Re-Fusing the Edifice:
Postmodernism and the
Reconstruction of English Studies
GORDON
A.
GRANT
III
But the truth is that most of us had to leave the humanities in order to do
serious work in it.
Stuart Hall
In traditional humanist literary studies, theory supports criticism, the way
teachers talk about literature. Humanist theory provides a vocabulary, a set
of categories, a methodology, a wayof justifying, more or less self-evidently,
the project of literary criticism as an academic endeavor; it tells us, usually in
the form of assumptions about human nature or about the role of art, how to
respond to texts, to literature. The inexorable growth of theory, however,
which began in earnest in the 1960s with structuralism and seems to have
reached some sort of apex with the arrival of postmodernism as a hotly
disputed but nevertheless pivotal intellectual category, has undone the
traditional relationships among theory, criticism, and literature, and has
complicated the ways in which teachers and students can talk about literary
texts. This story about theory and its relationship to literature is by now
rather well-known, but I would argue that the effects of theory are still being
sorted out in the classroom, where literature is still very often taught
according to humanist and modernist assumptions about expression, representation and aesthetics. Teaching literature still means talking about what
texts mean; even postmodernism, for all of its contradictions and overlappings
and its contested status, can be easily thematized into a style or period or way
of reading within a literature course.
As part of the postmodern scene.' however, teachers in the literature
classroom today need to confront the contemporary "distortion" of the
traditional and established textual hierarchy that has until now privileged
literature over criticism and theory. I would argue, in fact, that the changing
structure of the literature classroom is not simply due to the destabilizing
impact of postmodern culture or postmodern theory-which are too often
characterized only by their ontological skepticism, love of otherness and
fragmentation, and refusal of reified notions of rationalism and Truth-but
390 Journal of Advanced Composition
because of the built-in dead-end of modern(ist) aesthetics, which deprives
literature of its life-giving and life-enhancing social context by fixating on a
truncated notion of "meaning" within a reified notion of art as a distinct
sphere of experience. The most obvious example of this aesthetic is the New
Criticism, which jettisons context in order to focus on the meaning of the
aesthetic artifact itself; newer critical theories of interpretation, moreover,
fall into a similar epistemological trap (of finding or locating meaning) when
they too "interpret" a text according to their own principles. In the wake of
postmodern critiques of epistemology, which are also critiques of the search
for meaning, what is necessary now is a different way for teachers to orient
themselves in relation to literature, I want to argue in this essay that
postmodern theory offers a framework for restructuring the relationship
between critical (secondary) and literary (primary) texts in a way that will
allow us to continue to talk about literary texts in the classroom without
recapitulating new critical assumptions or other modern, epistemologicallyoriented perspectives. It can be argued from the perspective of postmodernism
that, although they use different codes, conventions, and languages to pursue
their claims about knowledge, all texts are discursive practices that articulate
a world-view; theory and criticism can be read as genres that are meant not
simply to disambiguate literature, but exist beside it. Literature, in other
words, is another genre of theory, ifby theory we mean awayof trying to make
sense of the world and our position in it. Reading literature from a
postmodernist perspective thus involves a larger project, a critique not of
aesthetics or expressiveness, but a cultural criticism that uses a plurality of
texts to shape and respond to cultural positions and values within our current
historical situations.
The motivation for this essay, however, involves more than an attempt
to describe an alternative conceptual model for literary studies that rests on
a philosophical notion of post modernism as an epistemological critique. My
argument is also propelled by more urgent historical, social and professional
issues. Over the last two years, the nature and role of English departments
has been debated in the national press, in the pages ofMLAnewsletters, and,
most illustratively for me, on my own campus.s Unlike other disciplinary
arguments about the usefulness or accuracy of different theoretical approaches which have occurred in cascading fashion over the last thirty years,
these more recent arguments, while encompassing and growing out of
theoretical differences, have focused sharply on the placets) English departments are supposed to occupyin our society. For instance, Barbara Hermstein
Smith, as president of the MLA, wrote in Profession89, the association's
year-end disciplinary exercise in self-analysis,
that "literature" is no longer a
solid referent, "literary study" encompasses everything and nothing, and the
dtscipline itself is coming apart despite "institutional inertia" (2-3). Her
statement was meant to encourage as much as to analyze. Since Smith's
"manifesto," other proposals addressing the institutional direction and vigor
Re-FusingtheEdifice 391
of English have appeared. Robert Scholes, for example, has presented a
revamped model of literary study that quite consciously dismisses literature
and aesthetic interpretation in favor of developing the skills of textual power
he has previously elaborated ("Flock").
Defenses of English departments as they now more or less exist have also
been written, and these are particularly interesting because of the ways they
seek to define the institutional role of literary studies. Writing to a broader
audience (specifically,beyond the profession) in Harper's, Louis Menand has
presented a liberal-traditionalist argument about the future of literary
studies. Despite his acknowledgement that canons reflect cultural selfinterest and that models of objective knowledge have been discredited,
Menand still recoils from actually suggesting that teachers change the way
they present literature: "English professors
are taught how to identify
tropes, not how to eliminate racist attitudes
[They] are trained to study
culture, not conserveit (whatever that would mean)" (56). We may infer as
well from Menand's narrow definition of professionalism that teachers are
not supposed criticize culture either. The university, in Menand's view,
should "restrict itself to the business of imparting some knowledge to the
people who need it" (56). In short, Menand tells us that the conflicts and
disagreements that animate contemporary culture are not part of the academy's concern, which should seek only to sustain its own niche as the chief
purveyor of a subservient and instrumental literacy. Menand's reconstruction of the ivory tower not only furthers the use of higher learning as an
exercise in the reproduction of middle class power and authority.J it also
seeks to tame one of the most powerful insights of postmodern theory (which
is also most corrosive to institutional academic structures): knowledge must
be historically and materially connected to its social foundations, to its
history of defining and disciplining the way people act, especially within the
knowledge-producing culture of the academy (Hariman 213). By stepping
into the debate about what English departments look like and what they do,
I want to argue that postmodernism offers a way to confront the conflict
surrounding the role of literary studies in contemporary society, a way to
understand why this debate is occurring and what is at stake for people who,
like me, are faced with the problem of defining a professional life in a time
of intellectual and political turmoil.
This problem of defining a professional life is not merely limited to
philosophical and moral issues, however. My attempt to re-fuse literary
studies through postmodernism also addresses the intra-disciplinary and
scholarly-professional split between literature and composition, between
reading and writing. Postmodernism offers a way for me to attempt to avoid
this split, to find a way to participate in both of these intellectual projects
without giving in to the structural impetus of the discipline that glorifies
literature (and theorizing about it) and denigrates the teaching of writing. As
Peter Elbow remarks in What Is English?, in literary studies "the study and
392 Journalof Advanced Composition
teaching of literature are privileged and people who study and teach writing
are treated shabbily, both materially and ideologically" (138). Yet Elbow
also does a good job in his book of documenting (or perhaps articulating) the
complicated, love-hate relationship teachers in the discipline of English have
with literature. Literary texts are often one of the primary inspirations for
people who enter the field of English, but we often cannot justify veneration
as a useful or even responsible mode of teaching. Though at different times
in the book Elbow tentatively offers "language arts" as an answer to the
question his title poses (a solution I am drawn to), it is his more provocative
point that drives my desire to reformulate my approach to literature: that
"writing could serve as a paradigm for English-a paradigm that offers help
on some of the important problems in the profession" (130). Rather than
continue to argue about the role of literature in writing classes, as Erika
Lindemann and Gary Tate have done recently," it is time to reverse the
debate and ask why so little writing, which is itself a form of theorizing, of
establishing relationships and linkages and causalities, is undertaken in
literature classes. It is time, to put the challenge more forcefully, to ask why
literary studies as a discipline privileges the reading of culturally anointed
texts over other approaches that engage language and meaning in a fuller
social and political context.
In order to present my notion of are-fused postmodernist literary
studies, I want first to show what we have to gain by abandoning the
modern(ist) view that opposes literature as expression to philosophy as
knowledge. Second, after describing this alternate post modern epistemology, I want also to present a picture of what a postmodern literary studies
might look like or do as it turns away from interpretation in a modern sense
and toward the ethics of reading and writing. As Lester Faigley has recently
argued in FragmentsofRationality:Postmodemityand theSubjectof Composition, writing (and the emergence of composition as an independent discipline) potentially offers a way to solve the "impasse" of postmodern theory,
the situation where no "principled position" can be maintained in the face of
postmodern critiques of knowledge, subjectivity, and politics (xii). Faigley
argues that, from within the postmodernist frame, "ethics becomes a matter
of recognizing the responsibility of linking phrases" (Faigley 237). By
exceeding, or perhaps even negating, "aesthetic" discussion in the literary
classroom, postmodernism positions literary studies as a materially grounded, socially implicated, existentialist discourse that takes as its focus the
relationship among texts, cultural forms and representations, and individual
and collective identities. Interpretation, within this model, must be understood as an argumentative and value-laden process which requires that all
participants have the opportunity to write and to argue about meaning and
to be able to establish their own relations with(in) culture as they are
educated.
Re-FusingtheEdifice 393
Postmodernist Perception and Knowledge
As David Harvey defines it, postmodernism brings a number of the crises that
energized modernism, especially the search for a transcendent truth or
beauty amid a growing acceptance of flux and ephemerality as the basis for
experience (10), to a breaking point Denying modernity's desire for transcendence, postmodernism "swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the
chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is" (44). This description can
be given a more critical inflection, furthermore, if we acknowledge that
postmodernism, as an epistemological theory, breaks up accepted, normativeways of understanding and speaking about the world, and argues that new
models must be formulated to "overcome the deficiencies of modern discourses and practices" (Best and Kellner 30). In other words, knowledge, as
a modern code-word for the processes that energize us as conscious agents,
no longer functions as a monolithic category or a series of epistemologically
grounded procedures that arbitrates our relationship with truth or value.
Post modern theories instead posit new models for apprehending the world,
models which deal in particular with the problems of representation and the
incompleteness of knowledge.
John Berger, for instance, in the deceptively simple Waysof Seeing, has
pointed out that we confront reality through expectations; one's understanding of the world is always preceded by a pre-constructed knowledge of it, a
specific way of seeing, or framing, the world. To put this process into a
linguistic register, as Robert Scholes does, we learn not directly about the
world, but acquire different discourses that enable us to see it (Textual 141).
As we better understand a discourse and are familiar with a wider variety of
discourses, so we perceive the world with more complexity. Indeed, experience itself is a textual process where the "productive quality of discourse"
engenders both subjectivity and agency (Scott 793). Reality, and, more
crucially, identity are part of a resolutely informational process; they are a
matter of finding, choosing, or-to acknowledge some degree of the determinism of discourse-simply arriving at fairly stable positions within the
possibilities articulated by one's social and historical circumstances. By
framing reality as part of a set of expectations, Berger frees his art criticism
from the hegemonic (modern) cultural frame that aestheticizes images so
that he may see art differently and derive a more useful experience from it
Rather than try simply to figure out what a picture means, Berger uses an
image to "place [him]self historically" ("Between" 140), to find in his own
responses and answers about himself, both individually and socially, as a
viewer and as an agent
Walter Truett Anderson's popularizing account of postmodernism as
"constructivist" foregrounds the spirit of Berger's discursive framing of
perception and captures more fully the ontological skepticism of the
postmodern point of view:as contemporary Western subjects, we livewith( in)
a burgeoning number of "belief systems," and we can no longer trust the
394 Journal of Advanced Composition
assumption that "somebody posess [es]the real item, a truth fixed and beyond
mere human conjecture" (3). The existence of these multiple ways of
believing suggests that we need to do more than simply seek out the shape or
form of knowledge(s), which is necessarily only part of the process of
learning. We also have an obligation to place ourselves in relation to other
beliefs and belief systems, and to see knowledge as a collection of discourses
that enable us to articulate and explain our material and historical situations.
Knowledge merely helps us gain access to and map out the debate about how
we construct our lives and our social experience; it does not absolutely convey
to us the nature of reality. As Richard Rorty, perhaps the most well-known
exponent of this point of view, has argued, "we [should] see knowing not as
having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as
a right, by current standards, to believe" (389). Rorty also argues that this
right is best sustained through "conversation," the hermeneutic process of
exploring understanding and belief that focuses on opening up problems for
investigation rather than regulating them through epistemological algorithms (389, 320). This position, moreover, leads to the explicitly anticognitivist and holist corollary that learning is not so much a matter of having
a truth demonstrated, but of "getting acquainted" with something, of being
able to use or manipulate the discourses of knowledge through an engagement with language and writing (319).
A Postmodernist Refusal of Literature and the Discipline of English
The revival of antifoundationalism has especially energized critiques of the
academy and its role in the construction of knowledge; these critiques, which
are also often made under the banner of postmodernism, challenge traditional (essentialist and objectivist) methods of organizing knowledge by investigating the "knowledge-power formation embodied in academic institutions,
practices, and languages" (Conner 11). In the case of literary studies, an
investigation of this sort coneen tra tes not only on how texts have been cut 0 ff
from their social context in order to critique them from the perspective of
formalist and humanist aesthetics, and but also on how these texts are then
used to fabricate a specific world-view. Humanist aesthetics, in other words,
marginalize language and rhetoric in favor of an epistemology that foregrounds the search for truth (or beauty) and, consequently, posit the subject
as autonomous, stable, and given. Before literary studies can be reframed as
a postmodernist and pragmatist conversation that seeks to explore the
problems and the potential of our culture and our identities within it,
therefore, we need to understand how modernity constructs the opposition
between literature and knowledge, which, as philosophy, has traditionally
been the premier discourse and final arbiter of truth and knowledge in the
humanities. Once the opposition between literature and philosophy has
been undone, literary studies can be brought into line with the mission
Patricia Harkin and John Schilb have set out for rhetoric and composition as
Re-FusingtheEdifice 395
it solidifies its own disciplinary identity: rather than simply serve larger (and
more powerful) discourses of knowledge, literature-like writing-can function as an "inquiry into cultural values" (1). Under this postmodernist
rubric, literature and philosophy are both discursive practices, and they can
be read as attempts to make sense of ourselves and our relation to the world.
Another way to frame the problem is to say that literature pedagogy is
still burdened by modernist, New Critical assumptions. By avoiding the
epistemological idea that language used to set out a proposition about the
world, the New Criticism, in its quest for aesthetic purity, left itself open to
the very dichotomies that have come to stifle traditional academic criticism.
These dichotomies-the split between art and life, high and low culture, the
artist -genius and the ordinary person -con tinue, moreover, to represent the
official picture of literary studies, despite the obvious violations of this
ideo logythat are visible in the everyday practice of English departments. The
problem, therefore, is getting the rest of the academy, not to mention the
larger culture, to accept the changes in our theories and practices and our
new, and increasingly dominant, institutional self-image. One example that
sets out the task facing us can be seen in Jurgen Habermas' attempt (and I
read him symptomatically as an expression of the modern cast of mind ) in The
PhilosophicalDiscourseof Modernityto enforce the essential genre distinctions between philosophy and Iiterature.> Habermas' defense of the
modern(ist) project in philosophy, particularly the separation and articulation of distinct spheres of knowledge, provides New-Critical literary studies
with the warrant that underlies its critical practice. The division of labor that
results from these distinctions, and which also marginalizes writing within
English, however, also clarifies the nature of the crisis the official discipline
faces today. Habermas argues that modernity and rationality, embodied best
by the project of philosophy, are still useful and productive concepts and
must be defended from the incursion of postmodern irrationality, which, by
denying the transcendent power of reason, leads us into epistemological and
political chaos. His defense of rationality deserves consideration as a claim
for the usefulness of one particular discourse; his consistent dismissal of
poststructuralist and postmodern theory, however, suggests an unwillingness to face the possibility that discourse can still be vital even if it is
unhitched from its ontological moorings and allowed to function in a more
provisional style as a way of mapping out the world for us and to us.
Unfortunately, if Habermas' argument about genre distinctions holds and
literature continues to be narrowly defined as expression, English departments need to return the discursive territory annexed from philosophy and
other disciplines, bar new forms of criticism, and resign themselves to the
traditional role of aesthetic interpretation and validation (as keepers of the
canon) while accepting an intellectual backseat in contemporary cultural
relations and in progressive politics that seek to challenge current doxa, both
inside and outside the academy. Composition, as a discipline, is not likely to
396 Journal of Advanced Composition
fair much better in institutional struggles under a Habermasian framework.
Like literary studies, composition will constantly have to defend itself against
the epistemological status of philosophy, which robs composition of its claim
to generate knowledge or valuers).
Habermas' "Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature" thus provides a starting place for a critique that
seeks to unmask modernist claims of epistemological and ontological superiority, claims that marginalize both literature and composition. Dominick
LaCapra has described The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which
the "Excursus" appears, as "a monument to good housekeeping of the mind"
which tries to "defend monogeneric forms and to reassert the decisively
hegemonic role of analytic distinctions in defining the central core of a
discipline or genre" (4). LaCapra accurately characterizes the institutional
politics in Habermas' argument about analysis and classification, which, in
his choice of the word "leveling" instead of another territorial metaphor such
as blurring, implies a hierarchical arrangement of discourse that clearly
privileges philosophy. The more immediate and important lesson of the title,
however, is that it forecasts the rhetoricity of Habermas' own argument, an
argument that claims to rest securely on the strength of analytic discourse.
The "Excursus" extends Habermas' attack on Jacques Derrida's philosophy, which culminates in the previous chapter with charges of mysticism and
irrationalism. In this essay, however, Habermas argues that Derrida rejects
logic in favor of rhetoric in order to avoid the consistency requirements that
are necessary for philosophical discourse-but which, so Habermas claims,
are unnecessary within the literary tradition of rhetorical, or stylistic,
analysis-because they short circuit his critique of reason (188). Habermas
specifically claims that Derrida's deconstruction "stand]s] the primacy of
logic over rhetoric, canonized since Aristotle, on its head" (187). This
argument rests, however, on his misrepresentation of Derrida's interpretation of the logic-rhetoric polarity, which does not simply invert the status of
these two "different" discourses, but deconstructs their opposition to show
how one differentially uses the other to define and establish itself within
language. While this disagreement, especially since it seems focused on the
way philosophical criticism may legitimately proceed, may seem quite distant
from the problems facing literary studies, it is here that we can find the fate
of a postmodern literary studies, since undoing the logic/rhetoric opposition
is the first step to retrieving literature from the immobilizing frame of
aesthetics.
Habermas' criticism ofDerrida, rather than disqualifying deconstruction
as a philosophical discourse and keeping literature in its place, actually
reinscribes a larger conflict within philosophy. The relationship between
rhetoric and dialectic, as Chaim Perelman has argued in The Realm of
Rhetoric, is not as permanent or distinct as Habermas claims. According to
Aristotle, rhetoric is "a branch of dialectic and similar to it. ... Neither
Re-FusingtheEdifice 397
rhetoric nor dialectic is the scientific study of anyone separate subject: both
are faculties for providing arguments" (TheRhetoric25-26). In an extension
of this traditional linkage, Perelman's reconstruction of Aristotelian argumentation "subordinat[es] philosophical logic" to his "new rhetoric" (5);
this action revives Aristotle's connection between these two discourses, and
rescues rhetoric from its degraded and marginalized status as a discourse on
style, or "the study of ornate forms of language" (3). Byexcavating the history
of these discourses, Perelman notes that Aristotle's distinction between
analytical reasoning-or formal logic-and dialectical reasoning--or arguments that proceed from "generally accepted opinions" and "theses" and
which seek "to persuade or convince" an audience-had been erased byPeter
Ramus in his formulation of the trivium of the liberal arts (2, 3).6 This
erasure effectively disassociated rhetoric from dialectic, and reduced rhetoric to mere ornamentation. As a result, when modern logic developed in the
mid-nineteenth century under the influence of Kantian philosophy and
dialectic was consequently subsumed into formal logic, any sense of argument operating within a social realm was suppressed in favor of scientistic
demonstrations (Perelman 3). Rhetoric, within this constellation of modern
knowledge, was treated with contempt while only scientific knowledge, based
on "evidence," was acceptable. Perelman's new rhetoric, however, sets out
to reclaim Aristotle's linkage between dialectics and rhetoric and, as "a
theory of argumentation, covers the whole range of discourse that aims at
persuasion and conviction" (5). By admitting the discursive nature of
knowledge claims, and using this awareness to support these knowledge
claims through argument, Perelman's rhetoric thus "becomes the indispensable instrument for philosophy" (7). Rhetoric provides a way to analyze
arguments while also understanding that knowledge is not permanently,
ideally, or, in modern terms, scientifically indisputable. For Perelman, in
other words, rhetoric functions as a method of analysis as well as persuasion.
In light of this, Habermas' account of Derrida's deconstruction of the logicrhetoric polarity is incorrect; Derrida actually reinvokes an ancient relationship, one that stresses the provisionality of human knowledge of the world
and our ability or desire to act on this knowledge.
When Habermas accuses Derrida of adopting a literary criticism that
"merely continuesthe literary process" and which therefore cannot "end up
in science," he also situates himselfwithin a Western metaphysics that makes
an artificial distinction between the "purely cognitive" aspect of "problem
solving" and its discursive ties (188). For Habermas, thinking and writing are
unconnected activities: "As soon aswe take the literarycharacter ofN ietzsche's
writing seriously," he writes, "the suitableness of his critique of reason has to
be assessed in accord with the standards of rhetorical success and not those
of logical consistency" (188). Byoperating within this opposition, however,
Habermas ignores or misses the possibility of the discursive logic of rhetoric,
or, perhaps an even more frightening possibility, the ethos of logic, which
398 Journalof Advanced Composition
seeks to convince us by the powerof its logical demonstration, and not just by
its logic. Habermas' defense of the analytical progress of philosophy against
Derrida's rhetorical analysisthus also seems somewhat disingenuous: "Derrida
does not proceed analytically, in the sense of identifying hidden presuppositions or implications. This isjust the wayin which each successive generation
[of philosophers] has critically reviewed the works of the preceding ones"
(189). Yet a rhetorical analysis necessarily performs the tasks Habermas
defends as the simultaneous method and goal of philosophy. Rhetoric, like
philosophy, seeks the cracks in the edifice of a text so we might more
effectively respond to it and offer counter-claims, corrections, or amplifications. We could even argue further, against Habermas, that aesthetic
discourse, like philosophical discourse, works within a similar logic of
successive counterstatement. David Lodge theorizes, for instance, that
succeeding generations of writers respond to previous models of represent ation by moving between the linguistic poles of metaphor and metonymy to
disclose their versions of reality ("Modernism"). And surely Marcel
Duchamp's critical reappraisal of aesthetic categories through his own
avant-garde art is as much a philosophical as an aesthetic statement. In short,
Habermas' claim for a privileged style of progressive knowledge-building on
the part of philosophy seems overstated at the very least.
Habermas-and here he most fully represents the modernist worldview-longs for a purely cognitive philosophy, a way of thinking that is
similar to the role of avant-garde art in Adorno's negative dialectics, which,
as Ha bermas writes, "preserves our connectio n with the utopia 0 f a long since
lost, uncoerced and intuitive knowledge belonging to the primal past" (186).
Indeed, Habermas' use of Adorno's aesthetic concept belies the influence the
category of pure rationality has on his own work. This category ignores,
unfortunately, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith observes, the way "value," as
well as meaning, is "the product of the dynamics of some economy ("Value"
1). Habermas' model of communication follows the Saussurian tradition and
its idealized vision of language that assumes a message can be straightforwardly and innocently decoded. As Smith notes, however, "that model of
discourse ... along with the entire structure of conceptions, epistemological
and other, in which it is embedded, is now increasingly felt to be theoretically
unworkable" (2). In fact, that which opposes the value of rationality in
Habermas' communicative action, what he calls "distortions," can be seen as
the very ground out of which rationality grows (Smith 9). Self-referentiality,
world disclosure, fictiveness-in short, the qualities of language used to
define aesthetic discourse-are necessary to establish a notion of rational
communication, and they in turn need rationality in order to be defined.
Habermas creates a category of communication that is "sublime ... but also
quite empty" (Smith 16); crucially, however, he fills this category on the
academic level with philosophy, which offers a version of argumentation as
a way to escape the snares of rhetoric. Referring to his "What is Pragmatics?"
Re-FusingtheEdifice 399
Smith accuses Habermas of constructing a model that, as
a type of communicationthat excludesall strategy, instrumentality,(self-) interest, and
aboveall,the profit motive,reflectswhatappears to be a more generalrecurrent impulse
to dream an escape fromeconomy,to imaginesomespecialtype,realm or mode ofvalue
that is beyond economicaccounting,to create by invocationsome place apart from the
marketplace-a kingdom,garden or island, perhaps, or a plane of consciousness,form
of socialrelationship,or stageof humandevelopment-where the dynamicsof economy
are, or oncewere,or somedaywillbe,altogether superseded,abolishedor reversed. (17)
Habermas' claims about ordinary language and the autonomy of fictional
discourse in the "Excursus" reflect a similar wishfulness. He suggests, at least
by implication, that reason, through the instrument of philosophy, will
eventually lead to a utopia. Though he does not naively contest the idea that
rhetoric can ever be fullyremoved from language, Habermas does claim that
it can be "tamed" in order to function analytically (209). Yet this confidence
in the domestication of language, which is grounded in ordinary language
theory, rests finally on the idealized ground of a transparent language. Put
bluntly by Jonathan Arac, Habermas wishes to "trade excessive rhetoric for
sensible analysis" but "at just these moments, however, [his] own rhetoric
swells" (xii). In the end, Habermas' defense of philosophy from the incursions of literary criticism and theory shows more about academic cultural
history and politics than it does about the power of reason to understand the
world and make it a better place.
Beginning to Re-Fuse Literary Studies
If crumbling genre distinctions between philosophy and literature only
partially point to a need to reconstruct literary studies, though, Habermas'
criticism oftextualism shows how we can begin to rethink the uses of literary
criticism and the purposes of our institutionally mandated talk. The concept
of a "universal text" (Habermas 190), or, as John Murphy suggests, the
notion that linguistic structures are at the center of social systems (241),
provides Habermas with a picture of an inescapable circuit of information,
an endless loop of regressive, repetitive, and finally pointless conversation.
In his dismissal of textualism, Habermas essentially accuses Derrida (and
poststructuralism) of a linguistic idealism (and nihilism), the notion that we
are trapped within the constraining powers of language, devoid of human
agency. Poststructuralism allegedly removes the distinctions between different discourses and negates any kind of criticism beyond a non-generic
exegesis of texts; critical discourse is reduced to a "mechanistic combinatoire,
in which everything is given in advance, in which there can be no practice but
the endless recombination of fixed pieces from the generative machine"
(Polan 49). Murphy proposes, however, that the universal text should be
construed as a "syntase ... a process whereby the parts of society are directly
integrated, without the aid of an ahistorical regulatory system ... society can
400 Journal of Advanced Composition
resemble a patchwork of language games" (248). In other words, Derridean
deconstruction does not narrowly destabilize or disseminate meaning, nor
does post modern theory abolish or simply relativize categories or genres. In
fact, the more postmodernism undermines the regulative power of genre, the
more it affirms its constitutive power (see Perloff 4).
Textualist criticism does not deny or submerge formalist distinctions,
because such an act would indeed negate all criticism; it instead denies
formalism its ontological force, and this move enables critics to focus on how
distinctions get made and unmade in different historical moments and from
different perspectival positions. Habermas' defense of genres, grounded in
a version of ordinary language philosophy, overgeneralizes and naturalizes
different speech strategies. Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, has pointed out
how the formalist distinction between ordinary language and literary language cited by Habermas is one of degrees within discourses, not between
different kinds of discourse (29). Metaphor "is a property of language," and
it exists in all texts (Brodkey, Academic 65). Indeed, Habermas overlooks
contingencies that affect ordinary and fictional discourse such as different
levels of competence or, even more crucially, categories such as temporality
or perspective, which influence not only reception but also production, and
which certainly complicate the communicative act. In short, the distinction
between knowledge and literature, which also bolsters the separation between knowledge and writing (thus undermining writing) does not hold up.
Knowledge and discourse are intimately, inherently connected, and attempts
to keep them separate undermine the productive power of discourse.
Habermas' failure to maintain the boundaries between philosophy and
literature, between argument and expression, between cognition and representation, creates, therefore, the space that enables us to rethink the role and
function of literary studies as an academic discourse. To see literary studies
as focusing on a discrete form of aesthetic experience devalues the workings
of discourse and misreads the argumentative dimension of representation,
which must always be read in the context of cultural power. The failure to
recognize that current disciplinary boundaries are also complicit in maintaining the status quo, moreover, relegates fields like literary studies to a
project that supports current hegemonic social and cultural structures.
Literary studies, therefore, ifit wants to be able to do more than reaffirm the
cultural status quo without constantly having to defend itself against charges
that it has overstepped its essential boundaries, needs to avoid the modernist
tendency to look for meaning as an end-point of its activity. Producing
readings is not enough. By adopting a postmodern notion of constructing
meanings within the context of our relation to our world and our understanding of this world, we can allow criticism, as Mary Poovey urges us, to
"reconstruct the debates and practices in which texts initially participated"
(623), and we can, more importantly, use these debates to enter contemporary discussions about meanings and values in the world around us. This act
Re-FusingtheEdifice 401
of disciplinary re-focusing can revitalize the power of literary critique, for it
enables an interrogation of reified constructions of knowledge that serve
specific ideological agendas, and it does so on the explicit premise of writing.
"Literary" texts must be subsumed into a notion of argumentation; teachers
and students need to talk back to and along with literature and not merely
attempt to fathom its meaning.
Before moving on to describe a postmodern literary studies, though, it
would be helpful to get a fuller sense of the educational context in which it
is located. Henry Giroux has identified postmodernism with what he calls
border pedagogy, which "stresses the necessity for providing students with
the opportunity to engage critically the strengths and limitations of the
cultural and social codes that define their own histories and narrative" (248).
In light of Giroux's statement, the important difference between the modern
and postmodern approach to interpretation shows up in what we do after we
gain access to texts, to the codes that structure our lives. Giroux sees
postmodernism as "a culture and politics of transgression ... a challenge to
the boundaries in which modernism has developed its discourses of mastery,
totalization, representation, subjectivity, and history" (227). Foremost
among these transgressions must be the "modernist distinction between art
and life" (227), for, as Dick Hebdige observes, modernist aestheticism
"privileges form over content or function, style over SUbstance,abstraction
over representation" (52). In short, modernist aesthetics value a reified,
fixed and immobilized object over the acting subject. A postmodern approach to literature, in contrast, allows us once again to use representations
as maps for locating ourselves within history and current social positions.
Unbracketing the aesthetic as a distinct category also opens up the
possibility of thinking about postmodern culture and society as strictly
material and historical, a world made up of and continually remade byits own
subjects and processes. For example, John Johnston describes a "semiotics
of flow" that "link]s] the philosophical problem of radical immanence or
multiplicity to a theory of culture conceived as the conjoining of different
'semiotic regimes' with various material arrangements, but without recourse
to any transcendent unity ... that would stand outside the historical field or
domain as their cause or ground" (156, 154). Johnston's schematic thus both
avoids instituting any ahistorical or transcendent regulating device and
positively theorizes the notion of a temporalized, provisional ground, a
situation that modernism casts as a "negative other" in its idealizing attempt
to locate and secure meaning. Such a definition of postmodernism, as
Murphy argues, does not destroy or fatally relativize truth, history or order,
but reconceptualizes them within historical narratives and exigencies and
thus opens a space for truly transformative action: "the world is not denied
but made erotic" (250). More importantly, from within these definitions
literary criticism can therefore reconstruct itself as an ongoing interpretive
action that seeks to return to a living community the power to define truth,
402 Journal of Advanced Composition
history, and knowledge as concrete concepts and not reified systems that
control identity. Rather than straightjacket itself bydenying its contingency
as a discourse, literary studies can position itself as one of many semiotic
systems that seek to (re)define reality. A textualized cultural matrix demonstrates the need for literary studies to develop a procedure we might call a
semiotics of contingency, which acknowledges that all interpretations are
ideological in that they are attached to larger, usually unspoken, semiotic
codes and discourses, and which recognizes further that these discourses
must be historically contextualized and adduced a product of specific value
systems.
Murphy's and Johnston's critical paradigms are especially encouraging
for a postmodern literary studies because both programs are grounded in an
enlarged concept of reading, one that at least implicitly acknowledges that
writing isconcomitant with reception."Johnston argues that postmodernism
necessitates that we read in "a new and completely different way," a way
which "seeks to formulate the relationships between literature (and art) and
the social context on a new conceptual basis (148). Using Deleuze and
Guattari's concept of "agencement,"he argues that a postmodernist literary
analysis could examine how different codes of meaning function together in
a system. Such a system of semiotic analysis allows a critic to look for breaks
within regimes of meaning that can be exploited by a reader while making
interpretations and counter-arguments. Murphy's plan similarly presents
reading as an "existential problem" (242), where one does not methodically
find an abstract modern and reified truth or beauty, but creates them through
an "erotics" of interpretation, a concrete and human-scale knowledge that
depends on a political process of personal control. The distinction, as Linda
Brodkey points out, is between an exercise in "mining out" elements of
meaning predetermined by formalist theory, and finding connections between writers and their worlds (Academic66-67). A postmodernist version
of reading stresses both attaching ourselves to larger codes as well as seeing
how these codes relate to each other, conflict, or break apart under scrutiny.
What is necessary is a willingness and ability to read these discourses not in
terms of their own self-justifying existence, but in their relationship to other
discourses and to a SUbject'sown contemporary existential situation.
Literature, Writing, and Cultural Studies in the Postmodernist Classroom
For literary studies to join such a project, teachers must first displace the
formalist paradigm that dominates literary criticism. Terry Eagleton's
functionalist definition of literature grounds literary studies specifically in
the rejection of the distinction between everydaylanguage and literature that
Habermas defends, and argues instead that literature be defined through the
way people "relate themselves to writing" (Literary9). Rejecting generic,
formalist and pragmatic definitions of literature, Eagleton instead arrives at
Re-FusingtheEdifice 403
a description that stresses the material, political procedures we use to define
what is literary:
John M. Ellis has argued that the term "literature" operates rather like theword ''weed'':
weeds are not particular kinds of plants, but just any kind of plant which for some reason
or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps "literature" means something like
the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values
highly. (9)
Literature, instead of having an essence, is powerful because it possesses a
strategic flexibility that locates it within larger cultural power structures.
Eagleton provides, in short, an ideological definition of literature, where
value-systems function through hegemony, and literature, particularly in its
most recent historical conception, serves the interests of ruling minorities.
A return to rhetoric and, ultimately, to composition is inevitable in light
of these definitions of culture and literature, for, as John Schilb notes, it is
composition that "best embodies the preoccupation with discourse associated with ... postmodernism" (176). It makes sense, therefore, that Eagleton
does not offer a counter (political) theory at the end of his survey of the
leading schools of literary theory. Because literary theories are "social
ideologies" (204), Eagleton instead promotes rhetoric as a constitutively
political model of criticism. Returning to his definition of literature as
strategic and functional, he promotes a critical enterprise that examines
language to see how it affects people, that is, how language gets people to
believe or act or interpret. This critical perspective, moreover, does not
merely displace previous theories, but actually encompasses them. "Rhetoric" he writes,
or discourse theory, shares with Formalism, structuralism and semiotics an interest in
the formal devices oflanguage, but like reception theory is also concerned with how these
devices are actually effective at the point of "consumption"; its preoccupation with
discourse as a form of power and desire can learn much from deconstruction and
psychoanalytical theory, and its belief that discourse can be a humanly transformative
affair shares a good deal with liberal humanism. (205)
Rhetoric, while not stepping in as a super-discourse or interpretative
metanarrative, allows us to strategically and contextually define our approaches to literature and our reasons for reading it. In Eagleton's case, for
instance, the crucial question is not how but whyone approaches literature,
and his preferred reason isthe "strategic goal of human emancipation" (211),
which he, expectedly, elaborates in terms of lived experience and not just as
a form of abstract enlightenment.
To focus on emancipation, though, is also to focus in some sense on
subjectivity, on the wayspeople make sense of their livesthrough their values
and actions. There can be little doubt that, as a social institution, literary
studies is intimately involved in the shaping ofsubjectivity, and that modern-
404 Journal of Advanced Composition
ist literary studies, with its stress on transcendent meaning, produces the
bourgeois subject as a universal subject.f Postmodern literary studies,
therefore, needs to work toward the development of an alternative model of
selfhood. Subjectivity emerges as a crucial category in postmodernist literary
studies because, as Cornel West observes, it "returns humanistic studies to
the primal stuff of human history, that is, structuredandcircumscribedhuman
agencyin all its various manifestations" (4; emphasis added). In her theorization of "situated knowledges," moreover, Donna Haraway locates a responsible subject only in the embodiment of partial perspective, which,
because it relies on "epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating,"
provides a ground for "conversation, rationality, and objectivity" that "resists the politics of closure" (195-96). These ideas are useful for a
postmodernist literary studies because Haraway's situated knowledge and
West's notion of the integrated individual foreground agencywithin a coded
reality and enable the deployment of a notion of intersubjectivity which
focuses on the relationship forged between separate subjects within social
spaces, and which is also material and historically situated knowledge that
can support standards of evaluation or of truth in workable forms that do not
automatically become reified and oppressive. Intersubjectivity operates on
the assumption "that individuality is properly, ideally, a balance of separation and connectedness, of the capacities for agencyand relatedness" (Benjamin 82), and it limits and tethers one's position within semiotic regimes or
an historicized erotics of interpretation, thereby enabling a cogent rhetorical
analysis to take place. Rejecting the autonomous-and thus unaccountable
or irresponsible subject (Haraway 191)-the intersubjective model relies on
negotiation and mediation, on a "split and contradictory" self, which, because it is open, can join in a rational conversation with an eye toward
agreement that requires neither dominance nor submission but a dialogue of
positions (Haraway 193). Critics often accuse postmodernism of abandoning standards, of denying that individuals can know something and act on it;
intersubj ectivity,as a model of in(ter )dependen t identity, provides an answer
to that charge by offering a standard of evaluation that can be objectively
measured in material culture. Because it sets limits on the play (without
denying it) of language games or the disruption of semiotic systems,
intersubjectivity provides postmodernism with a standard of evaluation
consistent with its aims of opening up the discursive structures that define
reality.
From the perspective of an intersubjective definition of language and
identity, a model for literary studies that depends on pre-conceived and
reified aesthetic response actually looks quite destructive. If the life-world
is threatened by cultural rationalization, and if the reification of the lifeworld can only be overcome by the interaction of all spheres of culture
(Habermas, "Modernity" 9, 12), then rhetoric, defined as a linguistic model
of intersubjectivity, offers a powerful opportunity to make progressive
Re-FusingtheEdifice 405
incursions and connections through textual analyses. John Fiske has demonstrated the power of one form of rhetorical analysis, for example, through his
reading of the jeans people wear and how they wear them (1-23). Fiske's
analysis demonstrates how cultural meanings are both constructed and
evaded by consumers who are constantly locating themselves within their
culture and society. Similarly, in a literature class, examining the influence
of Walt Whitman can likewise demonstrate how ideas, styles, and worldviewsare passed on and influence not only contemporary poets and constructions of poetry, but our ways of understanding the value of emotion, our
relationship with nature or with our own bodies, and our desire for authenticity. Rhetorical analysis strategically connects different spheres of experience and diverse texts to overcome the reification of our lives into the
homogenous existence which modernity threatens to bring us. This form of
analysis encompasses rational, expressive, and normative discourses, and
seeks to return to individuals, as a goal of education, concrete control over
their own historical positions and the processes that determine them.
A number of possibilities emerge from the postmodern, intersubjective
model of literary studies in terms of the classroom. Writing theory and
pedagogy offer the most effective model for rethinking interpretation as a
practice in the classroom. English teachers and studen ts must, most 0 bviously,write more in English while managing to write less about what a text simply
"means." As Christy Friend has noted in her insightful critique of Gerald
Graffs ProfessingLiterature,by focusing on interpretation teachers perpetuate dominant power relations that require efficient decoders of information
but not people who might, by writing, question the status quo (281-83).
Writing, in effect, is more subversive than reading because it lets us, and our
students, reinscribe reality from our own perspective. By drawing the way
recent composition theory and pedagogy rejects formalist paradigms and
their use of preconceived narrative forms that stress the quality of expression
and devalue substance, literary studies can be opened up to allow students to
explore their own worlds directly. Because poststructural composition
theory also acknowledges that ideologies-that is, belief systems-are inextricably linked to expression, students must not only become competent in
the conventions of writing, they also must learn to make, as Linda Brodkey
explains, "a sustained interrogation of the doxa out of which claims about
reality arise" ("Transvaluing" 600).
Patricia Bizzell's concept of rhetorical authority offers one possible
approach that can be used in literature classrooms to explore the doxa in
which we are situated. According to Bizzell, progressive teachers need to
stop pretending that they are "merely investigating" different ideas or texts
("Beyond" 672), and, instead, "aver provocatively that we intend to make our
students better people, that we believe education should develop civic
virtue" (671). Rather than inviting a teacher naively to "impose" his or her
viewpoint or set of values on students (673), however, Bizzell's classroom
406 Journal of Advanced Composition
model foregrounds the rhetorical process, the making and defending of
arguments as well as the ethos of the orator. In Bizzell's model, both the
teacher and students need to study the "historical rootedness" of their beliefs
(Afterword 292), and learn to acknowledge and understand the assumptions
on which they base their claims and the values which remain unarticulated in
their evaluations. Beyond this act of clarification, however, members of the
classroom need to be able persuade each other, including the teacher, about
which values work best (Afterword 292). Consequently, Bizzell argues that
"pedagogical mechanisms whereby everyone's access to rhetorical authority
could be realized" must be implemented (Afterword 293). Bizzell's model of
teachmg can allow literature courses, in other words, to pursue dialogues
about how we imagine our world, how texts give us ways to conceptualize and
judge reality and our selves. These dialogues, moreover, can proceed
democratically, not as part of a teacherlyoration.
The return to rhetoric in the classroom, in short, can reinvigorate the
study of literature (and its language) by showing that literature is a constituent part of our social ground and our consciousness, not just a set of static
texts which are good for us to know. Literary interpretation, like composition, must engage in an investigation of the life-world; classes that foreground reception can take a text, in the words of Adrienne Rich, "as a clue
to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine
ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us" (35).
Responding to texts is not merely a matter of getting the message or the
"meaning," but must also involve taking a meaning into a critical conversation that does not limit itself to the world of art as a discrete form of
experience (Scholes, Textual 38). Sharon Crowley sees criticism as "a
rhetorical strategy for opening the discursive possibilities offered by texts"
(191), and she points out that literary studies, whether it admits it or not,
needs rhetoric to justify its own project. Indeed, Crowley is absolutely right
when she notes, with (justified) satisfaction, that the salvation of literary
studies depends on its ability to enlarge the domain of English to "the study
of texts, any and all of them" (191), including the texts generated within a
classroom by students.
I want to round out the model of postmodern literary studies I have
sketched by explicitly invoking the attitude and critical practice of cultural
studies.? Complementing the pedagogical lessons offered bywriting scholars
and theorists, cultural studies, because it is historically committed to democratic procedures and self-determination as goals of both education and
culture, explicitly enables postmodern literary studies to find a warrant to
expand its subject matter and sharpen its political commitment. As Richard
Johnson describes-and to a certain extent defines-it, cultural studies
thrives on the intellectual "alchemy" of critique, and uses and constructs a
wide range of knowledges in a project that intimately investigates "relations
of power" (38, 53). In pursuing this agenda, Johnson argues, one of the
Re-FusingtheEdifice 407
central goals of cultural studies is the understanding of "the historical forms
of consciousness or subjectivity, or the subjective forms we live by," that is,
the way individuals shape and are shaped by their culture (43). John Fiske
similarly focuses on subjects and agencyas he champions "popular culture as
a site of struggle," and defines his project through a focus on the dialectic
between the "processes of incorporation" and the "popular vitality and
creativity that makes incorporation such a constant necessity" (20). Though
Fiske restricts the range of his analysis to the roles commodities play in
hampering or helping struggles for self-determination, his methodology
could easily apply to a wide range of texts, especially literary ones, and easily
answer Robert Scholes' call for a textual studies that utilizes a negative
hermeneutic that "question[s] the values proffered by the texts we study"
(Textual 14). Influenced by cultural studies, a postmodern reading of literary
texts would focus not on just texts, but also on the readings, meanings, and
criticisms that are received and generated inside and outside the academy.
Hegemonic subjectivities, classifications, or canons cannot be completely
avoided or evaded, but, from within these positions, and bolstered by the
antiauthoritarian politics of cultural studies (Nehring 235), we can chart
alternative spaces of understanding entailed by the constructedness of our
(narrated) reality. Parallel to the way composition enables the process of
interpretation to be reframed as an argumentative and rhetorical process,
cultural studies offers literary studies a way to reframe literary texts in ways
that allow us to continue to organize our teaching through texts without
having to "teach" these texts. Rather than suffer some sort of postmodern
self-immolation, literary studies can, through the examples of composition
and cultural studies, more effectivelyconfront the wayswe use texts to build
and defend the versions of our world that we care to champion.
Neopragmatism, which provides the version of postmodernism I have
used in this essaywith much of its progressive potential, does not amount to,
as Cornel West says, "a wholesale rejection of philosophy [or literary
studies], but rather a reconception of philosophy as a form of cultural
criticism that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural, and political
traditions for the purposes of increasing the scope of individual development
and democratic operations" (230). As I have been arguing throughout this
paper against tradition, against the institutional hegemony of contemporary
English departments, I feel the need to reassert, with West, that "tradition
per se is never a problem, but rather those traditions that have been and are
hegemonic over other traditions" (230). Critically and pedagogically, contemporary literary study operates institutionally within the tradition of
modernist thought, and often perpetuates the problems that accompany a
striving after transcendent value. to A postmodern literary studies wants not
to find simply the best reading-though it will use readings to articulate ideas
and arguments; its goal is a fundamentally progressive opening up of human
possibilities and potential, a project that needs to be undertaken without the
408 Journal of Advanced Composition
bother of having to apologize for the presence of values and politics in
culture.
Modern consciousness often displays itself in a frozen conflict between
the transcendent and the real. Take, for example, J. Alfred Prufrock's
paranoid fear of the other that finally obliterates his own pure subjectivity in
a "drowning" into reality, or Yeats' recurrent meditations on the corruption
of politics and purity of aesthetics. Much postmodern literature, on the other
hand, like Graham Swift's Waterland,focuses on the quality and fullness of
representation, the constantly shifting areas of solid and liquid, the temporary foundations of meaning and the currents that erode them. David
Lodge's novels similarly explore the shifting power of individual identity and
experience and the pressure of discursive determinations. In How Far Can
You Go? Lodge simultaneously examines the erosion of the metaphysical and
existential certitude of religious belief and the conventions of contemporary
novel writing. In both cases, as his title implies, he wonders what will happen
to us as we lose these guideposts. Life, however, is a matter of getting on, of
making something out ofwhat the characters in the story have. Talking about
Virginia Woolf in the context of pragmatism, Linda Brodkey sums up the
attitude literary studies needs to develop in the postmodemist context:
"language cannot be possessed, but must be created by the lovers who use it"
(Academic 75). Postmodernism, by freeing us from the constraints of a
modernist conception of knowledge, avoids polarizing knowledge and chaos,
the self and other, and maintains a human(ist) perspective on the formation
of power and knowledge structures.
Undeniably, certain strands of postmodern thought turn to discourses
that reject all stability for flux, play, or infinite cynicism, but they finally
expose the imperial (modernist) self, not a negotiated subjectivity, which
holds such inclinations in check. Postmodernism, as a theoretical perspective and as a set of values, offers us an opportunity to strategically promote
the value of radical democracy through a renewed interest in discourse.
Institutionally, postmodernism provides the study of literature, as a mechanism of culture, with a chance to refocus its activities. We might continue the
critique made by literature: the desire to refigure knowing and living as part
of a community, the need to make meaning, especially when it isbeyond what
other forms can or will provide. Literary studies needs to ground itself in
Robert Bellah's notion of culture as "an argument about the meaning of the
destiny its members share" (27), an argument that has strong affinities with
what Jasper Neel calls "strong discourse" and its "tolerance for, even
encouragement of, other discourses" (208). I think of Bellah's cultural
argument, to again acknowledge Chaim Perelman, as one that "gives meaning to human freedom" by avoiding the absolutism of "compelling" truth or
the violent assertion of an "arbitrary" relativism (The New Rhetoric 514).
Literary studies, in the postmodern frame, may not be able to provide solid
answers in the form of discrete readings of reified objects; it could, however,
Re-FusingtheEdifice 409
make literature once againdemocraticallyviablebyencouragingreaders to
articulate their own lives.
Universityof Texas
Austin, Texas
Notes
1Even though I use Kroker and Cook's phrase to signify a terrain that is different from
hegemonic (modernist) domains of knowledge and culture, I do not want to suggest that the
postmodernism I am describing is necessarily the same one they describe in their Baudrillardian
mediations on excremental culture and hyper-aesthetics. Literary studies does need to confront
the reality of an image culture, of cyberspace and the problems of simulation (among other
notations of the postmodern) but that is only a peripheral concern here. Perhaps Fredric
Jameson's claim that we are all part of a postmodern culture whether we like it or not (86),
whether we know it or not, best describes the situation in which teachers find themselves.
2See, for example, George Will's editorial in Newsweek(April 22, 1991) suggesting NEH
director Lynn Cheney needs to be a "secretary of domestic defense" who must thwart cultural
subversives in the academy (72). On the University of Texas campus, the revamped freshman
composition course, titled "Writing About Difference," was cancelled in the wake of protests
that ignored its theoretical and pedagogical foundations and focused narrowly on "political
correctness" (See Brodkey and Fowler). The ensuing controversy not only shattered my
idealized notions of academic debate and collegiality,but clearly exposed the cultural fault lines
that define and threaten English departments as academic institutions.
3Ehrenreich describes the professions and the academic training they require as a barrier
that protects the professional/managerial class (78-83).
4Lindemann's and Tate's point/counterpoint articles effectively reproduce the hegemony
of literature by framing the question in terms of literature's role in composition. Lindemann
argues that the kind of writing represented by literature provides little help in teaching students
how to take part in academic discourses and educated conversations, while Tate advocates
literature as a humanistic antidote to the "Rhetoric Police" and their over-emphasis on
conventions and skills (318). The fact that Tate's defense of literature comes second and is
clearly a response to Lindemann's provocation, moreover, suggests that literature still (automatically) holds the higher moral ground in educational debate. The upstart discipline of writing has
a lon~ way to go before it can challenge literature on equal footing.
Norris also critiques Habermas' misreading of Derrida. My reading of Habermas follows
a similar path, although Norris is more concerned with situating Derrida's work as a philosophical enterprise and the conflict as it existswithin the discipline of philosophical writing, while I
focus on the status of literary studies.
6Ramus defined the trivium, the arts of discourses, as follows: grammar is the "art of
speaking well, that is, of speaking correctly"; dialectic is the art of "reasoning well"; and rhetoric
is the art of the "eloquent and ornate use of language" (Perelman 3).
7Mowitt also argues that reading, though admittedly a limited political act, crucially
unde~irds postmodem agency as it mediates between the poles of activation and activism (xxi).
Eagleton writes that the subject of literature, the kind of individual constructed by
modernist literary studies under the "moral technology of Literature," is one whose life is
separate from politics. Literature teaches us to be "sensitive, imaginative, responsive, sympathetic, creative, perceptive, reflective," but these feelings are "intransitive ... [and are] about
nothinginparticular,"and thus reinforce the disconnection between our subjective life and the
lived experience ("Subject" 98).
9BerubC's overview of cultural studies suggests that cultural studies has reached critical
mass inside the academy, and that it is about to be recognized as a cohesive intellectual issue and/
or academic practice in the larger culture as well. Berube's characterization of cultural studies
410 JournalofAdvancedComposition
as intensely self-aware, self-critical, and resistant to institutionalization, moreover, highlights the
most attractive elements of its theory and practice.
lOEven J. Hillis Miller's notion of deconstruction, as he locates it in the marketplace of
ideas where only the toughest come out ahead, must figure as part of a modernist desire for
"mastery" and not, though it promotes the deferral of meaning, as a form of postmodern
conversation (Lodge, "A Kind of Business" 184).
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