In Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the
Subject of Composition, Faigley notes that if we follow the now standard
taxonomy for distinguishing modernity from postmodernity--purpose/play,
design/chance, hierarchy/anarchy, finished work/process-performance--then
composition studies still rests on modernist goals [+].
We pay lip service to play, chance and anarchy with pedagogical tools such
as "freewriting" and early drafts, but these disorganized materials are
always in the service of "the purposeful design of the end product, a design
that achieves closure" (14). Even in the opposition of product/process
"composition studies tilts toward modernism because while composition studies
has professed to value process, it is not process for its own sake but
rather the process of teleological development toward a product" (14).
In her essay "Around 1971: Current-Traditional Rhetoric and Process Models
of Composing," Sharon Crowley notes that "composition teachers' adoption
of process-oriented pedagogies cannot have challenged the epistemological
assumptions that undergrid current-traditional rhetoric for two obvious
reasons: that very rhetoric is still a dominant feature of contemporary
composition, and process strategies fit quite comfortably within its framework"
(64). [%] She cites The Bedford Guide for College
Writers as an archetypal example that combines process-oriented exercises
and various heuristic-inventional devices with current-traditional formalism
(thesis statements, outlining, topic sentences, and coherence, along with
"strategies for development" based on the standard topoi--classification,
analysis, definition, comparison and contrast, cause and effect.) She argues
that there was NO paradigm shift in composition studies because process-oriented
practices share the same ideological assumptions. Deemer's, Lutz's, and
Green's attempts to throw a wrench into the current-traditional order fail
because liberal humanism is the politics behind both Enlightenment rationalism
that informs current-traditional rhetoric and the romanticism that informs
expressionism's antithesis reaction to these strict formalisms (74).
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