bibliographic instruction and postmodern pedagogy

8/2/2019 Bibliographic Instruction and Postmodern Pedagogy

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Bibliographic Instruction andPostmodern Pedagogy

TAYLOR. HUBBARDASSTRACTPOSTMODERNISTEBATES IN ACADEMIC CIRCLES provide expanded opportunitiesfor making information studies an integrated part of the academicprogram. Past bibliographic instruction (BI) practices have been basedon a reductionist scientific model that dislocates the focus of instructionfrom the documents of a discipline to a structure of disciplinary literaturefrequently imposed from without and often having little to do with theinformation content. Postmodern concepts provided by textual criticismand the sociology of knowledge can turn libraries into learninglaboratories for studying information in the context of the academicdiscourses that create it. Postmodernist approaches allow students tocompare, at one level, methods of information organization and, at amore basic level, how knowledge is claimed in a variety of scholarlydisciplines. Rhetoricians, especially composition teachers with whombibliographic instruction librarians have much in common, have alreadyrealized the importance of postmodernism as a strategy for teachingcomposition. Rhetorician Richard Lanham even maintains that elementsof postmodernism applied to emerging information technology provideways to reform the undergraduate curriculum.

Taylor E. Hubbard, Library, Evergreen State College, Olympia,WA 98505LIBRARY TRENDS,Vol. 44, No. 2, Fall 1995, pp. 439-520 1995 The Board of Trustees, Universityof Illinois


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440 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1995INTRODUCTION Dya know the creed a

Jacque Derrida?Der aint no reader.Der aint no wriderIder-Anonymous

This bi t of wit might be the abstract of many responses topostmodernism-the projects of deconstruction, irrationalism, and otherforms of the virulent French disease spraying through ink jets on tosacrificial trees around the country. Canonical outrages rumble acrossthe academic landscape. Strong programs battle weak responses, agentsunfix, texts destabilize, boundary disputes flourish. Of these academicwars going on in the texts we buy and the disciplines we support, librar-ians and campus information specialists might well ask Gertrude Steins(1937) famous question: Is there a there there (p. 289)? From thepaucity of references to postmodern anything in our professional litera-ture, the answer would appear to be negative. A quick search throughthe 1982-1994ERIC can link librar and (deconstruct* or postmodern)only seven times total. LISA finds eleven links. Despite the odds, how-ever, this author maintains that postmodernism is worth consideration.

For one thing, as information managers, we should have front rowseats at discussions that go to the heart of our profession as collectors,codifiers, and deliverers of information. In many ways, we seem to havesettled on definitions of information that resemble a cargo manifest ofhardware and artifacts. We take pride in volume counts and holdings buttake the Nuremberg defense when asked how, except by shear weight ofnumbers, these tomes and tools function to support the disciplines forwhich they were brought into being. Postmodernists would like us toconsider that there may be no knowledge, only knowledges, that our ref-erence and circulating texts are curiously ambiguous as communicatorsof information, and that each text (document) is a knowledge claim thatfollows local rules made by social agents we call disciplines-the humanfactor.For those involved in bibliographic instruction (BI),postmodernismimplicitly invites us to revisit our concepts of information as we go aboutour instructional business. If all knowledge is local, should not our in-structional focus be on those who create it rather than on the subsequentacts of others who publish, collect, and organize it? If we accept thereflexivity principle prescribed by postmodernists, should not we be look-ing at the preconceptions, values, and biases we and others have imposedduring the classifylng and organizing process (Hubbard, 1992)? This hasalready occurred to others on campus. Among composition instructors,for example, there has been movement toward reorienting student re-search from a top-down structured exercise to a bottom-up discovery ex-perience. Rhetoric is being rehabilitated. Perhaps we have been lookingthrough the wrong end of the telescope.


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442 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1995must conform to rigid rules and sensibilities pronounced by the criticsand priests of high culture. Modernism craves certainty and predictabil-ity. Kears would say it has no negative capabilities.Postmodernisms tangled roots, along with those of poststructuralism,reach into the materialism of Epicurus, existentialism, hermeneutics (thetheory of interpretations), phenomenology, and especially linguistics.While it is not immune to speculation, its gaze is most often to the pastand present rather than to the unpredictable future. It avoids grand theo-ries or metanarrativesas Jean-Franqois Lyotard (1984) calls them (p.xxiv). Like Tip ONeillspolitics, postmodernism maintains that all knowl-edge is local. It particularizes rather than generalizes, thus privilegingsocial, cultural, political, and philosophical diversity. Its interest in mar-ginal groups created by modernism is shared to some degree by the criti-cal theory of the Frankfurt School and communication theory of HaroldInnis. Since this attitude denies universal laws, postmodernists may findthemselves labeled irremissible relativists by modernists. Particularizinggives postmodernism a pronounced interest in linguistics insofar as itstudies acts of communication and the play of language-the linguisticturn. In its literary and legal deconstructionist form, it challenges theability of texts to connect readers with authorial intent. In architecture,it tosses offplayful faqades, inversions like the inside out Pompidou Cen-ter in Paris, and eclectic quotes from other buildings, periods, and styles.It challenges traditional aesthetic theories by turning the everyday andbanal into art (e.g., works by Oldenburg and Warhol). In short, it defiesthe aura and doctrines of orderliness and certitude found in modernismby turning them on their heads and asserting the vagaries and diversitiesof human intervention. Keats might have been a postmodernist.THOROUGHLYODERNBIBLIOGRAPHICNSTRUCTION

Snow Crash, one text being used in Evergreens information coursethis year, is awitty cyberpunk sci-fi thriller heroed by the pixelesque Asian-African-American,Hiro Protagonist (Stephenson,1993). The action takesplace in the not-too-distant future when government has been franchisedand privatized, and the only employment possibilities are music, movies,software programming, and pizza delivery. Given these uncomfortablyimaginable possibilities, life is lived as little as possible in sentient reality,more so in virtual reality constructed in a Metaverse. As his source ofinformation, Hiro is served by his librarian, the keeper of all wisdomstored in the universe. Tweedy, rumpled, aged to dusty maturity, the li-brarian is, cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks ofinformation in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across avastweb of cross-references. . . he only thing he cant do is th ink (p. 107).

The librarian is a piece of very expensive, user-friendly, retrieval soft-ware-a digitized Randtriever. If storage and retrieval are the only rolespossible, what might this librarians BI program look like? What wouldits learning objectivesbe?


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HUBBARD/POSTMODERN PEDAGOGY 443Unfortunately, the answer to these questions may already be at hand

in the form of that venerable campus institution, the Research Paper As-signment (RPA), in whose interest much BI is expended. According toone criticism: Students generally view the research paper as informativein aim, not argumentative, much less analytical; as factual rather thaninterpretive, designed to show off knowledge of library skills and docu-mentation procedures . . . as an exercise in information gathering, no t adiscovery (Schwegler & Shamoon, 1982, pp. 817-24).

BIs contribution to these conditions is apparent: teaching informa-tion gathering is not teaching discovery. Some would maintain that li-braries are primarily organizing activities complex enough to require someexplanation in order to make them useful. In the instructional event, theemphasis falls on explaining organization (indexes, catalogs, bibliogra-phies, etc.),implicitly assuming, it would seem, that figuring out our com-plex rules and organizing puzzles is somehow central to students intel-lectual discovery of the world. That we assume the structure we haveimposed on information is itself a topic of academic value outside ourown discipline is implicitly a modernist argument that can be reduced tothe premise that structure equals substance. There are obvious flaws inthis thinking as struggles for librarians faculty status attest. What com-position reform faults (see below) is that finding information is only partof the lesson, an d that the focus of our attention needs to be on educat-ing about knowledge-why the documents in our collections figure inthat inquiry and how they can challenge students. In pursuing howpostmodernism can contribute to creating conditions of discovery for BI,it is necessary to make a few observations about the modernist/structur-alist paradigm that has become imbedded in BI.STRUCTURAL INSTRUCTIONIBLIOGRAPHIC

National attention to BI was ushered in by the Monteith College re-port in the mid-1960s (Knapp, 1966). By the 1970s and 198Os, one par-ticular modernist model, taxonomy, brought scientism to BI methodol-ogy. This model maintained that, with the regularity of a conveyor belt,knowledge moved from field work, to the lab, to conferences, to jour-nals, to the apotheosis of a text sitting on a library shelf. Diagrams sug-gested knowledge arranged in a hierarchical structure with referenceworks at the apex, primary works at the foundation, with a varied assort-ment of publication formats in between. This Newtonian building blockparadigm maintained that the bibliographic structure was isomorphic withthe reality. The correlation between the structure of the literature in adiscipline and the reference sources in that discipline can be illustratedby tracing the progress of a piece of research from the time of its inception to its appearance in specialized texts, as a leading BI proponentclaimed (Frick, 1975, p. 13). Friedess Literature and Bibliography of t h


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4-44 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALl 1995Social Sciences (1973) was perhaps the most extended example of thismodel. In it, Friedes proposed structural concepts that explained disci-plines as reifications of their literature as molded by the science para-digm. Again, the basic bibliographic structure mirrors the structure ofscholarly literature, she maintained (p. 257). The successof the modelwas so widely accepted, it became part of professional library education.

A study by Hopkins (1987) illustrates the extent to which this taxo-nomic model of disciplinary literature was promoted in library schoolcurricula around the country to at least one generation of librarians. Thearticle, which appeared in the library schools professional journal, be-gins by admonishing the profession that to be considered professional [,]librarians would need to learn and understand something about the con-tent of the various materials they. . . deal with (p. 136). The author thenproceeds to elaborate in a very detailed fashion about various formats ofliterature and how they can be schematized to the point of having stu-dents construct diagrams (p. 146), concluding that in a structured ap-proach, students should develop a clear understanding of how scientific/scholarly communication, the substantive component of literatures, andthe reference/bibliographical component, are all part of one integralprocess (p. 150). The obvious question is whether this conclusion reallysupports the authors contention or whether content here is being con-fused with structure.

What this and similar articles firmly maintain is that the taxonomicmodel suggested by a reductionist conception of the scientific methodprovides a one-size-fits-allBI mold for all disciplines. This was clearly theassumption when the Social Sciences Citation Index came into libraries inthe 1970s followed shortly thereafter by the Arts and Humanities CitationIndex. These products assume that all disciplines do or should follow theexample of scientists. At the same time, the taxonomic structural modelis appealing as a BI model. Not only does it have the beauty of simplicity,but it also incorporates principles from the librarys own organizing ac-tivities such as establishing conceptual hierarchies and emphasizing char-acteristics that, rather than capturing the messiness of knowledge mak-ing, distinguish and deceptively order materials through subject catalog-ing and classification. Symbolically, much BI activity took place in thereference area looking at the superstructure organizing creates, whilethe actual knowledge-bearing documents rested undisturbed and unques-tioned in distant stacks. We learned and taught about the organizingprocess. In the event, as one composition teacher suggests,wewere teach-ing about ourselves and not about academic knowledges (McDonald,1990). Moreover, by fixing knowledge-bearing documents in a hierar-chical dimension, this method reinforced disciplinary boundaries andcreates fugitive iteratures of which those of a multicultural nature areonly the most glaring example. It lends credibility to the Great Booksconcept by allowing reference works to speak as authorities about whatconstitutes substantive literature even if this is calculated by adding up


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HUBBARD/POSTMODERN PEDAGOGY 445(with Eugene Garfields help and products) the frequency of citation with-out considering whether this sort of canonicity perpetuates in studentsthe awe-inspired uncritical attitudes lamented by their instructors. Lit-erature documented as significant in this manner achieves a level ofArnoldian privilege that discourages students from directly questioningits authority. In return, the method legitimates ou r organizing activitiesand products with a certain insouciant symbiosis.DISCOURSE INSTRUCTIONNALYSIS AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC

The late Foucault (1972) has informed the postmodern attitude asmuch, if no t more than, any contemporary thinker. A key interest in thisFrench philosophers works is the diverse and subtle ways in which socialpower evolves and is exercised. In a widely read and cited work, TheArchaeology of Knowledge, Foucault poses the questions that can be asked ofany form of communication claiming authority:

[W ] ho is speaking? Who, among the totality of speaking individu-als, is accorded the right to use this sort of language (lungage)? Whois qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, hisprestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the assur-ance, at least the presumption that what he says is true? What is thestatus of the individuals who-alone-have the right, sanctioned bylaw or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, toproffer such discourse? (p. 50)

Obviously, this is a different concept of content than that of struc-tural BI. If we spin a BI program out of it, Foucaults method propositionmight be: if information has its roots in human activity and its expressionin human action, then questions of authority, and the discourse analysisembedded in them, are worth considering in what we teach about infor-mation. What is going on in the texts we collect? How do they create theknowledge that places the library at the center of the university? How-ever, library literature seems to be ignoring, or studiously avoiding, thesebasic questions. For example, in a recent review of Library Literacy,the BI column of RQ a twenty-five-year summary of the column couldcite only two articles related to discourse studies (Arp, 1994).

The inattention to texts is an odd circumstance when we considerthat our shelves are virtually groaning with works on the social aspects ofknowledge. Woolgars (1988),Science, the V q dea, which addresses bothscience and social sciences, is a good example, as are Latour and WoolgarsLaboratory Life, McCloskeys The Rhetoric of Economics, and Nelson, et al.sThe Rhetoric of the Human Sciences.... Gross, in his Rhetoric of Science, a ppends a twenty-page list of them (pp. 22142). Becher (1989) has made acareer of writing delightful articles and a book, Academic Tribes and Teni-tories, on the behaviors of knowledge communities. Lodge and others(Small World)have contributed satiric looks at ou r academic worlds. To-gether, they are a reminder that knowledge, like life, is no t an orderly


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446 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1995progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation(p. 69), as Leonard Woolf (1970) observed. These are examples of hu-manistic tools we can give students to break into the disciplinary ivorytowers.

One study used frequently in information courses at Evergreen isShaping Written Knowledge, by rhetorician/writing instructor Bazerman(1988). The work is a collection of Bazermans published articles, one ofwhich, What Written Knowledge Does, is especially useful for illustrat-ing how a text can be analyzed by students (pp. 18-55). In the article,Bazerman dissects three illustrative articles taken from journals in liter-ary studies, social sciences, and science, each by disciplinary heavy-weights-i.e., Hartman, Merton, and the well-known duo of Watson andCrick of DNA fame. Bazerman uses these articles in a Sherlockian man-ner to compare how these authors go about constructing statements ofknowledge that are recognizable and accepted by their disciplines. Inmediating reality, literature, audience, and self, each text seems to bemaking a different kind of move in a different kind of game (p. 46). Heconcludes by pointing to these four components of composition as thedefining elements in disciplinary knowledge:

Getting the words right is more than a fine tuning of grace and clar-ity; it is defining the entire enterprise. And getting the words rightdepends not just on the individuals choice. The words are shapedby the discipline-in it s communally developed linguistic resourcesand expectations; in it s stylized identification and structuringof re-alities . . . in its literature; in its active procedures of reading, evalu-ating, and using texts; in its structured interaction between writerand reader. The words arise out of the activity, procedures, and rela-tionships within the community. (p. 47)

A BI program predicated on the bottom-up approach suggested byBazerman and others looks radically different from the topdown taxo-nomic model. It turns the focus of research to the truly primary docu-ments of a discipline and de-emphasizes the possibly cognitively unre-lated bibliographic web by which they are currently located or dislocated.Information curricula formed around such concepts as Bazermans heto-ric-based discourse analysis invite students to look critically at the claimsof knowledge with which they will be barraged throughout their collegecareers and beyond. Indirectly, the same methods can give librarians amore critical reflexive stance toward our own armory of bibliographiccreations. We destabilize our own references.COMPOSITION INSTRUC~ONND BIBLIOGRAPHIC

Composition (writing/rhetoric) instructors and BI librarians havemuch in common, not only in instructional matters but in their emer-gence and status among their respective professional colleagues. Both


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HUBBARD/POSTMODERN PEDAGOGY 447the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Mod-e m Language Association ( M U ) date from the latter part of the nine-teenth century-1889 and 1883, respectively. However, despite their aca-demic orientations, neither organization proved particularly attentive topedagogical concerns. According to Goggin (1994), from the very be-ginning of MLA, rhetoric and writing instruction were shunted aside infavor of literary scholarship. As a result, MLA formally disbanded itspedagogical section in 1903 to focus solely on highculture concerns ofliterary criticism, philological scholarship, and linguistic discipline (pp.1-2) . As a consequence, rhetoricians and composition teachers embarkedon establishing independent forums to meet their own needs. However,no sooner was a series of associations and journals established to repre-sent and communicate the interests and practices of composition teach-ers, than these organizations and journals were invaded by theoreticiansseeking outlets for tenure-rewarding publications and status-the ascen-dancy (and glamour) of theory over practice (pp. 1417). Since 1955,writing interests have been represented by the Conference on CollegeComposition and Communication (CCCC) far removed from their origi-nal homestead in MLA.

The bibliographic instruction movement-the pedagogical interestswithin ALA and ACFX,-shares some of the homeless aspects of composi-tion. Those present at the 1976 ChicagoALA annual meeting may recallthe charged meeting of disappointed, even outraged, BI librarians tryingto gain legitimacy for pedagogical interests within ALA.With Mimi Dudleyas our leader, those gathered in that crowded hotel room plotted some-thing like armed rebellion to gain reluctant recognition from the organi-zation. LOEX, a semi-autonomous organization outside of ALA, in factdeveloped as the real home of early BI. My belief is that, since libraryliterature is clearly management oriented, there is little place for eithertheoretical speculations or pedagogical methodology in it.

The working alliance that developed between writing teachers an dlibrarians is suggested by McDonald in a paper documenting the historyof the RPA (1990). McDonald contends that it was librarians who wereinstrumental in shaping the RPA earlier in this century by creating andmaking available a variety of indexes and other bibliographic aids (p. 8).Library information organization provided writing instructors with a ready-made structure on which to base the format for the RPA. Thus, librariansfigure as unindicted coconspirators in the dubious achievements of theRPA as a retailer of undigested facts. Echoing Schwegler and Shamoon(1982), McDonald's criticism of the RF'A is that fact-finding is not educa-tion; it is a treasure hunt of sorts with rigid rules of conduct in which astudent is neither asked nor encouraged to question o r analyze the factsbeing assembled. Citing colleagues with similar concerns, he calls forwriting assignments which reward critical analysisby students, assignments


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448 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1995that allow students to become more than outside admirers of disciplinaryedifices. They should be brought inside to see and learn firsthand theillusive and situational character of facts, and implicitly the social envi-ronments that bring them into being. McDonalds concern about thecurrent state of the RPA transfers easily to BI.

McDonald looks to theories from Paul0 Freire and like-minded re-formers as solutions to the research paper problem. Referring to Freire,McDonald (1990) maintains that, by using postmodernist concepts,[wlriting a research paper could involve more than merely gleaning in-formation from sources but could be a study of the discursive practices oftexts on a particular subject in which writers consciously situate their owntext in the discourse of others. He concludes: I believe that we canwork out pedagogics informed by postmodernism that can transform, ifnot explode, the genre of the research paper to help students becomebetter readers, researchers, and writers (p . 15).RHETORICAND BIBLIOGRAPHICNSTRUCTION

The Net promises to be the working model of postmodernism pro-posed by Jean-Franqois Lyotard. Physical and textual dimensions of com-munity are abolished; all knowledge is local. As Archilochus might won-der, will there be any all-knowing hedgehogs among the local-knowledgefoxes? As a BI person, I wonder if our response to the invasion of ourtext-based domains by media will be only a replay of ou r past associationwith knowledge, merely substituting the word media for text. Thequantity of Net lists, management discussions, product reviews, and justplain wavy speculations o n metatopias in library literature are not alwaysencouraging. But the biggest concern is whether our shelves of textsteach us anything about the knowledge creation process that can be pro-ductively applied to the raucous electronic environment.

One answer worth considering comes from Richard Lanham (1993),yet another rhetorician/writing teacher. His book, The Electronic Word,addresses a wide-ranging interrelated list of academic concerns, amongthem: liberal arts curriculum reform; the meaningof electronic infor-mation; the dominance of the sciences on campuses; what is wrong withthe E. D. Hirsch/William J. Bennett canon; why Plato is bad; and how toreturn values to the curriculum. Despite some repetitiveness, Lanhamlays a lavish intellectual board, too lavish to pursue in i t s entirety in thisbrief article. There are, however, a number of points bearing on thepresent discussion.

Based o n Eric Havelocks (1986) work on the transition from oralityto literacy in ancient Greece, Lanham proposes that electronic media arefundamentally changing our experience of knowing and therefore ourcriteria for what constitutes knowledge. According to Lanham and Have-lock, before the development of literacy, knowledge in ancient Greecewas expressed orally using the five elements of classical rhetoric-inven-tion, argument, arrangement, style, an d delivery. Before Plato and the


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HUBBARD/POSTMODERN PEDAGOGY 449shift to literacy, education consisted of mastering these five elements. Platoand the academy disallowed decoration [style] and emotion [delivery] asvalid elements of knowledge, banishing them and their poetic licensesfrom the academys paideia. Platos abridged rhetoric was ideally suitedto establishing abstract facts and truths, circumstances that privilege sci-entific, linear reasoning, and which accelerated dramatically with theNewtonian revolution, reaching an all pervasive apotheosis in modernism.

According to Lanham, the codex book has been an accomplice inestablishing and maintaining the ascendancy of science and linear think-ing in the curriculum. It is the icon of Platonic tyranny. By its very exist-ence, the book represents irrefutable facts-aloof, unalterable, inhospi-table to interaction with the user. The emphasis on facts mplicit in thePlatonic curse results in the Great Books of the Canon. These rely on theCanon as the ideal means for teaching students dumb respect for facts-a catechism of reverence-rather than providing them with the processby which to pose and solve problems themselves. Even the physical at-tributes of the codex book-beginning, middle, end-imply a misleadinglinear reality, a world with directional orientation and purpose. The com-plicity of libraries in this seems clear. Echoing McDonald, Lanham con-gratulates the deconstructionists (Derrida and others) who have destabi-lized not only the text but also the Platonic foundations on which it rests,just as chaos theory, according to him, has destabilized the scientific world.

For Lanham, Western industrialism has fostered a culture of objects(such as books) which has fed upon, and been fed by, Platonic linearthought. But information has no substance; attempting to objectify it asan industrial product is like trying to drink from a fire hose. In the face ofthese vagaries, electronic media returns knowledge to its classical bal-ance (or perhaps imbalance), which turns ou t to be remarkably like thedemocracy of local knowledges described by Lyotard (1984) in ThePostmodem Condition. The paideia turns from teaching objective facts toteaching effective interaction with facts based on a students individualexperience. In a curriculum incorporating the electronic word ofLanhams title (hypertexts, images, sounds), a student has the potentialto alter, embellish, comment on, and criticize the subject of study, therebyreturning the playful humanizing rhetorical elements of style and emo-tion to the educational endeavor. Effective use of information requires astudent to engage in rhetorical individual negotiating processes; no twoof them will produce the same results, but there are no wrong answers.

How can all five elements of classical rhetoric be reunited? Lanhamproposes a bipolar model, maintaining that learn ing is both an un-conscious and a self-conscious act. We have been taught, against ou rbasic instincts, to accept the objective world of Platonic forms by un-consciously looking throug h exts as though they were windows on ahigh er reality beyond personal experience. Comp uters an d the


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450 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1995electronic word allow-even encourage-manipulation of text, thus al-tering the privileged status of facts by forcing us to look consciously atthe media aswell as through t, a process Lanham calls toggling. Elec-tronic information is heavily influenced by the arts and humanities-theemotional and the playful. Computers are rhetorical machines that in-vite students to manipulate text, images, and sounds, thereby participat-ing in the creation of knowledge. On the one hand, students would con-tinue to be taught to look through linear narratives [books] to the Pla-tonic world of facts and truths. On the other, students learn the reflexiveact of looking at how information is altered and acted upon by themedium which presents it. To illustrate the reunion of the lost tribes ofrhetoric, Lanham points to twentieth-century art. He maintains that,since the Italian Futurists in 1909, modern art has been toggling betweenmaking statements about art (looking at it) by contradicting viewersexpectations, while at the same time using art as a medium of communi-cation to an aesthetic experience (looking through it). Every workanswers the question: What is art? Using rhetorical analysis and the a-historicism of postmodernism as one pole and the conventions and con-structs of Platonically based disciplines as the other, we can begin to askthe same What is . . . question of any discipline or subject.

What might a BI program based on Lanhams ideas look like? Forone thing, it would probably look critically at how the codex book func-tions as an icon of knowledge. This, after all, is the form of knowledgewe as librarians deal with constantly. Has, for example, the physical com-position of the book determined that the acceptable formula for fictionis begmning-middleend? Does the book suggest a closed argument, adispenser of information that will only answer questions posed by itself,resisting interrogation by any user?

Few of those riding in the posse of postmodernism and curriculumreform may be willing to jump over the bookless precipice to keep upwith Lanham. However, his concept of at and through is an impor-tant model aimed at creating in students a self-consciousness about theirown and others role in the information creation process, while at thesame time looking through the media to disciplinary matters beyond.This, of course, returns us to the postmodernists perspective of inquirythrough discourse analysis, the sociologyof knowledge, deconstruction,and other manifestations of postmodernism. Knowing knowledge requiresknowing the how and why of its creation and uses aswell as its expressionand claims in presentation. Its organization should not obscure thesebasics.CONCLUSIONS

The above discussion is a prospectus for an experimental informa-tion course that was offered at Evergreen State College this spring. Withstudents, we read and held seminars on Havelock, Lanham, Stephenson,and Bazerman, among others. Against this backdrop of knowledge cre-


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