What follows is basically the intro to the paper I'm turning in tonight. The rest is more CMAP dependent (I'll bring CMAP copies to class and will post as a jpeg tomorrow). Looking through this week's blog, I don't believe I'm facing a hostile crowd of Hairston enthusiasts.
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There are moments in “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing” (1992) when you can imagine Maxine Hairston preparing to hold for applause—imagining an audience of like-minded pedagogues weary of “literary critics who are at the center of power in most English departments,” interlocutors equally incensed that freshman writing topics “used to be literary [and] now they’re political” (179-180). There are times when, having “cut my teeth” as a grad assistant the year after this was published, I found myself nodding to examples of FYC teachers asserting their “duty” and “right” to “put ideology and radical politics at the center of their teaching” (180). Yet not far into Hairston’s quotes from such “radicals” as James Laditka and Patricia Bizell, I began to shrug and remember it was really only two or three fellow grad assistants who believed you couldn’t teach writing in sixteen weeks, but you could force eighteen year-olds out of Plato’s cave a little faster. We were devotees of Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981)—thanks to a Colley Cibber scholar who encouraged us to “lay ideology bare” for our students (he had no patience for Berlin’s heuristic approach; he insisted on de-mystifying his audiences in dramatic lectures)—and as devotees some of us did fall into Hairston’s category of “those who . . . show open contempt for their students’ values, preferences, or interests” (181).
Still, there are so many problems with Hairston’s argument. An early difficulty is that she qualifies (“I don’t suggest that all or even most freshman courses are turning this way”) only to overstate in the same paragraph (“Nevertheless, everywhere I turn I find composition faculty. . .”) (181). As the essay unfolds, Hairston also appears guilty of brushing past arguments she set out to counter. Why have writing courses suddenly become obsessed with the “diversity” and “ideology” of her title? “Major issues about social change and national priorities are involved,” she concedes, “[but] I cannot digress into those concerns in this essay” (183). Later, after citing Berlin’s argument that Flower’s cognitivism, with its “pursuit of self-evident and unquestioned goals in the composing process” parallels “the pursuit of self-evident and unquestioned profit-making goals in the corporate market place,” Hairston dismisses Berlin as “facile” and guilty of “non-logical leaps” sans analysis or counter-argument—in spite of the fact that, five pages later, she claims: “ad hominem arguments don’t impress me.” (183, 187).
As I researched a network of associations for this piece, I found that C.H. Knoblauch, one of the ideologues Hairston uses to establish her Leftist scare, later complained to the editor of CCC that he was incorrectly quoted when Hairston attacked him for “setting up a straw man by attacking a mechanistic, structuralist model of composition [that had] already been discredited in the literature and calling it ‘conservative, repressive, deterministic, and elitist’” (Hairston “Reply” 255). Hairston offers an “apology” in her own reply, which was published alongside other response essays in CCC. In it she admits Knoblauch was “justified in complaining” and claims, “I regret my misattribution; it was careless,” though two paragraphs later she circles back to qualify that “although my quotation was literally inaccurate, I do not think it misrepresented Knoblauch’s views” (“Reply” 257). It’s revealing that in misquoting Knoblauch to attack a straw man argument, Hairston not only creates another straw man but reveals how political even the most purportedly “disinterested” plea to return to the “classics” can be.
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See you soon,
Kevin
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