Suggests that William Gibson offers a way to negotiate the conventional discursive elements used within online communication. Notes that cyberspace discourse appears to be at its best not when it tries to minimize the effects of the conventional narratives from which it is built, but instead when it exploits those discourses most fully to reveal their sources and conflicts.

Considers the role of the “white ground” in English studies at a critical period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the discipline, along with the rest of the academy and country, struggled mightily with issues of race. Describes the author’s interest in constructing a narrative about the relationships between discourse and identity with students.

Claims scholars in English, as a field of study, share a common object of study, specifically the study of discourse. Compares and attempts to integrate the scholarship on one part of discourse--genre--from two subdisciplines of English, literary and composition study.

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Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.

ror Has Two Faces-in class no less-with Jane Gallop's essay, Teacher's Breasts, and you find an apparent contradiction. The professor played by Barbra Streisand blithely lectures about sexuality and casually acknowledges students' awareness of her breasts, shown off in a low-cut black dress; Gallop, however, contends that teacher's create a conflict about the question of sex and, thus, the question of (84-85). In Gallop's view, teacher's display of authority makes male student more not less recalcitrant, and more not less in struggle for power (86). As usual, Gallop offers a startling interpretation: breast-singular, symbolic, and maternal-is precisely imaginary organ of nurturance, what good feminist teacher proffers to her daughterstudents. Refusing to nurture, . . . bad, sexual teacher brings into discourse of feminist pedagogy not breast, which is already appropriately there, but breasts (87). By mentioning her in plural, Streisand sexualizes literature classroom, exactly as camera does when it follows boys hurrying to class or pans intensely yearning students' faces. Streisand's movie demonstrates these cultural politics, showing how female teacher's sexuality has to be managed in order to avoid threat of sexual power struggle Gallop accurately predicts. What we see in Streisand is a version of Gallop's theory: maternal breast-safe and good-is opposed to more dangerous plural breasts, offered promiscuously to class's gaze. The erotics of literature classroom in Hollywood imagination comes as no surprise. Hollywood eventually misrepresents all professions, and all voca

Examines the ways in which literacy functions in institutional encounters and focuses on the ways literacy interacts with power and authority. Examines the enactment of literacy in medical encounters. Finds that institutional encounters enacting the discourse system of American medicine reproduce power and dominance in fairly predictable ways.

Examines the roles of collaboration in the sciences and humanities by focusing on the complicated relationship between syntax and semantics. Uses scholarship on the social study of science to discuss strategies for collaboration in the humanities. Discusses why those studying language and literature are in a particularly good position to understand the nature of intellectual collaboration and its benefits.

Examines classroom dialog about arranged marriages in Ali Ghalem’s “A Wife for My Son” (as well as several other postcolonial, nonwestern texts) as a means of defining and sharing appropriate curricular and pedagogical modes for classroom discourse and discussion. Urges rethinking the boundaries of English studies and redefining the study of literature more broadly.

Examines the effects of reading and writing multivocal texts and argues that writers need to assume interpretive responsibility for creating new forms of discourse.

he generally prevailing concept of the enthymeme, or the one most frequent in the world of rhetoric and composition studies, tends to define it either as a of elliptical, informal based on probable rather than certain premises and on tacit assumptions shared by audience and rhetor, or as a of Toulmin argument, or as a general mode of intuitive reasoning representable in syllogistic or Toulminian terms, or, most simply, as the juxtaposition of any idea with another that is offered as a reason for believing it. All such thinking starts from Aristotle's famous dicta that the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism or rhetorical syllogism, and that rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic (Rhetoric 1.1 [1355a]; 1.2 [1356b]; 1.1 [1354a]).' This prevailing definition, however, has recently been put in question (see in particular Conley, Enthymeme; Gage, Theory). And, as we will see, it is inadequate. In what follows, we will first reexamine the primary (and not exclusively Aristotelian) ancient sources from which a more adequate concept of the enthymeme can be derived. Then, we will consider the relevance of that concept to the analysis of modern discourse-specifically, to the analysis of Roland Barthes' The World of Wrestling and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, both of which appear in popular anthologies used in composition courses, and both of which provide good examples of modern-but unrecognized-enthymeming.

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under attack, and social constructionism-the view that good writers must master the accepted practices of a discourse community-was widely adopted as an alternative. The purpose of this article is to defend expressivism against this attack, particularly against two charges. First, responding to the charge that expressivism, following the romantics, is tied to the ideal of the isolated writer, Steve Fishman argues on historical grounds that it was the social reform dimension of German romanticism that inspired expressivism. Second, Lucille McCarthy responds to the charge that expressivism disempowers students because it does not help them learn disciplinary and professional languages. She presents Fishman's class as one which is committed both to the mastery of philosophic method and to the development of student voices, committed, that is, to achieving social constructionist goals within an expressivist environment. Part I presents a theoretical perspective on expressivism; Part II shows the practical implementation of that theory in the classroom.

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Our profession's recent focus on the social construction of knowledge and the roles that discourse and community play in this construction have made some of us aware of disturbing characteristics in our classrooms. We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms-group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments-generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine appropriate and inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patterns disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority. In creating such non-traditional forums to supplement the work now going on in our classrooms, we tacitly argue for the importance of discourse in learning, the importance of students talking and writing to one another as well as to the teacher as they attempt to come to terms with the theories and concepts raised in their courses. This particular kind of learning does not take place often enough within the forums characteristic of our traditional classrooms, where interaction-at least the approved kind of interaction-is all too often dyadic, emphasizing the role of the all-knowing teacher discussing a topic with quiet, attentive students who may respond to the teacher but not directly to one another. Socrates tells Phaedrus that this is the ideal learning situation: lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons on justice and honor and goodness

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The footnote, being dead, bears studying. Debilitated by disuse and misunderstanding, and finally euthanized in 1984 by Modern Language Association, footnotes in scholarly prose are gone with breezes that blow through English departments these days. The various subtleties and textures of referential and discursive footnotes, intricate interlockings of notes and texts, revelations of authorial intent-all terminated now, and quietly mummified. Therefore, since literary scholars need be wary of living art forms, which are inclined to twitch suddenly and knock over even most carefully constructed of critical hypotheses, footnote now becomes appropriate as a subject, rather than a method, of scholarly commentary. The footnote was a writer's direct address to reader, a message slipped under door, a whispered aside in counterpoint to formal discourse of text. Footnotes could elucidate, castigate, praise, blame, and crow. Notes might wander off on scenic side-trips, discurse eloquently on stuff and nomenclature, and run happily on for pages and pages until reader quite forgot she was supposed to be back at text by dinnertime. Material could slip into a footnote that simply would not fit body of work: Joseph Thomas, for example, in his sprightly 1985 history of College English Association, Sansculotte, appropriately published by that organization, used a footnote to present his wife's graduate-school recipe for roast bologna. Mary-Claire van Leunen's wise and witty Handbook for Scholars, a gift in 1978 from Alfred Knopf to a generation of perplexed students, attributed academic propensity for footnotes to soapbox phenomenon, wherein the footnote permits scholar to say another word, just one other word, just one word more, before he has to stop (8). Her discussion of content footnote was cautionary:

A belief shared by teachers of writing, one that we fervently try to inculcate in our students, is that revision can improve writing. This notion, that revision generally results in better text, often pairs up with another assumption, that revision occurs as we work through separate drafts. Thus, hand in your working drafts tomorrow and the final ones next Friday is a common assignment, as is the following bit of textbook advice: the draft is completed, a good critical reading should help the writer re-envision the essay and could very well lead to substantial rewriting (Axelrod and Cooper 10). This textbook advice, hardly atypical, is based on the rationale that gaining distance from a piece of discourse helps the writer to judge it more critically. As evidence for this assumption, Richard Beach's 1976 study of the self-evaluation strategies of revisers and nonrevisers demonstrated that extensive revisers were more capable of detaching themselves and gaining aesthetic distance from their writing than were nonrevisers. Nancy Sommers' later theoretical work on revision also sensitized us to students' need to re-see their texts rather than to view revision as an editing process at the limited level of word changes. A logical conclusion, then, is to train student writers to re-see and then redraft a piece of discourse. There are other compelling reasons for helping students view first or working drafts as fluid and not yet molded into final form. The opportunities for outside intervention, through teacher critiques and suggestions or peer evaluation sessions, can be valuable. And it is equally important to help students move beyond their limited approaches and limiting tendency to settle for whatever rolls out on paper the first time around. The novice view of a first draft as written-in-stone (or fast-drying cement) can preclude engaging more fully with the ideas being expressed. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that there are advantages in being able, where it is appropriate, to master the art of one-draft writing. When students write essay exams or placement essays and when they go on to on-the-job writing where time doesn't permit multiple drafts, they need to produce first drafts which are also coherent,

Literary theories put forward by Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Walter Michaels, and Jonathan Culler all insist, to varying degrees, that any individual critic's view of a particular literary text is likely to be affected by certain assumptions (schemata) shared by the community of scholars to which the critic belongs. Literary interpretation, so the argument goes, is not a matter of individual perception alone; every interpretation is both a process of individual discovery and a product of shared interpretive strategies. From this reader-response perspective, then, the prior assumptions held by the interpretive community are crucial constituents of the discourse, and often, as in the case of the Canadian interpretive response, such shared assumptions form the paradigm that in time becomes the locus of critical authority. Canadian criticism, in particular that branch which focuses on prairie fiction, offers an intriguing case study of just such an interpretive community at work. Canadian literary criticism has long spoken if not with one voice then at least with a widely-shared critical intent: to further the aims of cultural nationalism by establishing a critical narrative that privileges those aspects of Canadian literature-the lonely prairie landscape, the implacable brooding force of Nature, the sense of human isolation-that are historically associated with the early Canadian pioneer experience and the process of nation-building. Once accepted, the narrative assumes paradigmatic status: it establishes a closed frame of reference marked by remarkable critical consensus. Such a state of critical concord has not gone unnoticed. In his retrospective look at the teaching of Canadian literature, John Harker explains that

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If is one thing contemporary observers of American literary studies agree upon, it is New must finally be transcended. William Cain, for example, protests New Critics' identification of with close reading of classic literary texts. It is not 'close reading' is itself misconceived, he argues, rather case for it has always been made at expense of other important things. Because New Critics won their case so convincingly, these other things have long been excluded from literary establishment. A list of costs resulting from institutionalization of New in 1950s, according to Cain, would include the rejection of other methods and other kinds of texts; misguided attempt to define (and thus defend) teaching of literature as, above all, 'close reading'; skepticism shown towards literary theory; and refusal to see other disciplines as having relevance for 'literary' criticism (New Criticism 1111-12). Criticism, in short, has become formalistic, to use an old critical buzz-word. Even deconstruction, as Cain correctly observes, is more an intensified continuation of tradition of formalistic close reading than a new, expansive kind of Fortunately, says Cain, there have been signs in recent years New Critical reign is at last coming to an end. The most important of these signs is the revival of 'history' as an instrument for criticism. This revival is result of work of certain critics and theorists-Cain mentions Foucault, Said, and Jameson-who have shown that 'history' does not have to imply-as it did for scholars New Critics attacked in 1930s-a narrow and naive review of sources, backgrounds, and influences. Rather, history now means the formation of an archive, building up of a rich, detailed, and complex discursive field. The ground for criticism, from this point of view, is not classic literary text, but inter-textual configurations and arrangements; 'criticism' thus entails study of power, political uses of language, and orders of discourse (New Criticism 1116-17). This reconstitution of ground for will produce, presumably, an analogous transformation of practice of close reading and expand domain of to include methods, texts, and disciplines suppressed by New Criticism. These developments, needless to say, win Cain's seal of approval.

Most Freshman English programs conceive of themselves as providing some form of introduction to university level discourse. The expectation is that students will leave English I (or whatever its designation) with the requisite reading and writing skills to enter a new discourse community, the world of the academy. Just what that means, however, is invariably in contention. Even within our own discipline, the acts of reading and writing have become the subject of much controversy. A recent review in College English gives some indication of one of the current divisions within the profession about exactly what we teach people when we teach them to read: Despite the recent wrangle and heated debates among the various camps of literary criticism, there are quite a few of us-most,

The situation of women in the modern world is clearly a major concern of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (see Allen 160-78 and Whittier 12746). Less obvious is how the book might embody a feminist aesthetic, that is, how it might define, as a solution to the sociological and psychological problems of women, a language and an art competent to secure women, especially the female writer, against male domination. In her essay on “Women’s Literature,” Elizabeth Janeway suggests that to be distinct from men’s literature women’s literature must constitute “an equally significant report from another, equally significant, area of existence” (344-45). Hence, some of the major themes of women’s literature: madness, powerlessness, betrayal and victimization. Though not exclusively feminine, nonetheless these situations frequently arise from the situation of women as women (Janeway 346). Equally important to women’s literature, however, is a unique literary language and form. Marjorie Perloff’s “‘A Ritual for Being Born Twice,’” for example, focuses in Laingian terms on The Bell Jar’s “attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self . . . so that a real and viable identity can come into existence” (102). It touches on many female issues. The title itself expresses a female motif. But it does not establish a specifically feminist context. As Erica Jong puts it, “the reason a woman has greater problems becoming an artist is because she has greater problems becoming a self” (qtd. in Reardon 136), which means not just integrating the masked self and the genuine self, but also, as Joan Reardon explains in her analysis of Jong, “in coming to terms with her own body,” expressing herself in her “own diction . . . images and symbols” (136). In her introduction to The New Feminist Criticism, and in her two contributions to the volume, Elaine Showalter describes how, in recent years, attention has shifted from the treatment of women in male fic-

This special double issue of College English in some ways illustrates what its essays are about, possibly the resistance, as Freud said about analysis, against the uncovering of resistances (Analysis 239). This first issue begins where a Freudian approach to pedagogy necessarily starts, with the Freudian concept of resistance-four essays, by Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl, Patrick McGee, and Robert Brooke, dealing with blockages theoretical and practical to reading and to teaching. The second issue, with essays by Gregory Ulmer, Gregory Jay, and Ronald Schleifer, moves beyond to explore Freud's concept of the as it bears on the role of the teacher (the subject who is supposed to know), the student, learning, teaching, reading, and so on. The essays of both issues argue that the to reading and teaching is also the force that makes them possibleparticularly that reading and teaching must in an important sense fail before they succeed. This claim arises in relation to Freud's discussion of the to therapy and Paul de Man's resistance to and from specific comparisons of the classroom and the therapy session. The course of these essays will move from (1) a consideration of and its place in a Freudian approach to pedagogy, (2) to a theory of the subject for a Freudian account of student/teacher interaction, and (3) to a theory of Freudian discourse as a communication model. All of these essays, but especially those in the second issue, then move toward another consideration-the ideological critique of what teachers teach and how they teach it. These special issues of College English also illustrate the they are talking about in that a few contributors bowed out early-schedules busier than

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

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Like all second editions, the new version of Richard Graves' Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers implies the success of the first edition. But that success itself also radiates questions about the nature and purposes of the courses that might use the book, about the texts with which it competes in the marketplace, about what prompts a second edition, and about the relationship of such textbooks and courses graduate education in English. All these questions frame the larger issue of the continuing emergence of composition studies. Any course using the Graves book (or one of its competitors) is a relatively new one because composition instructors have had rely, until recently, on an informal curriculum for their training. To be sure, there have been exceptions such as Fred Newton Scott, who in the early decades of this century trained graduate students at the University of Michigan in what might today be described as composition studies. And Herbert Cheek reports in his retrospective Forty Years of Composition Teaching (College Composition and Communication, 6 [1955], 4-10) that some universities began by 1940 to have distinguished specialists in linguistics, in semantics, and in logic who were graduate students how apply what they could learn about these subjects composition teaching (p. 9). Most instructors of writing have, however, learned through the informal curriculum of ideas gleaned from self-sponsored reading, orientation sessions, and conversations with other instructors, rather than in graduate classes. When Harold Allen made his 1951-52 tour of forty-seven composition programs, he found only five graduate courses on composition, and not all of the five were offered regularly (Preparing the Teachers of Composition and Communication-A Report, CCC, 3 [1952], 3-13).

In Philosophy in a New Key Susanne Langer writes of the great generative ideas that periodically arise to transform our intellectual enterprises by changing the very terms in which we frame our questions and conceive our purposes. When one of these concepts bursts into consciousness, we cannot at first view it critically, because it is the nature of a key change to possess us with its compelling new vision of the world. For some time afterwards we are absorbed in exploiting the energizing, fertilizing power of the new idea, which seems limitless in its implications and applications. Only later, as a paradigm matures, can we begin to refine and correct its key concept and to achieve the critical distance necessary to recognize its bounds. We are approaching this moment in composition, which has taken process as its generative theme for over a decade. By keying composition studies to writers' thought processes and the relations between cognition and language, this theme has restored to the field what was lost with the decline of rhetoric: a genuinely rich, humanly significant, and inexhaustible object of inquiry. In the next stage of our development as a discipline, we need to take up a more critical attitude toward process theory, to probe its limits and to articulate and address some of the conceptual problems it leaves unresolved. I would like to make a contribution to that work in this essay. My starting point is the difficulty of handling textual issues-for example, matters of style or discourse form-within the process framework. That framework has no principled way to account for the role of texts in discourse events because it was constituted initially by a contrastive opposition between composing (dynamic process) and texts (inert product). Texts were therefore rejected as proper objects of inquiry in composition. I suggest we might resolve this problem and work toward a more comprehensive theory of discourse by developing concepts on the principle of integrating text and process at all levels of analysis.

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Dorothy Augustine's Geometries and Words: Linguistics and Philosophy: A Model of the Composing Process (College English, 43 [1981], 221-31) illustrates how radically our understanding of the composing process has changed from the linear schemes of the last generation.' However, this new understanding is not always applied to discussions of technical writing. In fact, technical writing is sometimes assumed to be a rhetorically simple process because the rhetorical context of the completed product, the document, is generally limited.2 This assumption is not borne out by practical experience. My own initiatory adventures as a technical writer have led me to the conviction that technical discourse of any seriousness is a structure necessarily created by the writer out of the elements of the writing situation. In other words, the writing situation cannot by itself determine for the writer or editor the meaning of the technical document to be produced; in a fundamental sense, technical discourse is a lamp upon rather than a mirror of the world it represents. Of course, not all technical writing is complex; the IRS form 1040A is simple, not only as product but also as process. Moreover, a given technical document

In 1977 Donald Stewart startled his audience at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention by giving them a test.1 Not at all to his surprise, Professor Stewart found that although the teachers assembled devoted forty-five percent of their working time to teaching composition, hardly any of them recognized the names of twenty prominent rhetoricians or titles of works by those rhetoricians. Professor Stewart did not include Alexander Bain on his list, but had he done so very few of the writing teachers in his audience would have heard of Bain. Almost certainly, none would have read his books on composition and rhetoric. That such should be the case seems remarkable, for a great deal of what has been taught in traditional composition courses derives directly or indirectly from Bain's work. In an historical study of the paragraph written at the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Lewis describes Bain's influence as formative. Indeed, Lewis claims that Bain's analysis of the paragraph was presented and defended with the same acuteness and grasp that made him perhaps the ablest writer on rhetoric since Aristotle.2 Bain's stock, however, has plunged since Lewis wrote those words. The revival of interest in rhetoric occurring during the last three decades has led us to call into question what Richard Young calls the current-traditional in the teaching of composition.3 For those challenging this paradigm and attempting to improve or replace it, Bain has become a popular whipping boy, identified with a rigidly prescriptive, product-centered system. Exactly who was Alexander Bain, and has his influence on our discipline been, on the whole, salutary or detrimental? When Bain died at the age of eighty-six in 1903, major newspapers throughout Britain and North America carried the news. The headline in the New York