Re-Fusing the Edifice:Postmodernism and theReconstruction of English Studies

GORDON A. GRANT III

But the truth is that most of us had to leave the humanities in order to doserious work in it.

Stuart Hall

In traditional humanist literary studies, theory supports criticism, the wayteachers talk about literature. Humanist theory provides a vocabulary, a setof categories, a methodology, a wayof justifying, more or less self-evidently,the project of literary criticism as an academic endeavor; it tells us, usually inthe form of assumptions about human nature or about the role of art, how torespond to texts, to literature. The inexorable growth of theory,however,which began in earnest in the 1960s with structuralism and seems to havereached some sort of apex with the arrival of postmodernism as a hotlydisputed but nevertheless pivotal intellectual category, has undone thetraditional relationships among theory, criticism, and literature, and hascomplicated the ways in which teachers and students can talk about literarytexts. This story about theory and its relationship to literature is by nowrather well-known, but I would argue that the effects of theory are still beingsorted out in the classroom, where literature is still very often taughtaccording to humanist and modernist assumptions about expression, repre­sentation and aesthetics. Teaching literature still means talking about whattexts mean; even postmodernism, for allof its contradictions and overlappingsand its contested status, can be easily thematized into a style or period or wayof reading within a literature course.

As part of the postmodern scene.' however, teachers in the literatureclassroom today need to confront the contemporary "distortion" of thetraditional and established textual hierarchy that has until now privilegedliterature over criticism and theory. I would argue, in fact, that the changingstructure of the literature classroom is not simply due to the destabilizingimpact of postmodern culture or postmodern theory-which are too oftencharacterized only by their ontological skepticism, love of otherness andfragmentation, and refusal of reified notions of rationalism and Truth-but

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because of the built-in dead-end of modern(ist) aesthetics, which deprivesliterature of its life-giving and life-enhancing social context by fixating on atruncated notion of "meaning" within a reified notion of art as a distinctsphere of experience. The most obvious example of this aesthetic is the NewCriticism, which jettisons context in order to focus on the meaning of theaesthetic artifact itself; newer critical theories of interpretation, moreover,fall into a similar epistemological trap (of finding or locating meaning) whenthey too "interpret" a text according to their own principles. In the wake ofpostmodern critiques of epistemology, which are also critiques of the searchfor meaning, what is necessary now is a different way for teachers to orientthemselves in relation to literature, I want to argue in this essay thatpostmodern theory offers a framework for restructuring the relationshipbetween critical (secondary) and literary (primary) texts in a way that willallow us to continue to talk about literary texts in the classroom withoutrecapitulating new critical assumptions or other modern, epistemologically­oriented perspectives. It canbe argued from the perspective ofpostmodernismthat, although they use different codes, conventions, and languages to pursuetheir claims about knowledge, all texts are discursive practices that articulatea world-view; theory and criticism can be read as genres that are meant notsimply to disambiguate literature, but exist beside it. Literature, in otherwords, isanother genre of theory, ifby theory we mean awayof trying to makesense of the world and our position in it. Reading literature from apostmodernist perspective thus involves a larger project, a critique not ofaesthetics or expressiveness, but a cultural criticism that uses a plurality oftexts to shape and respond to cultural positions and values within our currenthistorical situations.

The motivation for this essay, however, involves more than an attemptto describe an alternative conceptual model for literary studies that rests ona philosophical notion of post modernism as an epistemological critique. Myargument is also propelled bymore urgent historical, social and professionalissues. Over the last two years, the nature and role of English departmentshas been debated in the national press, in the pages ofMLAnewsletters, and,most illustratively for me, on my own campus.s Unlike other disciplinaryarguments about the usefulness or accuracy of different theoretical ap­proaches which have occurred in cascading fashion over the last thirty years,these more recent arguments, while encompassing and growing out oftheoretical differences, have focused sharply on the placets) English depart­ments are supposed to occupyin our society. For instance, Barbara HermsteinSmith, as president of the MLA, wrote in Profession89, the association'syear-end disciplinary exercise in self-analysis,that "literature" is no longer asolid referent, "literary study" encompasses everything and nothing, and thedtscipline itself is coming apart despite "institutional inertia" (2-3). Herstatement was meant to encourage as much as to analyze. Since Smith's"manifesto," other proposals addressing the institutional direction and vigor

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of English have appeared. Robert Scholes, for example, has presented arevamped model of literary study that quite consciously dismisses literatureand aesthetic interpretation in favor of developing the skills of textual powerhe has previously elaborated ("Flock").

Defenses of English departments as they now more or less existhave alsobeen written, and these are particularly interesting because of the ways theyseek to define the institutional role of literary studies. Writing to a broaderaudience (specifically,beyond the profession) inHarper's,Louis Menand haspresented a liberal-traditionalist argument about the future of literarystudies. Despite his acknowledgement that canons reflect cultural self­interest and that models of objective knowledge have been discredited,Menand still recoils from actually suggesting that teachers change the waythey present literature: "English professors are taught how to identifytropes, not how to eliminate racist attitudes [They] are trained to studyculture, not conserveit (whatever that would mean)" (56). We may infer aswell from Menand's narrow definition of professionalism that teachers arenot supposed criticize culture either. The university, in Menand's view,should "restrict itself to the business of imparting some knowledge to thepeople who need it" (56). In short, Menand tells us that the conflicts anddisagreements that animate contemporary culture are not part of the acad­emy's concern, which should seek only to sustain its own niche as the chiefpurveyor of a subservient and instrumental literacy. Menand's reconstruc­tion of the ivory tower not only furthers the use of higher learning as anexercise in the reproduction of middle class power and authority.J it alsoseeks to tame one of the most powerful insights of postmodern theory (whichis also most corrosive to institutional academic structures): knowledge mustbe historically and materially connected to its social foundations, to itshistory of defining and disciplining the way people act, especially within theknowledge-producing culture of the academy (Hariman 213). By steppinginto the debate about what English departments look like and what they do,I want to argue that postmodernism offers a way to confront the conflictsurrounding the role of literary studies in contemporary society, a way tounderstand why this debate is occurring and what is at stake for people who,like me, are faced with the problem of defining a professional life in a timeof intellectual and political turmoil.

This problem of defining a professional life is not merely limited tophilosophical and moral issues, however. My attempt to re-fuse literarystudies through postmodernism also addresses the intra-disciplinary andscholarly-professional split between literature and composition, betweenreading and writing. Postmodernism offers a wayfor me to attempt to avoidthis split, to find a way to participate in both of these intellectual projectswithout giving in to the structural impetus of the discipline that glorifiesliterature (and theorizing about it) and denigrates the teaching ofwriting. AsPeter Elbow remarks in What Is English?, in literary studies "the study and

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teaching of literature are privileged and people who study and teach writingare treated shabbily, both materially and ideologically" (138). Yet Elbowalso does a good job in his book of documenting (or perhaps articulating) thecomplicated, love-hate relationship teachers in the discipline of English havewith literature. Literary texts are often one of the primary inspirations forpeople who enter the field of English, but we often cannot justify venerationas a useful or even responsible mode of teaching. Though at different timesin the book Elbow tentatively offers "language arts" as an answer to thequestion his title poses (a solution I am drawn to), it is his more provocativepoint that drives my desire to reformulate my approach to literature: that"writing could serve as a paradigm for English-a paradigm that offers helpon some of the important problems in the profession" (130). Rather thancontinue to argue about the role of literature in writing classes, as ErikaLindemann and Gary Tate have done recently,"it is time to reverse thedebate and ask why so little writing, which is itself a form of theorizing, ofestablishing relationships and linkages and causalities, is undertaken inliterature classes. It is time, to put the challenge more forcefully, to ask whyliterary studies as a discipline privileges the reading of culturally anointedtexts over other approaches that engage language and meaning in a fullersocial and political context.

In order to present my notion of are-fused postmodernist literarystudies, I want first to show what we have to gain by abandoning themodern(ist) view that opposes literature as expression to philosophy asknowledge. Second, after describing this alternate post modern epistemolo­gy,I want also to present a picture of what a postmodern literary studiesmight look like or do as it turns away from interpretation in a modern senseand toward the ethics of reading and writing. As Lester Faigley has recentlyargued in FragmentsofRationality:Postmodemityand theSubjectof Compo­sition,writing (and the emergence of composition as an independent disci­pline) potentially offers a way to solve the "impasse" of postmodern theory,the situation where no "principled position" can be maintained in the face ofpostmodern critiques of knowledge, subjectivity, and politics (xii). Faigleyargues that, from within the postmodernist frame, "ethics becomes a matterof recognizing the responsibility of linking phrases" (Faigley 237). Byexceeding, or perhaps even negating, "aesthetic" discussion in the literaryclassroom, postmodernism positions literary studies as a materially ground­ed, socially implicated, existentialist discourse that takes as its focus therelationship among texts, cultural forms and representations, and individualand collective identities. Interpretation, within this model, must be under­stood as an argumentative and value-laden process which requires that allparticipants have the opportunity to write and to argue about meaning andto be able to establish their own relations with(in) culture as they areeducated.

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Postmodernist Perception and KnowledgeAs David Harvey defines it, postmodernism brings a number of the crises thatenergized modernism, especially the search for a transcendent truth orbeauty amid a growing acceptance of flux and ephemerality as the basis forexperience (10), to a breaking point Denying modernity's desire for tran­scendence, postmodernism "swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and thechaotic currents of change as if that is all there is" (44). This description canbe given a more critical inflection, furthermore, if we acknowledge thatpostmodernism, as an epistemological theory, breaks up accepted, norma­tiveways of understanding and speaking about the world, and argues that newmodels must be formulated to "overcome the deficiencies of modern dis­courses and practices" (Best and Kellner 30). In other words, knowledge, asa modern code-word for the processes that energize us as conscious agents,no longer functions as a monolithic category or a series of epistemologicallygrounded procedures that arbitrates our relationship with truth or value.Post modern theories instead posit new models for apprehending the world,models which deal in particular with the problems of representation and theincompleteness of knowledge.

John Berger, for instance, in the deceptively simple Waysof Seeing,haspointed out that we confront reality through expectations; one's understand­ing of the world is always preceded by a pre-constructed knowledge of it, aspecific way of seeing, or framing, the world. To put this process into alinguistic register, as Robert Scholes does, we learn not directly about theworld, but acquire different discourses that enable us to see it (Textual 141).As we better understand a discourse and are familiar with a wider variety ofdiscourses, so we perceive the world with more complexity. Indeed, experi­ence itself is a textual process where the "productive quality of discourse"engenders both subjectivity and agency (Scott 793). Reality, and, morecrucially, identity are part of a resolutely informational process; they are amatter of finding, choosing, or-to acknowledge some degree of the deter­minism of discourse-simply arriving at fairly stable positions within thepossibilities articulated by one's social and historical circumstances. Byframing reality as part of a set of expectations, Berger frees his art criticismfrom the hegemonic (modern) cultural frame that aestheticizes images sothat he may see art differently and derive a more useful experience from itRather than try simply to figure out what a picture means, Berger uses animage to "place [him]self historically" ("Between" 140), to find in his ownresponses and answers about himself, both individually and socially, as aviewer and as an agent

Walter Truett Anderson's popularizing account of postmodernism as"constructivist" foregrounds the spirit of Berger's discursive framing ofperception and captures more fully the ontological skepticism of thepostmodern point ofview:as contemporary Western subjects, we livewith( in)a burgeoning number of "belief systems," and we can no longer trust the

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assumption that "somebody posess [es]the real item, a truth fixedand beyondmere human conjecture" (3). The existence of these multiple ways ofbelieving suggests that we need to do more than simply seek out the shape orform of knowledge(s), which is necessarily only part of the process oflearning. We also have an obligation to place ourselves in relation to otherbeliefs and belief systems, and to see knowledge as a collection of discoursesthat enable us to articulate and explain our material and historical situations.Knowledge merely helps us gain access to and map out the debate about howwe construct our lives and our social experience; it does not absolutely conveyto us the nature of reality. As Richard Rorty, perhaps the most well-knownexponent of this point of view, has argued, "we [should] see knowing not ashaving an essence, to be described byscientists or philosophers, but rather asa right, by current standards, to believe" (389). Rorty also argues that thisright is best sustained through "conversation," the hermeneutic process ofexploring understanding and belief that focuses on opening up problems forinvestigation rather than regulating them through epistemological algo­rithms (389, 320). This position, moreover, leads to the explicitly anti­cognitivist and holist corollary that learning isnot so much a matter of havinga truth demonstrated, but of "getting acquainted" with something, of beingable to use or manipulate the discourses of knowledge through an engage­ment with language and writing (319).

A Postmodernist Refusal of Literature and the Discipline of EnglishThe revival of antifoundationalism has especially energized critiques of theacademy and its role in the construction of knowledge; these critiques, whichare also often made under the banner of postmodernism, challenge tradition­al (essentialist and objectivist) methods of organizing knowledge by investi­gating the "knowledge-power formation embodied in academic institutions,practices, and languages" (Conner 11). In the case of literary studies, aninvestigation of this sort coneen tra tes not only on how texts have been cut 0 fffrom their social context in order to critique them from the perspective offormalist and humanist aesthetics, and but also on how these texts are thenused to fabricate a specific world-view. Humanist aesthetics, in other words,marginalize language and rhetoric in favor of an epistemology that fore­grounds the search for truth (or beauty) and, consequently, posit the subjectas autonomous, stable, and given. Before literary studies can be reframed asa postmodernist and pragmatist conversation that seeks to explore theproblems and the potential of our culture and our identities within it,therefore, we need to understand how modernity constructs the oppositionbetween literature and knowledge, which, as philosophy, has traditionallybeen the premier discourse and final arbiter of truth and knowledge in thehumanities. Once the opposition between literature and philosophy hasbeen undone, literary studies can be brought into line with the missionPatricia Harkin and John Schilb have set out for rhetoric and composition as

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it solidifies its own disciplinary identity: rather than simply serve larger (andmore powerful) discourses of knowledge, literature-like writing-can func­tion as an "inquiry into cultural values" (1). Under this postmodernistrubric, literature and philosophy are both discursive practices, and they canbe read as attempts to make sense of ourselves and our relation to the world.

Another way to frame the problem is to say that literature pedagogy isstill burdened by modernist, New Critical assumptions. By avoiding theepistemological idea that language used to set out a proposition about theworld, the New Criticism, in its quest for aesthetic purity, left itself open tothe very dichotomies that have come to stifle traditional academic criticism.These dichotomies-the split between art and life, high and low culture, theartist -genius and the ordinary person -con tinue, moreover, to represent theofficial picture of literary studies, despite the obvious violations of thisideo logythat are visible in the everydaypractice of English departments. Theproblem, therefore, is getting the rest of the academy, not to mention thelarger culture, to accept the changes in our theories and practices and ournew, and increasingly dominant, institutional self-image. One example thatsets out the task facing us can be seen in Jurgen Habermas' attempt (and Iread him symptomatically as an expression of the modern cast of mind ) in ThePhilosophicalDiscourseof Modernityto enforce the essential genre distinc­tions between philosophy and Iiterature.> Habermas' defense of themodern(ist) project in philosophy, particularly the separation and articula­tion of distinct spheres of knowledge, provides New-Critical literary studieswith the warrant that underlies its critical practice. The division of labor thatresults from these distinctions, and which also marginalizes writing withinEnglish, however, also clarifies the nature of the crisis the official disciplinefaces today. Habermas argues that modernity and rationality, embodied bestby the project of philosophy, are still useful and productive concepts andmust be defended from the incursion of postmodern irrationality, which, bydenying the transcendent power of reason, leads us into epistemological andpolitical chaos. His defense of rationality deserves consideration as a claimfor the usefulness of one particular discourse; his consistent dismissal ofpoststructuralist and postmodern theory, however, suggests an unwilling­ness to face the possibility that discourse can still be vital even if it isunhitched from its ontological moorings and allowed to function in a moreprovisional style as a way of mapping out the world for us and to us.Unfortunately, if Habermas' argument about genre distinctions holds andliterature continues to be narrowly defined as expression, English depart­ments need to return the discursive territory annexed from philosophy andother disciplines, bar new forms of criticism, and resign themselves to thetraditional role of aesthetic interpretation and validation (as keepers of thecanon) while accepting an intellectual backseat in contemporary culturalrelations and in progressive politics that seek to challenge current doxa, bothinside and outside the academy. Composition, as a discipline, is not likely to

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fair much better in institutional struggles under a Habermasian framework.Like literary studies, composition will constantly have to defend itself againstthe epistemological status of philosophy, which robs composition of its claimto generate knowledge or valuers).

Habermas' "Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Phi­losophy and Literature" thus provides a starting place for a critique thatseeks to unmask modernist claims of epistemological and ontological supe­riority, claims that marginalize both literature and composition. DominickLaCapra has described The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in whichthe "Excursus" appears, as "a monument to good housekeeping of the mind"which tries to "defend monogeneric forms and to reassert the decisivelyhegemonic role of analytic distinctions in defining the central core of adiscipline or genre" (4). LaCapra accurately characterizes the institutionalpolitics in Habermas' argument about analysis and classification, which, inhis choice of the word "leveling" instead of another territorial metaphor suchas blurring, implies a hierarchical arrangement of discourse that clearlyprivileges philosophy. The more immediate and important lesson of the title,however, is that it forecasts the rhetoricity of Habermas' own argument, anargument that claims to rest securely on the strength of analytic discourse.

The "Excursus" extends Habermas' attack on Jacques Derrida's philos­ophy, which culminates in the previous chapter with charges of mysticism andirrationalism. In this essay, however, Habermas argues that Derrida rejectslogic in favor of rhetoric in order to avoid the consistency requirements thatare necessary for philosophical discourse-but which, so Habermas claims,are unnecessary within the literary tradition of rhetorical, or stylistic,analysis-because they short circuit his critique of reason (188). Habermasspecifically claims that Derrida's deconstruction "stand]s] the primacy oflogic over rhetoric, canonized since Aristotle, on its head" (187). Thisargument rests, however, on his misrepresentation of Derrida's interpreta­tion of the logic-rhetoric polarity, which does not simply invert the status ofthese two "different" discourses, but deconstructs their opposition to showhow one differentially uses the other to define and establish itself withinlanguage. While this disagreement, especially since it seems focused on thewayphilosophical criticism may legitimately proceed, mayseem quite distantfrom the problems facing literary studies, it is here that we can find the fateof a postmodern literary studies, since undoing the logic/rhetoric oppositionis the first step to retrieving literature from the immobilizing frame ofaesthetics.

Habermas' criticism ofDerrida, rather than disqualifying deconstructionas a philosophical discourse and keeping literature in its place, actuallyreinscribes a larger conflict within philosophy. The relationship betweenrhetoric and dialectic, as Chaim Perelman has argued in The Realm ofRhetoric, is not as permanent or distinct as Habermas claims. According toAristotle, rhetoric is "a branch of dialectic and similar to it. ... Neither

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rhetoric nor dialectic is the scientific study of anyone separate subject: bothare faculties for providing arguments" (TheRhetoric25-26). In an extensionof this traditional linkage, Perelman's reconstruction of Aristotelian argu­mentation "subordinat[es] philosophical logic" to his "new rhetoric" (5);this action revives Aristotle's connection between these two discourses, andrescues rhetoric from its degraded and marginalized status as a discourse onstyle,or "the study ofornate forms of language" (3). Byexcavating the historyof these discourses, Perelman notes that Aristotle's distinction betweenanalytical reasoning-or formal logic-and dialectical reasoning--or argu­ments that proceed from "generally accepted opinions" and "theses" andwhich seek "to persuade or convince" an audience-had been erased byPeterRamus in his formulation of the trivium of the liberal arts (2, 3).6 Thiserasure effectivelydisassociated rhetoric from dialectic, and reduced rheto­ric to mere ornamentation. As a result, when modern logic developed in themid-nineteenth century under the influence of Kantian philosophy anddialectic was consequently subsumed into formal logic, any sense of argu­ment operating within a social realm was suppressed in favor of scientisticdemonstrations (Perelman 3). Rhetoric, within this constellation of modernknowledge, was treated with contempt while onlyscientific knowledge, basedon "evidence," was acceptable. Perelman's new rhetoric, however, sets outto reclaim Aristotle's linkage between dialectics and rhetoric and, as "atheory of argumentation, covers the whole range of discourse that aims atpersuasion and conviction" (5). By admitting the discursive nature ofknowledge claims, and using this awareness to support these knowledgeclaims through argument, Perelman's rhetoric thus "becomes the indispens­able instrument for philosophy" (7). Rhetoric provides a way to analyzearguments while also understanding that knowledge is not permanently,ideally, or, in modern terms, scientifically indisputable. For Perelman, inother words, rhetoric functions as a method of analysis as well as persuasion.In light of this, Habermas' account of Derrida's deconstruction of the logic­rhetoric polarity is incorrect; Derrida actually reinvokes an ancient relation­ship, one that stresses the provisionality of human knowledge of the worldand our ability or desire to act on this knowledge.

When Habermas accuses Derrida of adopting a literary criticism that"merely continuesthe literary process" and which therefore cannot "end upin science," he also situates himselfwithin a Western metaphysics that makesan artificial distinction between the "purely cognitive" aspect of "problemsolving" and its discursive ties (188). For Habermas, thinking and writing areunconnected activities: "As soon aswetake the literarycharacter ofN ietzsche'swriting seriously," he writes, "the suitableness of his critique of reason has tobe assessed in accord with the standards of rhetorical success and not thoseof logical consistency" (188). Byoperating within this opposition, however,Habermas ignores or misses the possibility of the discursive logic of rhetoric,or, perhaps an even more frightening possibility, the ethos of logic, which

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seeks to convince us by the powerof its logical demonstration, and not just byits logic. Habermas' defense of the analytical progress of philosophy againstDerrida's rhetorical analysisthus also seemssomewhat disingenuous: "Derridadoes not proceed analytically, in the sense of identifying hidden presupposi­tions or implications. This isjust the wayin which each successive generation[of philosophers] has critically reviewed the works of the preceding ones"(189). Yet a rhetorical analysis necessarily performs the tasks Habermasdefends as the simultaneous method and goal of philosophy. Rhetoric, likephilosophy, seeks the cracks in the edifice of a text so we might moreeffectively respond to it and offer counter-claims, corrections, or amplifica­tions. We could even argue further, against Habermas, that aestheticdiscourse, like philosophical discourse, works within a similar logic ofsuccessive counterstatement. David Lodge theorizes, for instance, thatsucceeding generations of writers respond to previous models of represent a­tion by moving between the linguistic poles of metaphor and metonymy todisclose their versions of reality ("Modernism"). And surely MarcelDuchamp's critical reappraisal of aesthetic categories through his ownavant-garde art is as much a philosophical as an aesthetic statement. In short,Habermas' claim for a privileged style of progressive knowledge-building onthe part of philosophy seems overstated at the very least.

Habermas-and here he most fully represents the modernist world­view-longs for a purely cognitive philosophy, a way of thinking that issimilar to the role of avant-garde art in Adorno's negative dialectics, which,as Habermas writes, "preserves our connectio nwith the utopia 0 fa long sincelost, uncoerced and intuitive knowledge belonging to the primal past" (186).Indeed, Habermas' use of Adorno's aesthetic concept belies the influence thecategory of pure rationality has on his own work. This category ignores,unfortunately, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith observes, the way "value," aswell as meaning, is "the product of the dynamics of some economy ("Value"1). Habermas' model of communication followsthe Saussurian tradition andits idealized vision of language that assumes a message can be straightfor­wardly and innocently decoded. As Smith notes, however, "that model ofdiscourse ... along with the entire structure of conceptions, epistemologicaland other, in which it is embedded, is now increasingly felt to be theoreticallyunworkable" (2). In fact, that which opposes the value of rationality inHabermas' communicative action, what he calls "distortions," can be seen asthe very ground out of which rationality grows (Smith 9). Self-referentiality,world disclosure, fictiveness-in short, the qualities of language used todefine aesthetic discourse-are necessary to establish a notion of rationalcommunication, and they in turn need rationality in order to be defined.Habermas creates a category of communication that is "sublime ... but alsoquite empty" (Smith 16); crucially, however, he fills this category on theacademic level with philosophy, which offers a version of argumentation asa wayto escape the snares of rhetoric. Referring to his "What isPragmatics?"

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Smith accuses Habermas of constructing a model that, as

a typeof communicationthat excludesallstrategy, instrumentality, (self-) interest, andaboveall,the profit motive,reflectswhatappears to bea more generalrecurrent impulseto dream an escape fromeconomy,to imaginesomespecialtype,realm or modeofvaluethat is beyond economicaccounting,to create by invocationsome place apart from themarketplace-a kingdom,garden or island,perhaps, or a plane of consciousness,formofsocialrelationship,or stageof humandevelopment-where the dynamicsof economyare,or oncewere,or somedaywillbe,altogether superseded,abolishedor reversed. (17)

Habermas' claims about ordinary language and the autonomy of fictionaldiscourse in the "Excursus" reflect a similar wishfulness. He suggests, at leastby implication, that reason, through the instrument of philosophy, willeventually lead to a utopia. Though he does not naively contest the idea thatrhetoric can ever be fullyremoved from language, Habermas does claim thatit can be "tamed" in order to function analytically (209). Yet this confidencein the domestication of language, which is grounded in ordinary languagetheory, rests finally on the idealized ground of a transparent language. Putbluntly by Jonathan Arac, Habermas wishes to "trade excessive rhetoric forsensible analysis" but "at just these moments, however, [his] own rhetoricswells" (xii). In the end, Habermas' defense of philosophy from the incur­sions of literary criticism and theory shows more about academic culturalhistory and politics than it does about the power of reason to understand theworld and make it a better place.

Beginning to Re-Fuse Literary StudiesIf crumbling genre distinctions between philosophy and literature onlypartially point to a need to reconstruct literary studies, though, Habermas'criticism oftextualism shows howwe can begin to rethink the uses of literarycriticism and the purposes of our institutionally mandated talk. The conceptof a "universal text" (Habermas 190), or, as John Murphy suggests, thenotion that linguistic structures are at the center of social systems (241),provides Habermas with a picture of an inescapable circuit of information,an endless loop of regressive, repetitive, and finally pointless conversation.In his dismissal of textualism, Habermas essentially accuses Derrida (andpoststructuralism) of a linguistic idealism (and nihilism), the notion that weare trapped within the constraining powers of language, devoid of humanagency. Poststructuralism allegedlyremoves the distinctions between differ­ent discourses and negates any kind of criticism beyond a non-genericexegesisof texts; critical discourse is reduced to a "mechanistic combinatoire,in which everything is given in advance, in which there can be no practice butthe endless recombination of fixed pieces from the generative machine"(Polan 49). Murphy proposes, however, that the universal text should beconstrued as a "syntase ... a process whereby the parts of society are directlyintegrated, without the aid of an ahistorical regulatory system ... society can

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resemble a patchwork of language games" (248). In other words, Derrideandeconstruction does not narrowly destabilize or disseminate meaning, nordoes post modern theory abolish or simply relativize categories or genres. Infact, the more postmodernism undermines the regulative power of genre, themore it affirms its constitutive power (see Perloff 4).

Textualist criticism does not deny or submerge formalist distinctions,because such an act would indeed negate all criticism; it instead deniesformalism its ontological force, and this move enables critics to focus on howdistinctions get made and unmade in different historical moments and fromdifferent perspectival positions. Habermas' defense of genres, grounded ina version of ordinary language philosophy, overgeneralizes and naturalizesdifferent speech strategies. Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, has pointed outhow the formalist distinction between ordinary language and literary lan­guage cited by Habermas is one of degrees within discourses, not betweendifferent kinds of discourse (29). Metaphor "is a property of language," andit exists in all texts (Brodkey, Academic 65). Indeed, Habermas overlookscontingencies that affect ordinary and fictional discourse such as differentlevels of competence or, even more crucially, categories such as temporalityor perspective, which influence not only reception but also production, andwhich certainly complicate the communicative act. In short, the distinctionbetween knowledge and literature, which also bolsters the separation be­tween knowledge and writing (thus undermining writing) does not hold up.Knowledge and discourse are intimately, inherently connected, and attemptsto keep them separate undermine the productive power of discourse.

Habermas' failure to maintain the boundaries between philosophy andliterature, between argument and expression, between cognition and repre­sentation, creates, therefore, the space that enables us to rethink the role andfunction of literary studies as an academic discourse. To see literary studiesas focusing on a discrete form of aesthetic experience devalues the workingsof discourse and misreads the argumentative dimension of representation,which must always be read in the context of cultural power. The failure torecognize that current disciplinary boundaries are also complicit in main­taining the status quo, moreover, relegates fields like literary studies to aproject that supports current hegemonic social and cultural structures.Literary studies, therefore, ifit wants to be able to do more than reaffirm thecultural status quo without constantly having to defend itself against chargesthat it has overstepped its essential boundaries, needs to avoid the modernisttendency to look for meaning as an end-point of its activity. Producingreadings is not enough. By adopting a postmodern notion of constructingmeanings within the context of our relation to our world and our understand­ing of this world, we can allow criticism, as Mary Poovey urges us, to"reconstruct the debates and practices in which texts initially participated"(623), and we can, more importantly, use these debates to enter contempo­rary discussions about meanings and values in the world around us. This act

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of disciplinary re-focusing can revitalize the power of literary critique, for itenables an interrogation of reified constructions of knowledge that servespecific ideological agendas, and it does so on the explicit premise of writing."Literary" texts must be subsumed into a notion of argumentation; teachersand students need to talk back to and along with literature and not merelyattempt to fathom its meaning.

Before moving on to describe a postmodern literary studies, though, itwould be helpful to get a fuller sense of the educational context in which itis located. Henry Giroux has identified postmodernism with what he callsborder pedagogy, which "stresses the necessity for providing students withthe opportunity to engage critically the strengths and limitations of thecultural and social codes that define their own histories and narrative" (248).In light of Giroux's statement, the important difference between the modernand postmodern approach to interpretation shows up in what we do after wegain access to texts, to the codes that structure our lives. Giroux seespostmodernism as "a culture and politics of transgression ... a challenge tothe boundaries in which modernism has developed its discourses of mastery,totalization, representation, subjectivity, and history" (227). Foremostamong these transgressions must be the "modernist distinction between artand life" (227), for, as Dick Hebdige observes, modernist aestheticism"privileges form over content or function, style over SUbstance,abstractionover representation" (52). In short, modernist aesthetics value a reified,fixed and immobilized object over the acting subject. A postmodern ap­proach to literature, in contrast, allows us once again to use representationsas maps for locating ourselves within history and current social positions.

Unbracketing the aesthetic as a distinct category also opens up thepossibility of thinking about postmodern culture and society as strictlymaterial and historical, aworld made up of and continually remade byits ownsubjects and processes. For example, John Johnston describes a "semioticsof flow" that "link]s] the philosophical problem of radical immanence ormultiplicity to a theory of culture conceived as the conjoining of different'semiotic regimes' with various material arrangements, but without recourseto any transcendent unity ... that would stand outside the historical field ordomain as their cause or ground" (156, 154). Johnston's schematic thus bothavoids instituting any ahistorical or transcendent regulating device andpositively theorizes the notion of a temporalized, provisional ground, asituation that modernism casts as a "negative other" in its idealizing attemptto locate and secure meaning. Such a definition of postmodernism, asMurphy argues, does not destroy or fatally relativize truth, history or order,but reconceptualizes them within historical narratives and exigencies andthus opens a space for truly transformative action: "the world is not deniedbut made erotic" (250). More importantly, from within these definitionsliterary criticism can therefore reconstruct itself as an ongoing interpretiveaction that seeks to return to a living community the power to define truth,

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history, and knowledge as concrete concepts and not reified systems thatcontrol identity. Rather than straightjacket itself bydenying its contingencyas a discourse, literary studies can position itself as one of many semioticsystems that seek to (re)define reality. A textualized cultural matrix demon­strates the need for literary studies to develop a procedure we might call asemiotics of contingency, which acknowledges that all interpretations areideological in that they are attached to larger, usually unspoken, semioticcodes and discourses, and which recognizes further that these discoursesmust be historically contextualized and adduced a product of specific valuesystems.

Murphy's and Johnston's critical paradigms are especially encouragingfor a postmodern literary studies because both programs are grounded in anenlarged concept of reading, one that at least implicitly acknowledges thatwriting isconcomitant with reception."Johnston argues that postmodernismnecessitates that we read in "a new and completely different way," a waywhich "seeks to formulate the relationships between literature (and art) andthe social context on a new conceptual basis (148). Using Deleuze andGuattari's concept of "agencement,"he argues that a postmodernist literaryanalysis could examine how different codes of meaning function together ina system. Such a system of semiotic analysis allows a critic to look for breakswithin regimes of meaning that can be exploited by a reader while makinginterpretations and counter-arguments. Murphy's plan similarly presentsreading as an "existential problem" (242), where one does not methodicallyfind an abstract modern and reified truth or beauty, but creates them throughan "erotics" of interpretation, a concrete and human-scale knowledge thatdepends on a political process of personal control. The distinction, as LindaBrodkey points out, is between an exercise in "mining out" elements ofmeaning predetermined by formalist theory, and finding connections be­tween writers and their worlds (Academic66-67). A postmodernist versionof reading stresses both attaching ourselves to larger codes as well as seeinghow these codes relate to each other, conflict, or break apart under scrutiny.What is necessary is a willingness and ability to read these discourses not interms of their own self-justifying existence, but in their relationship to otherdiscourses and to a SUbject'sown contemporary existential situation.

Literature, Writing, and Cultural Studies in the Postmodernist ClassroomFor literary studies to join such a project, teachers must first displace theformalist paradigm that dominates literary criticism. Terry Eagleton'sfunctionalist definition of literature grounds literary studies specifically inthe rejection of the distinction between everydaylanguage and literature thatHabermas defends, and argues instead that literature be defined through theway people "relate themselves to writing" (Literary9). Rejecting generic,formalist and pragmatic definitions of literature, Eagleton instead arrives at

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a description that stresses the material, political procedures we use to definewhat is literary:

John M. Ellis has argued that the term "literature" operates rather like theword ''weed'':weeds are not particular kinds of plants, but just any kind of plant which for some reasonor another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps "literature" means something likethe opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody valueshighly. (9)

Literature, instead of having an essence, is powerful because it possesses astrategic flexibility that locates it within larger cultural power structures.Eagleton provides, in short, an ideological definition of literature, wherevalue-systems function through hegemony, and literature, particularly in itsmost recent historical conception, serves the interests of ruling minorities.

A return to rhetoric and, ultimately, to composition is inevitable in lightof these definitions of culture and literature, for, as John Schilb notes, it iscomposition that "best embodies the preoccupation with discourse associat­ed with ... postmodernism" (176). It makes sense, therefore, that Eagletondoes not offer a counter (political) theory at the end of his survey of theleading schools of literary theory. Because literary theories are "socialideologies" (204), Eagleton instead promotes rhetoric as a constitutivelypolitical model of criticism. Returning to his definition of literature asstrategic and functional, he promotes a critical enterprise that examineslanguage to see how it affects people, that is, how language gets people tobelieve or act or interpret. This critical perspective, moreover, does notmerely displace previous theories, but actually encompasses them. "Rheto­ric" he writes,

or discourse theory, shares with Formalism, structuralism and semiotics an interest inthe formal devices oflanguage, but like reception theory isalso concerned with how thesedevices are actually effective at the point of "consumption"; its preoccupation withdiscourse as a form of power and desire can learn much from deconstruction andpsychoanalytical theory, and its belief that discourse can be a humanly transformativeaffair shares a good deal with liberal humanism. (205)

Rhetoric, while not stepping in as a super-discourse or interpretativemetanarrative, allows us to strategically and contextually define our ap­proaches to literature and our reasons for reading it. In Eagleton's case, forinstance, the crucial question is not how but whyone approaches literature,and his preferred reason isthe "strategic goal of human emancipation" (211),which he, expectedly, elaborates in terms of lived experience and not just asa form of abstract enlightenment.

To focus on emancipation, though, is also to focus in some sense onsubjectivity, on the wayspeople make sense of their livesthrough their valuesand actions. There can be little doubt that, as a social institution, literarystudies is intimately involved in the shaping ofsubjectivity, and that modern-

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ist literary studies, with its stress on transcendent meaning, produces thebourgeois subject as a universal subject.f Postmodern literary studies,therefore, needs to work toward the development of an alternative model ofselfhood. Subjectivity emerges as a crucial category in postmodernist literarystudies because, as Cornel West observes, it "returns humanistic studies tothe primal stuff of human history, that is,structuredandcircumscribedhumanagencyin all its various manifestations" (4; emphasis added). In her theori­zation of "situated knowledges," moreover, Donna Haraway locates a re­sponsible subject only in the embodiment of partial perspective, which,because it relies on "epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating,"provides a ground for "conversation, rationality, and objectivity" that "re­sists the politics of closure" (195-96). These ideas are useful for apostmodernist literary studies because Haraway's situated knowledge andWest's notion of the integrated individual foreground agencywithin a codedreality and enable the deployment of a notion of intersubjectivity whichfocuses on the relationship forged between separate subjects within socialspaces, and which is also material and historically situated knowledge thatcan support standards of evaluation or of truth in workable forms that do notautomatically become reified and oppressive. Intersubjectivity operates onthe assumption "that individuality is properly, ideally, a balance of separa­tion and connectedness, of the capacities for agencyand relatedness" (Ben­jamin 82), and it limits and tethers one's position within semiotic regimes oran historicized erotics of interpretation, thereby enabling a cogent rhetoricalanalysis to take place. Rejecting the autonomous-and thus unaccountableor irresponsible subject (Haraway 191)-the intersubjective model relies onnegotiation and mediation, on a "split and contradictory" self, which, be­cause it is open, can join in a rational conversation with an eye towardagreement that requires neither dominance nor submission but a dialogue ofpositions (Haraway 193). Critics often accuse postmodernism of abandon­ing standards, of denying that individuals can know something and act on it;intersubj ectivity,as a model of in(ter )dependen t identity, provides an answerto that charge by offering a standard of evaluation that can be objectivelymeasured in material culture. Because it sets limits on the play (withoutdenying it) of language games or the disruption of semiotic systems,intersubjectivity provides postmodernism with a standard of evaluationconsistent with its aims of opening up the discursive structures that definereality.

From the perspective of an intersubjective definition of language andidentity, a model for literary studies that depends on pre-conceived andreified aesthetic response actually looks quite destructive. If the life-worldis threatened by cultural rationalization, and if the reification of the life­world can only be overcome by the interaction of all spheres of culture(Habermas, "Modernity" 9, 12), then rhetoric, defined as a linguistic modelof intersubjectivity, offers a powerful opportunity to make progressive

Re-FusingtheEdifice 405

incursions and connections through textual analyses. John Fiske has demon­strated the power of one form of rhetorical analysis, for example, through hisreading of the jeans people wear and how they wear them (1-23). Fiske'sanalysis demonstrates how cultural meanings are both constructed andevaded by consumers who are constantly locating themselves within theirculture and society. Similarly, in a literature class, examining the influenceof Walt Whitman can likewise demonstrate how ideas, styles, and world­viewsare passed on and influence not only contemporary poets and construc­tions of poetry, but our ways of understanding the value of emotion, ourrelationship with nature or with our own bodies, and our desire for authen­ticity. Rhetorical analysis strategically connects different spheres of experi­ence and diverse texts to overcome the reification of our lives into thehomogenous existence which modernity threatens to bring us. This form ofanalysis encompasses rational, expressive, and normative discourses, andseeks to return to individuals, as a goal of education, concrete control overtheir own historical positions and the processes that determine them.

A number of possibilities emerge from the postmodern, intersubjectivemodel of literary studies in terms of the classroom. Writing theory andpedagogy offer the most effective model for rethinking interpretation as apractice in the classroom. English teachers and studen ts must, most 0 bvious­ly,write more in English while managing to write lessabout what a text simply"means." As Christy Friend has noted in her insightful critique of GeraldGraffs ProfessingLiterature,by focusing on interpretation teachers perpet­uate dominant power relations that require efficient decoders of informationbut not people who might, by writing, question the status quo (281-83).Writing, in effect, is more subversive than reading because it lets us, and ourstudents, reinscribe reality from our own perspective. By drawing the wayrecent composition theory and pedagogy rejects formalist paradigms andtheir use of preconceived narrative forms that stress the quality of expressionand devalue substance, literary studies can be opened up to allow students toexplore their own worlds directly. Because poststructural compositiontheory also acknowledges that ideologies-that is, belief systems-are inex­tricably linked to expression, students must not only become competent inthe conventions of writing, they also must learn to make, as Linda Brodkeyexplains, "a sustained interrogation of the doxa out of which claims aboutreality arise" ("Transvaluing" 600).

Patricia Bizzell's concept of rhetorical authority offers one possibleapproach that can be used in literature classrooms to explore the doxa inwhich we are situated. According to Bizzell, progressive teachers need tostop pretending that they are "merely investigating" different ideas or texts("Beyond" 672), and, instead, "aver provocatively that we intend to make ourstudents better people, that we believe education should develop civicvirtue" (671). Rather than inviting a teacher naively to "impose" his or herviewpoint or set of values on students (673), however, Bizzell's classroom

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model foregrounds the rhetorical process, the making and defending ofarguments as well as the ethos of the orator. In Bizzell's model, both theteacher and students need to study the "historical rootedness" of their beliefs(Afterword 292), and learn to acknowledge and understand the assumptionson which they base their claims and the values which remain unarticulated intheir evaluations. Beyond this act of clarification, however, members of theclassroom need to be able persuade each other, including the teacher, aboutwhich values work best (Afterword 292). Consequently, Bizzell argues that"pedagogical mechanisms whereby everyone's access to rhetorical authoritycould be realized" must be implemented (Afterword 293). Bizzell's model ofteachmg can allow literature courses, in other words, to pursue dialoguesabout how we imagine our world, how texts give uswaysto conceptualize andjudge reality and our selves. These dialogues, moreover, can proceeddemocratically, not as part of a teacherlyoration.

The return to rhetoric in the classroom, in short, can reinvigorate thestudy of literature (and its language) by showing that literature is a constit­uent part of our social ground and our consciousness, not just a set of statictexts which are good for us to know. Literary interpretation, like composi­tion, must engage in an investigation of the life-world; classes that fore­ground reception can take a text, in the words of Adrienne Rich, "as a clueto how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagineourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us" (35).Responding to texts is not merely a matter of getting the message or the"meaning," but must also involve taking a meaning into a critical conversa­tion that does not limit itself to the world of art as a discrete form ofexperience (Scholes, Textual 38). Sharon Crowley sees criticism as "arhetorical strategy for opening the discursive possibilities offered by texts"(191), and she points out that literary studies, whether it admits it or not,needs rhetoric to justify its own project. Indeed, Crowley is absolutely rightwhen she notes, with (justified) satisfaction, that the salvation of literarystudies depends on its ability to enlarge the domain of English to "the studyof texts, any and all of them" (191), including the texts generated within aclassroom by students.

I want to round out the model of postmodern literary studies I havesketched by explicitly invoking the attitude and critical practice of culturalstudies.? Complementing the pedagogical lessons offered bywriting scholarsand theorists, cultural studies, because it is historically committed to demo­cratic procedures and self-determination as goals of both education andculture, explicitly enables postmodern literary studies to find a warrant toexpand its subject matter and sharpen its political commitment. As RichardJohnson describes-and to a certain extent defines-it, cultural studiesthrives on the intellectual "alchemy" of critique, and uses and constructs awide range of knowledges in a project that intimately investigates "relationsof power" (38, 53). In pursuing this agenda, Johnson argues, one of the

Re-FusingtheEdifice 407

central goals of cultural studies is the understanding of "the historical formsof consciousness or subjectivity, or the subjective forms we live by," that is,the way individuals shape and are shaped by their culture (43). John Fiskesimilarly focuses on subjects and agencyas he champions "popular culture asa site of struggle," and defines his project through a focus on the dialecticbetween the "processes of incorporation" and the "popular vitality andcreativity that makes incorporation such a constant necessity" (20). ThoughFiske restricts the range of his analysis to the roles commodities play inhampering or helping struggles for self-determination, his methodologycould easily apply to a wide range of texts, especially literary ones, and easilyanswer Robert Scholes' call for a textual studies that utilizes a negativehermeneutic that "question[s] the values proffered by the texts we study"(Textual 14). Influenced bycultural studies, a postmodern reading of literarytexts would focus not on just texts, but also on the readings, meanings, andcriticisms that are received and generated inside and outside the academy.Hegemonic subjectivities, classifications, or canons cannot be completelyavoided or evaded, but, from within these positions, and bolstered by theantiauthoritarian politics of cultural studies (Nehring 235), we can chartalternative spaces of understanding entailed by the constructedness of our(narrated) reality. Parallel to the way composition enables the process ofinterpretation to be reframed as an argumentative and rhetorical process,cultural studies offers literary studies a way to reframe literary texts in waysthat allow us to continue to organize our teaching through texts withouthaving to "teach" these texts. Rather than suffer some sort of postmodernself-immolation, literary studies can, through the examples of compositionand cultural studies, more effectivelyconfront the wayswe use texts to buildand defend the versions of our world that we care to champion.

Neopragmatism, which provides the version of postmodernism I haveused in this essaywith much of its progressive potential, does not amount to,as Cornel West says, "a wholesale rejection of philosophy [or literarystudies], but rather a reconception of philosophy as a form of culturalcriticism that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural, and politicaltraditions for the purposes of increasing the scope of individual developmentand democratic operations" (230). As I have been arguing throughout thispaper against tradition, against the institutional hegemony of contemporaryEnglish departments, I feel the need to reassert, with West, that "traditionper se is never a problem, but rather those traditions that have been and arehegemonic over other traditions" (230). Critically and pedagogically, con­temporary literary study operates institutionally within the tradition ofmodernist thought, and often perpetuates the problems that accompany astriving after transcendent value. to A postmodern literary studies wants notto find simply the best reading-though it will use readings to articulate ideasand arguments; its goal is a fundamentally progressive opening up of humanpossibilities and potential, a project that needs to be undertaken without the

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bother of having to apologize for the presence of values and politics inculture.

Modern consciousness often displays itself in a frozen conflict betweenthe transcendent and the real. Take, for example, J. Alfred Prufrock'sparanoid fear of the other that finallyobliterates his own pure subjectivity ina "drowning" into reality, or Yeats' recurrent meditations on the corruptionof politics and purity of aesthetics. Much postmodern literature, on the otherhand, like Graham Swift's Waterland,focuses on the quality and fullness ofrepresentation, the constantly shifting areas of solid and liquid, the tempo­rary foundations of meaning and the currents that erode them. DavidLodge's novels similarly explore the shifting power of individual identity andexperience and the pressure of discursive determinations. In How Far CanYouGo?Lodge simultaneously examines the erosion of the metaphysical andexistential certitude of religious belief and the conventions of contemporarynovel writing. In both cases, as his title implies, he wonders what will happento us as we lose these guideposts. Life, however, is a matter of getting on, ofmaking something out ofwhat the characters in the story have. Talking aboutVirginia Woolf in the context of pragmatism, Linda Brodkey sums up theattitude literary studies needs to develop in the postmodemist context:"language cannot be possessed, but must be created bythe lovers who use it"(Academic 75). Postmodernism, by freeing us from the constraints of amodernist conception of knowledge, avoidspolarizing knowledge and chaos,the self and other, and maintains a human(ist) perspective on the formationof power and knowledge structures.

Undeniably, certain strands of postmodern thought turn to discoursesthat reject all stability for flux, play, or infinite cynicism, but they finallyexpose the imperial (modernist) self, not a negotiated subjectivity, whichholds such inclinations in check. Postmodernism, as a theoretical perspec­tive and as a set of values, offers us an opportunity to strategically promotethe value of radical democracy through a renewed interest in discourse.Institutionally, postmodernism provides the study of literature, as a mecha­nism of culture, with a chance to refocus its activities. We might continue thecritique made by literature: the desire to refigure knowing and living as partof a community, the need to make meaning, especiallywhen it isbeyond whatother forms can or will provide. Literary studies needs to ground itself inRobert Bellah's notion of culture as "an argument about the meaning of thedestiny its members share" (27), an argument that has strong affinities withwhat Jasper Neel calls "strong discourse" and its "tolerance for, evenencouragement of, other discourses" (208). I think of Bellah's culturalargument, to again acknowledge Chaim Perelman, as one that "gives mean­ing to human freedom" by avoiding the absolutism of "compelling" truth orthe violent assertion of an "arbitrary" relativism (The New Rhetoric 514).Literary studies, in the postmodern frame, may not be able to provide solidanswers in the form of discrete readings of reified objects; it could, however,

Re-FusingtheEdifice 409

make literature once againdemocraticallyviablebyencouragingreaders toarticulate their ownlives.

Universityof TexasAustin, Texas

Notes

1Even though I use Kroker and Cook's phrase to signify a terrain that is different fromhegemonic (modernist) domains of knowledge and culture, I do not want to suggest that thepostmodernism I am describing is necessarily the same one they describe in their Baudrillardianmediations on excremental culture and hyper-aesthetics. Literary studies does need to confrontthe reality of an image culture, of cyberspace and the problems of simulation (among othernotations of the postmodern) but that is only a peripheral concern here. Perhaps FredricJameson's claim that we are all part of a postmodern culture whether we like it or not (86),whether we know it or not, best describes the situation in which teachers find themselves.

2See, for example, George Will's editorial in Newsweek(April 22, 1991) suggesting NEHdirector Lynn Cheney needs to be a "secretary of domestic defense" who must thwart culturalsubversives in the academy (72). On the University of Texas campus, the revamped freshmancomposition course, titled "Writing About Difference," was cancelled in the wake of proteststhat ignored its theoretical and pedagogical foundations and focused narrowly on "politicalcorrectness" (See Brodkey and Fowler). The ensuing controversy not only shattered myidealized notions of academic debate and collegiality,but clearly exposed the cultural fault linesthat define and threaten English departments as academic institutions.

3Ehrenreich describes the professions and the academic training they require as a barrierthat protects the professional/managerial class (78-83).

4Lindemann's and Tate's point/counterpoint articles effectively reproduce the hegemonyof literature by framing the question in terms of literature's role in composition. Lindemannargues that the kind of writing represented by literature provides little help in teaching studentshow to take part in academic discourses and educated conversations, while Tate advocatesliterature as a humanistic antidote to the "Rhetoric Police" and their over-emphasis onconventions and skills (318). The fact that Tate's defense of literature comes second and isclearly a response to Lindemann's provocation, moreover, suggests that literature still (automat­ically)holds the higher moral ground in educational debate. The upstart discipline of writing hasa lon~way to go before it can challenge literature on equal footing.

Norris also critiques Habermas' misreading of Derrida. Myreading of Habermas followsa similar path, although Norris is more concerned with situating Derrida's work as a philosoph­ical enterprise and the conflict as it existswithin the discipline of philosophical writing, while Ifocus on the status of literary studies.

6Ramus defined the trivium, the arts of discourses, as follows: grammar is the "art ofspeaking well, that is, of speaking correctly"; dialectic is the art of "reasoning well"; and rhetoricis the art of the "eloquent and ornate use of language" (Perelman 3).

7Mowitt also argues that reading, though admittedly a limited political act, cruciallyunde~irds postmodem agency as it mediates between the poles of activation and activism (xxi).

Eagleton writes that the subject of literature, the kind of individual constructed bymodernist literary studies under the "moral technology of Literature," is one whose life isseparate from politics. Literature teaches us to be "sensitive, imaginative, responsive, sympa­thetic, creative, perceptive, reflective," but these feelings are "intransitive ... [and are] aboutnothinginparticular,"and thus reinforce the disconnection between our subjective life and thelived experience ("Subject" 98).

9BerubC's overview of cultural studies suggests that cultural studies has reached criticalmass inside the academy, and that it isabout to be recognized as a cohesive intellectual issue and/or academic practice in the larger culture as well. Berube's characterization of cultural studies

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as intensely self-aware, self-critical, and resistant to institutionalization, moreover, highlights themost attractive elements of its theory and practice.

lOEven J. Hillis Miller's notion of deconstruction, as he locates it in the marketplace ofideas where only the toughest come out ahead, must figure as part of a modernist desire for"mastery" and not, though it promotes the deferral of meaning, as a form of postmodernconversation (Lodge, "A Kind of Business" 184).

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