Many of the ongoing difficulties teachers face revolve around the “translation” of disciplinary knowledge—especially critical theory—into pedagogical praxis. It often seems that our teaching lags behind our theoretical knowledge by about two decades, and sometimes we wonder if it will ever catch up. This sense of disjunction has been compounded by the difficulty of “teaching” postmodern understandings of subjectivity, truth, and epistemology in increasingly commodified teaching contexts, where consumers expect to purchase clear, identifiable, and literally usable products, and where “knowledge” often means easily digestible and repeatable content rather than analytic skills, critical understandings, or complex world views....

My goal in this chapter is to interrogate the concept of “clarity” that has become a discursive sine qua non of effective student writing. The virtues of clarity are routinely expounded or assumed in composition handbooks, rubrics used to evaluate student writing, the everyday informal interactions of writing instructors with their students and with each other, the stated philosophies of many college composition programs in the United States, and the course descriptions and expectations of other college faculty (including faculty who work with graduate students). I take issue with the fact that clarity’s virtues are taken for granted by analyzing...

The issue of writerly intent and its role in readers’ response to and interpretation of texts marks a fracture that is particularly telling of the dysfunctional ways in which student writers are often constructed in composition theory and pedagogy. In this chapter I investigate several dichotomies that structure this fracture (literature versus composition, theory versus pedagogy, fiction versus nonfiction, students versus authors), and suggest some theoretical and practical problems for composition because of its attachment to authorial intent, as well as some possibilities for a twenty-first century composition pedagogy.

I’ll begin by invoking the specter of authorial intent in literary...

In aLos Angeles Timesreview of Los Angeles Opera’s infamous postmodern staging of Wagner’sRingcycle in the summer of 2010, Ann Powers defended designer Achim Freyer’s muchmaligned use of masks in the production, noting that “much of today’s most important mainstream and indie pop resides in a similarly fantastic realm, far from conventional emotional expression. Artists as diverse as Gaga, Kanye West, Of Montreal and Animal Collective use masks both visual and vocal to challenge the idea that human expression is ever really ‘natural’” (Powers 2010). Many attendees found thisRing’s masks alienating, missing the warmth and directness...

In the opening sentence of their introduction to the anthologyEthics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, Kirsch and Mortensen (1996b) were able to confidently assert that “Qualitative approaches to research—ethnographies and case studies in particular—continue to gain prominence in composition studies as researchers strive to enrich our understandings of literacy in its myriad cultural context” (xix). Almost twenty years later, the pace of ethnographic work and case studies in composition scholarship has not slowed down, nor has the popularity of the pedagogical corollary to this scholarship waned, meaning student-generated ethnographies as assignments in university composition classes...

The recent reenergized attention to audience in composition scholarship and teaching supposedly signals attempts to honor students as writers (axiom 4), who don’t just dutifully compose for their teachers.¹ But, as I suggested in chapter 3, this imperative breaks down in the face of more entrenched pedagogical procedures and writerly dispositions associated with the process movement in composition. In this chapter, I am interested in thinking more specifically through the ways in which notions of audience are constructed in composition, especially composition textbooks and pedagogy. However, the injunction about audience awareness is not exactly the commonplace I wish to tackle...

In 1988, William Covino succinctly articulated the challenges poststructuralism posed to humanist composition practices and theory: “The epistemological crisis of this century—the failure of objectivity, Cartesian rationality, and detachment to account for our complicated perception of a world in flux where matters are never settled—has called into question writing that tries to maintain unity, coherence, perspicuity, and certainty, writing that Edward Said has called ‘preservative’ rather than ‘investigative’” (Covino 1988a, 121). This chapter is especially concerned with the first concept on Covino’s list, objectivity, though perceptions and constructions of rationality and detachment are inextricably linked with assumptions about...

The preceding chapters have, I hope, offered a sense of the radical challenges to composition business that the upsetting of the six commonplaces—and the values and assumptions on which they rest—offer. Upsetting these commonplaces at least precipitates interrogations of teaching in general, of composition teaching specifically, of student composition, and of commonplace ideas about students as composers. To whom and for whom should students write? Is there anything special about the qualifier “student” in the term “student writer,” and, if so, how does and should composition’s exceptionalism maintain or explode the tension between “student” and “writer”? What new...