Exchanges

Composition Studies, Spring 2001

Comment on Horner-Lu/Gaillet (28.2) and Bruce Horner's Review of Rethinking Basic Writing

Bruce Homer's recent review of my book, Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction, like the exchange between Homer/Min-Zhan Lu and Lynee Gaillet (CS 28.2), raises several issues that deserve attention. While the substance of the arguments offered is quite valuable, the mode in which the arguments are conducted should give us pause. Such debate is increasingly informed by anxieties over the legitimation of Basic Writing as a scholarly enterprise. As a result, Basic Writing scholars are rehearsing fairly limited lexicons and terminological investments associated with the theoretical stances to which they wish to connect Basic Writing, staking out positions at least in part colored by this anxiety. In "Terministic Screens" Kenneth Burke indicated that "any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention to some channels rather than others," such that what we take to be "observations about 'reality' may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms" (Language as Symbolic Action, U of CP, 1966, 45-46). The words we utilize, Burke cautioned, necessarily limit our ability to pursue our intended agendas. Interrogating the terms surfacing in our critical debates, it follows, is necessary if we are to understand the consequences of our scholarly conversations, and what contributions they might make to the future of radical inquiry in Basic Writing.

The Homer/Lu-Gaillet debate concerns an issue, the status of Shaughnessy, that will likely occupy Basic Writing scholars for some time. Unfortunately, the short format of this recent exchange sometimes devolves into a rehearsal of positionings made available by participants' chosen terminologies. Indeed, there is a substantial unity among the scholars' ideas that is obscured. All are evidently committed to the critique of imperialistic language-use: Homer and Lu argue against the colonizing aspects of Shaughnessy's practice and theory; Gaillet asserts that Homer and Lu's insistence on broadly-conceived social categories for critique results potentially in an imperialistic misreading of Maher's efforts and therefore of Shaughnessy's work. To my mind, this common ground is likely the location of the debate's potential. However, the deepening allegiances of Basic Writing scholars to terminology fixed in contemporary theoretical frameworks make it exceedingly hard for these common identifications and the value of these insights to be acknowledged. Instead, the terms themselves stress what Burke wisely describes as "division."

Homer's review of my book also depends largely on divisive terms similar to those that structure the Homer/Lu-Gaillet exchange. Although debate necessarily involves difference, and division itself is not inherently negative, interrogating the motives underlying division might prove useful. One of Homer's most telling criticisms of my work comes in his closing comment that he is "not sanguine about the potential of Gray-- Rosendale's study to sway public opinion on the legitimacy accomplished in `basic writing' and `remedial' college writing programs" (139). Leaving aside the fact that Homer assumes an audience for my work ("the public") that my book isn't primarily concerned to address, the comment is ostensibly meant to connect to claims Homer offers elsewhere about the necessity of construing Basic Writing work in the widest social terms. But the misreading of my intended audience also illustrates an anxiety about the legitimation of BW studies within the public and academic spheres that has become one of the most obvious features of recent BW scholarship. This is anxiety has been largely quelled by turning to broad social theories, already legitimated years ago in philosophical and literary theory circles, for support.

Homer appears to be engaged in just such a practice. As a result, Homer is led to supply a rehearsal of familiar arguments associated with a poststructuralist-Marxist position [a desire for a description of the "larger social and institutional settings in which that work takes place" and a call for greater "critical reflection" about methodology and "rendering" of "discoveries" (139)]. That is, Homer's most substantive criticism entails admonishing the writer for not repeating work already done (broad sociological approaches). For such criticisms to hold, however, Homer's position forces him to rewrite and decontextualize. My book actually addresses his first charge throughout Chapters One and Two and his second on pages 71-75, specifically, as well as in sections of Chapter Three. But, perhaps more importantly, Homer's discursive identifications demand that he rely upon a form of argumentation that is less persuasive than it could be. Homer criticizes my text for not doing something rather than establishing why the approach he advocates would indeed be more beneficial than the work my book in fact does. A more convincing critique would require evidence for why an exclusive focus on "larger social" issues is necessarily better than a focus on the combination of broad and local, what my book seeks to provide. But Homer's terministic screens afford him little help with this: while they allow him to adeptly employ a set of rhetorical criticisms, they do not furnish him with sufficient evidence to substantiate them.