Abstract
Just before the roundtable began, in Seattle, my friend John Trimbur asked me something about foundationalism. When I asked did he mean Ford, Carnegie, or Rockefeller, John said, patiently, that I really ought to read more of the current literature on discourse communities. I responded, a bit defensively, that I had tried but couldn't get past the counter-hegemonic language. When Min Lu heard that, she raised her eyebrows, Pat Bizzell looked suspicious, Lil Brannon said Really? and Joe Harris wondered, no doubt, what I was doing on the panel in the first place. I explained that I really couldn't read some of that stuff any more than I could write or speak it, and if that meant the revolution would have to go on without me, that was OK. These words among friends were not, in any way, angry-and probably didn't even happen, though they seemed to.