Shows how some key postmodern ideas about texts forced a teacher and her students to rethink typical writing assignments and typical student responses. Describes the assignments and considers how they invite postmodern critique. Suggests giving up grandiose, romantic notions that Freshman Composition can fix students either personally or politically.

Suggests that what makes Charles Johnson’s “Middle Passage” significant and eminently teachable is that it is an accessible example of “historiographic metafiction”-bestselling postmodern novels set in the past. Notes that students find the novel “easy” and enjoyable and that teaching the novel with some of its intertexts, such as H. Melville’s “Moby Dick,” can be a rewarding experience.

Reviews Linda Brodkey’s prominent critique of the image of the solitary writer, and uses it as a means to examine the identity and behavior of the writer in nature. Uses various nature writers as exhibits, and speculates as to why Wendell Berry makes a distinction between “writer” and “creature.”

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.

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This essay was first presented at a CCCC panel whose project was to examine relations between literary studies and composition studies by focusing on what the organizers called an text. In a companion panel, representative voices from each institution spoke together about Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa, with its call for outrageous opposition to patriarchal institutions. Although we should be the first to say ceci n'est pas Cixous, we nonetheless use her text as a model; we mimic its outrageousness as we look at the institutions that constrain us as teachers of writing and put forth a modest proposal for changing them. We therefore take our charge literally. The institutional text on which we focus is not Professing Literature, Discipline and Punish, English in America or Politics of Letters. Rather, we look at the gradesheet. At the conclusion of each semester or quarter, every university prints a gradesheet on which its faculty is required to evaluate students' performances. Upon this institutional text our educational system might be said to rest. In his provocative book, Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Evan Watkins puts the matter succinctly: in the context of work time, it matters less how you were taught Romantic poetry say-what socialization or countersocialization of expectations took place-than what grade you got at the end of the process.

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As feminism has sought to contest patriarchy in ever more diverse sites of culture and increasingly to interrogate power/knowledge relations in a variety of disciplines, its languages have become more complex and difficult. This creates the paradox of a feminism much more capable of reunderstanding reality-and thus changing it-in profoundly different ways and yet much less accessible and understandable to those whose lives it seeks to affect. In other words, a widening gap is developing between the advanced languages and discourses of feminism-especially feminist theory-and its main constituency: those women (and men) who rely on its insights and the movement it articulates to orient their lives in more egalitarian and non-exploitative ways-in sexual relations, in raising children, in the politics of the work place and domestic arrangements. In fact, the difficulty of recent (postmodern) feminist theory has led many to reject it altogether as too remote and politically ineffective. But I believe that feminist theory is necessary for social change and that, rather than abandon it as too abstract, we need to reunderstand it in more social and political terms. I have thus attempted in this essay to rearticulate some of the main theoretical concepts of contemporary feminism in a more available language and, more important, to offer a political rewriting of these concepts. My text, therefore, is a series of explanatory speculations on feminist theory, its main concepts and the way these concepts enable a feminist rewriting of patriarchy. In doing so, it points to the emergence of what I call materialist feminist theory. In feminism, as elsewhere, postmodern has become a loaded and politically volatile word. Many feminists are opposed to it, worried that such a term may trivialize the serious import of feminism, which is intervention and social change. Underlying such mistrust is the common misunderstanding of postmodernism as a fad based on passing desires and trivial pursuits. This may be true of some aspects of postmodernism, but it is not at all characteristic of postmodernism in general; it is a significant political, cultural, and historical development. Teresa L. Ebert teaches critical theory and feminism at the State University of New York at Albany. She has completed a book on materialist feminism called Patriarchal Narratives and is at work on another on feminist theory and politics. In 1990 she organized and directed the conference on Rewriting the (Post)modern: (Post)colonialism/Feminism/Late Capitalism at the University of Utah where she was a Fellow in the Humanities Center.

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