Abstract

So ends Arthur Clarke's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, as David Bowman contemplates with some dismay his seeming mastery of the universe, his unstated question is one the contemporary writing or literature teacher might well appropriate for his or her own contemporary pedagogical dilemma: So what do I do now with my students? It is the question a high-school English teacher once asked me as she read some Derrida and Nietzsche as part of a required Contemporary Theory and Pedagogy class I was teaching. Her pedagogical quandary was not an isolated one. I answered her with another question: What if a student in your freshman writing class submits to you a rough draft of a paper which you consider to be racist-very racist? Would you, or should you, with that paper-or perhaps one that asserts that it is the duty of Christians to ferret out every gay and 'beat some sense into him'-mark it as any other paper? She seemed to squirm in her seat. She had, in fact, once gotten a racist paper, and her response had been unequivocal: she did not allow the paper and sat the student down and set him right. Whatever truth there is to Foucault's assertion that each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth-i.e., the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true (Truth 131), and whatever personal power agendas are working subtly at the heart of any particular discourse, still, to that teacher that morning, there were some things you could be certain about. In the case of a racist paper, some seemingly universal principle far beyond political correctness, beyond situational truths, was at issue. Still, as she struggled through some of the assigned readings for the course, it was clear she was having some difficulty reconciling her own moral fervor