LeFevre Fever

Maggie's comments about LeFevre made me think about her overall distinction between individual and social, and whether the weirdness of it stems from her work being a little older (LeFevre, not Maggie :)). It was actually when I was using the reading protocol from our syllabus that I discovered that I did, possibly, disagree with something that she said, so holla, Donna, for making disagreement a potential part of the reading process.

The main question inspired by what I read so far is, "What is this individual that's being juxtaposed with the social?" Class discussion covered how we juxtapose the two naturally, but LeFevre's concessions to Platonic invention techniques, as allowing student writers to "look inside" for material, seems a little strange, since we're talking about invention as a social act, and it follows, maybe, that the "inside" where students are looking is a social space, even if it's one where they interact with the Buberian (Buberistic? Buberlicious?) Thou. So the idea that students could retreat into themselves, using Platonic invention, works as a concession to Platonists reading the book, but seems like it might weaken her overall attempt to demonstrate the social as the necessary focus for invention.

Again, I wonder if I'm reading material that would have been groundbreaking in 1987 (and still is, to me, definitely) with a mindset brought on by the social turn that her work may have helped to promote. I may also be making assumptions about LeFevre and the social; she may not think that knowledge is an inherently social thang.