and
other Center members were going through the university system (Schulrnan 1). Hoggart,
Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson were particularly interested in impacting the
academic tradition that supports distinctions between "high culture" and "mass culture"
(Turner 40). Of particular focus was the inﬂuential work of F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis,
and Denys Thomson, that assumed that literature as one form of "culture" could function
as antidote to the split between a morally superior "high culture" and a "mass culture"
characterized by its "abuse of language" and "lack of 'moral seriousness' or of aesthetic
value" (Turner 40).

Although the ﬁeld of literary criticism in the U. S. has changed dramatically over

the past twenty years (in part as a response to cultural studies), it is not difficult to see, in

 

studies engages.

65

the contemporary academy, a corrollary between the "split" between the more serious
endeavors of literary criticism. Notwithstanding Berlin and Vivian's contention tint
cultural studies in the U. S. would signal a challenge to the division between the
rhetorical and the poetic, the structure of the U. S. academy continues to rrnintain such
divisions. The association of the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric with pedagogy, student
writing, and expository writing has continued, even in light of contemporary theory, to
imply a separation from the more serious work of literary criticism. Therefore, what is
needed is an intervention that focuses on the disciplinary structure of the academy (and a
host of other institutions) itself.

The project of British cultural studies can be viewed in a similar vein, as an
intervention that sought to challenge the privilege afforded to traditional disciplines. This
project, moreover, was already underway prior to the establishment of the Center. One of
the "founding texts," Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) was published four
years prior his appointment as director of the new Center. The extent to which Hoggart's
text functioned within the British academy is clear in his strategic use of Leavisite
methods against their own conceptions of culture. Speciﬁcally, in this text, Hoggart uses
Leavisite methods for a sociological analysis that challenges their claim tint emerging
mass communications threatened to ﬁrrther degrade nnss culture through the "rnisuses of
language." In so doing, Hoggart seeks to elevate perceptions of "working class society"
as "authentic" and morally stable, in contrast to the Leavisite notion "high culture" as
morally superior (Brantlinger 46).

In Culture and Society (1958), Raymond Williams similarly seeks to challenge

the traditional concepts of culture as the Leavisites assumed them. Like Hoggart,

66

Williams employs careﬁrl textual analysis as a means to "reading" the social. Williams'
text was especially Signiﬁcant because of its radical cinllenge to the universality of the
term "culture" itself. Through a type of historical etymology of the terrn's various uses,
Williams argues that what culture "means" shifts in response to signiﬁcant changes in
socio-econornic conditions ﬁ'om the industrial revolution to the 19505. Moreover,
Williams' analysis begins to focus directly on the relationship between traditional
disciplinary orthodoxys, supported by different cultural spheres, and the maintenance of
social power.

Finally, in The Making of the English Working Class (1964), E. P. Thompson,
directs this concern over class divisions sustained by assumptions about culture to the
ﬁeld of history. Like Hoggart and Williams, Thompson sought to employ traditional
methods to reread British cultural politics in a way that challenges the universality of
cultural divisions between mass and high cultural. In particular, Thompson's work
overturns the traditional and dominant narrative of the British working class as an
"automatic and passive" working class culture (Mukerji and Schudson 13) "by advancing
a notion of a 'common culture'" (Schulman 4).

There are some obvious differences between the focus on class in the British
school and the concerns of contemporary composition and rhetoric in the U. S. Although
class continues to be an important issue, it is has not, in the last thirty years, had the kind
of inﬂuence on scholarship in the U. S. tint it has in Britain. Over the years since the
early British school texts were published, there has, however, been a good deal of
criticism of the emphasis on class-based assumptions we see in Hoggart's assertion of an

"authentic" working class culture and Thompson's notion of a "common culture."

67

Much like contemporary U. S. cultural studies, moreover, these early works often
rely on traditional academic formulations, like Leavisite methods of literary analysis. As
a result, they tend to maintain some of the problematic assumptions about culture that
later theorists would critique. However, these early works are remarkable to the extent
that they begin to focus on how speciﬁc aesthetic, social, or historical objects, are
ultimately underwritten by the traditional disciplines to which they are associated.
Thompson's critique of English history, for example, is noteworthy in its presentation of
an alternative reading of "mass culture." Its critical force, however, becomes much more
pronounced as it suggests that the ﬁeld of history itself has, itself, been one of the
primary means through which the high culture/ low culture split has been maintained.

Williams' historical analysis of the concept of culture as, alternately, a speciﬁc
body of knowledge, a group of individuals, class-based distinctions, and a "structure of
feeling" suggests that they are not the timeless referents upon which individuals can be
separated into different spheres. The claim that the Center itself, as an anti- or counter-
disciplinary institution maintaining a distance from the British academy, however,
deserves some clariﬁcation. Concerned with the hegemony of the British academy that,
like the modern U.S. university, focuses on separate objects of culture (rather than
interrelated processes), the British school clearly sought to maintain a critical distance
from the academy. Yet emerging as it did in response to the speciﬁc social, institutional
and material conditions of 1960s England, the British School also maintained a critical
position within the academic discourse of the time. In fact, as the project develops,

through its critique of Marxism, the questions about critical perspective become more

68

pressing to the British School, as they demonstrate that there is no "outside" from which
to establish a critical perspective. '6

The focus on Marxism constitutes one of the primary differences between
contemporary cultural studies in U. S. composition and rhetoric and the British school.
Any attempt to draw on British cultural studies for composition and rhetoric, therefore,

beneﬁts ﬁ'om attention to the theoretical developments of Marxism and New Marxism.

British Cultural Studies, Marxism and the Question of Disciplinarity

One interesting and irnportant Similarity between British cultural studies in its
emergence as a Center and U.S. cultural studies in composition and rhetoric is their
mutual focus on praxis. Both are concerned with the practical, social implications of
bringing theory into practice—particularly through a form of institutional arnlysis that
looks at the function of the academy in terms of its cultural politics. To gain a better
understanding of early cultural studies' relationship to its speciﬁc and academic context,
and what lessons they may hold for U.S. composition and rhetoric, therefore, it is
important to understand that these texts were also attempts to adapt theoretical
arguments, in structural and cultural Marxism, to the Speciﬁc institutions of the British
academy. In other words, the "founding texts" are both responses to, and strategic
interventions, in two Western institutions: the British academy and Marxist social theory.

It is particularly important to see the British school's contention that culture is "a
category that transcends or transgresses various disciplinary and theoretical boundaries"

(Turner 37) as a response to the limitations of Orthodoxy or early Marxism. In early

 

'6 It may also be instructive, for instance, to consider how our understanding of cultural studies might be
shaped by attention to the fact that the founders come from working class backgrounds and that Williams

69

Marxism, culture itself is equivalent to the "superstructure" which Marx and Engels argue
is a reﬂex response to a single determinant, the modes of production or "base." British
cultural studies challenges this monodeterministic model. One of the problems which the
British School sought to address is that, in this conception of orthodox Marxism, there is
"no way out" of the effects of class-based economic systems. Marxism with its focus on
class determination was particularly well-suited for Williams, Hoggart and others, who
were primarily focused on class inequalities in Britain. The problem was that early
Marxism was inconsistent with Williams' developing argument tint culture itself was a
complex and often contradictory set of practices that was often determined by factors
which could not be reduced to class. Of primary concern for all of the founding texts, for
example, was the impact of British nationalism in the formation of identities along lines
of "mass" and "high" culture. If, as early Marxism suggests, the individual's location
within the modes of production ultimately shaped their sense of identity, then how could
we explain the emergence of subcultures that were built around an idealized notion of
British traditions?

Perhaps a more pressing concern for Williams and the founder of the Birmingham
Center was the assumption in most formulations of Marxism: tint historic change was
ultimately a ﬁtnction of historical processes that were outside the control of individual
practices. Historical materialism in the Marxist conception held the problematic
assumption that change occurred not through slow developments, but through forms of
social revolution that unseated dominant social formations. The reliance on a Marxist
teleology that fashioned these changes in terms of historical epochs determined by the

control of capital—ﬁom feudalism, to capitalism to socialism—moreover, seriously

 

and Hoggart taught in adult education programs.

70

undermined the role of the critical intellectual who sought to explicate social
phenomenon as a form of political praxis.

In this formulation, distinctions between different objects of study, like literature
and anthropology as well as the intellectual's attempt to demonstrate their function in
dominant social politics are subordinated to a focus on a single determinant: control of
capital. In the end, they are all ultimately ideological obfuscation or "false
consciousness." British cultural studies, however, takes up attempts to rethink this early
model that were already being addressed in the Frankfurt school and which would
develop through their convergence with structuralism and poststructuralism to better
develop an understanding of the role tint disciplinary institutions like the academy played
in the maintenance of social formations.

Structuralism is particularly important to this move as it provides the necessary
link between the analysis of language and the reading of culture. The science of signs
developed by Saussure, semiotics, is particularly inﬂuential to British cultural studies
because it provides the necessary link between language and other meaning-producing
systems. Assuming that all meaning is arbitrary (and therefore negotiated) in the
relationship between the signiﬁer and the signiﬁed, semiotics provides the arnlytical
approach through which Marxists would come to challenge the notion that the separate
spheres of knowledge upon which the modern university is based can each be understood
as cultural epiphenomenon to the control of capital. Graeme Turner stresses the
irnportance of semiotics for cultural studies' rethinking of early Marxism tint "supplies us

With a terminology and a conceptual ﬂame that enables the analysis of non-linguistic

71

Signs. For this reason alone, semiotics has become part of the vocabulary of cultural
studies" (21).

As Turner suggests, cultural studies' attempt to destabilize the relationship
between separate spheres of knowledge is dependent upon understanding the relationship
between linguistic analysis and the other systems that were the basis of different
disciplines:

[Saussure] argues tint the principles which structure the linguistic systems
can also be seen to organize other kinds of communication systems—not
only writing, but also non-linguistic systems . . . . The reasons for its
attractions [to other disciplines] are pretty clear. Langlage is a signifying
system that can be seen to be closely ordered, structured, and thus can be
rigorously examined and ultimately understood; conversely, it is also a
means of 'expression' tint is not entirely mechanistic in its functions but
allows for a range of variant possibilities. Saussure's system thus
acknowledges or recognizes the power of determining, controlling
structure (analogous to Iangue), as well as the speciﬁc, partly 'free',
individualized instance (analogous to parole). It offers enormous
possibilities for the analysis of cultural systems that are not, strictly
speaking, language, but that work like languages. (15)

In providing Marxists a ﬁ'amework that links the study of language, literature and
rhetoric to other forms of meaning-making, Saussurean semiotics provided the means for
focusing on the relationship between language systems as the traditional focus of

linguistics and other spheres of knowledge in the modern university. This inﬂuence is

72

seen in the anthropological work of Levi-Strauss; Roland Barthes' "readings" of ritual
practices in Western societies in Mythologies; Lacan's psychoanalysis based on reading
the unconscious as a Sign system; and, most inﬂuential for British cultural studies, Louis
Althusser's structural Marxist analysis of social systems.

Althusserian structuralism exerted a particularly strong inﬂuence on British
culttnal studies' response to orthodox Marxism and its rethinking of the disciplinary
fornntions tint were subsumed under the concept of superstructure/culture. Employing
structural linguistics, Althusser sought to develop Marxist concepts of "base" and
"superstructure" into a discussion of the speciﬁc ways tint the individual comes to see
his/her "lived relations to the real." In so doing, Althusser introduces concepts of
Ideological State Apparatuses, interpellation, and overdeterrnination, and signiﬁcantly
complicates the Marxist understanding of the complex processes through which the
superstructure can be said to respond to material conditions.

Althusser’s focus on the importance of the ISAS, for instance, signiﬁcantly
focuses the direction of Marxist criticism on the institutions through which social power
and individual consciousness are mediated. In contrast to early Marxist formulations tint
maintained a fairly undifferentiated conception of "superstructure," Althusser focuses on
how different institutions—religion, education, and family—participate in the fornntion of
individual subjects. Althusser, in contrast to orthodox Marxism, supplies language for
understanding the complex and often contradictory processes through which these
apparatuses operate on the individual. Moreover, Althusser's argument for Education as
the “most important” of the ISA’s directs critical attention to the institutions, the schools

and universities, as the mechanisms through which dominant ideas become naturalized.

73

Thus, the academic intellectual in Althusserian structuralism could explicate the
university's function in social politics.

Whereas the Marxist conception of superstructure often rennins undifferentiated,
in Althusser's formulation it is a Site of contestation between the interests of different
apparatuses. For example, while the educational system may present concepts like
science or history as the foundations from which the individual sees his/her rightﬁll place
in a social formation, a religious organization might aver that all such explanations be
ultimately subordirnted to the will of God and that too great a reliance on science can
ultimately lead the subject away ﬁom his/her path towards salvation.

In contrast to the monodetermination of orthodox Marxism, Althusser introduces
the concept of multiple determinants or overdeterrnination that stresses the multiple,
contradictory ideologies through which the subject comes to see him/her self in relation
to nnterial conditions. Moreover, Althusser's use of "interpellation" as the process
through which the individual comes to see him/herself as "hailed" by these various
apparatuses, signiﬁcantly complicates orthodox Marxism. The concept of interpellation,
borrowed ﬁ'om Lacan, assumes a much more complex process of perception through
which the subject comes to see him/herself.

Althusser's work, while signiﬁcantly developing the orthodox Marxist model in
ways that are important for thinking about disciplinary fornntions, ultimately does
maintain many of the problems of it. Even though multiple, contradictory apparatuses
overdetermine the individual, for instance, he/she is ultimately subject to ideology as
"false consciousness" that reinscribes the notion that individual consciousness is

determined by his/her relationship to dominant modes of production. Moreover, in

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developing a social model that represents a total system tint can be studied empirically,
Althusser's model maintains the original Marxist notion that historical change occurs
from somewhere "outside" the system. In other words, although the ISA'S may function
in contradictory ways, in the end, as "state apparatuses," they ultimately support the
dominant social formation and its uses of capital. There is, therefore, no room ﬁom
within the system to effect signiﬁcant change,“ since individuals are ultimately
overdetermined to accept the naturalized conditions of their existence.

It is this model that Williams draws on and challenges in his focus on cultural
processes. In particular, Williams challenges Althusser’s reliance on a totalizing social
structure that is historically determined. Because there is nothing within the structure to
effect social change, nothing but a revolution in consciousneSs will change a social
structure. The fact tlnt ideological apparatuses that serve to create an illusionary sense of
reality maintain the existing order, however, makes it difficult to understand how a
moment of consciousness might emerge for a revolution.

In contrast, culturalists, according to Turner, "retained a stronger sense of the
power of human agency against history and ideology" (29). Williams is concerned with

developing an understanding of the historical shifts and ﬁssures that contribute to social
change. Williams focuses on critical concepts, or key words, as they change over time in
response to multiple determinants.

In contrast to Althusser, for whom change in the structure is ultimately dependent
upon some agent outside the structure itself—namely History in the classical Marxist
teleology—Williams argues that individual experience and imagination help produce

change. Given their emphasis on human agency, culturalists, in contrast, would focus on

75

those texts and ideas which were local and "parochial" as the ones which provided the
most indication of resistance to dominant structures.

Implicit in the structuralist/culturalist debates are different uses of Saussurean
linguistics that inve important implications for the way British cultural studies develops
its critique of all systems through which knowledge is produced. Althusser uses
Saussure's Langue to read social formations as static totalizing systems. The
conventional objects of academic inquiry like society, culture, and literature maintain
their separate status, based on the types of systems they reﬂect. As a result, moreover,
Althusser’s scientiﬁc approach assumes Saussure’s synchronic conception of language
which isolates the components of a particular system at a speciﬁc time. In contrast,
Williams' etymological analysis, reﬂected in foundational British school texts like
Culture and Society, Key Words, and Marxism and Literature, argues strongly for the
importance of a diachronic model which, in linguistics, looks for changes in language
over time (Abrams 102).

The Marxist telos implicit in many formulations of Althusser's theories, however,
signiﬁcantly limits the effect of such efforts.17 In other words, since all actions are
ultimately determined by the control of capital, there is no room in this conception of
Althusserian structuralism for the critical intellectual to develop an effective critique of
the institution and its function within the dominant fornntion. Moreover, in this
conception of Althusserian Structuralism, the question of disciplinarity becomes

subsumed under the force of history. Since all forms of critique are ultimately to be

 

'7 At this point it is critical to make a distinction between the different types of readings of Althusserian
Structuralism. While the structrualist/culttnalist debates assume a mechanical deterministic model of social
power, this is often based on a reductive reading of Althusser’s theories. As Hall’s reading of the debates

76

shaped by forces outside the I SAs, historical evolution, it is reasonable to question the
efﬁcacy of any interrogation of existing disciplinary models.

In contrast, the culturalist school that was inﬂuenced by early British theorists like
Williams focuses the direction of Marxist criticism to the complex historical processes
through which individual consciousness is mediated by the institution. Accepting
Althusser’s conception of the ISA and the critical importance of education as a
mechanisms through which dominant ideas become naturalized, Williams assumes that
such processes are always being negotiated in a continual process of struggle.
Irrrportantly, Williams’ focus on the historic shifts in meaning as a means to unsettle
naturalized assumptions about what counts as knowledge tends suggests that critical
importance of rereading the terms upon which dominant structure is based. This is the
assumption that informs Williams’ explication of culture itselfas a category tint
functions ideologically to sustain speciﬁc social formations. But as Williams argues in
Culture and Society, such terms are always involved in complex processes of
renegotiation.

Historicizing "culture" in this way enables Williams to challenge its use in
anthropology, literary analysis and sociology as an object that can be studied empirically
as epiphenomenon of speciﬁc economic developments. In Williams' more complex
conception, culture

was not a response to the new methods of production, the new Industry,
alone. It was concerned, beyond these, with the new kinds of personal and

social relationship: again, both as a recognition of practical separation and

 

later in this chapter suggests, it is possible to read a much more complex conception of social formations in
Althusser’s theories.

77

as an emphasis of alternatives. The idea of culture would be simpler if it
had been a response to industrialism alone, but it was also, quite evidently,
a response to the new political and social developments, to Democracy.
(Introduction xviii)

Culture, for Williams, is not reducible to a speciﬁc set of economic
circumstances, and therefore cannot be "known" as a ﬁlnction of a single, economic,
determinant. Moreover, ill Williams' consideration, culture becomes a point of mediation
that includes the complex interactions of material, social and personal relationships. It is
not difﬁcult to see, in this critique, how Williams’ work inﬂuences the British school’s
focus on disciplinary fornntion. After explicating culture as historically contingent,
Williams takes a similar tack to demonstrate denaturalized terms like aesthetics and
literature that have become naturalized in the contemporary academy. Althusser expands
Marx’s early formulation to focus on the ISAS, interpellation, and overdetermination. In
British cultural studies, these concepts gain critical purchase as they are incorporated into
Williams' insistence upon historicizing the processes through which knowledge is
mediated to support and resist existing social formations.

This focus on the institution, particularly as it pertains to the academy, provides a
particularly useful line of convergence between British cultural studies and U. S.
composition and rhetoric. Recent scholarship in social epistemic rhetorics, in particular,
focuses attention on the educational institution (read apparatus) as a primary factor in the
construction of identies. Yet the relationship between Althusser's conception of
education as an ISA, disciplinary formations, and individual consciousness becomes

much more developed through its engagement with structuralism and poststructuralism.

78

Semiotics, Poststructuralism and the Postdisciplinary Subject

Stuart Hall's attempt to resolve the impasse between classical, structuralist and
cultural Marxist notions involves a critique of the notion of determination upon which
disciplinary fornntions are based. Hall is critical of the classical Marxist assumption that
there is a "necessary correspondence" between the social structure and individual
consciousness. In contrast, Hall draws on post structuralists Paul Hirst and Michel
Foucault, who emphasize the indeterminacy of all language systems, to assert a
"necessary non-correspondence." This concern over the correspondence, or lack thereof,
between social formations and individual consciousness has important implications for
the modem university structure which assumes a similar (to classical Marxist)
correspondence between the university as one institutional state apparatus and what
individuals perceive about their social station. In classical and structural Marxists, this
relationship would hold that the social formation, mediated by academic ﬁelds like
literary criticism, can predictably affect the way individuals see themselves. The basis of
this necessary correspondence, however, is found in the relationship between modes of
production and superstructural texts.

In unsettling this correspondence, Hall assumes no foundation—whether it be
natural, universal or transcendent—that determines the relationship between a particular
ideological discourse and the social structure. Instead, Hall argues that meaning is a
function of "historical articulation"—a historically speciﬁc signiﬁcation tint relates
consciousness to social struggle and practice. Incorporating Althusser's notions of
interpellation, Hall suggests that consciousness is constitutive of multiple subject

positions that depend upon their historical context in which the individual in

79

interpellated. Ideology, Hall states, involves "historical articulations between forms of
consciousness and forms of practice or struggle, it is a complex web of meaning and
discourse" ("Signiﬁcation" 112). Because language is already "inscribed with ideology,"
what is important is the "form" that a discourse takes in relation to the historically
situated struggle for cultural hegemony. Consequently, the relationship between textual
practices to the structures of dominance will be different in the different contexts. Hall
notes, for example, how his own subject position as a Black man "means" different
things, based upon the historical context in which "blackness" is articulated. In England
the term will have different meanings—different historical traces—tlnn it does in Jamaica
("Signiﬁcation" 1 12-14).

The multiple contradictory subject positions involved in the negotiations over what
counts as knowledge, moreover, participate in hegemonic processes which assume a
necessarily ﬂuid conception of social processes. Jackson Lears describes these processes
ill terms of Gramsci's notion of hegemony in which what counts as everyday knowledge
or common sense, Lears argues, is not "a static, closed system of ruling-class
domination. Rather, it is a society in constant process, where the creation of
counterhegemonies rennins a live option" ( 371).

In this framework there are no transcendent objects to which the empirical study
of literature, anthropology, or sociology, for example, can by dint of scientiﬁc
examination necessarily uncover or explicate. Instead, traditional Spheres of knowledge
are themselves ideological assumptions that must be regarded in the context of broader
cultural struggles for power. As Lears suggests, these negotiations are hegemonic in the

sense that

80

a given group or class, as it develops in the economic sphere, ﬁnds some
values more congenial than others, more resonant with its own everyday
experience. Selectively refashioning the available spontaneous philosophy,
a group may develop its own particular world view—an ideology that
cements it into what Grarnsci called a 'historical bloc' possessing both the
cultural and economic solidarity. (372)

In contrast to the traditional fornntion of the modern university with its emphasis
on the essential differences between different spheres of knowledge, Hall's
understanding of social fornntions as historically articulated "blocs" focuses on the
relationships between particular "world views." In the context of the contemporary
academy, this means that rather than maintaining the differences between history and
literature, for instance, it is important to locate the "world views" implicit ill them as
mechanisms of ideological transmission that are constantly shifting in efforts to maintain
a speciﬁc "historic bloc."

These assumptions demonstrate the ﬂuidity of terms like culture, literature, and
society, that were formerly assumed to reference static objects which could be studied
empirically. Hall's notion of historical articulation, like Williams' etymological studies,
informs the project of British cultural studies over the last thirty years as primarily
concerned with unsettling naturalized concepts by demonstrating their investment in
power relations.

Thinking of ideology as a "web of discourses" where there are no clear
distinctions between cultural spheres, moreover, argues for the importance of studying

all textual practices ill relation to their speciﬁc, local and historical contexts. As Tony

81

Bennett argues regarding Gramsci's hegemony, "the part played by the most taken-for
granted, sedimented cultural aspects of everyday life are crucially implicated in the
processes whereby hegemony is fought for, won, lost, resisted" (xvi).

Bennett and Hall's views demonstrate an interesting line of development in the

British School ﬁ'om the foundational texts of Hoggart and Thompson. The developments
in cultural studies were dependent upon a conception of the "text" as an ideology that was
not dependent upon separate and autonomous cultural spheres. Such a shift, moreover,
came not coincidentally with the willingness by Hall and others to contest the primacy of
the uniﬁed and autonomous bourgeois subject. It is important, however, to acknowledge
the ﬁll] impact of the ﬁagmentation of the subject to include the aesthetic, historical and
cultural subjects.

The subtext of the historical shifts in cultural studies, therefore, is a radical
critique of subjectivity. As Hall and Bennett demonstrate, once the veil has been lifted
ﬁ'om this subject, the constructedness of literature (and all forms of culture) is revealed
and there is little argument left for an aesthetics removed ﬁ'om the everyday.
Consequently, the entire concept of " literature" is being rethought in ways that parallel a
Shift in conceptions of culture and ideology. When cultural spheres are denaturalized,
they become part of the "web of discourses," the meanings of which are indeterminate
except as "historical articulations." This does not mean, hoWever, that certain forms of
art cease to please or that all are the same. It simply argues that the distinctions between
cultural artifacts are invested ill ideological struggles that are constitutive of the struggle

for cultural hegemony.

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Cultural Studies and English Studies in the U.S.

In one sense, therefore, it seems that British cultural studies would be an easy
match for U.S. composition and rhetoric. In much the same way that the British school
emerges through criticism of the Leavisite, contemporary composition and rhetoric have
been inﬂuenced by the challenges to American New Criticism. Moreover, the focus in
British cultural studies on the interelationship between the academic institution,
disciplinary formations and language would appear to make it particularly useful for the
U.S.

In U.S. English studies the borders between the ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition
and literary criticism were sustained by the New Critical movement that arose during and
after World War II. Headed by Cleanth Brooks, John Crow Ransom, and inﬂuenced by
the writings of T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, this movement was particularly concerned
with insulating the text from the effects all contexts. New Criticism, like the Leavisite
tradition, therefore, offered an interesting mixture of cultural elitism and scientism. The
critic was to be concerned with establishing literary value based upon the text itself. New
Criticism emphasized that which rrnde the "poem a poem and not some other thing."
Removing the text ﬁom its historical and cultural context argued for its universality
based on the criteria of complexity and cohesion. The speciﬁc attributes that constituted
this type of text, moreover, were ambiguity, paradox and irony. The effect of New
Criticism on literary analysis in America was to argue for literary value by reading a text
for these attributes. From the 19303 on, there was a proliferation of readings of canonized
texts tint sought to establish their value by locating these attributes in them. Importantly,

American New Criticism disavows historical and contextual analysis with the rhetorical

83

gesture, articulated by Wismatt and Beardsley in 1946 as the "intentional fallacy." This
"fallacy" is the "error of interpreting and evaluating a literary work by reference to
evidence, outside the text itself" (Abrams 90).

The nationalist impulses of New Criticism were clearly at odds with the
developments in structuralism and post structuralism. For one thing, New Criticism was
American and had a particular tradition of scholars who were ensconced in literary
institutions. In addition, the "close reading" of speciﬁc texts was a particularly
manageable form of intellectual activity for both the post war American student and
professor. This was an important consideration, given the large numbers of G.I.s who
ﬂooded the campuses after World War 11. Perhaps the primary concern in American
literary circles was the apparent affinities between structuralism and Marxist conceptions
of social dominance.

As Chapter One has suggested, however, this engagement has been limited by the
elimination of the question of disciplinarity in English studies. This elimination,
ironically, has been reinforced by the interest in composition and rhetoric in establishing
academic legitimacy as a discipline. As a way to better understand the limitations of this
disciplinary concern in composition and rhetoric, therefore, the next chapter focuses on
debates over the uses of literature in the writing class, to dramatize how

counterdisciplinary cultural studies might help intervene.

84

Chapter Three
Framing the Question, Questioning the Frame: Cultural Studies, Disciplinarity and

the Debates over Appropriateness of Literature in Composition and Rhetoric

At the beginning of each class that I teach in literature, composition or
interdisciplinary courses, I ask students to discuss what they like to read. I have done this
for several years now, and I can't really recall why I started to do it, except perhaps as
some kind of logical icebreaker to a course tint involves reading and writing. Depending
on how I have ﬂamed the question, I have received vastly different responses. If I. simply
ask students to introduce themselves and say what they like to read, they will often offer
up a series of familiar names like Morrison, Dickens, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Walker,
and so on. Mixed into the listing, some students will offer up interests in popular novels
(Clancy, Grisham, King) and rrngazines (Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, and M).

When, however, I begin the course by discussing my penchant for reading true
crime books, or how I like to go to blockbuster movies (I avoid the term "ﬁlms"), I have
perhaps not surprisingly tended to get different responses. In these cases students tend to
answer as if I had asked what they like to read in terms of what they (and not the
academy) privilege. Consequently, students provide a lot fewer references to Julius
Caesar and Hamlet, and a good deal more Danielle Steele and John Grisharn. Therefore,
when I preface the discussion by presenting my own interest in a genre that is coded non-
literary in the traditional conception of the term "literary," students are much more likely

to present a much wider variety of popular texts.

85

This exercise is a constant reminder to me that students in my English classes
have their own ideas about "high" and "low" cultural texts and that the way we ﬂame
questions about what counts as knowledge has an important impact on how students
situate themselves in relation to different types of texts.18 When I did not preface my
question with information about what I liked, students tended to answer as if I'd asked,
what do you like tint you think the academy values? However, my admission regarding
my own interests in reading other types of ﬁction and non-ﬁction seemed to give some
level of validity to what students already like to read. Ultimately this preliminary activity
lead to a discussion about different assumptions about texts, how they are coded, what
the academy privileges, and how individuals view their relationship to these texts.
Because of these classroom encounters, I have come to the conclusion that not only can
"literature" be used in composition studies, it should be used. ‘9

In this chapter I will explore the recent controversial debates regarding the
"appropriateness of literature in composition," (the so-called "Tate-Lindemann debates")
to demonstrate how cultlual studies can intervene in discourses about cruriculum and
pedagogy.20 First, I will contend that these debates are indicative of the limitations of the

"disciplinary drive" in composition and rhetoric.21 Second, I will employ cultural studies

 

'8 Although I am focusing hue on the writing class, the concerns over how the class is ﬂamed are always
present ill any classroom.

'9 Literature as 1 am using me term hue refers to both imaginative ﬁction and an institution with a
problematic history. This deﬁnition is contrasted to the humanist conception of lituattue ill the debates I
analyze in this chapter.

2° This notion of cultural studies draws on British cultural studies and the emphasis on counter
disciplinarity that is developed in Chapter Two.

2' I do not mean to assert that the wrrcern over disciplinarity that we see in the work of Sharon Crowley,
Erika Lindernann and many others is somehow incorrect or misguided. In fact, I readily acknowledge that
the hard-fought battles over composition's disciplinary standing have cleared a space for the kinds of
arguments I am making hue. However, in analyzing these speciﬁc debates over "lituature in
composition," I am calling into questionuby looking at one of the "blind spots" caused by this drive for
disciplinarity-the merits of maintaining this disciplinary drive today. In other words, 1 am assuming that

86

theories to reconsider how literature can and, I argue, ought to be used in the writing
classroom.

Doing so, I assume, requires that compositionists extend the conversation beyond
the troubled historical relationship with literary criticism that is documented in the works
of Berlin, Crowley, Scholes, France and many others. While composition emerged as an
academic discipline separate ﬂom literary criticism, the division between the two
intellectual and institutional areas has become so pronounced that it often obscures some
of the promising points of intersection between them. One way to begin to disrupt these
disciplinary tendencies, I believe, is through an analysis of the problematic ways
literature and critical theory are characterized in such debates. Of particular relevance to
this dissertation is the lack of attention, in these debates, to the inﬂuence of
counterdisciplinary notions of cultural studies in rethinking practices in composition and
rhetoric. This elision is partially a function of the way the debates are ﬂamed in the ﬁrst

place.

Framing the Question

These so-called "Tate-Lindemann debates" over the "appropriateness of literature
in composition," began in the March 1993 issue of College English. They began with
Gary Tate and Erika Lindenlann, two well-known ﬁgures in composition and rhetoric,
presenting antithetical responses to the question, is literature appropriate to composition?
Lindernann argues tint literature is an unnecessary distraction in courses designed to help

students in academic and professional discourse. Literature, she argues, is inconsistent

 

we are at a strategic point where composition and rhetoric may be better-suited to a countudisciplinary
perspective.

87

with a course that "offers guided practice in reading and writing the discourses of the
academy and the professions" (312). Gary Tate, in contrast, cautions against
Lindemann’s use of “academic discourse” as the objective of the writing course. He
argues that literature serves composition because it helps students "enter and participate
in conversations outside the academy, as they struggle to ﬁgure out how to live their lives
. . . how to vote and love and survive, how to respond to change and diversity and death
and oppression and freedom” (320).

Tate and Lindemann, who later expressed surprise that their discussion would
elicit the kinds of controversy it has, seem to have tapped into a concern that is on the
mind of nnny in composition. In addition to the four comments that accompanied this
issue of College English, the discussion ins been taken up in a series of articles, a book
and, doubtless, in nnny discussions on college campuses around the country. But why so
much attention to a question that many in composition, like Erwin Steinberg, believe has
been settled a long time ago? What is really at stake in debates over whether composition
teachers use literature, classical rhetoric or some other form of text? Sharon Crowley
argues that the answer to this question is institutional legitimacy. Debates over literature
in composition, she suggests, have less to do with the potential or limitations of
imaginative ﬁction for writing classes “than they are a cover or code for a much larger
institutional issue: the status relation between composition and literature within English
departments” (2 1).

Crowley's position seems warranted if we accept, as she does, Steinberg's
contention that "literature has not had a secure place in composition since at least the

1930s" (2). If, she argues, this is the case, then we can learn a good deal ﬂom these

88

debates about how composition views its practices, its institutional relationship to literary
criticism and even the status of the ﬂeshmen writing class. Crowley makes the case
persuasively in Composition in the University, a text at least as controversial as the Tate-
Lindemann debates in its call for the elimination of the required writing course.

What if, however, we are not so willing to accept the premise that literature has
been effectively jettisoned ﬂom composition? What if the debates over literature are, at
least in part, really about literature and its effectiveness or lack of effectiveness for
freshmen composition? At the very least, this perspective calls for a counter-reading of
debates themselves to seek out some understanding of why so many people seem to agree
that literature has been effectively eliminated. Moreover, it would, it seems to me,
require more attention (than is provided in the debates) to what we mean by terms like
literature and literary theory.

This is the perspective I have taken in my reading of the debates, in part because I
have found myself wondering at the numbers, proffered by Tate, Steinberg and others,
that suggest that, since at least the 1960s, only about one in ﬁve composition courses has
even used literature. My experiences teaching a number of writing courses (if only on
two campuses) suggests tint this is not the case. Moreover, a brief glance at the dozen or
so rhetorics on my bookshelves published in the last decade suggests that literature
continues to be included in books that are used in composition. At the same time,
however, I have to acknowledge, along with Steinberg, Crowley and others, tint I do not
see much discussion of literature at the CCCCS conference. In fact, I can recall feeling

somewhat embarrassed as a presenter at the Michigan College English Association

89

conference some years back that mine was the only paper that included a critical reading
of a literary text.

This discrepancy between what I've seen in conferences and journals and what I
have experienced as a graduate student in English studies, I will argue, does ultimately
suggest that the literature question has more to do with what is taught than it has to do
with the "status relations." In contrast to Crowley and others who assume tint when
compositionists talk about literature they refer to the tradition of literary humanism,
however, I am more concerned with what these debates tell us about what can be said in
composition and rhetoric. My purpose in so doing, however, has less to do with
supporting my own use of literature in writing than it is informed by my interest in the
potential and limitations of cultural studies in composition.

My use of literature, which is based on British cultural studies, is based on the
assumption that terms like literature, rhetoric, humanism and a host of related concepts
circulate in our society in ways that have important implications for power relations. In
this sense, composition and rhetoric, while disassociated ﬂom literary humanism, is
intimately concerned with the institution of English studies, which continues to present
complex and contradictory notions of terms like poetics and rhetoric. Moreover, I accept
the assumption of early British School theorists like Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson,
that the absence of critical dialogue on questions of aesthetics and the like tends towards
naturalizing them. Ultimately, then, my focus on the Tate-Lindemann debates, and the
attention] give to Crowley's argument in this and the following chapter, are directed at
better understanding the speciﬁc institutional context ill which cultural studies engages

composition and literature.

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These debates over literature in composition actually preclude discussions of
cultural studies and the literary as social text. One of the problems is that historical
narratives that position composition in diametrical opposition to literary humanism ﬂame
these debates. Speciﬁcally, I will argue that these debates reveal a tendency to ﬂame the
concerns and practices in composition as antithetical to those of literature. I will
conclude, ﬁnally, that what is needed is a conception of the literary in composition
studies as an institutional set of practices with historically indicated conventions and

social effects.

Composing Histories of the Literary

The early contributions to the Tate-Lindemann debates were followed by a series
of responses ﬂom scholars who used them as a forum for advocating a speciﬁc role of
composition, based on its historical, institutional relationship with literary criticism.
Most participants in the debate focused particular attention on the period following the
19508 as the point when literature started to be replaced by classical rhetoric.
Simultaneous to this moment was the emergence of the CCCCs, and the proliferation of
student populations on college campuses all over the country. Thus, the removal of
literature, according to these scholars, was intimately connected to the emergence of
composition as a separate academic discipline separate, in ﬁlndamental ways, ﬂom the
study of literature.

Not only do the debates over literature in composition reﬂect this narrative, they
also suggest speciﬁc reasons for the perceived shift away ﬂom literature in the post-war

era. Tate, for instance, offers the most controversial insight with his assertion attributing

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the elimination of literature to over-enthusiastic “Rhetoric Police" who were responding
to poor teaching practices in 19608 and 703 (318). Gregory Jay oﬂ‘ers a similar if less
controversial assessment tint the 19605 saw the elimination of literature ill large part
because of the “disciplinary drive” within composition (675). And Steinberg adds that the
removal of literature was inﬂuenced by post-war demographics where academics had to
contend with a large infusion of underprepared students. Sharon Crowley sums these
positions up nicely in her assessment tint literature was removed ﬂom composition
because of a combination of demographic, theoretical and institutional factors.

In reading these narratives, I was struck by what I would characterize as a
problematic similarity despite the differences. Although they attribute the change to
different factors and certainly advance different positions about what it should mean for
composition today, the scholars in this debate each tends to accept that literature was
removed somewhere around the middle of the century. Based on a closer reading of
these debates, however, I have come to view these Similarities as the effect of
problematic assumptions about what constitutes literature, how practices in composition

change, and the limitations of a grand historical narrative in composition studies.

Problems with Debates

As I have suggested, these debates too often assume a uniform, static conception
of literature that does little to advance our understanding of how it has continued to
impact composition studies in fornnl and informal ways. One reason for this limited
perspective is that the debates are, ﬂom the outset, ﬂamed in terms of an oppositional

discourse between Lindemann’s and Tate's positions. In asserting his argument

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speciﬁcally for literary humanism, Tate may have helped set the parameters of the
discussion. In any case, it is difficult to assess, in Lindemann's response, exactly what
She means when she invokes "imaginative literature."

Steinberg, however, presents a much more developed sense of what he means.
Through his attacks on Richard Lanham it becomes clear that when he refers to literature
he is referring to a hunnnist conception of it. For example, Steinberg takes Lanham to
task for viewing what he characterizes as Lanham's "elitist" tendency to privilege the
humanist (literary) over the practical (rhetorical) (275). Moreover, the literary in
Steinberg’s construction is deﬁned in opposition to the practical concerns of students, to
the point where the literary becomes a matter of “class” and “style” in marked opposition
to the “craft of prose” (267). Steinberg’s categorical dismissal of the use of literature in
composition, then, appears to be based on his feeling that literary humanism lurks behind
those who argue for literature in composition. Steinberg’s analysis of literature in
composition depends exclusively on historical documents about the use or lack of use ill
composition and on the arguments of humanist compositionists. What is missing ill this
criticism, of course, is any engagement with the various theories about imaginative
ﬁction.

As I have suggested above, both Steinberg's and Lindemann's focus on literary
humanism can be explained, in part, by the way the argument is ﬂamed in the ﬁrst place.
Lindemann's article is, after all, presented as a dialogue with Tate who self-consciously
identiﬁes himself as a humanist. Placing two notable ﬁgures like Tate and Lindernann in
diametrical opposition, however, seems to limit the possibility for alternative readings

that might include postmodern notions of the literary.

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The limitations of this problematic conception of the literary are particularly acute
in one of the few references to critical theory in Lindemann's argument. Lindernann
acknowledges the impact of new theories on composition when she states, "Some people
believe that recent work in critical theory offers new reasons to teach literature in
ﬂeshman English classes" (314). While critical theory rrny, for Lindernann, cinnge our
orientation towards speciﬁc texts, it apparently has no impact on what we consider
literature to be. “Critical theory,” she contends, “has value only insofar as it gives our
students a more self-conscious awareness of their behavior as readers, engaged in
signiﬁcant acts of language in every class they take, not just the literature class” (314). In
maintaining this separation between critical theory and what is meant by literature,
Lindernann ultimately maintains a division between the types of rhetorical texts She
wants her students to read and academic and professional discourses.

Although she offers a much more developed historical accounting of the uses of
literature in composition, Sharon Crowley offers an equally static representation of the
literary. In her argument, Crowley places the participants ill these debates in two,
mutually exclusive camps, based on their relationship to literary humanism. On one hand,
she associates Lindernann and those concerned with academic discourse as pragrrntists
who disavow humanism. In contrast, she views those who support literature's use, like
Tate, Latosi-Sawin, and Crain, with literary humanism. The latter group, moreover, hold
on to humanism because of their aversion to "anti-humanist literary theory" (24). Notably
absent in Crowley's summation of these debates are those who use theory, literary or

otherwise, as a means for using literature in the writing classroom.

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Historical Grand Narratives

I ﬁnd it interesting that, despite their disparities, these arguments—with the
exception of Tate's second essay—each begins by accepting the "fact" that literature has
been, to a greater or lesser degree, eliminated ﬂom the ﬁeld of composition studies since
around the 19608 and 19708. Even when the question of the historical validity of speciﬁc
claims comes into question, as they do in Steinberg and Crowley, for instance, these
arguments assume an extremely uniform narrative about what actually happened.

These debates are characteristic of what I perceive as a tendency in composition
studies to remove discussions of literature, and by extension literary theory, ﬂom the
official discourses of the ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric. In fact, these debates
demonstrate that not only has literature continued to be taught to larger degrees than are
reported in official discourses, but also that the conceptions of the "literary" and "literary
theory" remain critical to understanding pedagogy and scholarship in composition and
rhetoric.

One reason that the "fact" of literature's elimination has been so easy to accept is
tint it is fueled by the dominant narrative of composition studies which has been passed
down by the inﬂuential work of James Berlin and others.22 This narrative as it is clearly
outlined by Crowley approximates what I take to be received wisdom in the ﬁeld of
composition. Crowley, drawing on Berlin, contends tint up until the 19508 and 608,
humanism served as the "common thread " tint linked literary criticism and composition
in dialectical opposition to one another (21). In composition this inﬂuence is felt in the

tendency to privilege clear expository prose that most precisely expresses the student's

 

22 cf. Sharon Crowley’s Composition and the University and Alan France’s Composition as Cultural
Practice.

95

mastery of a given subject. These assumptions, as Alan France argues, support
movements like expressivism as the means for accessing a "self" through writing, and
cognitivism which develops research practices based on empirical observation of the
writing process. Humanism, according to this narrative, also serves as the foundation for
literary New Criticism in the post-war United States. In contrast to composition's focus
on the practical and pedagogical implications of writing instruction, New Criticism
privileges the reading of imaginative ﬁction through hermeneutic processes designed to
decode opaque or ﬁgurative uses of language to posit a best reading or interpretation. As
many commentators have suggested, these dual uses of humanism support hierarchical
distinctions that elevated literary criticism and marginalized composition. Whereas
literary criticism under humanism focused on the sanctiﬁed ﬁlnction of poetics to access
universal truths of great writers, composition remained moored in the rhetorical, practical
concerns of student writers. 23

In the decades following the 19608, this dominant narrative suggests, composition
has had new possibilities to forge its own disciplinary status separate ﬂom literary
criticism. This shift, moreover, is the result of a number of factors that ﬁlrther severed
the links between literature and composition: post war demographics, new theories, and
the development of composition as a separate discipline. As the Tate-Lindemann debates
suggest, moreover, this period also saw a reduction in the uses of literature in
composition and a focus on classical and new rhetorics as the obvious sources for
composition studies. While this dominant narrative has served to support the hard-fought

disciplinary status of composition studies, it also represses some of the complexities and

 

2" It is important to note, however, that even while humanist assrunptions about the subject formed the
foundation for these different schools of thought, these schools had very different conceptions of the

96

contradictions that shape practices in English studies. A closer analysis of the Tate-
Lindemann debates illustrates some of the assumptions that, I argue, contain composition
theory in ways that are important for understanding the possibilities and limitations of
anti-disciplinary theories like cultural studies.

In Crowley's prefatory comments to Composition in the University, she suggests,
that her criticism of contemporary practices in composition comes at “an inauspicious
moment, because as luck would have it, this is an auspicious professional moment for
those who teach composition in the university” (ix). Crowley’s argument from the outset
appears to be based on the idea that composition has now arrived at a critical place within
the academy, where “We now have an opportunity to decide whether orn' art and our
discipline will remain in thrall to attitudes about and uses of composition tint descend
ﬂom an older, very different kind of university” (ix). Crowley is not speciﬁc about why
the present is the time to remove the writing class, although it is clear ﬂom her Preface
tint composition has achieved some degree of agency to decide for itself how it views its
relationship to the past. What this past means and how composition might break ﬂee of it
are the subject of her text, one that depends in large part upon a developed rrnster

narrative that places composition at this place.

Paradigm Shifts

One of the problems in the Tate-Lindemann debates is a tendency to describe the
changes surrounding the 19608 and 708 in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shifts. It is not
difficult to see, given the dramatic social changes surrounding this period, why scholars

would think of it in terms of seminal movements. However, the concept of a paradigm

 

relationship between reality and language.

97

shift can also obscure the very complex processes involved in institutional and cultural
changes. This is, I think, the problem with Tate's ﬁrst essay as he explains tint literature
was eliminated, in part, because of poor pedagogical practices. "However," Tate
continues, "a teaching approach will not disappear merely because it is misguided or
downright wrong. It will disappear only when there is something else to replace it . . . . A
paradigm will not just disappear. It will vanish--whatever paradigms do—only when it is
replaced by another paradigm" (317). For Tate, as I have mentioned, classical rhetoric
under the purview of the CCCCS ultimately replaces literature.

Lindemann uses remarkably similar language to dismiss the use of literature in
composition today. “It is as if,” Lindernann argues,

we have already played out our enthusiasm for writing as process and
rejected those opportunities offered by the Writing Across the Curriculum
movement to learn more about discourse in other disciplines and as we
look about us, waiting for the paradigm to shift, we rediscover literature.
For some, the discovery represents a welcome resurgence of interest in
reading-as-process; for others, an antidote to writing courses that lack
‘content.’ (310-311)

In my reading of these arguments, both Tate and Lindemann invoke the paradigm
shift in ways that reduce the complex processes of historical change in the academy. For
Tate, it seems tint the "shift" is made at least in part as a reaction to poor teaching
practices. Lilldemann uses the idea of a paradigm shift to satirize those who argue for
literature as a rather capricious response to a need to ﬁnd something new after we've

"played out our enthusiasm" (310). In both Tate and Lindernann, although ill different

98

ways, the paradigm shift is used to obscure, rather than to clarify, the changes in
composition, particularly as they surround the implications of the 19608 and 708. And
while I do not wish to contend that such shifts do not happen over time, Tate and
Lindemann's early arguments provide little in the way of understanding the complex
interplay of theory and institutional contexts. Tate's reliance on a combination of poor
teaching and a consequent paradigm shift is predicated on his earlier contention tint
"literature's virtual disappearance. . .was not. . the result of all those theoretical reasons in

some recent articles on the topic" (315).

Rethinking the Historical in Composition

Pondering the reactions to his and Erika Lindemann’s initial pieces in College
English, Gary Tate sought to rethink the historical basis upon which he nnde his claims
that literature had been effectively eliminated from composition. He is particularly
interested in the “crucial years” of the 19508 and 19608, "as classical rhetoric was being
recovered and introduced into the composition classroom” (“Notes" 305). To address the
limitations of “grand narratives,” Tate looks to published reports of CCCCS workshops
ﬂom the 19508 to 1974. These sources, he contends, suggest an often-intense level of
insecurity among compositionists using literature. He concludes, ﬂom his reading of
these sources, that rather than being eliminated ﬂom Freshmen English, literature
continues to be “at least, ﬂom 1950 on, a matter of heated debate” (307). Tate’s re-
reading seems to suggest a much different picture of the uses of literature ill composition

than that which was advanced in the earlier debates. Not only was literature “contested

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ﬂom the ﬁrst CCCC onward,” but also its use was advocated by important ﬁgures in the
study of rhetoric like Wayne Booth (3 07).

Tate’s revision is suggestive of an important tension that is characteristic of the
use of literature in composition. While he draws on Kitzhaber’s study and his
correspondence with Richard Larson, which both suggest that one in ﬁve composition
courses employs literature, Tate revises his position: “My belief that literature has been
driven out of the writing class was a result of what had happened to me in the 19608. . . . I
obviously generalized my experience into a national trend” (304). For me, Tate’s
revision signals one of the most compelling contributions to the debates over literature in
composition. I am less interested ill the technical accuracy of his ﬁgures than I am his
assessment of the nature of the debates.

Tate’s conclusion points to a characteristic of English studies that is particularly
important to my consideration of new theories like cultural studies. In both his earlier
reference to the “Rhetoric police” and in his historical revision of the question of
literature in composition, Tate points to a divide between the ofﬁcial discourse and
unoﬂicial discourses in composition studies, stating tint

It would be more accurate to say that although literature certainly did not
disappear ﬂom the classrooms of many composition teachers, it did
disappear ﬂom the conversation of our discipline. In other words,
although we might still be using literature, we weren’t talking about it.

(305)

While I would not go so far as to reference the “rhetoric police” and their

association with the CCCCS, it seems plausible that the submersion of the literature

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question has been in part an effect of the disciplinary drive in composition studies. One
unfortunate effect of this submersion, moreover, has been a lack of a meaningful dialogue
on the various points of intersection between composition and literary studies. In fact,
the lack of a sustained encounter between composition and literary theory is indicated in
the Tate-Lindemann debates. It is noteworthy, for instance, that not only did the use of
literature in composition become removed ﬂom the unofficial discourse in the ﬁeld, but
when it does emerge, it is too often ﬂamed in the terms of 19508.

Tate’s argument compels me to reﬂame the question with which the Tate-
Lindemann debates began. As I have argued, much of the debate is ﬂamed through a
historical narrative that says literature has long Since been effectively eliminated ﬂom the
class. Crowley, Steinberg and others use this “fact” as the basis for casting the call for
using literature in composition as an attempt to reclaim humanism as the model of
literature that was active when compositionists quite teaching literature. If, however, we
assume as I do that imaginative ﬁction continues to play an important role in composition
studies it seems to me that we ought to attend to how it is being taught in the composition

classroom and why official discussions of its uses are often marginalized.

Unofficial Discourses: Rethinking the Literary in Composition

Before approaching these questions, however, I would like to nnke a stronger
case for the “fact” that literature continues to play an important role in composition
studies, which points to the interesting division between official and unofficial
discourses. This notion of unofficial discourses draws on Foucault’s assessment of how

power operates. According to Foucault, every statement is also a decision to ignore or

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obscure other speech acts. If we view composition studies in terms of a gap between the
official and the unofficial, then we can useﬁllly ask what gets elided in the tendency to
remove literature ﬂom composition. One answer to this question, as I have argued, is the
status of composition and rhetoric as a separate discipline. In other words, attending to
the various uses of literature in composition ﬁrst suggests a point of intersection that,
given the institutional history of nnrginalization, compositionists are reasonably cautious
of. But as I have also tried to argue, removing literature ﬂom composition also precludes
the possibilities to be found in postmodern conceptions of the literary.

Such an engagement is inconsistent with Tate’s assertion, based on his reading of
CCCCS workshops, that ﬂom the 19508 to the mid-19708, "the proponents of literature
seemed unable to ﬁnd a language that would enable them to do more than nnke
unsupported declarations about the great value of literary study for composition students”
(309). Yet there is a certain logical problem at work in Tate’s argument. If, as he has
argued, literature had been effectively obscured ﬂom the official conversation in
composition and rhetoric (read Rhetoric Police), then it is also likely that those
conversations about literature tint do make their way into CCCCS workshops were
mediated by the same disciplinary biases. Thus, when Tate claims that “the conversation
about literature in ﬂeshmen composition was dying [and] tint no new insights were
present to invigorate the discussion,” we might well consider the academic culture that
limited invigorating new insights.

It is noteworthy that similar criticisms can and have been made about the Tate-

Lindemann debates. In fact, Steinberg, argues precisely the point that, with the exception

of Tate’s reference to the “Rhetoric Police,” there is nothing new in debates over

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literature in composition. It is difficult, however, to imagine that such new insights and
invigorating discussions are not part of the informal or unoﬂicial discourses surrounding
the question of literature ill composition.

My suspicion, however, is that there is a good deal more literature being taught in
composition classes, than these "official" sources indicate. In each of the writing courses
that I've taught where there has been a required rhetoric, it has contained texts tint would
fall into the category of canonical literature. Moreover, most of my colleagues teaching
ﬂeshmen composition come ﬂom literary studies and continue to employ canonical
literature as sources for study. Although I acknowlege that there are places where
literature of this sort is not taught, I believe that the question of literature's
appropriateness and use remains limited by a failure to acknowlege the less official
testaments to its use.

What is more important than whether literature is being taught, however, is meant
by literature and how it is being taught. As long as the conversation is ﬂamed to exclude
non-humanist theories like cultural studies, I doubt that the debates will move forward to
any signiﬁcant degree. Yet when we consider the various ways that we can think of
literature-as institution, rhetoric, social text--it becomes clear that there are excellent

reasons for using it in the writing class.

Cultural Studies and the Uses of Literature
Tony Bennett, an Austrailian cultural studies theorist who I locate ﬁrmly in the
tradition of British cultural studies provides a particularly useful way to think about

literature. Bennett's argument can be understood as a response to Terry Eagleton's

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argument tlnt literature no longer provides a useful term. Eagleton contends that because
the literary is no longer supported by scientiﬁc claims as a distinct form or writing or as
an illusion based on ideology it is no longer a useful concept (qtd. in Bennett, 139).

Tony Bennett responds that while literature "cannot designate an ontologically
distinct realm of writing. . . this [fact] need not huinder its capacity to designate
distinctions of another kind" (141). For Bennett literature can be used to "refer to a
particular socially organized space or representation whose speciﬁcity consists in the
institutionally and discursively regulated forms of use and depolyment to which selected
text are are put" (141).

This conception of literature as an institution provides an alternative to the
humanist-antihumanist dichotomy implicit in the Tate-Lindemann debates. Literatln'e in
Bennett's forrnuation as a "historically speciﬁc set of institutional and discursive
arrangements" can be used pedagogically because it has been put on a par with other
types of institutional practices tlnt "interact with other spheres of social practices" (141).

Fashioning the literary in this way, I will argue in chapter four, beneﬁts ﬂom a
cultural rhetorical approach that looks to the mechanisms that produce and maintain the
idea that literature is a separate sphere. Bennett's focus on the speciﬁcity of literature
found in its historically indicated "real" social practices that are both institutional and
discursive, moreover, draws our attention to the relationship between the institutional and
the discursive as both are seen to have rhetorical effects.

In moving away ﬂom a humanist conception of literature and literary theory,
Bennett moves towards questions surrounding the uses to which literature is put and the

occassions in which those uses are met. My interest in Alias Grace as a certain type of

104

historical ﬁction, as I will demonstrate in the following chapter on cultural rhetorics,

develops in part ﬂom the fact that it is one of the genres that foregrounds this tension.

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Chapter Four
Cultural Rhetorics in Practice:

Reading and Writing Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

The question of how to make cultural studies and rhetorical theory "work" for the
ﬁeld of composition and rhetoric remains perplexing. While it may be useﬁll to read
scholarship in composition and rhetoric as indicative of a disciplinary drive, it is more
difficult to offer alternatives to existing practices. Certainly we can still see a
contradiction in existing research in composition and rhetoric that continues to support a
"skills"-based approach to reading and writing on the one hand, and that tries to
incorporate cultural theories and a "critical" approach to learning on the other hand.

While there has been some recent attention to how the intersections of cultural
studies and rhetoric might help address this contradiction, this work has tended too often
to ignore the institutional politics that circumscribe what counts as knowledge in the ﬁeld
of composition and rhetoric. What reading and writing practices are best suited to the
"postmodern condition," where traditional forms of writing constitute only a portion of
the texts and images students negotiate on a daily basis? What are the forms through
which knowledge has been organized and disseminated? And how might we "read" the
hierarchical distinctions implicit in them?

Throughout this dissertation, I have employed disciplinarity as the operating
metaphor ﬂom which to read academic texts as themselves rhetorical forms. In shifting

the focus to speciﬁc reading and pedagogical strategies, I continue to stress the

106

disciplinary contexts in which texts are produced and consumed.24 However, in so doing
I must extend the conception of disciplines beyond that which we typically associate with
the academic ﬁelds.

Reading Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace as a speciﬁc type of cultural rhetoric,
this chapter builds on existing scholarship in cultural studies and rhetoric to develop
practices that view all texts as culturally situated forms of production. Speciﬁcally, I will
employ critical concepts in cultural studies to focus on the rhetorical questions of the
medes and forms of production in Atwood's novel. As will become clear in my reading
of A lias Grace, a novel which takes place in the nineteenth century, this broader
conception of disciplinarity enables us to read emergent ﬁelds of psychology next to less
"academic," but no less important, spheres of knowledge such as parapsychology and
metaphysics. In so doing, I will argue, the novel, like British cultural studies and rhetoric,
dranntizes the disciplinary and disciplining assumptions about knowledge implicit in the
generic forms and technologies surrounding writing.

This chapter ﬁrst attends to existing scholarship on cultural and social-epistemic
rhetorics as a means through which to develop an alternative conception of cultural
rhetorics—one which focuses on this notion of disciplinarity. Arguing that the theoretical
assumptions for cultural rhetorics are already apparent in the ﬁelds of rhetoric and
cultural studies, I then put these theories to work in a reading of Alias Grace. This
chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of cultural rhetorics for the writing

class.

 

2’ Disciplinary formations hue refer to academic and non-academic institutional sites through which texts
are produced to discipline the individual through the organization of different types of knowledge.

107

Already Cultural Rhetorics?: British cultural studies and Epistemic Rhetorics

One of the strengths of cultural studies has been that it allows the critic to employ
a variety of theories and assumptions that are best suited to his/her speciﬁc focus. As
Douglas Kellner argues in his analysis of Rambo ﬁlms in Media Culture, this multi
perspective approach allows the critic to incorporate a variety of critical perspectives.
Kellner suggests that for a " fuller picture of cultural text[8] and social phenomena, one
must therefore grasp a wide range of constituent elements of cultural texts and
practices....To do this properly, one needs to draw on a spectrum of critical methods"
(97). This approach avoids the pitfalls of more centered approaches, remaining "open,
critical and ﬂexible, reﬂlsing to ﬁx any orthodoxy, or to close off any ﬁeld ill any
prennture way" (Kellner 55).

In my reading of Alias Grace a8 a cultural rhetoric I have found it useful to draw
on this multi-perspective approach. Speciﬁcally, I employ the British School's arguments
about determination; Tony Bennett's arguments about historical ﬁction and genres; and a
reading of the novel itself as multi-perspective “critique. These emphases, moreover, are
directed at understanding the speciﬁc ways that the novel achieves its rhetorical effects
through a focus on the forms through which knowledges are organized and disseminated.
I do not intend to suggest that these constitute the "best" theories or concepts ﬂom which
i to explicate read the text as cultural rhetoric for classroom practcies. In fact, there are any
number of approaches, including feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural, which could
usefully be applied to this text to feature aspects of it that I do not stress. However, these

theories help me use Alias Grace to illustrate one application of the types of cultural

108

rhetorics I propose here. In other words, I have chosen these theories strategically to

emphasize the importance of the underutilized concept of disicplinarity.

Reading Alias Grace

Before explicating Atwood's strategic rendering of the story, it will be useful to
outline the "facts" that constitute the official story of the historical ﬁgure Grace Marks,
upon whom the text is based. Alias Grace is a literary recounting of the 1843 real-life
murder of Thomas Kinnear, a Calndian gentleman, and his maidservant and love interest,
Nancy Montgomery. Immediately after the two bodies are found, Canadian authorities
locate Grace Marks, 3 l6-year-old servant girl and James McDermott, a stable hand for
the Kinnear estate. Both Marks and McDermott, who the press describe as Marks’
“paramour,” are tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. McDermott was
subsequently hanged; however Marks' sentence was commuted to life in prison and she
was eventually paroled after serving 23 years in prison. The story is complicated,
moreover, by Grace's contention that she has no recollection of the murders.

Atwood structures her rhetorical treatment of the story around a ﬁctionalized
series of exchanges between Grace and Dr. Simon Jordon, a psychiatrist from the U.S.
who is interested in opening up a lunatic asylum in the Canadian province where Marks
is being incararated. These exchanges, which are variously told in ﬁrst and third-person
from both Grace's and Jordon’s perspectives, are interspersed with a series of historical
documents—prison records, newspaper accounts, poetry and folk songs--each
demonstrating how Grace Marks has been historically "written" along a series of terms:

evil, sick, insane, possessed, dirn-witted and sexually promiscuous. Through this multi-

109

layered narrative style, Grace is revealed as one of the sites through which Victorian
North America marks out boundaries along lines of class and gender against the backdrop
of nascent industrialism.

Yet Atwood's treatment of the story presents an alterative narrative where Grace
is given a voice that speaks back to the official narrative that pronounces her variously as
simple, evil, and insane. Moreover, it places Grace's actions--the question of whether she
participates in the murders remains unresolved--in the broader context of the various
determinants that shape the experiences of a 19‘"-century immigrant maid. The rhetorical
effect of the text, moreover, can be usefully explicated through cultural studies' concepts
of determination, the ﬁlnction of "literature" and literary genres, multiple-perspective

analysis and the technologies of writing.

Determination

A8 I have suggested in chapter two, Althusser's notion of overdetermination
contributes signiﬁcantly to cultural studies' understanding of the complex interplay of
factors that shape individual consciousness. Alias Grace foregrounds such factors with
attention to the interplay of family, gender, and nationality as they contribute to the way
Grace sees herself. As a poor Irish immigrant whose mother died on the passage to the
U.S. and whose father is an abusive drunk, Grace’s lot in life seems to be determined by
material and cultural circumstances that are well beyond her control. The text offers
some indication of Grace's plight as an immigrant ﬂom Ireland. In Ireland, Grace’s
mother is purported to have married beneath her to a nnn with few prospects. Her Aunt

Pauline sees this marriage as a bad sign for Grace’s prospects, but encourages her to

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“strive against” a similar fate. To Grace’s aunt this fate is deﬁned by the choice of a
marriage partner and the only possible alternative for Grace is to “set a high price” for
herself and, above all, to avoid marrying any “hail-fellow-well-met that should happen
along the way [her] mother did” (104). Grace is constructed as a poor Irish woman whose
options are demonstrably overdetermined by multiple inﬂuences: immigrant status of
Irish as non-white, the relationship between science and emergent industrialism, and the
construction of female as hysterical. This formulation applied to Alias Grace, therefore,
helps to theorize through intertextual narrative devices the construction of identity as

written subject.

Un-Disciplining the Text: Alias Grace as Post Historical Cultural Rhetoric

As the story of a “real-life” murderess whose guilt and sanity remain open
questions, the text often reads like a whodunnit that--through the exchanges between
Grace and Dr. Jordon--will ultimately tell the reader what "really inppened." In addition,
the text begins with a listing of Atwood’s texts, where Alias Grace is found under the
heading “ﬁction.” Yet even with this self-conscious allusion to the story’s un-truth, the
text carries the trappings of Western ﬁction that imply a logical resolution to its subject.
Fictional or not, Alias Grace, as a novel, carries the traces of narrative logic and its
pretenses towards “truth” tint are implicit in the historical novel.

As I have suggested in chapter two, British cultural studies has often taken as its
focus the problematic distinctions implicit in humanist literary criticism. In cultural
studies, literature ﬂmctions as an important category, not because it references universal

truths, but because as a historically privileged discursive form it raises a number of

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important rhetorical questions. Atwood's novel, like much postmodern historical ﬁction,
employs a variety of generic forms as a means through which to draw attention to their
conceits.

Tony Bennett's cultural studies work is particularly appropriate to understanding
Atwood's rhetorical use of the conventions of historical ﬁction. In response to Georg
Lukacs' view that society and literature inhabit separate spheres where one (society)
determines the form of the other (literary genres), Bennett argues tlnt literature and
society do not “operate as distinctive spheres” but are part of the same “sphere of social
action” called literature (108).

A8 Bennett argues,

The implications of this for the theory of genre are clear. Its tasks
do not devolve upon the decipherment of the impress of socially
determined ‘forms of life’ on the structures of literary forms and
the orders of their succession. Rather, its concern is with the ways
in which forms of writing which are culturally recognized as
generically distinct in the context under investigation function
within the ‘forms of life’—the speciﬁc modes of organized
sociality—of which they form a part. Its purpose, moreover, is to
examine what genres do within and as parts of such modes of
sociality rather than to reveal how their determined conditions
speak through them. (109)

Bennett’s focus on what literature and literary genres "do" suggests that the

rhetorical critic look for the function or role that genre distinctions play in relation to

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other social texts. Interestingly this approach extends beyond the “close reading” of a
text that Rosteck associates with "traditional rhetorics" in favor of an approach that
assumes a sociological or cultural perspective on the part of the critic. Bennett’s
challenge to the historical narrative upon which earlier Marxism was based, and the
distinctions between social reality and literature tint are maintained, in effect, challenge
the critic to engage in a sort of meta-criticism of genres tlnt we see in texts like Alias
Grace.

Atwood's text serves as a particularly stark example of a rhetoric of generic forms
tint displaces the uniﬁed theory advocated by Lukacs. Alias Grace blends genres to
confound the hermeneutic questions, implicit in the texts, tint contribute to the mystique
associated with the historical story of Grace Marks: Was Grace guilty of murder? Why
did Grace kill the housemaster and maid? Was Grace sane at the time of the murders?
Such questions ﬁmction as the invisible devices through which most readers will address
the question of a sensational murder. These questions are more pressing when the
murderer is a 16-year-old servant whose actions so apparently countermand the existing
social system and naturalized ideas about the “feebler sex.” While Grace’s material
situation may have offered some explanation—she could, after all be of a "savage" or
"inferior" race of people—such explanations did little to quell the anxieties and
fascination invoked by the phrase “murderess.” In fact, we can assume that the legend of
Grace Marks was in part a response to the inability to satisfy the hermeneutic questions to
which the murder of Thomas Kinnear gave rise. Thus, the novel, like the historical

questions surrounding the story of Grace Marks, constitute a blending of genres-true

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crime, detective ﬁcition, historical ﬁction--that call attention to the limitations implicit in

the assumption that such forms will ultimately supply the truth.

Alias Grace as Multi-Perspective Cultural Rhetoric

As a speciﬁc type of historical postmodern ﬁction, Atwood’s text features
multiple perspectives which, like British cultural studies, seek to foreground the
disciplinary assumptions. The text itself, structured by the exchanges between Grace and
Dr. Jordon, exposes the rhetoric of psychoanalysis through internal monologues. In
particular, Dr. Jordon’s pretense towards scientiﬁc objectivity is progressively undercut
by his thoughts that reveal more than a disinterested perspective of women.

In her initial encounter with Simon Jordon, for instance, Grace quickly places him
with the other “collectors” who presumably have come to gather her for their own
interests. “Perhaps he is from a newspaper. Or else he is a travelling man, making a tour.

They come in and they stare, and when then look at you, you feel as small as an ant, and
3 they pick you up between ﬁnger and thumb and turn you around. And then they set you
down and go away” (41).

As the story unfolds, Jordon’s curious fascination with working women, in
particular, is traced back to his own privileged upbringing. As the son of a U.S. textile
manufacturer, Jordon’s perspective is demonstrably shaped by his sexual fascination
since his childhood with poor working women who helped raise him. While his
exchanges with Grace are designed to create associations that tap into her unconscious,

ironically, it is often Dr. Jordon for whom the process unearths complex associations

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ﬂom which the reader can better understand the limitations of the claims to objectivity in
pschoalnlysis.

The exclnnges between Dr. Jordon and Grace, moreover, juxtapose two critical
perspectives as a means to show their limitations. Jordon is associated with science,
privilege, reason, sanity, health and self-control. In contrast, Grace who is initially
constructed (written) as the antithesis of reason is revealed, through Grace's dramatic
monologues, as extremely intelligent. The psychiatrist-patient dialogue, then, is
represented as a strategic process, guided by the therapist to lead to understanding on the
part of the patient.

This model of scientism is resisted, however, through a narrative structure that
gives Grace agency to write back against. In a disruption of the scientiﬁc model, the
object is subjectiﬁed and, in an effective reversal, calls the model into question.

Dr. Jordon represents the optimism of psychoanalysis in light of Freud. Jordon’s
method are clearly derived from the assumption that the psyche is a repository of lost
memories tint can be effectively reactivated by through a series of cognitive links.
Speciﬁcally, Jordon believes tlnt he can trigger memories of the murder of Nancy
Montgomery in the Kinnear root cellar by bringing Grace vegetables that might cause the
association.

To understand Jordon’s perspective, the text places it next to competing theories
about the human psyche as represented ill a series of letters to and ﬂom Dr. Jordon. One
such perspective comes ﬂom Dr. Bannerling, the physician who ran an asylum Grace was
held at prior to her removal to the penitentiary. Bannerling represents the dominant

conceit that the “taint of insanity is in the blood, and cannot be removed with a little soft

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soap and ﬂannel” (71). In addition, Barmerling is convinced that Grace’s claims to
amnesia are false and that “She is as devoid of morals as she is of scruples, and will use
any unwitting tool that comes to han ” (71 ).

Bannerling’s skepticism i8 contrasted with “a crowd of well-meaning but feeble-
minded persons of both sexes, as well as clergymen, who have busied themselves on her
behalf’ (7]). Speciﬁcally, Reverend Verringer as a clergyman makes a strong distinction
between the body and the mind (79). Yet the Reverend's differences with Dr. Bannerling
are revealed to be politically motivated. Verringer says to Jordon, “You have heard ﬂom
Dr. Bannerling, I suppose. He has been against [Grace] ﬂ'om the beginning. We on the
Committee have appealed to him—a favourable report ﬂom him would have been
invaluable to our cause—but he is intransigent. A Tory, of course, of the deepest dye—
he would have all the poor lunatics chained up in straw, if he had his way; and all hanged
who look sideways” (79).

The lines between religion and science become blurred with the introduction of
Mrs. Quenell, a “Spiritualist and advocate of an enlarged sphere for women,” and Dr.
Jerome DuPont, a trained “Neuro-hypnotist” whose claims to science Jordon regards with
extreme skepticism. Each of these characters represents a speciﬁc disciplinary
perspective that organizes thinking about Grace in terms of guilt/innocence,
sanity/insanity, and good/evil. Placing these competing perspectives side by side, in
effect, reveals their logical blind spots.

Atwood, moreover, locates the dynamics of Grace’s story in the economic context
of nascent industrialism—a move that reveals the relationship between scientiﬁc

humanism and patriarchy. The question of Grace’s guilt or innocence, for instance,

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becomes subordinated to contextual concerns. In addition to Jordon’s Freudian
perspective, the novel introduces different types of modern science and metaphysics, all
making pronouncements on Grace Marks.

Jordon’s psychoanalysis is associated with nascent industrialism through a series
of exchanges with his mother who encourages him to forgo his psychiatric work in favor
of manufacturing.

I strongly urge that a manufactury would be far preferable, and although
the textile mills are not what they were, due to the mismanagement of the
politicians, who abuse the public trust unmercifully and become worse
with every passing year; yet there are many other opportunities at present

. . . . There is talk of a new Sewing Machine for use in the borne, which
would do exceedingly well if it might be cheaply produced; for every
woman would wish to own such an item, which would save nnny hours of
monotonous toil and unceasing drudgery. (51)

In this sense, scientiﬁc progress serves the rrnterial interests of the individual and
its social effects are viewed in terms of the impact on women. Dr. Worknnn, one of the
physicians who had treated Grace, moreover, also links Jordon’s enterprise to the
material, stressing tint “Enterprises like yours are unfortunately much required at present,
both in our own country and in yours, as due to the increased anxieties of modern life and
the consequent stresses upon the nerves, the rate of construction can scarcely keep pace
with the numbers of applicants” (49).

Throughout the text, the material and social contingencies that shape characters

challenge the ideal of objective science. In fact, as Jordon recognizes, the illusion of

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“disinterested science” is maintained only by the control of capital where “most of the
best scientists. . . have private incomes, which allows them the possibility of disinterested
research” (55). The relationship between science and religion in the text can only be
understood with attention to the material conditions that make it possible. These
conditions, moreover, reveal the extent to which both are underwritten by control of
capital. In fact, Alias Grace represents science as a distinctly male endeavor and locates
the metaphysical in the realm of the feminine.

Allowing Grace to "write back" against experts who are demonstrably limited by
their disciplinary logics, Atwood dramatizes a multi-perspective approach to reading
history through characterizations of a historical moment when empirical science,
associated with emergent ﬁelds like medicine and psychology, was developing
connections with industrialism. In the process, Atwood demonstrates the rhetorical use of

writing as a disciplinary and disciplining technology.

Writing as Disciplinary Technology

British cultural studies also provides a critical vocabulary for understanding
Atwood’s novel as a rhetorical challenge to historical tendencies to employ writing as a
disciplinary technology that enables one to "write" the other as a transparent reﬂection of
reality. Technology as I have suggested elsewhere refers to the mechanisms that organize
and legitimize knowledge. In this sense it draws on the Foucauldian concern for
understanding how relationships between power and knowledge are organized and
disseminated to maintain “regimes of truth” through speciﬁc institutions like the academy

and the popular media.

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Atwood’s novel as a cultural rhetoric focuses attention on technologies of print
and their historical legacies to show how Grace has been "written" and how Atwood
enables her to "write back." For example, the novel begins with the following
quotations:

God knows I speak the truth, saying that you lie.
-William Morris
“The Defense of Guenevere”
I have no Tribunal.
—Emily Dickenson,
Letters
I cannot tell you what the light it, but I can tell you what
it is not. . .What is the motive of the light? What is the
Light?
—Eugene Marais
The Soul of the White Ant

Questions of Grace’s guilt or innocence, sanity or insanity, are disrupted ﬂom the
outset by these expressions. Morris’s poetry is notably a Victorian writing of another
legendary ﬁgure that mixes truth with lies and challenges the sanctity of the male to
speak for the other. Morris’s pronouncement on Guenevere, in this context, reads as the
exertion of power without recourse to questions of historical shifts, imbuing the speaker
with the right to nnke pronouncements of truth and falsity.

This passage is quickly subverted by Dickenson’s perspective as a 19m-century

wonnn whose truncated words speak to the veracity of Morris’s complaint. Dickenson’s

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poet, a feminine subject without “tribunal,” has no voice in constructing her own sense of
truth or innocence. In essence, she is the subject of the male voice who can pronounce on
her subjectivity. Marais’s commentary further complicates the dialogic by suggesting that
truth cannot be found in the ﬁrst place. In fact, Marais’s poem shifts the focus in
attention ﬂom the truth/ light to its absence, begging the apparently nonsensical question,
“What is the motive of light? What is the light?”

These three quotations subvert the hermeneutic charge of the conventional
historical novel, to provide some form of illumination by focusing on the "light."
Morris’s comments present the deﬁnitive pronouncement of truth regardless of history,
residing in the authoritative “I." Dickenson’s phrases disrupt the hermeneutic process
itself, drawn as a tribunal which ostensibly functions to provide a fair an rationale hearing

of evidence in attempt to render a judgement.

Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Cultural Rhetorics
In a recent interview with Julie Drew, Stuart Hall suggests that
there is not a ﬁnal, ﬁnished identity or position or self simply then to be
produced by the writing. Any cultural practice plays a role in the
construction of an identity. . . . Of course, writing, is also a production, a
production of a version of the self. (207-208)
The assumption in Alias Grace that writing functions as a disciplinary technology
provides a particularly useful point of entry into classroom practices which are designed
to encourage students to consider how their own writing is mediated through its form

This focus, moreover, helps generate discussion and practices that look at the various

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other forms through which individuals are disciplined. In my ﬂeshmen composition
class, I have focused on the multiple-perspective and writing as a means through which to
get students to consider their own culturally situated writing practices. Speciﬁcally, I
have asked students to use Alias Grace as a model for their own culling together of
multiple textual forms in a narrative.

In so doing, I have found it useful to have students employ hypertext technologies
which often foreground the links between different discursive forms. Speciﬁcally, I have
had students write a series of responses to the text and to related issues of their choosing.
Students have employed the Internet to focus on and research various issues related to the
novel including constructions of gender, nineteenth-century nnidservants, contemporary
maids, and the industrial revolution. For example, one student focused on the fact that
many of the quotations at the beginning of chapters in Alias Grace came ﬂom Susanna
Moodie's Life in the Clearing. In fact, this student found that Atwood ﬁrst encountered

the story of Grace Marks in her reading of this text. Incensed at the class-based

I N 0

references in Moodie 8 writing" of Grace, the student devoted her project to "unwriting'
the speciﬁc references of Susana Moodie. She looked at the travel narrative in which
Moodie describes her encounter with Grace and constructed her own counter narrative.
She found that the rhetorical force of her argument, like many of the constructions in
Alias Grace, came by juxtaposing Moodie's words with parts of the novel and some of
the few extant historical accountings of the real Grace Marks. In this sense, Atwood's
text provided a useful model for cultural rhetorical writing practices that focused on the

intertextual technologies through which individuals are "written."

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Consistent with the spirit, if not the form, of Atwood's text, I have also asked
students to create their own narrative rhetorical responses to the issues in the text. They
were then required to link their pages together to create yet another narrative. In so doing,
the class mediated the institutional requirements for students to write certain types of
essays, and to develop certain skills writing skills. The focus on the forms, technologies
and rhetorical effects often encouraged students to think of their academic writing as a
technology that can be useﬁllly ﬂamed to subvert the dominant form of the essay. For
example, in one course students wrote a conventional essay on an issue related to the
novel and placed their essays on the WEB. They were then asked to consider how they
would like to ﬂame this essay with other prose and images and what effect this act of
ﬂaming would have on what their initial essays "meant."

Many of the students, borrowing ﬂom Atwood (and with some encouragement
from their instructor), used this exercize as a chance to comment on the conventions of
the essay, their perceptions of its purpose and their relationship to the academic situation
in which their writing took place. In the end students created and read a variety of
perspectives which, although they included conventional essays, provided them an
opportunity to interrogate their own writing and the writing of others, as disciplinary

technologies with social implications.

Conclusion
Anti-foundational postmodernism presents new challenges with respect to
rhetorical research and scholarship. Approaching a text like Alias Grace a8 rhetorical

arguments presents the opportunity for students to look at their own writing as

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technologically mediated productions that respond and contribute to the disciplinary
formations that shape individual subjectivities. This employment of cultural studies and
rhetoric, therefore, Speaks back to the previous chapter by suggesting that compositionists
are at a critical juncture where we can now concern ourselves less with disciplinary
drives tint might preclude the use of imaginative ﬁction and more with how using
literature can be used to facilitate classroom practices. The next clnpter takes a similar
tack by extending the criticism to a consideration of how Julie Dash's postcolonial ﬁlm,

Daughters of the Dust, can also be employed as a speciﬁc type of cultural rhetoric.

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Chapter Five
Cultural Rhetorics, Visual Rhetorics and Classroom Practices in Julie Dash’s
Daughters of the Dust
Critical literature in rhetoric and composition increasingly points to contemporary
concerns over what counts as legitimate student reading and writing practices. While
some theorists ascribe value to the actual effects of student writing,25 others focus on the
social implications of language as it is read in popular forms.26 As I have argued
throughout this project, what I ﬁnd interesting and provocative about these arguments is
the lack of attention given to the institutional conditions shaping textual production. In
this chapter I argue that a visual rhetoric which explores institutional and cultural
constraints inﬂuencing textual production is a necessary, and often overlooked, part of a
critical pedagogy that seeks to engage students to participate effectively in democratic
practices. A visual rhetoric is deﬁned as the exploration of ﬁlm and media images and
their production practices in order to critique dominant assumptions about what counts as
legitimate knowledge and how that knowledge relates to power in society. Visual texts
are especially critical for engaging students in an increasingly media-saturated society.
In Textual Carnivals, Susan Miller critiques rhetorics, which ascribe value to

student writing that is detached from everyday situations. In particular, Miller cites the
process-based composition course that "values the student for activity, reﬂection, and
'meanings' that are entirely contained in the community constituted by the classroom.
These are not activities that do anything in particular, or that have 'meaning' about

anything in particular"(97). The process in these courses, then, is unconcerned with the

 

25 Cf. Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals, 97.
26 Cf. Berlin, James A. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Cultures, 117.

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"actual results" a text might bring about in the real world (100). Value and meaning are
empty concepts because of the classroom setting in which they take place. Miller’s
argument, then, implies a distinction ﬂom practices outside academic and real writing,
where academic writing can only be validated with reference to activities that extend
outside of the classroom. This focus invalidates academic practice as irredeemably
“inside,” in contrast to those practices which result ill some kind of action. Students in
the classroom, however, write with a number of possible reasons, the relative utility of
which cannot easily be enhanced with reference to an “outside” of the classroom Even
the process-based composition approaches that Miller clnllenges operate within a
particular institutional setting and involve complex processes of negotiation.

Other recent literature in composition and rhetoric reﬂects a grong interest in
the use of visual texts, such as ﬁlm and television, to engage students in critical inquiries
in writing processes. Berlin suggests the use of media images to engage students with
academic discourses and to promote democratic classroom spaces. In Berlin’s social-
epistemic rhetoric, students read to locate gender and class ideologies in television
programs like Roseanne to explore the ways television interacts with dominant social
formations. Moreover, Berlin’s exploration of such rhetorics in Rhetoric, Poetics, and
Cultures, argues persuasively for attention to institutional and ideological factors.
Berlin’s description of his approach towards Roseanne, however, focuses on important
broad cultural effects of language usage and evades the implications of localized
relationships between production apparatuses and ﬁlmmakers. Berlin’s analysis of
Roseanne, for instance, raises provocative questions that fall beyond the sc0pe of his

ideological approach: What conditions enable Roseanne, as one of the few “working

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class” programs, to be produced? What, if any, compromises did producers make in
developing the program? What constraints and limitations did Barr face as a female
producer? Berlin does well to encourage a close reading of ideologies in visual mediums,
but ultimately his approach tends to obscure the processes of production, potentially
undermining students’ abilities to relate the texts to social formations (76-93).

Julie Dash’s 1991 ﬁlm, Daughters of the Dust provides a useﬂll example of a
visual rhetoric. As a site for classroom practices, it focuses on the relationship between
the construction historical knowledge and power relations.27 Mary Louise Pratt provides
the useﬁll concept of “contact zones” to describe sites where “the processes of
negotiation ﬂom speciﬁc locations over what constitutes knowledge and how knowledge
is related to power.”28 Adding institutional and material constraints to Pratt’s formulation,
the following analysis of the ﬁhn focuses on three contact zones: the culture industry,
technologies of historical representation, and authorial subject position. The ﬁnal section,
“Implications for the Classroom,” discusses speciﬁc ways that visual rhetorics can be
used to encourage students to view their own writing as embedded within processes of

negotiation with historically-speciﬁc institutional and cultural determinants.

 

27 Daughters of the Dust employs a number of conventions of postcolonial ﬁction. Postcolonial texts are
especially useful sources for visual rhetoric because they focus on the speciﬁc mechanisms by which
knowledge is produced about marginalized groups. They tend to look at historic geographical and temporal
conditions surrounding textual production. Critiquing the gaps of traditional scholarship, writers such as
Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose David Saldlvar stress that texts operate as strategic
responses to colonial logics that continue to naturalize dominant ideologies along lines of race, class,
gendu and ethnicity. However, postcolonial discourses have also tended to focus on strategies located
within the written texts, ignoring production, so this line of inquiry could use furthu exploration.

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The Culture Industry: Visual Rhetorics and the U.S. Film Industry

The U.S. culture industry is an often-underemphasized contact zone with
important implications for the relationship between material conditions and cultural
forms. Questions regarding aesthetic value and historical legitimacy are often mediated
in the invisible processes, impacting which ﬁlms get produced and the terms upon which
a ﬁlm enters the nnrket. While a close reading of a particular text provides insights into
dominant ideologies, it often ignores these other important institutional determinants. The
following analysis of the culture industry begins with a reading of the ideological
implications to be found ill the text itself. It then contextualizes this reading in relation to
the speciﬁc conditions Dash faced as she attempted to get her ﬁlm produced. Finally, an
analysis of the culture industry returns to the text to explicate the implications of this
reading on questions of aesthetic value and historical validity tint will later be developed
into classroom practices surrounding the value of student writing.

A close reading of the text, without consideration of its production, provides
insights into the ﬁlm’s development of Dash’s narrative as a critique of traditional
historical representations of Aﬂican Americans. The ﬁlm centers on the Gullah culture,
ancestors of slaves, living on islands off the coast of South Carolina. The ﬁlm focuses on
a single day in 1902, and concerns the strife in the Peazant family as some members
prepare to leave the geographically isolated culture and migrate to mainland United
States.

Dash’s historical ﬁlm can be read as a strategic response to speciﬁc contemporary

institutional constraints that repress “subversive” ﬁlms. For example, the narrative voice

 

2" Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes .' Travel Writing and Transculturation. (London, New York:
Routledge, 1992), 7.

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states that the story takes place on a “signiﬁcant day.” Initially the audience is positioned
to view the day as historically Signiﬁcant through references to a particular date, Aug. 19,
1902, and a particular location, IBO Island. As the ﬁhn progresses, however, it becomes
' clear that the day’s signiﬁcance is contested and subject to each family member’s
perspective. The nntriarch Nana Peazant, for example, is upset that the move is causing
her family to be “coming apart.” Her daughter Viola, on the other hand, attrlhutes
historical signiﬁcance to the family’s move towards “progress” and “civilization.”
Several other characters add their own layers of meaning. Eula, another of Nana
Peazant’s daughters, is distraught over a pregnancy resulting ﬂom rape, and her husband
Eli’s perceived threat to his manliness. Yellow Mary, a prodigal daughter, returns ﬂom
Cuba “ruint” with cynicism and disdain for Viola’s idealism. The interplay of these
perspectives, often dramatized in heated exchanges, argues against a single historical
perspective. As the day unfolds, Dash’s use of vivid and dynamic visual images and
dialogue dramatizes the inability of traditional historical forms of representation to offer
anything more than a reduction of a collective history linked, as Nana Peazant says, to
“those who came before and those that will come.” The question of signiﬁcance, then,
becomes a multi-voiced challenge to the idea of a single perspective historical
accounting, inviting a series of generative questions. For whom is the day signiﬁcant? 18
the day meant to be historically signiﬁcant? 18 the ﬁlm historically signiﬁcant? 18 the
ﬁlm historical at all?

The text itself, then, presents an ideological challenge to the colonial practices
that represented Aﬂican American history as static and univocal. Ideological critiques, as

Stephen Slemon suggests, are “mediated through the colonialist educational apparatus,”

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including the ﬁlm industry, to effect “cultural domination by consent”(4). The
Gramscian notion of domination by consent is particularly important to understanding the
United States ﬁhll industry as a set of ideological practices that can be read through the
cinematic texts. Although no text is every either totally subversive or totally hegemonic,
some—and ﬂequently these ﬁlms make less money and might be less popular—more
consistently challenge normative westernized conceptions. Daughters of the Dust is one
compelling example of an oppositional ﬁlm that rigorously subverts norrrnlized western
concepts of story telling.29

A close reading of texts often provides important insights into dominant
ideologies and the ways they are reinscribed and resisted. Yet the focus on ideologies in
relation to broad social formations practices often obscures the extent to which matters of
aesthetics, or what seems to make a movie worthwhile or “good,” are mediated by
contemporary cultural politics and institutional constraints. Dash, who had spent ten
years researching the Gullahs, found it extremely difﬁcult to secure the funding for its
production. When she approached the major Hollywood production companies, all
refused to fund the ﬁlm. She ultimately had to secure production money ﬂom non-
Hollywood sources like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in exchange for
broadcast rights after the ﬁlm’s release in public cinemas. Additional difficulties arose as
Dash attempted to distribute the ﬁnished project. Even after entering the ﬁlm with some

success in the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals, it was ignored by large Hollywood

 

2" Although “oppositional” or postcolonial ﬁlms” provide excellent sources for visual rhetorics because
they often foregrormd issues surrounding the politics of representation, 1 have also used texts which are less
subversive. For instance, other movies I’ve found useﬁll for these purposes are Mississippi Masala, and
The Quick and the Dead. Although alternate arguments could be made for ways in which these ﬁlms
reinscribe traditional norms of gendu, sexuality, class and race, this concern does not limit their potential
for providing insights into various ways that dominant lmowledges are subverted. Indeed, ‘mixed’ texts are

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distributors. Finally, a small distributor, Kino International, agreed to distribute the ﬁlm
through small “art” theaters. Although it eventually became very popular among
primarily Black middle class audiences, the lack of advanced billing and limited
distribution channels suggest that the ﬁlm suffered ﬂom a tendency in the U.S. ﬁlm
industry to ignore ﬁlms that veer too widely ﬂom mainstream conventions (Rule C15,
C17).

Dash’s experiences reﬂect a historical pattern in Hollywood, guided by market
conditions, of not ﬁnancing unconventional ﬁlms. 3° Mark Crispen Miller argues that the
ﬁlm industry took a signiﬁcant turn in 1985 when anti-trust legislation opened the doors
for large corporate acquisitions of independent ﬁlm companies such as Lorimar, Cannon,
New World, Atlantic, De Laurentis, Alive and Island. The legislative act, Miller
contends, put control of cinematic production in the hands of corporate giants like Disney
and Time Warner for whom the movie industry constitutes one segment in an
overarching industry guided by proﬁt motive. The effect was a shift ﬂom ﬁlms with “a
tragic or subversive view to a posture both reverential and promotional” of national and
corporate interests (6-10).

These market conditions provide insight into how we read the aesthetic qualities
of Dash’s ﬁlm and her conscious decision “to subordinate market forces to spiritual
forces as determining criteria for Daughters” (Tate 90). Dash’s treatment of the

immigration/migration story, for example, can be read as a challenge to the “reverential”

 

often ulgage the most spirited and thoughtﬂll inquiries into the relationship between politics and
knowledge.

3° Vietnamese ﬁlrnmaku and critic, Trinh T. Minh-ha describes the invisible relationship between media
and aesthetics as follows: “standardization and samuless in variation is the unacknowledged agenda of
media supplius and consmners. . .the goal is to render power sufficiently invisible so as to control more
efﬁcaciously the widest number down to the smallest detail of existence.” For an excellent discussion of

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expectations of the cinema industry. This reading is supported by Dash’s
characterization of Viola, Nana Peazant’s daughter, who embodies this celebratory
position in the ﬁlm Viola wholly accepts the promises of the mainland to provide
“education, wealth and civilization.” Dramatically opposite Viola is her sister Yellow
Mary, who has returned ﬂom the rrninland with a caustic cynicism about both the
promise of the mainland and the “salt water Negroes” to whom she’s retmned. Viola’s
idealism, which resonates with the rhetoric of Christianity and the United States
nationalism, is ultimately deﬂated in a crucial scene where she is asked to kiss a Bible
which Nana Peazant has wrapped with one of her Voodoo religious icons. Her
willingness to ﬁnally embrace the dual religious icons calls into question the exclusivity
upon which western historical teleologies are built. To refuse the Bible as heresy would
be to do violence to her past, a dangerous act in a society tint embraces a circular history
conception of history where past and ﬁlture are interminably connected. While she is
willing to embrace Christian ideals and to associate them with a move forward, Viola is
unwilling to live with the implications of a faith that denies her connection to her mother
and her ancestors. This overlaying of alternative perspectives is consistent with what
Stephen Slemon argues is the primary strategy of postcolonial literary texts, “to position
the oppositional and reiterative textual responses of post-colonial cultures in dialectical
relation to their colonialist precursors” (4).

Ultimately we gain a good deal ﬂom reading Dash’s ﬁlm in relation to dominant
ideologies that ignore or marginalize the experiences of Aﬂican Americans. However,

while this conception beneﬁts ﬂom a sophisticated understanding of the way texts

 

the relationship between cinema and market conditions see, Trinh, Minh-Ha. When the Moon Waxes Red:
Representation and Cultural Politics. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 86-91.

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operate as ideologies to effect “domination by consent,” it doesn’t encourage the reader
to view the text itself as the certiﬁed outcome of a long, ﬂequently formidable process of
legitimization and silencing. Reading Dash’s aesthetic through local production
processes, however, argues tlnt one level of “signiﬁcance” in the historical ﬁlm is to be
found in its irreverent response to the very contemporary implications of institutional
constraints that endorse celebratory immigration/migration stories. In contrast to the
tendency to consider a ﬁlm which takes place in the American past as divorced ﬂom the
present, production analysis encourages an awareness of how history and historical
knowledge emerge only as part of an ongoing process of elimination, reconstruction and

sanctiﬁcation.

Technologies of Visual Rhetorics

Another underemphasized contact zone with important implications for the way
we view visual rhetorics can be found in ﬁlm’s unique capacity to dramatize the
technologies tlnt organize and legitimize particular types of knowledge. Technologies
of visual rhetorics refer to the mechanisms used to dramatize the organization of power
relations. Although written rhetorics often dramatize such technologies, it is important to
consider the unique ways that ﬁhn a8 a rhetorical form embodies its distinct technological
potential. This section explores the ways Dash represents and employs technologies in
the ﬁlm to subvert traditional notions of historical authenticity. It then explores these
uses as critiques of contemporary representational politics. The implications of Dash’s
commentary on technologies of representation for classroom practices are particularly

important and will be developed in the ﬁnal section of this paper.

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In Daughters of the Dust, cinematic technology enables Dash to dranntize ways
in which relationship between power and knowledge is organized and disseminated. In
particular, she focuses on technologies of photographs and writing as colonial
apparatuses that produce historical records. While it is important to read these
technologies as they are explicitly portrayed in the ﬁlm, it is equally important to
consider Dash’s ﬁlm as a particular type of contemporary technology impacting our
understanding of the past. In this section I initially look at how Dash disrupts colonial
technologies and therefore colonial logics. I will then focus on Dash’s self-referential
critique of ﬁlm itself as a technology that perpetuates racial discrimination.

Within the ﬁlm, Dash inverts colonial logics by concentrating on the
photographer instead of the photograph to help tell her story. Throughout the ﬁlm Mr.
Snead positions the Islands’ inhabitants in poses that will likely become part of the
family’s historical record. As a light- skinned Aﬂican American ﬂom the rrninland that
speaks “proper English,” Snead is decidedly an outsider whose sole purpose is to collect
the record of people he doesn’t appear to understand. His authority, like that of the
colonial ethnographer, derives solely ﬂom his ability to use scientiﬁc expertise to
construct an authoritative record. Snead’s authority is dramatically subverted by the
supematural Unborn child who ﬂits in and out of the view ﬁnder, causing Snead to
momentarily question his own observations. The child’s timelessness, which allows her
to visit the indigo producing ancestors, is an attractive alterrntive to Snead’s rigid faith in
the merits of modern technology. Photography ultimately becomes problematic because

it pretends to present an apparently unbiased representation. Dash, however, uses ﬁlm as

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a means to shift the focus from the photographic record, to the process of photographing
itself.

Dash’s ﬁlm, moreover, can be viewed as a self-referential critique of a
contemporary tendency to view cinema a8 a reﬂection of reality. Dash reveals the
illusionary technology of ﬁlm through her representation of a child’s manual movie
camera, where a series of images of a United States city are turned with a lever to provide
the illusion of movement. This image—between photograph and motion picture—
suggests a self-conscious critique of all forms of representation to render a reﬂection of
reality. This self-referential treatment of cinema is suggestive of the explicitly
subjectivity of the ﬁlm In contrast to the scientiﬁc forms of representation associated
with Mr. Snead these images demonstrate the limitations of science to reproduce reality,
giving added credence to Nana Peazant’s haunting Shouts, “I remember and I recall” as
viable sources of historical signiﬁcance. Moreover through Nana Peazant, Dash presents
a challenge to colonial conceptions of history. For Nana the past is carried by “Those
eighteenth century Aﬂicans watch[ing] us.”

Dash’s focus on photographic processes and her self-referential critique of the
moving picture can also be viewed as an argument against contemporary exclusive media
practices. Dash alludes to the historical aspect of practices of exclusion, stating, “In my
ﬁlm, I'm asking the audience to sit down for two hours and listen to what black women
are talking about. When have we been asked that before, ﬂom a female point of view?”
(qtd. in Rule C15-C17). Read in the context of dominant cinematic practices, Dash’s
challenge to the politics of representation in the colonial past establishes a necessary

connection between contemporary colonial practices that exclude alternative historical

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accounts. On one level, Dash’s parodic treatment of Mr. Snead and her self-referential
critique of cinema can be viewed as part of a broader attack on colonial forms of
representation. It is also possible to gain, ﬂom a close reading of the ﬁlm itself, a
criticism of contemporary politics of representation. Indeed, Dash’s critique of ﬁlm
suggests such a reading that is not necessarily dependent upon understanding the complex
institutional processes of negotiation involved in contemporary cinematic production.
However, consideration of these processes challenges a broader cultural tendency to view
the turn of the century racial politics as an empirical historical object, divorced ﬂom

contemporary circumstances.

Displacing the Colonial Subject

Viewing the uniﬁed subject as a contact zone has important implications for the
way visual rhetorics are used to legitimize and challenge particular types of knowledge.
Dash’s focus on history as the producer of subjective interpretations, limited by
vantagpoints and cultural biases, can be located within the text. Read in the context of
institutional constraints and the cultural politics surrounding the ﬁlm’s production,
however, Dash’s ﬁlm can be viewed as a critique of the perseverance of one of the
primary assumptions of the western historical narrative: the uniﬁed subject. This section
focuses on two instances of Dash’s challenge to the subject. First, I will explicate her
critique of the authorial or ethnographic subject position tlnt has historically presumed
the authority to speak for the “other.” I will then look explore Dash’s ﬂagmented
subjectivities. While it is important to read these critiques as they are explicitly portrayed

in the ﬁlm, it is equally important to consider Dash’s ﬁlm as a challenge to contemporary

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adherence to the autonomous subject. Such cinematic treatments are especially useful for
helping students understand complex notions of subjectivity.

To disrupt the historical and contemporary pretense of cinematic objectivity, Dash
employs conventions speciﬁc to mainstream cinema to initially assume an authoritative,
objective stance. Speciﬁcally she supplies apparently objective textual signposts that
orient the viewer to a particular place of origin by presenting written text:

At the turn of the century, Sea Island Gullahs, descendents of
African slaves, remained isolated from the mainland of South
Carolina and Georgia.

This objective authorial subject position is established only to be displaced
through a sequence of written, audible, and visual images that disassemble and fragment
the authoritative subject. The presumably objective backgron information creates the
expectation that the narrative to follow will correspond with the way empirical reality has
fornmlly been disseminated in western cultures. This orienting voice, however, is
supplemented by another written statement that begins to reveal a crack in objective

stance:

As a result of their isolation, the Gullahs created and maintained a
distinct, imaginative and original African American culture.

In contrast to the descriptive information of the ﬁrst lines, this evaluative
language reveals a slight shiﬁ in narrative perspective. Words like “imaginative” and
“original” suggest that the group being described has its own agency. Importantly, the
posture of ethnographic objectivity is subverted through the suggestion that “culture”
functions not as a static entity to be described by others, but that it is “created” by the

individuals who participate in it.

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The third phrase provides a more forceful disruption of the authority of
ethnographer to “write” another culture. Informing the audience that “Gullah
communities recalled, remembered and recollected much of what their ancestors brought
with them from Aﬁica,” Dash presents an alternative to empirical histories and undercuts
the authority of the omniscient historical subject.

The ﬁrst shot, a brief, slow-motion close up of two hands holding cupping dust is
a disorienting departure ﬁ'om the black and white words with which the ﬁlm began. The
following images of the community’s matriarch, Nana Peazant, fully clothed and
immersed in water, provides a brief hint that perhaps she will be the source of such
“remembrances.” Her words, however, suggest an alternative to familiar conventions of
a centralized narrative perspective:

I am the ﬁrst and the last,

I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin,

I am the barren one

And many are my daughters

I am the silence that you cannot understand
I am the utterance of my name.

This pattern of visual orientation, written words, and disorientation through visual
images which continues throughout the ﬁlm’s narrative, performs the multiple
subjectivities inhabiting Nana Peazant’s “1.” While she is a primary character in the
enfolding debates over migration, the ﬁlm dramatizes, through the sequence of images, a
sense of communal identity at odds with the conventional singularity of the western
narrative. The shot of Nana Peazant is followed by a sequence of misty images: A

woman in a white dress, a couple ﬂoating on a boat, and man praying. These images

ﬁirther suggest a radical deformation of the authoritative text with which the ﬁlm began.

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Nana Peazant’s words, moreover, establish a shift in subjectivity from the ethnographic
“the Gullahs” as a community known by its place and time, to a collective, circular
subjectivity where one voice is both “ﬁrst” and “last,” ‘Vvife” and “virgin.” Dash again
calls attention to the limitations of all historical accountings with her reference to “the
silence that you cannot understand.” Yet this silence is different ﬁom the silent voice of
the ethnographer who speaks for the Gullahs. The limitations of understanding any group
of people are inherent to all histories that attempt to establish a single story of what
happened. The ﬁlm accepts this limitation and because it regards all histories as
contingent, seeks to establish the credibility of alternative, circular, historical accounts
through recollection and imagination.

The text presents the limits of “recollection, remembrance, and recall” along with
the disorienting series of images in the opening sequence of Daughters of the Dust to
provide a linkage to the past buried by the traditional history or, here more
metaphorically, dust. Importantly, a mixture of visual, audio, and verbal images
dramatizes the apparent limitation of any image to convey the “truth.” In effect, the
multiplicity of forms enabled by the visual medium ruptures meaning ﬁ'om conventional
(western) systems of logic, with its testaments to truth, and the viewer is left to determine
the “signiﬁcance” of inﬁnite possibilities for meaning. The images then provide the basis
for the tmconventional narrative perspective of the Unborn Child who represents the link
between past, present and future. Over shots of the community she asserts another claim
to subjectivity through her extended links to the family through time and space: “My

story begins on the eve of my family’s migration. My story begins before I was born.

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My Great-Great Grandmother, Nana Peazant saw her family come apart. Her ﬂowers to
bloom in a distant frontier. And then there was my Daddy’s problem.”

This close reading of the text provides rich insights into the ﬁlm’s ideological
critique of dominant colonial and neo-colonial formations. Yet the focus on multiple
subjectivities inhabiting Nana Peazant must also be considered as a response to the power
dymmics that remain masked by third person authorial subjects. Through relentless
fragmenting of the narrative subject, Dash provides a commentary on past and present
practices of writing the “other.”

Dash’s use of cinema to construct a contemporary rhetorical argument, therefore,
is enhanced by consideration of the linkages she makes between historical imperial logics
and contemporary practices. Read outside of the context of contemporary racial and
gendered politics in the ﬁlm industry, moreover, the ﬁlm may actually reinscribe a sense
of disconnectedness between past and present, under the assumption that contemporary
society has progressed beyond colonialism. So-called postcolonial discourses argue
forcefully that a view of the historical past as a separate knowable object, rather than as
sites of ongoing contestation and debate, is in danger of simply repressing those colonial
logics and related material conditions that maintain in contemporary society.

A similar logic, I will argue, operates in writing classrooms that rely on
unexplored distinctions between student writing processes divorced from sanctiﬁed
knowledge. Susan Miller’s distinction between process writing and “actual” practices is
one example of this tendency to rely on too great a separation between student writing
and other, sanctiﬁed forms of knowledge. A visual rhetoric, as I stated above, is part of a

pedagogical approach that seeks to complicate these distinctions, emphasizing a critical

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approach that places student rhetorics in relation to multiple rhetorical forms, including
but certainly not limited to ﬁlm. Visual rhetorics, moreover, provide a particularly rich
starting point, because of the increasing occurrence of multiple visual media forms in
student’s everyday lives. In the following section, I will explore the broader pedagogical
implications of this rhetorical emphasis by offering speciﬁc strategies for using visual
rhetorics like Dash’s ﬁlm for classroom practices that seek to demystify the complex

processes of negotiation that go into all forms of textual production.

Classroom Implications of Visual Rhetorics: Negotiating Signiﬁcance in Student
Writing

In Shooting for Excellence, Jabari Mahiri argues that “As educators we ask
students to study things we have seen to be important in our world, but our
success with them also depends on our efforts to understand things they have
deemed important in theirs"(1 16-117). To understand the “things” students value
and that we, as educators, value ourselves, we might start by acknowledging the
terms upon which such exchanges take place. Reading Daughters of the Dust as a
visual rhetoric provides an alternative to conventioml rhetorical tendencies to
avoid the impact of production on textual practices. By combining ideological
critique with analysis of production constraints, we get a richer view of the
material, institutional and ideological terms Dash negotiated. While the ﬁlm
provides an excellent source for reading the particularities of cinema and

cinematic production, the ultimate purpose of a visual rhetoric is to encourage

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students to view their own writing practices as the effect of processes of
negotiation in speciﬁc contact zones.

Rather than suggesting that we somehow equate the capital-intensive
processes of cinema production with student writing, this approach uses a reading
of the ﬁlm to encourage students to explore the terms upon which they engage
with instructors to negotiate similar their own material and ideological
constraints. It will be clear that Daughters of the Dust was strategically selected to
focus on these concerns. At the same time classroom practices should be ﬂexible
enough to generate additional contact zones that emerge in the classroom. For
example, the above ﬁlm raises important questions surrounding collaborative
groups as contact zones that impact textual production. What is important, in this
visual rhetorical approach, is that visual texts be used to encourage students’ self-
conscious negotiations of the terms of exchange upon which they read and write.
What follows, then, are speciﬁc practices surrounding students’ linking Dash’s
text to their own engagement with the culture industry, technologies and

subjectivities.

The Culture Industry: Visual Rhetorics, the Academy and Student Writing

Film’s unique institutional setting, demonstrated in the discourses surrounding
Dash’s ﬁlm, provides a provocative ﬁamework for discussing the hierarchy of textual
values within the institution. This section explores classroom strategies that use Dash’s
ﬁlm to explore the material and institutional conditions inﬂuencing students’ reading and

writing. It begins with a series of questions concerning the terms of exchange upon

14]

which the student writes in the classroom. It then considers academic deﬁnitions of
aesthetics and history that shape their readings of cinema in the classroom, and concludes
with a discussion of a classroom practice that questions the criteria for “good” student
writing.

This focus challenges Susan Miller’s assumption that students ﬁequently perform
activities that do not “do anything in particular, or . . . have 'meaning' about anything in
particular” (97). When asked why they are writing, students will often provide answers
that like: “I write for a grade,” or “I write to improve my skills for later.” Such claims
often reduce complex motives into simple apparently obvious purposes. However, it is
worthwhile to consider how such claims might be probed further. What, for instance,
does a grade represent regarding the students’ ability to strategically negotiate academic
expectations? What does it represent to students about their relationship to the academy
as a discursive site? And how do expectations about future skills reﬂect a complex
understanding of the terms upon exchange upon which students negotiate the
contemporary academy?

A visual rhetorics challenges the perceived stability of institutional deﬁnitions
through such questions and by introducing deﬁnitions which ﬁ'ame aesthetic value and
historical legitimization as open questions that students will have to negotiate. A
postcolonial visual rhetoric, like Dash’s ﬁlm, is part of a pedagogy that opens up
questions of aesthetics in relations to the historical and material conditions inﬂuencing
what counts as knowledge for the academy and for students. Daughters of the Dust
provides just one source in an ongoing interrogation of the conditions attendant to all

forms of textual production. In a cultural context where creative texts are often viewed

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and read as uniﬁed, autonomous expressions—as something that the student should
“get”—I have found it useful to begin the course by calling assumptions regarding
aesthetic value and legitimate historical knowledge into question. Daughters of the Dust
is read through deﬁnitions of historical and aesthetic texts that ﬁame the discussion and
provides a context for students to create their own understanding of the text.

Before introducing the ﬁlm, students discuss two deﬁnitions of historical and
aesthetic texts each. Historical texts are deﬁned as l.) Objectivist: those texts that seek
to present as close a reproduction of facts, events and people from the past. and 2.)
Culturalist: texts deﬁned as historical by those in a position to nnke distinctions between
historical and non-historical texts. After some discussion of the limitations and
possibilities of each deﬁnition we turn to deﬁnitions of literary/aesthetic texts which are
similarly introduced as 1) F ormalist: those texts which employ creative devices to elicit
emotional or intellectual responses and 2) Culturalist: Those texts which are called
literary/aesthetic by those in the position to so name them.

While these deﬁnitions are problematic in terms of contemporary theoretical
developments, they provide a taxonomy from which the class may begin to frame the
relationship between their own valued texts and those that the academy implicitly or
explicitly privileges. This taxonomy was particularly useful, for example, in a recent
discussion of Makaveli’s (Tupac Shakur) “Me and My Girlfriend.” Many of the students
decided that aesthetic concerns are highly personal yet at the same time acknowledged
the institutional tendency to marginalize rap lyrics. By calling these texts into question,
students are ready to broach the relationship between aesthetics and material constraints

at work in Daughters of the Dust.

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The questions that emerge from a discussion of aesthetic value and historical
legitimacy in Dash’s ﬁlm provide a promising framework for exploring the relationship
between perceptions of aesthetic and historical value and the circumstances surrounding
the production of texts. Students who research questions surrounding the production of
Dash’s text begin to locate institutional and material constraints that too often go
unnoticed in rhetorical analysis. Rather than supplying deﬁnitive answers regarding
institutional politics, the difﬁculties associated with Dash’s text, ﬂamed in relation to the
deﬁnitions presented, generate promising lines of inquiry: What do her difﬁculties
suggest about the racial politics of the ﬁlm industry? What other visual forms support or
complicate Dash’s claim that there is an “aura of invisibility around black women ﬁlm
makers”? (qtd. in Rule C17). Does the ﬁlm itself comment on the contemporary politics
of cinematic production?

An important shift in the class takes place when students are asked to explore
similar questions regarding their own written productions. While there is no shortage of
ready responses for what constitutes “good writing,” questions surrounding the
mechanisms that inﬂuence these conceptions are much more complex. Ultimately the
dichotomies presented in my deﬁnitions of aesthetic and historical texts provide the
framework from which student rhetorics will be negotiated. Discussions of what deﬁnes
good writing, then, are cast in terms of a similar dichotomy. 1.) Traditional deﬁnition:
Good student writings are those texts that employ proper narrative conventions to clearly
develop a sustained coherent argument; and 2.) Culturalist deﬁnition: Good student
writing is that which is called good writing by those who are in a position to make

distinctions between good and poor writing.

The class presents a series of assumptions or deﬁnitions from which their own
writing will be evaluated. In the context of the writing classroom, the perception of
subjectivity is often a good starting point and students will inevitably argue that grading
policies in writing are often subjective. When asked to clarify they begin to approach
something similar to a “culturalist” deﬁnition of good writing—that which those in power
determine to be good writing. At the same time, I encourage students to consider those
factors that they might argue make all writing good or which are essential to good
academic writing. A list ﬁ'om a recent class reads as follows: “clarity, interesting, good
grammar, addresses audience.” This “Formalist” or “Objectivist” deﬁnition presents the
source for classroom discussion of the terms upon which their writing will be graded.
However, as our analysis of the ﬁlm suggests, such questions are often complicated by
factors external to the ﬁnished project.

Reading Dash’s ﬁlm through these deﬁnitions, then, helps generate questions
directly related to student writing. For example, it is important to ask students what
factors inﬂuence their desire to write a certain way in the classroom? It is often difﬁcult
to extend this conversation beyond grading and classroom concerns. However, the
vocabulary provided by an analysis of Daughters of the Dust, proves useful. Students,
for example, are encouraged to consider the following questions: What are the material or
monetary factors involved in your own textual productions? What are the cultural
relationships between you and your perceived audience? Is there a “dominant” idea of
good writing to which the classroom, instructor or institution subscribes? Is there room
for you to subordinate such an idea for alternative purposes? These questions often place

the instructor in the dubious position of opening up grading criteria to student debate.

145

Yet, this position is preferable to the tendency to obscure the terms of exchange upon

which students are asked to produce texts.

Technologies of Student Visual Rhetorics

Dash’s ﬁlm provides an excellent example of the use of technology to mix textual
forms for aesthetic and political effect. As mentioned above, technologies here refer to
the institutional mechanisms that organize and legitimate speciﬁc knowledges. Dash’s
text provides a framework for a classroom focus on modes of visual rhetorics through the
WEB Technology. The WEB provides any number of opportunities for students to
construct themselves, their personal histories, and the histories of others through various
mediums. One speciﬁc example I’ve used in my class entails students’ creating their
own immigration narratives, drawing ﬁom the wide array of sources on the WEB and
their own narratives. Initially students are asked to create as comprehensive and as
objective a narrative as possible as a means to getting at the “whole story.” Often students
will incorporate authoritative sources such as written artifacts and photographs.
However, they do so as a means to subverting or reinscribing the narrative. Ultimately,
this exercise urges students to consider narrative gaps and how they might ﬁll them in.
Students are then asked to construct their own alternative histories, a process that
suggests subjectivity of historical narratives.

A similar approach employs a contingent structure that the instructor has created,
but which, with hypertext technology, students can manipulate. At Michigan State
University students have access to a CD-ROM called American Identity which provides

such a structure by creating an interactive package of the immigration/migration

I46

experiences of ﬁve groups: African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Germans, Poles,
and Jewish Americans. The experiences of these groups are represented through
photographic images and written texts. Initially this program was designed to encourage
students to understand and conrpare different experiences. However, this technology also
enables the instructor to foreground the construction process itself, by asking students to
consider what is repressed and what is emphasized in the narrative.

In each case, the student’s reading practices and his/her construction of a narrative
of immigration is viewed as a process of negotiation in which questions of empirical
reality are complicated by institutional processes of representation. In other words,
students are encouraged to create their own sense of history by considering the
implications of each decision. Viewed in this way narrative devices like parody,
intertextuality, and multiple perspectives operate as strategies with ideological
implications. In essence, hypertext technology allows students to consider, through
various textual forms, the myriad ways they must negotiate myriad inﬂuences to
construct their own narratives. What limitations are inherent to the technology? What
possibilities does it afford? How can students create different narrative strategies that

employ texts constructed by others for their own purposes?

Displacing the Student Subject

The often-difﬁcult notion of authorial subjectivity is critical to understanding the
ways students rhetorically negotiate speciﬁc institutional and cultural domains. The
opening sequence of the ﬁlm which enacts a sequence from third-person authorial

subjectivity to a single individual inhabiting multiple subjectivities provides an excellent

I47

conceptual ﬁamework for student to consider their own assumptions. Students are
encouraged, therefore, to explore their own multiple subjectivities through various
discursive forms including letters, email, written assignments and WEB pages.

At the same time, moreover, Dash’s ﬁlm introduces important considerations for
how institutions construct individuals. As Susan Miller argues, classroom practices often
assume a “presexual, precultural” subject who is shaped by classroom practices to
construct appropriate student subject positions." The tendency to view students as
monolithic is particularly acute at my college of 40,000 undergraduates. It is possible,
however, to develop assignments that encourage students to consider the multiple ways in
which the university constructs them and to develop strategies for intervention. In the
aftermath of student riots on my campus, for example, students were asked to write their
responses to the event in which 10,000 students started ﬁres, overturned cars and looted
businesses. They were then asked to consider the ways that “students” were being
written in various institutional sites, including television reports, the university
newspaper, and a WEB-Site set up by the university to elicit tips for prosecution
Regardless of their ofﬁcial “position” on the riots, most of the students noted a stark
discrepancy between their own understanding of themselves as students and the ways in
which they were being written.

Dash’s ﬁlm, then, provides an excellent example of how one might ‘erite back.”
Students were encouraged to create WEB pages that pulled from a number of sources to
present their own accounting of the events in question. Some of the students “borrowed”
images from the University site in order to recontextualize them in an argument that

questioned the circumstances leading up the riots. At the same time that they were proud

148

of their pages, however, students were ﬁ'ustrated by the lack of viable forums to voice
their concerns regarding their representation on campus. In short, students are
encouraged to view their own writing practices as complex processes of negotiation that
account at some level for those often invisible determinants that inﬂuence production.
Importantly, these practices encourage students to consider the various subject
positions they inhabit as students, employees, athletes, and parents. Dash’s ﬁlm
generates ideas and questions from which students come to understand the ways that
these various subjectivities are articulated with different technologies and are inﬂuenced

by the institutional settings in which they are performed.

Conclusion

Discussing visual rhetorics is equivalent to arguing for multiple rhetorics. The
primary reason for doing so is to enable students and instructors to explore the unique
ways alternative discursive forms are circulated through speciﬁc institutional setting,
with distinct technologies, and with alternate assumptions about what constitutes
legitimate knowledge. Visual rhetorics into- classroom practices, then, encourage
students to explore how visual mediums attain effects in relation to non-visual rhetorics.
A visual rhetoric operates in the classroom as an alternative to a rhetorical tradition that
privileges writing over visual mediums. Our culture is becoming increasingly saturated
by visual imagery through media such as movies, MTV, the Internet, and television. It
seems only appropriate, therefore, that we as instructors engage students with textual
forms that they mediate in their everyday lives. The objective here, however, is not to

displace one form of rhetoric with another. It is to incorporate multiple rhetorics that

 

3' Miller, Textual Carnivals, 142.

149

more adequately represent the multiple ways legitimate knowledge is debated and
institutionalized through invisible logics. Ultimately, then, the use of visual rhetorics,
calls attention to the need for more rhetorical scholarship on teaching practices that
reﬂect the ways in which students engage in various settings through multiple subject
position. Mahiri’s claim that instructors hope to engage students by understanding
“things they value” also suggests that we understand speciﬁc rhetorical questions

surrounding the multiple discursive forms students negotiate daily.

150

Conclusion
Some Implications of Cultural Rhetorics

In an attempt to locate cultural studies in the speciﬁc context of U.S. composition
and rhetoric, I have drawn on a wide range of texts that I locate at the intersections of
British cultural studies and the ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition in the U.S. It may seem
that I have used different in readings of critical scholarship in Chapters One and Three
than I have in the textual analysis of Alias Grace and Daughters of the Dust, and that the
focus on postcolonial narratives is a departure ﬁ'om the postmarxist reading of Alias
Grace.

Arguing in Chapter One that the counterdisciplinary focus has been eliminated
ﬁ'om uses of cultural studies, I focused on critical analyses of scholarship at the
intersections of cultural studies, rhetoric, and composition in the U.S. In Chapter Two,
"Recovering British cultural studies and the Critique of the Disciplinary Subject," I then
drew on theoretical works in British cultural studies through early "founding texts" of
Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson. Through a re-reading of
British cultural studies for writing instruction, I argue that it provides a framework for
rethinking composition and rhetoric in the U.S. through the development of a
counterdisciplinary perspective.

The need for a counterdisciplinary perspective becomes clear in the absence of
critical theory in the "Tate-Lindemann debates." The debates over the uses of literature in
composition, I have argued, supply a meta-history that reveals 1.) that the tendency to
"read" the history of rhetoric and composition in opposition to literary criticism is often

based on a "disciplinary drive" in U.S. composition and rhetoric, and 2.) that cultural

151

studies provides a means for thinking of a counterdisciplinary orientation to writing
instruction. Ultimately, I have argued that Tony Bennett's focus on literature as an
institution recommends a cultural studies approach to imaginative ﬁction for pedagogy.
Framing the debates in binary opposition, Tate and Lindemann preclude anything but a
marginal consideration of cultural studies.

The possibilities for imaginative ﬁction for a critical writing pedagogy through
British cultural studies and rhetoric are demonstrated in a critical reading of Margaret
Atwood's Alias Grace. Chapter Four focuses on a postmarxist/cultural studies approach
to the text, with particular emphasis on Raymond Williams' conceptions of determination
and ideology. In addition, I link cultural studies theories to a focus on a pedagogy of the
institutional production of knowledge.

The focus on the production of knowledge becomes even more clear in Chapter
F ive's reading of Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust. Employing postcolonial theories for
a cultural rhetorical reading, this chapter focuses on the relationship between three
locations of the production of knowledge: the text, institutional (in terms of Hollywood as
a culture industry) factors involved in the production and distribution of the ﬁlm, and the
institutional assumptions about knowledge that circulate in the academy (in terms of a
distinction between Culturalist and F orrmlist assumptions about language and textuality).

In addition, Chapter Five focuses on visual rhetorics of a postcolonial ﬁlm as a
speciﬁc type of cultural rhetoric that extends the trajectory of British cultural studies to
postcolonial criticism. The study of African American Gullahs living off the coast of
South Carolina ﬁrrther focused critical attention on cinema as a speciﬁc type of medium

from writing.

152

These readings of critical scholarship in the ﬁeld of cultural studies and rhetoric
in Chapters One through Three and on imaginative ﬁction in Chapters Four and Five
dramatize cultural studies' multiperspective approach to reading texts. I stress this feature
of cultural studies here in anticipation of the objection that the pedagogy I have described
asserts, like the New Criticism it opposes, a single best reading. My description of
classroom practices that draw on Dash's ﬁlm, however, is not intended to assert that the
instructor is the arbiter of meaning in the classroom who simply shows students how to
decode a ﬁlm in a way that supports a postcolonial perspective. Read in the context of
other classroom texts, such as feminist readings of popular texts, my reading of
Daughters of the Dust becomes one perspective. And while it can be argued that students
will tend to imitate my reading, I have not found this to be the case. Neither have I found
students reticent about critiquing my reading of the text, even as they haven't mastered
concepts like subject position or ideology.

The danger of cultural rhetorics' simply supplanting New Critical tendencies, it
seems to me, is primarily a matter of how the theory is integrated into the course. What is
needed, therefore, are not more attempts to provide the single best or authoritative
reading of Alias Grace, because the text itself is not really the subject of the class. The
pedagogy that supports this reading encourages students to read ﬁlms and novels closely
and rhetorically, but as a means for understanding how cultural politics are related to the
institutional production of knowledge. Thus, the focus of a writing class that is based on
cultural studies helps develop multiple approaches to social-epistemic rhetoric's focus on
“technology[s] for producing consciousness" (Berlin, Rhetorics 108-109) through a

“multiplicity of formulations” including media, ﬁlm, and photography (108-109).

153

In saying that cultural rhetorics can help facilitate resistant practices, moreover, I
am not disagreeing with Sharon Crowley's assertion that writing classes function as
screening mechanisms for dominant discourses. I am contending, however, with
Crowley's assertion that screening is the function of the writing course. Composition
classes serve several ofﬁcial and informal ﬁmctions that are not reducible to screening.
Even if we accept that screening is one of the writing class's primary functions, this fact
would seem to recommend more practices that resist this tendency. Critical awareness of
the fact tlnt you are in a class in service of status quo will not necessarily change the
reality of the course's function, but it provides some room for subversion. This is what
happens in courses that frame dominant discourses like canonical literature in a
discussion of other textual forms like Rap lyrics.

Cultural studies, as I have suggested in Chapters One through Three, offers a
complex model of institutional power that helps understand the writing classroom in
terms of multiple effects. While I have stressed this through readings of critical
scholarship and pedagogy, however, I have given little attention to the important role that
administration can play in helping develop oppositional cultural rhetorics. As cultural
studies, through the work of Tony Bennett and others, moves more towards concerns
over policy it provides a promising line of convergence with institutional scholarship on
writing. In fact, the focus in Raymond Williams' work on cultural materialism would
encourage institutional scholars to factor in the material implications of arguments to
eliminate the writing requirement. While a focus on administration as an important place
for cultural studies was beyond the scope of this study, the project does tend to

recommend work in that area.

154

In addition to recommending more scholarly attention to administration, this
dissertation invites a series of questions for ﬁuther study. One area, for instance, that
deserves more attention is the model of institutional power implicit in arguments about
the politics of the writing classroom. The gap between the optimism of Berlin and Vivian
and the extreme pessimism of Sharon Crowley, with respect to resistant practices, ought
to be bridged through more attention to the multiple institutional locations that mediate
power relations in our daily lives. In the usage of Berlin's "technologies of l
consciousness," institutions like Hollywood, the academy (or multiple academic

institutions) and other forms of knowledge can be usefully explored in the writing

 

1.3.

classroom. 1
In suggesting this attention to institutional politics, moreover, I have stressed that
I view this focus as integral to projects to help students become "better writers."
Assumptions that the writing class ought to spend more time with writing skills ignore
the way that what counts as knowledge is ah'eady mediated before the instructor and
students enter the classroom by popular and academic assumptions about knowledge. As
a result, writing practices that feature explicating different forms help students develop

skills including the development of a critical perspective of language.

155

 

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