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Offering an emancipatory response to the widening fissure between day-to-day experience and institutional conventionality, [Kurt] Spellmeyer [in Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition] concludes with ideal of classroom practice that maintains a balance of communicative that silences no one, teachers or students (22-23). If freshman paper, for instance, were seen as threshold between two distinct contexts of social life and meaning, teachers could stop serving as initiatory gate-keep[ers], barring the way to pollution by the 'nonacademic.' (Bloom 846) Spellmeyer's reported view, seemingly endorsed by reviewer Lynn Z. Bloom, is that to eschew gatekeeping-at least in first-year college writing courses-is utopian aim, but in the good sense: the shimmering ideal at the horizon of current practice, the thing to keep moving toward. Gatekeeping is all caught up in power imbalances, silencings, the imposition of one value system (the academic) on another and presumably more natural one-an imposition seen as part of misguided and perhaps even fetishistic concern for purity (and consequent anxiety over pollution). Compared to such practice, any ideal is better, even one that's bit pie-inthe-sky. Views like these are such commonplaces that they are rarely defended in detail, or even fully articulated. Bits of explication, however, lie here and there in any

Locates postcolonial pedagogy within the context of institutional circuits of production and consumption, finding that instead of expanding the student’s experience with difference and diversity, it contains them through a managed encounter with otherness.

Examines testimonies of teachers to determine how and by whom a teacher/scholar’s authority is defined in the teaching of texts of different cultures. Looks at how teachers make themselves invisible and discusses some of the ways in which pedagogy and scholarship demand or allow for this (in)visibility through concealment or disclosure of personal lives.

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Rehearses some 20th-century narratives as they have appeared in United States history and as they have been represented in African-American literature. Suggests that some of these narratives are insufficiently critical in their construction of stereotypes or in their over-romanticized notions of racial memory, which mask the complications of color and racial identity in the United States.

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Pamela L. Caughie teaches twentieth-century literature and critical theory at Loyola University Chicago. She is author of Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991) and is currently completing a book, Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility, to be published by the University of Illinois Press. Essays from this book have appeared in College English (November 1992) and in the collection English Studies/Culture Studies, edited by Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff (1994); another will be included in the forthcoming special issue of PMLA on the teaching of literature.

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its principles in the linguistic formulation of Newspeak in 1984, I am surprised to have searched Orwell scholarship unsuccessfully for a specifically rhetorical treatment of the essay. Briefly analytic (and critical) is AlbertJ. Brouse's 1974 note registering his disagreement with Orwell's criticism of Harold Laski's prose in the former's list of not especially bad examples of English as it is now habitually written. Brouse feels that Orwell should be stripped of the golden essay award for the most anthologized essay in college texts on the basis of a miscount of negatives in one of the pieces Orwell attacks (Brouse argues that there are really seven negatives in the sentence rather than, as Orwell would have it, five). The closest to a developed analysis is Cleo McNelly's 1977 On Not Teaching Orwell, in which the first two sentences of Politics are shown, in a long paragraph, to be rhetorically complex, and thus, from McNelly's perspective (following Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations of the same year), unsuitable for the basic or developmental writing student, as is the entire essay, in that Orwell will fail [the student] as a guide, if not as a model as well (557). Shaughnessy writes of Orwell's plain style, To urge a student to emulate such 'simplicity' without exploring it thoroughly is to push him far beyond his verbal resources and encourage the very formalese a writer such as Orwell was careful to avoid (196-97). McNelly's and Shaughnessy's points, in terms of my essay, bear, as noted, on the uses of Politics as a model or

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ere is seldom mentioned but universally known fact of our profession, bluntly stated: the vast majority of our undergraduate students do not love or appreciate literature as we do. Indeed, the value of studying literature, the rewards of reading, are not immediately apparent to surprisingly large number of students, despite vaguely conceived (and externally imposed) notion that reading serious literature is somehow essential to becoming a wellrounded person. So we shake our heads in dismay, share our war stories in faculty lounges, rejoice in our occasional successes, and generally bemoan these students' lack of interest, spotty education, and limited life experiences; the sorry state of basic literacy in recent years; the dismal and misguided teaching conducted in high schools; and, eventually, the anti-intellectual strain in American culture itself, exacerbated by television, Danielle Steel, and Stephen King. Embedded in all this are unstated inklings that our entire enterprise may be suspect or indefensibly elitist. And it was ever so. Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History is replete with accounts of MLA addresses from the turn of the century onwards which express concern over students' indifference to literary studies and to the latest professional trends in literary theory. Even the decades-long debates over scholarship vs. criticism chronicled by Graff on occasion find it necessary to deal, somewhat reluctantly, with pedagogy and classroom applications. Not often enough, it has always seemed to me. This and other sweeping generalizations that follow, along with some radical observations-and few suggestions-are intended to refocus attention on what I take to be the principal function of college literature teachers, their primary raison d'etre: teaching undergraduates.

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Wilentz justifies her interpretation as a socio-cultural reading of the anti-Semitic theme in the text. See Wilentz’s “(Re)Teaching Hemingway: Anti-Semitism as a Thematic Device in The Sun Also Rise.” College English 52, no. 2 (Feb. 1990): 186-93. See also Pearl Greenberg Berg, Maurice H. Cummings, and Sanford J. Smoller’s “Three Comments on (Re)Teaching Hemingway: Anti-Semitism as a Thematic device in The Sun Also Rises.” College English 52, no. 8 (Dec. 1990): 924-28.

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We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those in music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts, and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose. --Gregory Bateson

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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

In recent years, as poststructuralist criticism has achieved a certain amount of acceptance and even dominance in some English departments, many scholars who are interested in bridging the gap between what they believe and publish professionally and what they teach have begun to construct pedagogical systems in which the analysis of texts, various entities that may fall within or without the customarily prescribed canon of literature, is the focus of study. Robert Scholes, in Textual Power, the third book in his critical trilogy, advocates bridging the gap between professional/critical stances and pedagogical practices, especially for those critics who espouse structural, semiotic, and poststructuralist practices. Scholes asserts that teachers of English have an obligation to teach their students about textuality: how texts function (both on a synchronic and diachronic level), how texts can be read (often in different ways and with different results), what informs texts (pretextual, contextual, and subtextual meaning always already inscribed in the text), how texts become part of readers' consciousness and spawn new texts (reading, interpreting, and critiquing), and how so much of what we refer to as culture (especially in a postmodern economy that is informationrather than industrial-based) is textual. Many authors, both directly and indirectly, have discussed the change from an industrial-based economy to an information-based economy as one of the characteristics of a postmodern era (see Huyssen; Jameson; Lyotard; Rowe). Reading (encountering a text), interpreting (creating a companion text), and critiquing (generating a dialectic or dialogic text) are essential acts for students as readers of literature, for students as writers, as well as for students as individuals. Scholes concisely summarizes the teacher's role in this process:

One of the most obdurate institutional restraints in literary criticism is the periodization of literature for purposes of teaching, of analysis, and of specialization. These periods, created by a male-dominated literary establishment for a predominantly male literary tradition and sanctioned by a chronological inevitability, may be fictions, but they have the tenacity of convenience and convention. Even after feminist critics have worked successfully to recover neglected women writers and to place established women writers in the canon, the old periodization of literary studies holds firm. For example, when Modernism is stretched to include women and blacks, the new term High Modernists arises to relegate the additions to what presumably would be the status of Low Modernists. In reconsidering the question of periodization from a feminist perspective, the best place to start is with a major woman writer. For this purpose, Emily Dickinson is ideal because her writing life spanned literary periods and her poetry dominates the century in which she wrote. Generally credited as the greatest woman poet and a major influence on all subsequent women writers, Dickinson is nonetheless set in the literary period of American Transcendentalism, not as the jewel in its crown, but rather as a writer in the Emersonian and Romantic male tradition (see Homans and Diehl). Yet the genre in which she exclusively writes distinguishes her from the American Transcendentalists, and the attitudes she takes toward the lyric I, her art, and her audience are all quite different from theirs. In this statement, I draw no revolutionary conclusions: Dickinson is generally considered so far outside the main currents of the period that she is not always included in major studies of the time (see Matthiessen and Irwin). She does not fit in, I want to argue, because she belongs to a later period, and the reason she belongs to a later period is that she did not fit into her own. In this situation, she may be typical of many women writers who look forward to the next literary period-the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, for example, who has a certain Romantic strain in her poetry, or the Modernist Gertrude Stein, who exemplifies the experiments of Post-Modernism. My reasoning about Dickinson is not so circular as it might at first appear, and it is pertinent to the problems that women writers pose to periodization.

In just about half of a colleague's teaching evaluations (twelve of twenty-six evaluations) from two first-year composition and introduction to literature sections, she read objections to her feminist stance, especially her discussions of feminism and pedagogy. Most of the objections came from students who insisted that the classroom ought to be an ideologically neutral space free from the instructor's interests and concerns. The following samples, copied verbatim, suggest the drift of the students' complaints:

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Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale presents its reader with an exercise in learning how to read for survival. The novel argues for a reading that combines emotional and intellectual perception and it demonstrates that without the combination of feeling and thinking, political meaning is lost. Atwood sets her novel in a future America, called Gilead. Pollution and war have resulted in a depletion of the white elite population and after a takeover of the government a stern religious patriarchy institutes a new regime dedicated to increasing the white population. Reproductive control always implies control of women, and Gilead first deprives the female population of all economic power and then divides them into five subjugated classes: Aunts, who do the dirty work of the revolution; Wives, who, past childbearing age, are married to the commanding elite; Econowives, women incapable of producing children, who marry the working classes; Marthas, servants of the Wives; and Handmaids, who have previously proven their ability to produce children and now are to do so for the elite Commanders. The futurist setting allows Atwood to invent words, reassign meanings, and explore the implications of a patriarchal language involved in creating an especially misogynist world. The three sections of the novel-the dedication, the tale itself, and the historical epilogue-combine to produce a text which comments on itself, on the act of authorship, and on the act of reading. Within the story itself, three narrative

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