Faigley

Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition is structured around the central question: Why hasn't composition studies responded to postmodernity in the academy? (I'm paraphrasing). Faigley argues that composition studies as a whole has ignored or neglected to significantly import elements from postmodern theory into its teaching/theorizing. He attributes this to the staying power of process pedagogy, which codified Comp. as a discipline but rendered postmodern theory obsolete. He makes this argument by exploring renditions of the subject/subjectivity that textbooks, process pedagogy, and student writing has produced.

Now, before I continue, I want to mention that Faigley's book is dated 1992, so some of his claims are dated and thus no longer true. I'm sure that there have been significant changes in the field since then, where claims of the subject's discursive construction have become commonplace and even contested -- in favor of other, more groundbreaking theories that critique the postmodern subjectivity as problematic. Similarly, Faigley's claims about electronic writing/networking/ computers have been retheorized, if only because it's been almost 20 years since his book has come out.

Key quotations:
"But while composition studies is concurrent with some characterizations of an era of postmodernity, it has by and large resisted the fragmentary and chaotic currents of postmodernity, and it has remained in many respects a modernist discipline, especially in its prevailing conceptions of the subject" (xi).

"The argument that runs through this book is that many of the fault lines in composition studies are disagreements over the subjectivities that teachers of writing want students to occupy" (17).

"This turn [the turn toward pomo theory] in composition studies is a recognition of the mutuality of theory and practice -- a recognition that, as Foucault argues....'Theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice, it is practice'(208). This revised notion of theory situates the practices of composition textbooks that encourage the orderly application of reason in a long theoretical tradition of the advancement of reason dating from the Enlightenment" (38-9). (* see also p. 44 for a longer discussion of theory/practice).

"The classroom successes of process pedagogy have drawn attention away from how judgments of writing quality reflect larger cultural assumptions about the purposes of literary education. Such was not the case throughout much of the history of writing instruction in America. Literacy instruction was closely associated with larger cultural goals, and writing teachers were as much or more interested in whom they want their students to be as in what they want their students to write" (113).

"I argue that shared assumptions about subjectives [sic] -- the selves we want our students to be -- still shape judgments of writing quality" (114).

"...what might happen if we were to disrupt standard classroom practice and introduce new forms of written discourse? Would it be more difficult to preserve the rational, autonomous subject? We can now ask this 'what if' question because different groups of writing researchers have brought new forms of writing to the classroom through the use of electronic written discussions on networked computers and the use of nonsequential writing known as hypertext" (165).

"The utopian dream of an equitable sharing of classroom authority, at least during the duration of a class discussion, has been achieved" (167).

"The dispersal of the subject in electronic communications technologies suggests that we need new ways of talking about subjectivity and raises the issue of what metaphor of the subject might be most useful for articulating a postmodern ethics" (227).

"The multiplicity of subjectivity is not necessarily a thing to fear because in classrooms it fosters discursive richness and creativity. But it does require theorizing and, if teaching practices are to be involved, new metaphors for the subject" (230).

This last quotation, for me, speaks to Faigley's larger project in the book: that theory is divided from practice. That is, composition studies has theorized a great deal, but this theorizing about postmodernity has not trickled down into new teaching practices that move away from a modernist subject. Faigley does suggest that the discussions of process theory have trickled down, but that these theories aren't quite enough; they still, according to Faigley, privilege certain kinds of subjectivities that harken to current-traditional rhetoric or worse.

There's a lot that's useful here, though the dated-ness is something to keep in mind. I'm not totally enamored with the book, because I think Faigley himself fails to see how his own beliefs (esp. regarding personal writing) are not theorized; I also think that more examples are needed to demonstrate his points. When he discusses textbooks, he talks about two; in discussions of his own students' writing, there's ONE. Makes me question his research practices. There is also a LOT of theory here, in ways that doesn't always connect with composition studies. At times I feel the connection is forced or overlooked. Faigley doesn't cite people like Karen Burke LeFevre, much feminist scholarship, or sophistic rhetoric that takes up the questions of postmodern theory before his book came out (Vitanza, for ex)...

Overall, though, his book is helping me see the disconnects between theory/practice and the ways in which composition has dealt with it, both in its own scholarship and in relation to other disciplines (ie linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies).

44,