Strange Writing in College English

Allying himself with American pragmatism--notably the work of Richard Rorty--and with the poststructuralist critique of "the idea of the individual, sovereign self," Hawkes denies "the supposed `authenticity' of the text as a document whose final `meaning' includes unmediated access to its author's intimate being" (John S. Mebane, "Pluralism, Relativism, and the Question of Evidence in Shakespearean Studies," CE 58 (September 1996, p. 517)

While I sympathize with the respect for evidence which Crews affirms, and I agree that political bias too often replaces an effort to assess evidence, I nonetheless believe that Crews seriously underestimates the extent to which an interpreter's presuppositions influence his or her selection of linguistic, historical, or bibliographical data in support of an interpretation. (518)

Some norms of interpretation and canons of evidence, while not absolute, may nonetheless obtain under a sufficiently broad range of circumstances and be founded upon sufficiently stable grounds that we may regard them as, to use Barbara Herrnstein Smith's term, "contingently objective" . . . (521)

An important implication of this argument is that interpretations may be judged as implausible if they demonstrably violate the grammatical norms of the language in which the text is composed. (525)

If the problem Watkins has with English professors is--to paraphrase Marx--that they have understood the world instead of changing it, Watkins, too, is an English professor doomed just to understand the world even though he too would rather change it. . . ."[January, 1997, p. 43]

Macedo and France both rouse us from a stuporous complicity with pragmatic politics and pedagogies, reminding us that, as teachers, we are also exchanging our literacies for commodities. But what's missing in their books is more student views: why are they more attracted to mall materialism than cultural materialism? Hourigan offers a solution to this problem: just ask. [January 1997, p. 82]

Truth, as many have pointed out, is not a heavyweight metaphysical notion. It is, like meaning and reference, a semantic-intentional, a conceptual notion. Even so, truth is truth--whether a belief or a descriptive sentence expressing that belief is true or not depends very immediately on whether the conditions external to (though expressed by) my thought or language satisfy or justify that belief. [September 1996, p. 561]

The cabin is an intermediate space between unmediated outdoor "living" and the entirely mediated space of manufacture and preconception associated with "writing," the elaborate human dwelling that the garret is presumed to top. In the cabin, it is presumed that the events of "living" may be simultaneously undergone and reconstituted in "writing," so that no clear distinction persists between stages of composition or levels of conversion into memory or text. It is no coincidence that the genre of nature writing originates with occupancy of a cabin. [April 1997, p. 399]

Specifically, collaborative and adversarial relationships seem based in part upon matching or conflicting assumptions about literacy. When all participants in an encounter enacted shared assumptions about literacy, as, for example, when the developmental pediatrician and the parents in (2) collaboratively enacted the doctor's right to interactional dominance putatively based on the literacy of medical education, or even when the parents in (1) did not contest this warrant underlying moves toward such dominance, those portions of the encounters were relatively successful, at least as defined by the lack of open conflict. [April 1997, p. 431.]

The key terms of the description I am presenting--"skillfulness," "apprenticeship," "collaboration"--are submerged in the atemporal individualism and universalism that Ernst Gellner demonstrates are embedded in Enlightenment "knowledge." Louis Hjelmslev, in Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, participates in these Enlightenment assumptions when he presents what he takes to be the traditional opposition between the sciences and humanities. "Humanistic, as opposed to natural phenomena," Hjelmslev writes, "are non-recurrent and for that very reason cannot, like natural phenomena, be subjected to exact and generalizing treatment"(8). [April 1997, p. 441]

Levinasian subjectivity, however, is not an Oedipal alienation from a prior wholeness which then forces the I to choose among a series of avatars within a network of synchronic signification; rather, subjectivity is the diachronic social production of identity in the subjection of the face-to-face. This serial nature of substitution accrues a debt that any subject owes to the other: even in its seeming uniqueness, the subject-as-hostage (the I not chosen by a subject but produced by the other's infinity) is always replaceable within a social realm characterized by the performative subjection of identities without alienation or lack. [February 1997, p. 136.]

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