Writing Theory and Critical Theory
Editor(s): John Clifford, John Schilb
Pages: ix & 374 pp.
Published: 1994
ISBN: 9780873525763 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780873525756 (hardcover)
"If theory (and even 'theory talk') can put as much intellectual fun into the study of composition as this volume of essays has, it will be doing teachers and students a great service."
Rocky Mountain Review
Writing Theory and Critical Theory discusses the growing body of work linking composition studies and literary studies. Enlisting the strategies of deconstruction, hermeneutics, postmodernism, feminism, neo-Marxism, neopragmatism, psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism, and cultural studies, the twenty-seven contributors investigate the resources that critical theory can bring to an examination of discourse. Composition teachers, critical theorists, and writing program administrators will find this collection a provocative and insightful overview of the field of composition studies.
Table of Contents
WRITING THEORY AND CRITICAL THEORY
Part I: Refiguring Traditions
Composition as a Cultural Artifact: Rethinking History as Theory
Susan Miller
"On a topic of your own choosing . . ."
Kathleen McCormick
Reading and Writing in the Classroom and the Profession
James F. Slevin
On Conventions and Collaboration: The Open Road and the Iron Cage
Kurt Spellmeyer
Rhetoric, Social Construction, and Gender: Is It Bad to Be Sentimental?
Suzanne Clark
The Doubleness of Writing and Permission to Lie
Susan Wells
Part II: The Language and Authority of Theory
Theory, Theory Talk, and Composition
Beth Daniell
The Rhetoric of Theory
Joseph Harris
Science, Theory, and the Politics of Empirical Studies in the English Department
David R. Shumway
Teaching Composition and Reading Lacan: An Exploration in Wild Analysis
Robert Brooke, Judith Levin, and Joy Ritchie
Part III: Narrative Theory and Narratives
Is There a Life in This Text? Reimagining Narrative
Judith Summerfield
Essays and Experience, Time and Rhetoric
Douglas Hesse
Street Fights over the Impossibility of Theory: A Report of a Seminar
Lester Faigley
Making a Federal Case out of Difference: The Politics of Pedagogy, Publicity, and Postponement
Linda Brodkey
Responses to Brodkey
A Writing Program Administrator's Response
Ben W. McClelland
Topic or Pedagogy?
Mark Andrew Clark
Narrating Conflict
Patricia Harkin
Part IV: Symposium: Looking Backward and Forward
On the (Pendulum-)Swinging Eighties
Louise M. Rosenblatt
My Life in Theory
Robert Scholes
Learning to Live with Your Past and Liking It
W. Ross Winterowd
"Gender and Reading" Revisited
Elizabeth A. Flynn
A Letter to the Editors
Sharon Crowley
"Rhetoric Is Politics," Said the Ancient. "How Much So," I Wonder.
Victor Villanueva, Jr.
Responses to Part IV
Constructing Narratives, Seeking Change
Susan Brown Carlton
Theory, Theories, Politics, and Journeys
Beverly J. Moss
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