Abstract

m ecently reprinted in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, David Bartholomae's the University is now a recognized classic in the field of composition theory. I admired the article, when I first read it over twenty years ago, as a telling criticism of writing as process. I also found it vexing, and still do. I use my vexation with Inventing as a catalyst for rumination on my social trajectory. My vexation is intimately related my passage from the working the middle class. I read Inventing as the negation both of my own educational experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy I employ as a teacher of writing with middle-class students. It is a tribute the power of Inventing, now seen as an early example of social constructionism, that I am not the only person more recently vexed by it. Thomas Newkirk and Nancy Welch are also. I use their particular responses Inventing as a way define my own. Newkirk points more my problem with the implications of Inventing for my view of education: making the move into university discourse is not simply a matter of inventing but also of uprooting. Welch points more my problem with Inventing as implying a narrative of academic socialization distinctly different from the socializing process I underwent. At the core of Inventing is Bartholomae's analysis of the function of the commonplace in student writing. He illustrates his claims through reference short student writings produced in response a prompt on creativity. One student writes, Creativity me, means being free express yourself in a way that is unique you (148). Bartholomae comments that with his use of to me the student appropriates a commonplace as his own. Further, this act of appropriation constitutes his as a writer (149). Bartholomae argues that one's authority as an academic